This week’s New York Times featured an investigation about sourcing future energy needs. The world is open, so we’re told, and human beings, indigenous groups or the environment are ignored. That’s “business journalism” in a nut shell: Brazil has begun building its first nuclear submarine to protect its vast, new offshore oil discoveries. Colombia’s oil…
Showing all posts tagged China
So now we know who has been talking to the US covertly
Philip Dorling writes in Fairfax in Australia that there are serious questions about who holds vital information, who releases it, who should horde it and where responsibility lies in an age where Wikileaks (rightly) forces governments and journalists to own up to their own culpability in human rights abuses and cover-ups: Confirmation that the full…
Arab revolutions ain’t all about Wikileaks or censorship but damn fine bravery
Despite what Wikileaks may claim – the release of US embassy cables undeniably revealed the depravity of the relationship between Washington and various dictators but they hardly sparked the Arab Spring – social media played a part in the uprisings and subsequent changes. As I argue in the recently released and updated edition of my…
Australia’s future is not ignoring human rights in the region
My following book review appeared in yesterday’s Sydney Sun Herald newspaper: There Goes the Neighbourhood Michael Wesley (New South Books, $32.95) Australia’s insecurity in the Asia-Pacific region is legendary. Over decades prime ministers and commentators have urged a close relationship with Washington while remaining open to romance with leading powers such as China to buy…
Yet another Western firm complicit with Chinese repression
A company that should be named, shamed and shunned (via the Sydney Morning Herald): Cisco, one of the world’s largest technology companies, is being sued by Chinese political prisoners for allegedly providing the technology and expertise used by the Chinese Communist Party to monitor, censor and suppress the Chinese people. Dan Ward, of US law…
The Blogging Revolution updated post the Arab revolutions
In 2008 my second book, The Blogging Revolution, was released. It told the story of the internet in repressive regimes. Now, post the Arab uprisings, I’ve updated the title and it’s been released globally this week as an e-book via Melbourne University Press:
The rise of a new and clever super-power, China
Smart: S. Pandiyarajan was fiddling around with his shortwave radio set one hot summer evening at Villupuram, Tamil Nadu, when he stumbled upon a strange station. At first listen, it was a language he couldn’t identify. It sounded like Tamil, but spoken in an accent he could not recognise. He listened on, straining his ears.…
Hacking is moving into industrial scale
Leaking is not the same as hacking. And they’re not all created equal. Bradley Manning allegedly leaked hundreds of thousands of US documents to Wikileaks showing a litany of criminality in the “war on terror”. His act, should it be proven true, was a noble attempt to alert the world of wrong-doing and violence. Cyber…
Zionism exports death globally (and the occupation comes on top)
Is there any nation on earth the Jewish state won’t sell weapons to? Unlikely: Israel’s defense industry racked an unprecedented $7.2 billion in exports in 2010, up on the $6.9 billion achieved in 2009. That put the Jewish state among the world’s top four arms exporters but declining military budgets around the world are likely…
Google head, fond of Chinese censorship, worries about Arab repression
His comments are fair and yet I can’t help but wonder about Google’s complicity with a range of autocratic regimes to censor some of its content, from search returns to YouTube clips: The use of the web by Arab democracy movements could lead to some states cracking down harder on internet freedoms, Google’s chairman says.…