My weekly Guardian column is published today: The viability of a fossil fuel future is rarely connected to the human rights abuses required to sustain it. How often do we think about where oil and gas is obtained? Are the Europeans or Americans any more aware? This deliberate depoliticisation of our energy present, by the…
Showing all posts tagged China
US mass surveillance in the Pacific
Here’s my weekly Guardian column published today: What if China was beating the US at its own super-power game in the Pacific and we didn’t even notice? While Washington distracts itself with… shutdown shenanigans… and failed attempts to control the situation in the Middle East, president Obama’s “pivot to Asia”… looks increasingly shaky. Beijing is… quietly filling the gap,…
Inside the mind of a Chinese internet censor
A key theme of my book The Blogging Revolution is China’s extensive web censorship regime. Fast forward to 2013 and this story, via Reuters, offers unique details about the pathological desire to exercise control over citizens: In a modern office building on the outskirts of the Chinese city of Tianjin, rows of censors stare at…
China’s gargantuan web filtering system
There has never been anything like it in human history. Then again, the internet is the perfect tool for officials to monitor and censor material. Disturbing piece in the New York Review of Books by Perry Link: Every day in China, hundreds of messages are sent from government offices to website editors around the country…
Untangling the murky energy war between US and China
Far too often the media covers conflicts in terms of good guys and bad guys, ignoring the never-ending power dynamics over energy and oil. Fascinating piece by Pepe Escobar in Asia Times that describes who really runs the world: Beijing has clearly interpreted the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s “liberation” of Libya – now reverted into…
Why Prism is important; we’re watching the watchers
My following article appears in today’s Guardian Australia: Politicians and journalists ignore public opinion at their peril. Less than two weeks after the explosive revelations by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden on the creation of a privatised,… American surveillance apparatus, a TIME poll finds a majority of… Americans support the leak, and… Snowden receives a…
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…
US doctrine: “stability means conformity to US orders”
Noam Chomsky, still as compelling and profound as ever, in an extract from a new collection of conversations with… David Barsamian: Right after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, amid all the cheers and applause, there were a few critical comments questioning the legality of the act. Centuries ago, there used to be something called presumption…
How lobby trips to Israel and beyond pollute political and media culture
Far too many reporters and politicians take free trips to Israel, America and elsewhere. In the vast majority of cases they’re little more than propaganda exercises. When it comes to Zionist lobby visits to Israel, I can count on one hand the number of returnees who write or say anything independent instead of mouthing Israeli…
That is what global “help” looks like in Afghanistan
America and China talk about assisting the war-torn country but the reality is so very different. The result? A supposed need to bring in private companies to fix the mess: