Julian Assange talks to Democracy Now!: Human civilization has merged with the internet. Every society has gone onto the internet, with communications between all of us as individuals but also communications between businesses, economic transfers, and even the internal communications and external communications of states. So there is no barrier anymore between the internet and…
Showing all posts tagged internet
“Sure, you could say this was a Twitter War”
Joseph Dana in Roads and Kingdoms challenges some of the more absurd claims in the corporate media about the Israel/Hamas conflict: Sure, you could say this was a Twitter War.… You would say that, of course, because Israel announced the launch of the fighting on Twitter. You would say that because after the fighting started,…
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:
ABCTV News24’s The Drum on media outrage over Alan Jones and Facebook
Last night I appeared on ABCTV News24’s The Drum (video here) talking about the current media feeding frenzy over broadcaster Alan Jones and his offensive remarks towards Prime Minister Julia Gillard. The amount of time and energy spent on this issue, I argued, was utterly disproportionate to the comment itself. It was crude and wrong…
Need some heroin or a bazooka online?
This article in Gizmodo may help: The… Bushmaster M4… is a 3-foot rifle capable of firing thirty 5.56×45mm NATO rounds, and used by spec ops forces throughout Afghanistan. It’s a serious weapon. But in the Internet’s darkest black market, it’s all yours. Who needs a background check? Nobody. The Armory began as an offshoot of… The Silk Road,…
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,…
Footage of my 2012 PEN Free Voices lecture
I was invited this year to give the 2012 Sydney PEN “Free Voices” lecture on free speech, censorship and war. It was delivered at the Sydney Writer’s Festival in May and in Melbourne in June. ABC published an extract recently. Film footage of the Sydney event is now available. May you be provoked:
Private eyes are watching all of us
The idea that repression only happens “over there” is a myth that needs to be constantly challenged (my recent PEN lecture tackled this). Take this (via Pro Publica): Cellphone companies hold onto your location information for years and routinely provide it to police and, in anonymized form, to outside companies. As they note in their…
Wikileaks releases the Syria Files
Yet more confirmation that Wikileaks remains an essential news organisation. Today they did this: Today, Thursday 5 July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Syria Files – more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, ministries and associated companies, dating from August 2006 to March 2012. This extraordinary data set derives from 680 Syria-related entities…