My weekly Guardian column: The secret CIA files appeared just before Christmas. One detailed how CIA operatives could maintain cover, using fake IDs, when travelling through foreign airports. Israel’s Ben Gurion airport was said to be one of the… hardest to trick. The other document, from 2009, was an assessment of the CIA’s assassination program. It…
Showing all posts tagged Google
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Silicon Valley and US intelligence doing more than heavy petting
Following the recent revelations about global surveillance and Prism by leaker Edward Snowden, the mainstream media is finally seriously investigating the intimate and unhealthy links between tech firms and the US government. This New York Times story… reveals some of those connections and why none of us should trust the privacy pledges given by Facebook, Google…
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ABC Radio’s The World Today on Edward Snowden and Prism
I was interviewed today for ABC Radio’s The World Today program: ELEANOR HALL: In the Federal Parliament today, The Greens will attempt to get an explanation from the Government about Australia’s involvement in the US PRISM surveillance system. America’s National Security Agency confirmed last week that it is running a clandestine internet surveillance program which…
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Julian Assange on the threat posed by US-govt backed web evangelists
What a stunning piece. Julian Assange writes the following review in the New York Times on the kind of mundane yet dangerous “debates” sucked up by many in the mainstream media when it comes to the supposedly liberating nature of the internet. When the corporation becomes far more powerful than the state (and they work…
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Perhaps Israel should sue Google for anti-Semitism
Israel’s response to this mundane and necessary decision by Google tells us much about the attitude of the Zionist state to any company or anybody who accepts Palestinians as human beings: Internet search giant, Google, has recognised the Palestinians’ upgraded UN status, placing the name “Palestine” on its search engine instead of “Palestinian Territories”. The…
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Iran’s “sphere of fear” around internet censorship
Al-Jazeera’s The Listening Post on one of the world’s most ambitious attempts to restrict the flow of information online:
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The news is now YouTubed
Fascinating new results on how we now consume news and what this may mean for the future of journalism (via Journalism.org): Worldwide YouTube is becoming a major platform for viewing news. In 2011 and early 2012, the most searched term of the month on YouTube was a news related event five out of 15 months,…
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My 2012 PEN Free Voices lecture on free speech and why it matters
The following is published today as the lead piece by ABC’s The Drum: The two-hour drive from Islamabad to Peshawar is along a surprisingly smooth road. Mud-brick homes sit amongst lush, green fields. Police checkpoints are set up routinely to stop unwanted visitors. I am asked why I want to see the troubled Pakistani town…
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Our web future is censored unless we fight our own government’s secret demands
The sooner we adjust our thinking to understand that growing number of so-called democracies rather like the idea of censoring the internet, the better (via the Guardian): There has been an alarming rise in the number of times governments attempted to censor the… internet… in last six months, according to a report from Google. Since the search…
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The Blogging Revolution gets endorsement in Calcutta
The Indian edition of my book The Blogging Revolution was recently released. Here’s a just published review in The Telegraph from Calcutta: The Blogging Revolution: How the newest media is changing politics, business and culture in India, China, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Cuba and Saudi Arabia By Antony Loewenstein, Jaico, Rs 350 Antony Loewenstein’s book is…