WikiLeaks

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WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency by Micah L. Sifry

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, Gabriella Coleman, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Network effects, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Skype, social web, source of truth, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Editorial board, “Internet Press Vulnerable After WikiLeaks,” Honolulu Civil Beat, December 9, 2010, www.civilbeat.com/posts/2010/12/09/7276internet-press-vulnerable-after-wikileaks. James Cowie, “WikiLeaks: Moving Target,” Renesys blog, December 7, 2010, www.renesys.com/blog/2010/12/wikileaks-moving-target.shtml. Rebecca MacKinnon, “WikiLeaks, Amazon and the new threat to Internet speech,” December 2, 2010, http://articles.cnn.com/2010-12-02/opinion/ mackinnon.wikileaks.amazon_1_wikileaks-founder-julian-assangelieberman-youtube. Reuters, “Eric Schmidt Expects Another 10 Years at Google,” January 26, 2011, www.mb.com.ph/articles/300691/eric-schmidt-expects-another10-years-google.

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Chapter 8 1 Philip Shenon, “Civil War at WikiLeaks,” The Daily Beast, September 3, 2010, www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-03/wikileaksorganizers-demand-julian-assange-step-aside. 2 Marina Jimenez, “Q&A: Birgitta Jonsdottir on WikiLeaks and Twitter,” The Globe and Mail, January 12, 2011, www.theglobeandmail.com/ news/opinions/qa-birgitta-jonsdottir-on-wikileaks-and-twitter/ article1866270. 3 Mark Hosenball, “Is WikiLeaks Too Full of Itself?” Newsweek, August 26, 2010, www.newsweek.com/blogs/declassiﬁed/2010/08/26/is-wikileakstoo-full-of-itself.print.html. 4 Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter, “Unpublished Iraq War Logs Trigger Internal WikiLeaks Revolt,” Wired.com, September 27, 2010, www. wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/wikileaks-revolt. 5 Steven Aftergood, “Wikileaks Fails ‘Due Diligence’ Review,” Secrecy News, June 28, 2010, www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2010/06/wikileaks_review.html. 6 Sarah Ellison, “The Man Who Spilled the Secrets,” Vanity Fair, February 2011, www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/02/the-guardian-201102. 7 Alan Rusbridger, “WikiLeaks: The Guardian’s role in the biggest leak in the history of the world,” The Guardian, January 28, 2011, www.guardian. co.uk/media/2011/jan/28/wikileaks-julian-assange-alan-rusbridger and Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark, “An Inside Look at Diﬃcult Negotiations with Julian Assange,” Spiegel Online, January 28, 2011, www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,742163,00.html. 8 “Chinese cyber-dissidents launch WikiLeaks, a site for whistleblowers,” Agence France-Presse, January 11, 2007, www.theage.com.au/news/ Technology/Chinese-cyberdissidents-launch-WikiLeaks-a-site-forwhistl eblowers/2007/01/11/1168105082315.html. 9 Julian Assange, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies,” November 10, 2006, and “Conspiracy as Governance,” December 3, 2006. 10 http://twitter.com/#!

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See also VoteWatch.eu, which collects and displays the full records of the European Parliament. WikiLeaks resources: –– WikiLeaks (WikiLeaks.ch). A non-proﬁt media organization dedicated to bringing important news and information to the public that provides an innovative, secure and anonymous way for independent sources around the world to leak information to our journalists. A list of mirror sites can be found at WikiLeaks.info. –– WikiLeaks Central (WLCentral.org). A hub for news, analysis and action run by volunteers supportive of WikiLeaks that covers censorship and freedom of information topics in all forms. –– The Bradley Manning Support Network (BradleyManning.org).

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This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers by Andy Greenberg

air gap, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Burning Man, Chelsea Manning, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disinformation, domain-specific language, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, hive mind, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mondo 2000, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, operational security, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Ralph Nader, real-name policy, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, SQL injection, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Teledyne, three-masted sailing ship, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Zimmermann PGP

The handbooks of secret rituals for nine different fraternities All of these are available at the WikiLeaks.org archive: http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Analyses. “smearing and stinging by governments, corporations, persons of all demonics” E-mail from John Young to the WikiLeaks developer mail list, December 20, 2006, http://cryptome.org/wikileaks/wikileaks-leak.htm “Or is it a clever smear by US intelligence?” “Inside Somalia and the Union of Islamic Courts.” WikiLeaks.org, available at http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Inside_Somalia_and_the_Union_of_Islamic_Courts reports of currency counterfeiting by the regime’s organized crime connections Xan Rice.

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indiscriminate police killings of thousands of young men “Oscar Foundation letter to Minister for Internal Security over extra-judicial killings in Kenya.” WikiLeaks.org, October 14, 2008, available here: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Oscar_Foundation_letter_to_Minister_for_Internal_Security_over_extra-judicial_killings_in_Kenya,_14_Oct_2008. tax shelters administered by the Swiss Bank Julius Baer “Bank Julius Baer.” WikiLeaks.org, available here: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Bank_Julius_Baer dumping in the Ivory Coast that had been legally prevented from appearing in British media “Ivory Coast toxic dumping report behind secret Guardian gag.” WikiLeaks.org, October 13, 2009 available here: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Ivory_Coast_toxic_dumping_report_behind_secret_Guardian_gag Icelandic banking documents that would catalog the country’s financial meltdown “Financial collapse: Confidential exposure analysis of 205 companies each owing above EUR45M to Icelandic bank Kaupthing.”

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WikiLeaks.org, October 13, 2009 available here: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Ivory_Coast_toxic_dumping_report_behind_secret_Guardian_gag Icelandic banking documents that would catalog the country’s financial meltdown “Financial collapse: Confidential exposure analysis of 205 companies each owing above EUR45M to Icelandic bank Kaupthing.” WikiLeaks.org, September 26, 2008 available at http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Financial_collapse:_Confidential_exposure_analysis_of_205_companies_each_owing_above_EUR45M_to_Icelandic_bank_Kaupthing,_26_Sep_2008 And a collection of pager messages from September 11, 2001 “9/11 tragedy pager intercepts.” WikiLeaks.org, available here: http://911.wikileaks.org/ would catch the attention of one young analyst in a dusty base in Iraq Hansen. “Wikileaks will release several thousand additional pages of Scientology material next week” “Scientology threatens WikiLeaks over secret cult bibles.”

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The End of Secrecy: The Rise and Fall of WikiLeaks by The "Guardian", David Leigh, Luke Harding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, air gap, banking crisis, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, Downton Abbey, drone strike, end-to-end encryption, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, friendly fire, global village, Hacker Ethic, impulse control, Jacob Appelbaum, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, machine readable, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, operational security, post-work, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Levy, sugar pill, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Guardian Books Kings Place 90 York Way London N1 9GU www.guardianbooks.co.uk A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-85265-239-8 CONTENTS Cast of characters Introduction Chapter 1: The Hunt Chapter 2: Bradley Manning Chapter 3: Julian Assange Chapter 4: The rise of WikiLeaks Chapter 5: The Apache video Chapter 6: The Lamo dialogues Chapter 7: The deal Chapter 8: In the bunker Chapter 9: The Afghanistan war logs Chapter 10: The Iraq war logs Chapter 11: The cables Chapter 12: The world’s most famous man Chapter 13: Uneasy partners Chapter 14: Before the deluge Chapter 15: Publication day Chapter 16: The biggest leak in history Chapter 17: The ballad of Wandsworth jail Chapter 18: The future of WikiLeaks Appendix: US Embassy Cables Acknowledgements CAST OF CHARACTERS WikiLeaks MELBOURNE, NAIROBI, REYKJAVIK, BERLIN, LONDON, NORFOLK, STOCKHOLM Julian Assange – WikiLeaks founder/editor Sarah Harrison – aide to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange Kristinn Hrafnsson – Icelandic journalist and WikiLeaks supporter James Ball – WikiLeaks data expert Vaughan Smith – former Grenadier Guards captain, founder of the Frontline Club and Assange’s host at Ellingham Hall Jacob Appelbaum – WikiLeaks’ representative in the US Daniel Ellsberg – Vietnam war whistleblower, WikiLeaks supporter Daniel Domscheit-Berg – German programmer and WikiLeaks technical architect (aka Daniel Schmitt) Mikael Viborg – owner of WikiLeaks’ Swedish internet service provider PRQ Ben Laurie – British encryption expert, adviser to Assange on encryption Mwalimu Mati – head of anti-corruption group Mars Group Kenya, source of first major WikiLeaks report Rudolf Elmer – former head of the Cayman Islands branch of the Julius Baer bank, source of second major WikiLeaks report Smári McCarthy – Iceland-based WikiLeaks enthusiast, programmer, Modern Media Initiative (MMI) campaigner Birgitta Jónsdóttir – Icelandic MP and WikiLeaks supporter Rop Gonggrijp – Dutch hacker-businessman, friend of Assange and MMI campaigner Herbert Snorrason – Icelandic MMI campaigner Israel Shamir – WikiLeaks associate Donald Böstrom – Swedish journalist and WikiLeaks’ Stockholm connection The Guardian LONDON Alan Rusbridger – editor-in-chief Nick Davies – investigative reporter David Leigh – investigations editor Ian Katz – deputy editor (news) Ian Traynor – Europe correspondent Harold Frayman – systems editor Declan Walsh – Pakistan/Afghanistan correspondent Alastair Dant – data visualiser Simon Rogers – data editor Jonathan Steele – former Iraq correspondent James Meek – former Iraq correspondent Rob Evans – investigative journalist Luke Harding – Moscow correspondent Robert Booth – reporter Stuart Millar – news editor, guardian.co.uk Janine Gibson – editor, guardian.co.uk Jonathan Casson – head of production Gill Phillips – in-house head of legal Jan Thompson – managing editor New York Times NEW YORK, LONDON Max Frankel – former executive editor Bill Keller – editor Eric Schmitt – war correspondent John F Burns – London correspondent Ian Fisher – deputy foreign editor Der Spiegel HAMBURG, LONDON Georg Mascolo – editor-in-chief Holger Stark – head of German desk Marcel Rosenbach – journalist John Goetz – journalist El País MADRID, LONDON Javier Moreno – editor-in-chief Vicente Jiménez – deputy editor Other Media Raffi Khatchadourian – New Yorker staffer and author of a major profile of Assange Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen – Reuters news agency employees accidentally killed by US army pilots in 2007 David Schlesinger – Reuters’ editor-in-chief Kevin Poulsen – former hacker, senior editor at Wired Gavin MacFadyen – City University professor and journalist, London host to Assange Stephen Grey – freelance reporter Iain Overton – former TV journalist, head of Bureau of Investigative Journalism Heather Brooke – London-based American journalist and freedom of information activist Bradley Manning Bradley Manning – 23-year-old US army private and alleged WikiLeaks source Rick McCombs – former principal at Crescent high school, Crescent, Oklahoma Brian, Susan, Casey Manning – parents and sister Tom Dyer – school friend Kord Campbell – former manager at Zoto software company Jeff Paterson – steering committee member of the Bradley Manning support network Adrian Lamo – hacker and online confidant Timothy Webster – former US army counter-intelligence special agent Tyler Watkins – former boyfriend David House – former hacker and supporter David Coombs – lawyer Julian Assange Christine Hawkins – mother John Shipton – father Brett Assange – stepfather Keith Hamilton – former partner of Christine Daniel Assange – Julian’s son Paul Galbally – Assange’s lawyer during his 1996 hacking trial Stockholm allegations / extradition “Sonja Braun” – plaintiff; member of Brotherhood movement “Katrin Weiss” – plaintiff; museum worker Claes Borgström – lawyer for both women, former Swedish equal opportunities ombudsman and prominent Social Democrat politician Marianne Ny – Swedish chief prosecutor and sex crimes specialist Mark Stephens – Assange lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, QC – Assange lawyer Jennifer Robinson – lawyer in Mark Stephens’ office Gemma Lindfield – lawyer acting for the Swedish authorities Howard Riddle – district judge, Westminster magistrates court Mr Justice Ouseley – high court judge, London Government Hillary Clinton – US Secretary of State Louis B Susman – US ambassador in London PJ Crowley – US assistant secretary of state for public affairs Harold Koh – US state department’s legal adviser Robert Gates – US defence secretary Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles – former UK government special representative to Afghanistan and former ambassador to Kabul INTRODUCTION Alan Rusbridger Back in the days when almost no one had heard about WikiLeaks, regular emails started arriving in my inbox from someone called Julian Assange.

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The company EveryDNS, which provides free routing services (translating human-readable addresses such as wikileaks.org into machine readable internet addresses such as 64.64.12.170) terminated the wikileaks.org domain name. It also deleted all email addresses associated with it. Justifying the move, EveryDNS said the constant hacker attacks on WikiLeaks were inconveniencing other customers. In effect, WikiLeaks had now vanished from the web for anyone who couldn’t work out how to discover a numeric address for the site. WikiLeaks shifted to an alternative address, www.wikileaks.ch, registered in Switzerland but hosted in a Swedish bunker built to withstand a nuclear war.

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The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire by Wikileaks

affirmative action, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, energy transition, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, F. W. de Klerk, facts on the ground, failed state, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, high net worth, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Northern Rock, nuclear ambiguity, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game, éminence grise

On the reaction to dollarization in Ecuador, see Sean Healy, “Latin America: Trend toward Dollarisation Accelerates,” Green Left Weekly, January 24, 2001. 23https://cablegatesearch.wikileaks.org/cable.php?id= 05QUITO882&q=ecuador. 24https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05QUITO895_a.html. 25https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05QUITO897_a.html. 26https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05QUITO900_a.html. 27https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05QUITO945_a.html. 28https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05QUITO898_a.html. 29https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05QUITO2699_a.html; https://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/08/06QUITO2150.html; https://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/04/06QUITO995.html. On NED funding, the fact is advertised on its own web page—see information on Ecuador at ned.org. 30https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08QUITO35_a.html. 31https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08QUITO75_a.html.

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., at amicc.org. 13http://wikileaks.org/cable/2003/04/03ZAGREB798.html. 14http://wikileaks.org/cable/2008/03/08CHISINAU314.html. 15http://wikileaks.org/cable/2004/06/04GUATEMALA1361.html. 16http://wikileaks.org/cable/2003/12/03SANAA3010.html. 17http://wikileaks.org/cable/2004/07/04SANAA1733.html. 18http://wikileaks.org/cable/2004/05/04MANAMA676.html. 19http://wikileaks.org/cable/2004/06/04MANAMA831.html. 20http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/02/05MANAMA158.html. 21http://wikileaks.org/cable/2004/03/04MANAMA368.html. 22http://wikileaks.org/cable/2004/03/04MANAMA368.html. 23http://wikileaks.org/cable/2004/06/04MANAMA831.html. 24Anna Fifield and Camilla Hall, “US and Bahrain Secretly Extend Defence Deal,” Financial Times, September 1, 2011. 25http://wikileaks.org/cable/2007/04/07KUWAIT487.html. 26http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/07/05AMMAN5624.html. 27http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/08/05AMMAN6612.html. 28http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/11/06MANAMA1925.html. 29http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/07/05ASUNCION869.html. 30http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/07/05ASUNCION860.html. 31http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/07/06ASUNCION750.html. 32http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/07/05ASUNCION860.html. 33Elise Keppler, “The United States and the International Criminal Court: The Bush Administration’s Approach and a Way Forward Under the Obama Adm,” Human Rights Watch, August 2, 2009, at hrw.org. 34http://wikileaks.org/wiki/CRS:_Article_98_Agreements_ and_Sanctions_on_U.S.

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_Foreign_Aid_to_Latin_America,_March_22,_2007. 35http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/11/05SANJOSE2717.html. 36Council on Hemispheric Affairs, “Costa Rica’s Fateful Move: San José Expands Its Role in US-Led Counter-Narcotics Efforts,” August 4, 2010, at coha.org. 37http://wikileaks.org/cable/2004/03/04BRASILIA745.html. 38http://wikileaks.org/cable/2004/12/04BRASILIA3154.html. 39http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/12/05SANTIAGO2573.html. 40http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/12/05SANTIAGO2573.html. 41http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/01/06SANTIAGO130.html. 42http://wikileaks.org/cable/2004/11/04QUITO3028.html. 43http://wikileaks.org/cable/2004/11/04QUITO3103.html. 44http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/03/05QUITO590.html. 45http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/04/05QUITO773.html. 46http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/05/05QUITO1048.html. 47http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/05/05QUITO1169.html. 48http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/09/05QUITO2235.html. 49http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/05/06QUITO1157.html. 50http://wikileaks.org/wiki/CRS:_Article_98_Agreements_ and_Sanctions_on_U.S._Foreign_Aid_to_Latin_America,_March_22,_2007. 51Glenn Greenwald, “US Continues Bush Policy of Opposing ICC Prosecutions,” Salon, February 28, 2011, at salon.com. 52Colum Lynch, “Exclusive: US to Support ICC War Crimes Prosecution in Syria,” Foreign Policy, May 7, 2011, at foreignpolicy.com. 53https://wikileaks.org/cable/2010/02/10TELAVIV417.html. 54Clayton Swisher, “Spy Cables: Abbas and Israel Ally Against 2009 UN Probe,” Al Jazeera, February 23, 2015, at aljazeera.com. 55Jeff Rathke, “Statement on ICC Prosecutor’s Decision,” Press Statement, US Department of State, January 16, 2015, at state.gov. 56Allyn Fisher-Ilan, “US Senator Threatens Aid Cut to Palestinians Over ICC Move,” Reuters, January 19, 2015, at reuters.com.

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Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

It’s an expensive investment, he says, and he sees WikiLeaks as “a complementary effort to try and make it cheap again”. Both men are aware that a part of their future lies in partnering with the press. For Daniel, the key realisation working with WikiLeaks is that “things given away for free are not worth anything. By creating scarcity you somehow create value”. Early experiments with offering exclusive access to material to particular newspapers have produced mixed results, but WikiLeaks will continue to trial this approach. And despite their fiscalised state, Julian also understands the value journalists offer WikiLeaks: “Contextualisation, adapting something to a local community or a political mood at that particular moment, making it emotional and hyping it up: these are very important things that journalists do.”

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Still, although the message behind the video only needed a light breeze to be carried out of the media echo chamber and disappear into the ether, WikiLeaks themselves remained in the headlines throughout the spring and into summer. In early June, Wired magazine’s Threat Level blog was the first to report the arrest of a junior US Army analyst in Baghdad. Private Bradley Manning, 22, was being held in Kuwait under suspicion of leaking the video and other classified documents to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks had been on the US government’s radar long before the Collateral Murder video. In 2008, the US Army Counterintelligence Center produced an internal memo entitled Wikileaks.org—An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents, or Terrorist Groups?

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And after a little conversation with Joe Lieberman, Amazon had decided it didnt want to do business with WikiLeaks. Just as Bluehost had with Zimbabwean activists Kubatana, Amazon had made the obvious business decision that, no matter what the legal niceties, WikiLeaks were not worth the trouble. But what was WikiLeaks doing hosting with a US-based mega-provider like Amazon in the first place? Surely they had the smarts to run their own operation? The truth is that since the day before the Cablegate leaks, WikiLeaks had been subjected to cyber-attacks called “Distributed Denial of Service”, or DDoS. DDoS attacks route tons of bogus traffic to a website’s servers, creating jams that stop legitimate traffic from getting through and effectively taking the website offline.

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Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Climatic Research Unit, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Filter Bubble, global pandemic, Google Earth, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Julian Assange, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, operational security, pre–internet, Russian election interference, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing test, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch activist, hacker, businessman, WikiLeaks funder, and overall backbone for Assange’s operations, told Khatchadourian that WikiLeaks plays an essential role in the media. “We are not the press,” Gonggrijp said. Rather, he considered WikiLeaks to be an advocacy group for sources. According to Gonggrijp, WikiLeaks created a world in which “the source is no longer dependent on finding a journalist who may or may not do something good with his document.” The statements by both Assange and Gonggrijp appeared almost immediately to be at odds with each other and with reality. WikiLeaks wasn’t the press, but it would provide raw information to all of the press in hopes that someone would get the story “right” by WikiLeaks’ standards.

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WikiLeaks wasn’t the press, but it would provide raw information to all of the press in hopes that someone would get the story “right” by WikiLeaks’ standards. WikiLeaks would go after the most oppressive regimes and any behavior it deemed illegal or immoral, making itself the arbiter for the world as to where the blurry lines of morality lie. These paradoxical statements have played out in confusing ways throughout WikiLeaks’ history. Notoriety brought in new pilfered secrets, and Assange claimed in 2010 that WikiLeaks was receiving dozens of disclosures a day. Each year, these disclosures struck bigger targets with larger caches of pilfered materials. WikiLeaks’ hit list from 2006 to 2009 included China, Kenya’s police force, Scientology, Sarah Palin, Bank Julius Baer, the Bilderberg Group, and Iran.

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The following day, October 27, 2010, an unnamed official at the FSB’s Center for Information Security, Russia’s internal intelligence arm, issued a statement: “It’s essential to remember that given the will and the relevant orders, [WikiLeaks] can be made inaccessible forever.”7 The Russian secrets never surfaced at WikiLeaks, and instead Assange’s next posting, on November 28, 2010, showcased U.S. State Department stolen diplomatic cables, beginning the slow drip of roughly 250,000 reports harming U.S. relations with countries worldwide. WikiLeaks’ challenge to the worst regimes, and Assange’s bravery in the face of dictators, faded away. Israel Shamir, a close associate of Assange’s, also began appearing in WikiLeaks circles in 2010. James Ball, a staffer at WikiLeaks during a tumultuous three-month period, described Shamir’s entrance in WikiLeaks circles: “A self-styled Russian ‘peace campaigner’ with a long history of anti-Semitic writing . . .

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We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency by Parmy Olson

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, bitcoin, call centre, Chelsea Manning, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, lolcat, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, pirate software, side project, Skype, speech recognition, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day

When the Stratfor hackers got wind of news that Sabu had asked for money for the e-mails they had stolen, they were shocked, and quickly transferred the e-mails to WikiLeaks’s server for free. WikiLeaks has not denied, publicly or in private, that Sabu asked for money from the organization. But if WikiLeaks had paid for them, American authorities might have had a much stronger case against Assange. It seems doubtful that the FBI had the time or inclination to decide from the top down that it wanted to play along and try to nab WikiLeaks, but perhaps an agent somewhere had the idea to nudge Sabu to ask Assange for money, and see what came of it. Once WikiLeaks had the Stratfor e-mails, it formed partnerships with twenty-five media organizations, including Rolling Stone and Russia Reporter, and published a drip-feed of confidential information.

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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the leaks “threatened national security,” and U.S. State Department staff were barred from visiting the WikiLeaks website. WikiLeaks.org quickly came under attack. An ex–military hacker nicknamed The Jester DDoS’d the site, taking it offline for more than twenty-four hours. Jester was a self-styled patriotic hacker who had been known for attacking Islamic jihadist websites; later he would become a sworn enemy of Anonymous. Now he claimed on Twitter that he was hitting WikiLeaks “for attempting to endanger the lives of our troops.” To try to stay on the web, WikiLeaks moved its site to Amazon’s servers. It was booted offline again, with Amazon claiming it had violated its terms of service on copyright.

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If anyone in the channel had a question about WikiLeaks as an organization, he or she was often referred to q, who was mostly quiet. So Kayla sent him a private message. According to a source who was close to the situation, Kayla told q that she was a hacker and dropped hints about what she saw herself doing for WikiLeaks: hacking into government websites and finding data that WikiLeaks could then release. She was unsure of what to expect and mostly just wanted to help. Sure enough, q recruited her, along with a few other hackers Kayla was not aware of at the time. To these hackers and to q, WikiLeaks appeared to be not only an organization for whistle-blowers but one that solicited hackers for stolen information.

pages: 457 words: 126,996

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman

1960s counterculture, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, Debian, digital rights, disinformation, do-ocracy, East Village, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, false flag, feminist movement, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Santayana, Hacker News, hive mind, impulse control, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, lolcat, low cost airline, mandatory minimum, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pirate software, power law, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, TED Talk, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, zero day

Lina Ben Mhenni, “Tunisia: Censorship Continues as WikiLeaks Cables Make the Rounds,” globalvoicesonline.org, Dec. 7, 2010. 4. Quinn Norton, “2011: The Year Anonymous Took On Cops, Dictators and Existential Dread,” wired.com, Jan. 11, 2012. 5. Ibrahim Saleh “WikiLeaks and the Arab Spring: The Twists and Turns of Media, Culture, and Power,” Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 237. 6. WikiLeaks, “Cable: 09TUNIS516-a,” wikileaks.org, last accessed June 5, 2014, available at https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/ 09TUNIS516_a.html. 7.

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A sizeable number of trolls still claimed the Anonymous moniker, but this stream of ultracoordinated motherfuckery was clearly on the wane. No, the intrigue saturating the conference was due to another player in town: the whistleblowing sensation WikiLeaks. More specifically, interest coalesced around the recent trove of documents and footage a young army private (then) named Bradley Manning had leaked, which WikiLeaks had then laid at the feet of the world. Founded in 2006, the driving concept behind WikiLeaks had been simple: provide both a safe house and clearing house for leaks. And for a couple of years, WikiLeaks circulated countless leaks but failed to draw significant attention from established media institutions like the New York Times.

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Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.”1 And so, by April 2010, WikiLeaks had dramatically switched public relations strategies. When they released video footage of a Baghdad air strike, which they called “Collateral Murder,” WikiLeaks left nothing to chance—packaging the already shocking material in a way that delivered an extra punch. They edited the video for maximum effect and added simple but powerful editorial commentary at the beginning. Julian Assange, the Australian hacker who founded WikiLeaks, was then known in the media as an “international man of mystery.” Now he broke with his previous disavowal of the spotlight.

pages: 474 words: 130,575

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

“In late 2010, when Assange seemed to be on the brink of long-term jail awaiting questioning for alleged sex crimes, one WikiLeaks staffer told me he hoped Appelbaum might even be the favored successor to Assange in WikiLeaks’ hierarchy.” Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets. 83. Nathaniel Rich, “The American WikiLeaks Hacker,” Rolling Stone, December 1, 2010. 84. Amy Goodman, “Part 2: Daniel Ellsberg and Jacob Appelbaum on the NDAA, WikiLeaks and Unconstitutional Surveillance,” Democracy Now, February 6, 2013, https://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/6/part_2_daniel_ellsberg_and_jacob _appelbaum_on_the_ndaa_wikileaks_and_unconstitutional_surveillance. 85. Rich, “American WikiLeaks Hacker.” 86. The American Civil Liberties Union partnered with Tor (“Privacy Groups Announce Developer Challenge for Mobile Apps,” press release, ACLU of Northern California, February 4, 2011, https://www.aclunc.org/news/privacy-groups-announce-developer-challenge-mobile-apps).

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Soon after that supposedly wild night, Appelbaum decided to attach himself to the WikiLeaks cause. He spent a few weeks with Assange and the original WikiLeaks crew in Iceland as they prepared their first major release and helped secure the site’s anonymous submissions system using Tor’s hidden service feature, which hid the physical location of WikiLeaks servers and in theory made them much less susceptible to surveillance and attack. From then on, the WikiLeaks site proudly advertised Tor: “secure, anonymous, distributed network for maximum security.” Appelbaum’s timing couldn’t have been better. Late that summer WikiLeaks caused an international sensation by publishing a huge cache of classified government documents stolen and leaked by Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning, a young US Army private who was stationed in Iraq.

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Andrew Lewman, email message sent to Kelly DeYoe and Roger Dingledine, “EPIC, BBC, Tor, and FOIA,” September 10, 2013, https://surveillancevalley.com/content /citations/email-from-andrew-lewman-to-kelly-deyoe-and-roger-dingledine-epic-bbc-tor-and-foia-10-september-2013.pdf. 78. WikiLeaks, email message sent to John Young, “Martha Stewart pgp,” Cryptome, January 7, 2007, https://cryptome.org/wikileaks/wikileaks-leak2.htm. 79. Mona Mahmood, Maggie O’Kane, Chavala Madlena, and Teresa Smith, “Revealed: Pentagon’s Link to Iraqi Torture Centres,” Guardian, March 6, 2013. 80. Scott Shane and Andrew W. Lehren, “Leaked Cables Offer Raw Look at U.S. Diplomacy,” New York Times, November 28, 2010. 81. “Affidavit of Julian Paul Assange,” WikiLeaks, September 2, 2013, https://wikileaks.org/IMG/html/Affidavit_of_Julian_Assange.html. 82.

pages: 302 words: 85,877

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Jake said a lot of provocative things, declaring that wiretaps were “entirely bogus” and that most search warrants were improper. One of the most surprising assertions came in response to questions about who should decide what secrets to publish. Instead of WikiLeaks holding that right as a publisher, Jake said it was up to WikiLeaks’s sources, whoever they were. “It’s a rough reality, but bitching about WikiLeaks makes little to no sense,” he wrote. “The point of the press is to inform.” Members of Congress condemned WikiLeaks, and a federal criminal investigation put pressure on PayPal, Visa, and others that helped people donate to the website. The sprawling online activist group known as Anonymous then coordinated denial-of-service attacks on PayPal and Visa, effectively commandeering the mantle of hacktivism.

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At least Jake was gone from cDc before the election of 2016, when his association with WikiLeaks would have been indefensible to everyone in cDc. WikiLeaks would be a central, partisan player in helping elect Trump, who lavishly praised it on the campaign trail. Emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee by Russian operatives were gleefully published by WikiLeaks as the Democratic convention was getting under way, when they could be dumped with maximum impact. Hours after Trump’s campaign was blown off course by the publication of a video in which he bragged of grabbing women “by the pussy,” WikiLeaks muddied the day by beginning to roll out stolen emails from Clinton campaign chairman Podesta.

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Then, “there was a miscommunication between some of them,” Phineas wrote, and one of the people gave the dump to WikiLeaks. He said that even though the person who had relayed the files realized the mistake and asked WikiLeaks not to publish, it did so anyway. But Phineas then published more files himself, including a database of ordinary AKP members and, worse, a database of almost all the adult women in Turkey, along with cell phone numbers and addresses for many of them. Those databases were copied and reposted by people like UK security activist Thomas White, who tweeted as @CthulhuSec and had won a measure of controversial fame by posting the fruits of many large hacks. WikiLeaks tweeted links to those databases, which allowed millions of women to be reached by stalkers, further angering previous admirers of Phineas, such as Electronic Frontier Foundation activist Eva Galperin.

Mbs: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman by Ben Hubbard

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, bitcoin, Citizen Lab, Donald Trump, fake news, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, NSO Group, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

pilgrimage to Mecca: Saudi Foreign Ministry document, Wikileaks, Jan. 22, 2012. https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables/pics/5357859a-e321-4088-9137-4b69e0a87f30.jpg hand out as he saw fit: Saudi Foreign Ministry document, Wikileaks document: #80451. Undated. https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables/doc80451.html “the kingdom asks of him”: Saudi diplomatic cable, Wikileaks document #53032. Dated Aug. 14, 2008. https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables/doc53032.html “problems the agency is facing”: Cited in “Cables Released by Wikileaks Reveal Saudis’ Checkbook Diplomacy,” NYT, June 20, 2015. from going to prison: Saudi diplomatic cable, Wikileaks document #72359. Undated. https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables/doc72359.html preachers had been “prepared”: Reports on the website of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Endowment, Preaching, and Guidance, moia.gov.sa, accessed 2015, since removed.

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MBS’S WAR Mayy El Shiekh dedicated many hours to helping me digest and translate the Saudi Wikileaks cables. Shuaib Almosawa provided reporting from Yemen. C. J. Chivers helped identify munitions scraps. Many of the Wikileaks documents cited here were first reported in “Cables Released by Wikileaks Reveal Saudis’ Checkbook Diplomacy,” NYT, June 20, 2015, and “Wikileaks Shows a Saudi Obsession With Iran,” NYT, July 16, 2015. For background on the Houthis, I consulted “Regime and Periphery in Northern Yemen: the Huthi Phenomenon,” RAND Corporation, 2010. pilgrimage to Mecca: Saudi Foreign Ministry document, Wikileaks, Jan. 22, 2012. https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables/pics/5357859a-e321-4088-9137-4b69e0a87f30.jpg hand out as he saw fit: Saudi Foreign Ministry document, Wikileaks document: #80451.

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Undated. https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables/doc72359.html preachers had been “prepared”: Reports on the website of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Endowment, Preaching, and Guidance, moia.gov.sa, accessed 2015, since removed. employed in Guinea: Saudi Foreign Ministry document, Wikileaks. Dated Jan. 18, 2013. https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables/pics/5a3363c8-a11e-4a5d-8b66-f39af6077f20.jpg twelve others in Tajikistan: Saudi Foreign Ministry document, Wikileaks document 96427. Dated 2011. https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables/doc96427.html. The Indian scholar was Sheikh Suhaib Hasan. Islamic association in India: Saudi Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs document, Wikileaks. Dated Feb. 6, 2012. https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables/pics/8770db3f-984c-4dda-8b78-96bd2853b063.jpg overwhelmingly Christian country: Saudi Foreign Ministry document.

pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

On July 18: United States of America v. Defendants, 18. @WikiLeaks tweeted: WikiLeaks (@WikiLeaks), “RELEASE: 19,252 Emails from the US Democratic National Committee,” Twitter, July 22, 2016, https://twitter.com/WikiLeaks/status/756501723305414656. searchable database: Database of DNC emails: https://WikiLeaks.org//dnc-emails/. The web page announced, “Today, Friday 22 July 2016 at 10:30am EDT, WikiLeaks releases 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments from the top of the US Democratic National Committee—part one of our new Hillary Leaks series.” Tom Hamburger and Karen Tumulty, “WikiLeaks Releases Thousands of Documents About Clinton and Internal Deliberations,” The Washington Post, July 22, 2016.

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voting technology standards: Perlroth, “Hackers Used New Weapons.” internet outage map on Twitter: WikiLeaks (@WikiLeaks), “Mr. Assange is still alive,” Twitter, October 21, 2016, https://twitter.com/WikiLeaks/status/789574436219449345?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw. The map is from DownDetector, a platform that provides information on service issues. See Blumenthal and Wiese, “Hacked Home Devices.” Julian Assange’s internet connection: WikiLeaks claims that Ecuador shut off Assange’s internet after WikiLeaks published Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches on October 16: WikiLeaks (@WikiLeaks), “We can confirm Ecuador cut off Assange’s internet access Saturday, 5pm GMT, shortly after publication of Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speechs,” Twitter, October 17, 2016, https://twitter.com/WikiLeaks/status/788099178832420865.

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To create excitement for Kaine, a politician who was not in the least bit exciting, Hillary decided to announce the choice on Twitter. Before Hillary could post her big news, WikiLeaks posted theirs. At 8:26 a.m., Eastern daylight time, WikiLeaks teased with a tweet: “Are you ready for Hillary? We begin our series today with 20 thousand emails from the top of the DNC. #Hillary2016.” Two hours later, the Gates of Hell opened. At 10:50 a.m., @WikiLeaks tweeted: The tweet announced the release of 19,252 emails from the DNC, with a cartoon of Hillary Clinton sitting in front of a laptop typing emails about money and bombs. An hour later, at 11:39 a.m., WikiLeaks announced the release of “1,062 documents and spreadsheets” with an accompanying link to a searchable database, so that journalists could hunt for the most damaging revelations.

pages: 587 words: 117,894

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know by P. W. Singer, Allan Friedman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, air gap, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business continuity plan, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, do-ocracy, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, global supply chain, Google Earth, information security, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, M-Pesa, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, packet switching, Peace of Westphalia, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, Twitter Arab Spring, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day, zero-sum game

“enemy combatant” Shane D’Aprile, “Gingrich: Leaks Show Obama Administration ‘Shallow,’ ‘Amateurish,’” Blog Briefing Room (blog), The Hill, December 5, 2010, http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/132037-gingrich-blames-obama-on-wikileaks-labels-assange-a-terrorist. traditional channels Ewen MacAskill, “WikiLeaks Website Pulled by Amazon after US Political Pressure,” Guardian, December 1, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-website-cables-servers-amazon. registered in Australia Hal Berghel, “WikiLeaks and the Matter of Private Manning,” Computer 45, no. 3 (March 2012): pp. 70–73. French national banking system Loek Essers, “Visa and Mastercard Funding Returns to WikiLeaks via French Payment Gateway,” PCWorld, July 18, 2012, http://www.pcworld.com/article/259437/visa_and_mastercard_funding_returns_to_wikileaks_via_french_payment_gateway.html. 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square Stephen Jewkes, “Milan Prosecutor Wants Jail Terms Upheld for Google Autism Video,” Reuters, December 11, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/11/us-google-italy-idUSBRE8BA10R20121211?

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“Two clandestine non-state groups” Paul Rexton Kan, “Cyberwar in the Underworld: Anonymous versus Los Zetas in Mexico,” Yale Journal of International Affairs, February 26, 2013, http://yalejournal.org/2013/02/26/cyberwar-in-the-under-world-anonymous-versus-los-zetas-in-mexico/. “noisy political demonstration” “WikiLeaks Cyber Backlash All Bark, No Bite: Experts,” Vancouver Sun, December 11, 2010. “this is Lexington” Steven Swinford, “WikiLeaks Hackers Threaten British Government,” Daily Telegraph, December 10, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8193210/WikiLeaks-hackers-threaten-British-Government.html. THE CRIMES O TOMORROW, TODAY: WHAT IS CYBERCRIME? “crime which may exist in the future” Neil Ardley, School, Work and Play (World of Tomorrow) (New York: Franklin Watts, 1981), pp. 26–27.

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As he wrote, “I listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltratrating [sic] possibly the largest data spillage in american history.” In April 2010, WikiLeaks published a provocatively titled video, “Collateral Murder,” depicting an edited, annotated video from a US Army Apache attack helicopter firing on civilians in Iraq, including two Reuters reporters. WikiLeaks followed this up in July and October 2010 by releasing immense troves of classified documents relating to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. While Manning had originally wanted to remain anonymous, as was the WikiLeaks model, his facilitator, Assange, instead sought to achieve maximum publicity. The video was first displayed at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

pages: 390 words: 96,624

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business cycle, business intelligence, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital Maoism, don't be evil, Eben Moglen, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Global Witness, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, online collectivism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pre–internet, race to the bottom, real-name policy, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

But without clear transparency and accountability about how, when, and under what specific circumstances personal information is being collected and used, citizens have good reason to worry about the growth of the state’s “panoptic” power. WIKILEAKS AND THE FATE OF CONTROVERSIAL SPEECH WikiLeaks and several news organizations that the whistle-blowing organization had chosen as partners published the first batch of classified US diplomatic cables, leaked by disgruntled US Army Private Bradley Manning, in November 2010. Vice President Joseph Biden declared WikiLeaks’ leader, Julian Assange, to be a “digital terrorist.” Senator Joe Lieberman declared that “WikiLeaks’ illegal, outrageous, and reckless acts have compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world.” Meanwhile, the WikiLeaks “Cablegate” website, dedicated to showcasing the leaked diplomatic cables, came under distributed denial of service attacks of unknown origin.

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Two days after Assange moved the Cablegate site to Amazon, Amazon headquarters received a call of complaint from Lieberman’s office. Shortly thereafter, Amazon booted WikiLeaks. The senator responded with a statement: “I wish that Amazon had taken this action earlier based on WikiLeaks’ previous publication of classified material. The company’s decision to cut off WikiLeaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies WikiLeaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material.” Amazon later insisted that it had acted independently of Lieberman’s phone call. At any rate, legally Amazon was off the hook.

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As Harvard legal scholar Yochai Benkler pointed out in a group e-mail discussion with colleagues about WikiLeaks and the State Department’s actions (which I am quoting with his permission), Koh’s assertion was patently “false, as a matter of constitutional law.” The Justice Department has not managed to bring a viable case to a court of law against WikiLeaks or any other entity involved with publishing the cables. Benkler argued the government had no case unless it could prove that somebody involved with WikiLeaks directly conspired with Manning. What Benkler and many other constitutional scholars find insidious about the US government’s approach to WikiLeaks is that since the government has no genuine case against the publishers, its assertion of WikiLeaks’ illegality—no matter how groundless—“leaves room for various extralegal avenues that can be denied as not under your control to do the suppression work.”

pages: 230 words: 60,050

In the Flow by Boris Groys

illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Julian Assange, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, WikiLeaks

Thus, the phenomenon of WikiLeaks signals a reintroduction of universalism into politics. This fact alone makes the emergence of WikiLeaks highly significant. We know from history that only universalist projects can lead to real political change. But WikiLeaks signals not only a return of universalism but also the deep transformation that the notion of universalism has undergone during recent decades. WikiLeaks is not a political party. It does not offer any universalist vision of society, political programme or ideology designed to ‘spiritually’ or politically unify mankind. Rather, WikiLeaks offers a sum of technical means that would allow universal access to any specific, particular content.

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The traditional media practice nothing else when they hunt down celebrities to reveal their personal lives. In a certain sense, WikiLeaks does the same in the framework of the Internet. Not accidentally, it cooperates with the international press – the New York Times, Der Spiegel, etc. The abolition and confiscation of the private sphere (but not of private property!) is what unites WikiLeaks with traditional media. WikiLeaks can be seen as a vanguard of the media. It is not a rebellion against it. Rather, WikiLeaks moves more audaciously and faster in the direction of the common telos of contemporary media, by realizing the goal of the universal class, of the new universalization of the world through the means of universal service.

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This eBook is licensed to Edward Betts, edward@4angle.com on 04/01/2016 CHAPTER 11 WikiLeaks: The Revolt of the Clerks, or Universality as Conspiracy In our epoch we have become accustomed to protests and revolts in the name of particular identities and interests. The revolts in the name of universal projects, such as liberalism or communism, seem to belong to the past. But the activities of WikiLeaks serve no specific identities or interests. They, rather, have a general, universal goal: to guarantee the free flow of information. Thus, the phenomenon of WikiLeaks signals a reintroduction of universalism into politics.

pages: 266 words: 80,018

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man by Luke Harding

affirmative action, air gap, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, disinformation, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Firefox, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job-hopping, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, undersea cable, web application, WikiLeaks

The appointment was supposed to draw a line under the intelligence scandals of the Bush years – the renditions, the secret CIA prisons and the illegal wiretapping. Snowden evidently knew of WikiLeaks, a niche transparency website whose story would later intersect with his own. But he didn’t like it. At this point, Snowden’s antipathy towards the New York Times was based on his opinion that ‘they are worse than Wikileaks’. Later, however, he would go on to accuse the paper of not publishing quickly enough and of sitting on unambiguous evidence of White House illegality. These are somewhat contradictory views.

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The other was Clement Walker, a 17th-century Somerset parliamentarian during the English civil war who was eventually locked up and died in the Tower of London. Significantly, verax is also an antonym of mendax. Mendax means ‘deceiving’ and was the handle used by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks when he was a young Australian hacker. WikiLeaks, with their electronic mass-leaking of US army files from Afghanistan, and of State Department diplomatic cables from all over the world, had recently plunged the US administration into uproar. Perhaps Snowden’s allusion was deliberate. Outwardly, his life continued as before.

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Assange’s view of the world was essentially self-regarding and Manichaean, with countries divided up into those that supported him (Russia, Ecuador, Latin America generally) and those that didn’t (the US, Sweden and the UK). As Jemima Khan, one of many demoralised former WikiLeaks supporters, put it: ‘The problem with Camp Assange is that, in the words of George W Bush, it sees the world as being “with us or against us”.’ On Sunday 23 June 2013, Snowden’s lanky figure, wearing a grey shirt and carrying a backpack, arrived at Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok airport. With him was the young WikiLeaks worker, Sarah Harrison. It was a hot and humid morning. The pair were nervous. They checked in at the Aeroflot counter for flight SU213 to Moscow, and made their way through normal departure channels.

pages: 525 words: 116,295

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

lightning rod, as Assange called himself: Atika Shubert, “WikiLeaks Editor Julian Assange Dismisses Reports of Internal Strife,” CNN, October 22, 2010, http://articles.cnn.com/2010-10-22/us/wikileaks.interview_1_julian-assange-wikileaks-afghan-war-diary?_s=PM:US. “Sources speak with their feet”: Julian Assange in discussion with the authors, June 2011. WikiLeaks lost its principal website URL: James Cowie, “WikiLeaks: Moving Target,” Renesys (blog), December 7, 2010, http://www.renesys.com/blog/2010/12/wikileaks-moving-target.shtml. “mirror” sites: Ravi Somaiya, “Pro-Wikileaks Activists Abandon Amazon Cyber Attack,” BBC, December 9, 2010, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-11957367.

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Eventually, though, the technology used by these platforms will be so sophisticated that they will be effectively unblockable. When WikiLeaks lost its principal website URL, WikiLeaks.org, due to a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and the pullout of its Internet service provider (which hosted the site) in 2010, its supporters immediately set up more than a thousand “mirror” sites (copies of the original site hosted at remote locations), with URLs like WikiLeaks.fi (in Finland), WikiLeaks.ca (in Canada) and WikiLeaks.info. (In a DDoS attack, a large number of compromised computer systems attack a single target, overloading the system with information requests and causing it to shut down, denying service to legitimate users.)

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Shortly thereafter, a series of cyber attacks crippled, among others, the websites for Amazon, which had revoked WikiLeaks’ use of its servers, and MasterCard and PayPal, which had both stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks. This campaign, officially titled Operation Avenge Assange, was coordinated by Anonymous, a loosely knit collective of hackers and activists already responsible for a string of prominent DDoS attacks against the Church of Scientology and other targets. During Operation Avenge Assange, the group vowed to take revenge on any organization that lined up against WikiLeaks: “While we don’t have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same reasons. We want transparency and we counter censorship. The attempts to silence WikiLeaks are long strides closer to a world where we cannot say what we think and are unable to express our opinions and ideas.

pages: 270 words: 79,992

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

These two core values of Wikipedia—that anyone can edit it and that everything is transparent—are part of the attraction of the “wiki” in WikiLeaks. While WikiLeaks actually started as a wiki, it is no longer one. But WikiLeaks is a place that wants to bring radical transparency to the world’s largest institutions and prove that anyone—even a lowly private in the U.S. Army—can be powerful beyond imagination. What is the role of secrecy in democracy and diplomacy, and what does it mean in a digital age where secrecy and privacy have nearly disappeared? It’s an important question, because whatever WikiLeaks’s future, Internet-fueled leaks are certain to rise again. Assange sees WikiLeaks as a new force in the world, one that works to bring accountability to large institutions like the U.S. government.

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v=swHkpHMVt3A 28. Julian Assange, “The Non Linear Effects of Leaks on Unjust Systems of Governance,” WikiLeaks 31 Dec. 2006. Archived from the original on 2 Oct. 2007. 29. http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/the-secret-life-of-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-20100521-w1um.html 30. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/01/us-embassy-cables-executed-mike-huckabee 31. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8171269/Sarah-Palin-hunt-WikiLeaks-founder-like-al-Qaeda-and-Taliban-leaders.html 32. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/19/assange-high-tech-terrorist-biden 33. http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/31/pentagon_whistleblower_daniel_ellsberg_julian_assange 34.

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In a series of blog posts explaining the purpose of WikiLeaks, he writes, “the more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. … Since unjust systems, by their nature, induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.”28 To Assange WikiLeaks is something between the accountability journalism of newspapers and the transparency activism of the open-source movement. By his count, WikiLeaks has released more classified documents than the rest of the world press combined: “That’s not something I say as a way of saying how successful we are—rather, that shows you the parlous state of the rest of the media.

pages: 159 words: 42,401

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

p. 67 Micah EFF start date: Micah Lee, “Leaving EFF and Joining a Fearless Team of Journalists,” Micah Lee’s blog, November 15, 2013, micahflee.com. p. 67 Trevor EFF start date: Trevor Timm, Linkedin, www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-timm-54346139. p. 67 WikiLeaks accounts frozen: Robert Mackey, “PayPal Suspends WikiLeaks Account,” The Lede, New York Times, December 4, 2010; Declan McCullagh, CBS News, December 6, 2010; “MasterCard Pulls Plug on WikiLeaks Payments,” December 6, 2010; “WikiLeaks’ Visa Payments Suspended,” BBC News, December 7, 2010. p. 67 what EFF called an “economic blockade”: Shari Steele, “Join EFF in Standing Up against Internet Censorship,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, December 7, 2010, Eff.org; Cindy Cohn, “EFF Helps Freedom of the Press Foundation,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, December 17, 2012, Eff.org.

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Though no charges were ever brought against Binney, a dozen rifle-toting FBI agents raided his home in 2007. One pointed a weapon at him as he stood naked in the shower. After the New York Times published The Program in late August, Laura was ready to start editing her WikiLeaks documentary. This time, extra precautions would be necessary to protect her source material. Her detentions by border officials were still fresh in her mind, and the US government had opened a secret grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks two years earlier. So Laura relocated to Berlin. Meanwhile, she was contracting out a major renovation of her New York loft. Having been a professional chef in the Bay Area before she made her first film, Flag Wars, she was especially eager to have a working kitchen.

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Laura arrived safely in Berlin, but her worries continued. What if the source was some kind of crackpot — or, worse yet, an undercover agent using her to target Assange? WikiLeaks had already been named an enemy of the state by a 2008 US Army secret report, which also suggested a strategy to damage the organization’s reputation by tricking it into publishing fake documents. (Ironically, that report was later leaked to — and published by — none other than WikiLeaks.) Laura’s source tried to reassure her he was legit, writing: [Regarding] entrapment or insanity, I can address the first by making it clear I will ask nothing of you other than to review what I provide … Were I mad, it would not matter — you will have verification of my bona fides when you … request comment from officials.

Active Measures by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, 4chan, active measures, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, continuation of politics by other means, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, East Village, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, guest worker program, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, operational security, peer-to-peer, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Young met Julian Assange on the cypherpunk list, and Assange described Cryptome as the “spiritual godfather”6 of WikiLeaks. In 2006, Assange asked Young to become the public face of WikiLeaks in the United States, and suggested that Young could register WikiLeaks.org in his name.7 The cooperation failed; two eccentric personalities clashed, and the radical-libertarian partnership came to an end. Yet WikiLeaks would soon eclipse Cryptome. In 2010, Chelsea Manning, then a twenty-two-year-old Army private known as Bradley,8 leaked more than a quarter million State Department and Department of Defense documents to WikiLeaks. The leaked diplomatic cables spanned about a decade, and turned Assange and his website into household names.

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The New York Post, usually adept at finding what it called “hair-raising data,” concluded there was none in the released opposition research.5 Press attention only picked up somewhat when Donald Trump claimed that the DNC itself “did the ‘hacking.’”6 It would take nearly six weeks before the story finally dominated the news cycle. Next, the GRU recruited the help of WikiLeaks. The Guccifer 2.0 account had claimed, in the first note on the DNC hack, that “the main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks.” The GRU had not yet handed over the treasure trove, but the announcement had caught Julian Assange’s attention, and WikiLeaks immediately but cryptically reacted on Twitter. “DNC ‘hacker’ releases 200+ page internal report on Trump, says gave WikiLeaks all the rest,” Assange posted hours after the first leaks appeared, carefully not acknowledging receipt, and only repeating what the GRU front had claimed in its ominous blog post.7 Events now started to move quickly.

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“We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton, which are great,” Assange said. “WikiLeaks has a very big year ahead.”24 As was often his strategy, Assange was being deliberately cryptic. Later he persistently refused to clarify either from whom or precisely when his organization had received specific leaks. Two days later, on June 14, the GRU, sensing that DCLeaks was a hard sell and not exactly a success, started to reach out to WikiLeaks directly. The @DCleaks_ Twitter account privately messaged Julian Assange’s outfit. “You announced your organization was preparing to publish more Hillary’s emails,” one GRU officer wrote to @WikiLeaks, referring to Assange’s TV interview just two days earlier, adding: “We are ready to support you.

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs by Kerry Howley

air gap, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, cognitive bias, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Joan Didion, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Nelson Mandela, operational security, pre–internet, QAnon, Russian election interference, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, social graph, surveillance capitalism, WikiLeaks

In 2015, when Hillary Clinton was expected to succeed Obama, the politics of a pardon seemed hopeless. By 2016 the politics of a pardon had been rendered promisingly bizarre. “WikiLeaks,” said Trump on the trail in 2016, “I love WikiLeaks,” and “It’s been amazing what’s coming out on WikiLeaks,” and “This WikiLeaks is like a treasure trove.” By the time Reality leaked the document, a realignment had taken place. No one was claiming that WikiLeaks was a “media darling”; the question was, rather, whether WikiLeaks, in its intention to help Donald Trump win an election, had successfully contributed to the win. * * * — In 2011 dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi is being beaten to death by his former subjects.

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There was so much information that the journalists who eventually mined the dumps had to set up a room and write computer programs to find out how to filter it, to find meaning and stories within this overwhelming mass of incriminating private communication. Tech writer Evgeny Morozov called WikiLeaks a “media darling” and speculated that it might become a kind of matchmaker for low-level leaks, interested journalists, and NGOs with related causes. WikiLeaks was associated with transparency, the weak against the powerful, and it was not meaningfully partisan. Assange cleaved the populace not into left and right but into libertarians and institutionalists, hawks and pacifists, advocates of transparency and supporters of an impregnable state.

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After Hale printed it out at the National Geospatial Agency, The Intercept published the rule book for who gets put on the terrorist watchlist. The Intercept published the Drone Papers, also from Hale, which revealed that in a yearlong mission in Afghanistan, 200 people were killed by drone, only thirty-five of whom had been the intended targets. A leaker from within WikiLeaks leaked about WikiLeaks, and The Intercept reported. All of this drama takes place in an age when U.S. intelligence agencies are having a lot of trouble with data. In this, they are relatable. This is a moment when we feel, as we gossip, the slightest twinge of anxiety that we’ve made of an unkind thought a reproducible record, that our friends will turn on us, that our phone will be lost and in the wrong hands found.

pages: 1,117 words: 305,620

Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield by Jeremy Scahill

active measures, air freight, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, blood diamond, business climate, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, false flag, friendly fire, Google Hangouts, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, information security, Islamic Golden Age, Kickstarter, land reform, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, operational security, private military company, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, WikiLeaks

All quotations of Indha Adde come from the author’s interview, unless otherwise noted. 192 five specific terrorists: US diplomatic cable 06NAIROBI2425, from Ambassador William Bellamy, US Embassy Nairobi, “Somalia: A Strategy for Engagement,” June 2, 2006, released by WikiLeaks, http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/06/06NAIROBI2425.html. “Fazul [Abdullah Mohammed], [Saleh Ali Saleh] Nabhan, [Abu Talha] el-Sudani, [Ahmed] Abdi [Godane] and [Aden Hashi] Ayrow must be removed from the Somali equation.” 192 “start an open war in Mogadishu”: US diplomatic cable 06NAIROBI1484, from Ambassador William M. Bellamy, US Embassy Nairobi, “Ambassador to Yusuf: Alliance Against Terror Not Directed at TFG,” April 4, 2006, released by WikiLeaks, http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/04/06NAIROBI1484.html. 193 small, regional Islamic courts: Cedric Barnes and Harun Hassan, “The Rise and Fall of Mogadishu’s Islamic Courts,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 1 (2) (July 2007). 193 twelve courts united: Author interview, Abdirahman “Aynte” Ali, June 2011. 193 receiving shipments: Schiemsky et al., “Report of the Monitoring Group on Somalia,” p. 15.

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Africa Report No. 95, July 11, 2005, p. 9. 200 “the special group”: International Crisis Group, “Somalia’s Islamists,” Africa Report No. 100, December 12, 2005, p. 11. 200 Italian cemetery: Ali, “The Anatomy of al Shabaab,” p. 28. 200 “headline-grabbing assassinations”: Ibid. 201 video teleconferences: Naylor, “Years of Detective Work Led to al-Qaida Target.” 201 took control of Mogadishu: “Islamic Militia Claims Mogadishu,” CNN.com, June 5, 2006. 201 “wonderful piece of news”: Transcript, “Islamic Militia Takes Control of Somali Capital,” NewsHour, PBS, June 6, 2006. 202 “establish a friendly relationship”: Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, letter to governments and international organizations, “The Union of Islamic Courts in Mogadishu Break the Silence,” June 6, 2006, www.hiiraan.com/news/2006/jun/somali_news6_7.aspx. 202 “invite an investigative team”: US diplomatic cable 06NAIROBI2640, from Ambassador William Bellamy, US Embassy Nairobi, “Islamist Advances, Prospects for Dialogue, but Still No Admission of the Al Qaida Presence,” June 15, 2006, released by WikiLeaks, http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/06/06NAIROBI2640.html. The cable includes the text of a letter sent from Sheikh Sharif on June 14. 202 “litmus test”: Ibid. 202 “moderate”: See US diplomatic cable 07NAIROBI5403, from Ambassador Michael Ranneberger, US Embassy Nairobi, “Somalia—Sheikh Sharif and the Future Role of Islamic Courts Moderates,” January 1, 2007, released by WikiLeaks, http://wikileaks.org/cable/2007/01/07NAIROBI5403.html. 202 “contemplate killing Sharif”: Jon Lee Anderson, “The Most Failed State,” New Yorker, December 14, 2009. 202 “onto everybody’s radar screen”: Author interview, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, March 2011.

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Hoover, US Embassy Nairobi, “Horn of Africa, State-USAID Humanitarian Cable Update Number 8,” August 8, 2006, released by WikiLeaks, http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/08/06NAIROBI3441.html. 203 “some semblance of order”: Author interview, Ismail Mahmoud Hurre, June 2011. 203 “rally with Ethiopia”: Memorandum from “Ennifar” (likely Azouz Ennifar, Deputy Special Representative for UN mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea), “Meeting with US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs,” June 26, 2006, released by WikiLeaks, http://wikileaks.org/wiki/US_encouraged_Ethiopian_invasion_of_Somalia:_UN_meeting_memo_with_Jenday_Frazer,_Secretary_of_State_for_African_Affairs,_2006. 204 training its notorious Agazi: Michael R.

pages: 233 words: 66,446

Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, capital controls, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer age, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, game design, Hacker News, hype cycle, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Julian Assange, land value tax, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Occupy movement, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing complete, Twitter Arab Spring, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, War on Poverty, web application, WikiLeaks

But on December 4th 2010, under pressure from the US government, PayPal froze the WikiLeaks account. Domain name providers and other payment systems followed suit and refused to handle WikiLeaks’ business. Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks boss, was involved in expensive litigation at the same time. WikiLeaks was starved of funds. And, unbeknownst to most, the organization was crumbling from within due to a falling-out between Daniel Domscheit-Berg, WikiLeaks’ number two, and Assange. One poster at BitcoinTalk thought that Bitcoin would be a means to help WikiLeaks. Others jumped at the idea. ‘Bring it on,’ said one. ‘Let’s encourage WikiLeaks to use Bitcoins and I’m willing to face any risk or fallout from that fact.’

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Milton Friedman, economist The US Department of Defense called it the ‘largest leak of classified documents in its history’. It’s difficult to overstate how big a threat to the existing world order WikiLeaks was perceived to be in late 2010. There has been revelation after revelation – the Bradley Manning leaks, the video of US soldiers shooting at Reuters cameramen, the ‘friendly fire’ and civilian casualties, then the leak of another 400,000 documents relating to the Iraq war. WikiLeaks had caught the imagination of those opposed to the US and other governments. Many wanted to help. PayPal was the main means by which WikiLeaks was able to receive funds for its activities and, in 2010, its donors gave around one million dollars.

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Is that really the end result the Bitcoin community most desires? Does it make sense to actively give multiple world governments incentive to shut down Bitcoin?’ asked Garzik. ‘WikiLeaks is the enemy of major world powers right now, with many influential elites feeling that Assange committed an act of war against the United States, or, at a minimum, irrevocably disrupted world affairs. This is not some mailing list discussion or theoretical exercise; there are very real, very powerful organizations actively targeting WikiLeaks’ network infrastructure, organizational infrastructure, and most importantly, financial infrastructure. It is extraordinarily unwise to make Bitcoin such a highly visible target, at such an early stage in this project.

Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, American ideology, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate personhood, David Brooks, discovery of DNA, double helix, drone strike, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, land reform, language acquisition, Martin Wolf, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, single-payer health, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tobin tax, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

In response to the question, “Name two countries that you think pose the biggest threat to you,” Israel received 88 percent, the United States 77 percent, and Iran 9 percent among those aged thirty-six and over and 11 percent among those thirty-six and under. 2010 Arab Public Opinion Survey. 16. Ian Black, “WikiLeaks Cables: Tunisia Blocks Site Reporting ‘Hatred’ of First Lady,” Guardian (London), 7 December 2010. Ian Black, “Profile: Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali,” Guardian (London), 14 January 2011. See also Amy Davidson, “Tunisia and WikiLeaks,” New Yorker, Close Read blog, 14 January 2011. 17. Steven Erlanger, “French Foreign Minister Urged to Resign,” New York Times, 3 February 2011. 18. Charlie Savage, “Soldier Faces 22 New WikiLeaks Charges,” New York Times, 2 March 2011. 19. Scott Shane, “Court Martial Recommended in WikiLeaks Case,” New York Times, 12 January 2012. 20.

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The same is true of terror, aggression, torture, human rights, freedom of speech, whatever it might be. So the line that the enormous trove of information that was disseminated through WikiLeaks was somehow compromising U.S. security doesn’t wash. It compromised the security that governments are usually concerned about: their security from inspection by their own populations. I haven’t read everything on WikiLeaks, but I’m sure there are people who are searching very hard to find some case where they can claim there has been a harm to genuine security interests. I couldn’t find any myself. One respect in which the United States is unusually open is in declassifying government documents.

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I think that’s been true of what I’ve seen of WikiLeaks, too. Take the one example I mentioned, Ambassador Patterson’s comments about Pakistan and the danger of the Bush-Obama policy destabilizing a country with one of the biggest nuclear weapons programs in the world, in fact, one that’s growing fast and interlaced with jihadi elements. That’s something the population ought to know about, but it has to be kept from them. You have to describe our policies in terms of defending ourselves from attack when you’re in fact increasing the threat of attack. That’s true over and over again. There are other interesting WikiLeaks exposures.

pages: 547 words: 160,071

Underground by Suelette Dreyfus

airport security, Free Software Foundation, invisible hand, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Loma Prieta earthquake, military-industrial complex, packet switching, PalmPilot, pirate software, profit motive, publish or perish, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, zero day

Julian Assange, ‘Serious nuclear accident may lay behind Iranian nuke chief’s mystery resignation.’ WikiLeaks, 16 July, 2009. See mirror site: http://mirror.wikileaks. info/wiki/Serious_nuclear_accident_may_lay_behind_Iranian_nuke_chief%27s_mystery_resignation/ The short entry is included in case the mirror disappears: ‘Two weeks ago, a source associated with Iran’s nuclear program confidentially told WikiLeaks of a serious, recent, nuclear accident at Natanz. Natanz is the primary location of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. WikiLeaks had reason to believe the source was credible however contact with this source was lost. WikiLeaks would not normally mention such an incident without additional confirmation, however according to Iranian media and the BBC, today the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, has resigned under mysterious circumstances.

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Suelette Dreyfus INTRODUCTION TO UNDERGROUND, SECOND EDITION BY SUELETTE DREYFUS Who are computer hackers? Why do they hack? Underground tried to answer these questions when it was first published in 1997. The questions still seem relevant more than a decade later. WikiLeaks, the world-famous publisher of documents leaked in the public interest, grew out of the computer underground described in this book. It has been said that WikiLeaks’ stories ‘have changed the way people think about how the world is run’.1 To understand WikiLeaks, you need to know the back story: Underground is that story. Underground is the back story because it reveals a world of people who use technology to solve problems with ‘thinking from outside the box’.

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This goes back to the earliest definition of a hacker, which doesn’t imply any illegal activity, but, rather, simply reflects someone who can find clever technical solutions to hard problems. It is this kernel of unusual creativity, not their illegal activities, that makes the hackers in Underground so interesting. This kernel carried through to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks revealed the creative application of technology, in the form of secure, anonymous online publishing, to the hard problem of getting governments and corporations to tell the truth. The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, and I worked on Underground for almost three years. He brought exceptional technical understanding and a detailed knowledge of the computer underground while I brought years of experience as a professional journalist and technology writer.

pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Moreover, there was no independent journalism to respond when the U.S. government launched a successful PR and media blitz to discredit WikiLeaks. Attention largely shifted from the content of these documents to overblown and unsubstantiated claims that WikiLeaks was costing innocent lives, and to a personal focus on WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange. Glenn Greenwald was only slightly exaggerating when he stated that “there was almost a full and complete consensus that WikiLeaks was satanic.” The onslaught discredited and isolated WikiLeaks, despite the dramatic content that could be found in the documents WikiLeaks had published. The point was to get U.S. editors and reporters to think twice before opening the WikiLeaks door.

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The consequences of this became striking in the wake of the brouhaha surrounding WikiLeaks after it released government documents in 2010. The “U.S. government response to WikiLeaks,” MacKinnon writes, “highlights a troubling murkiness, opacity, and lack of public accountability in the power relationships between government and Internet-related companies.” Amazon booted WikiLeaks off its servers, and the site immediately collapsed, as there was nowhere else to go.229 Apple pulled a WikiLeaks app from its store.230 Monopolist PayPal—as well as MasterCard, Visa, and Bank of America—also severed ties to WikiLeaks. There is no evidence that the executive branch made any explicit demand of the firms to do what they did; it appears they acted proactively, possibly egged on by all the saber rattling and macho talk coming from Capitol Hill.231 The firms responded to vague claims of illegality on the part of WikiLeaks, but no charges had been filed, nor had anyone been convicted.

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Nothing demonstrates the situation better than the release by WikiLeaks of an immense number of secret U.S. government documents between 2009 and 2011. To some this was investigative journalism at its best, and WikiLeaks had established how superior the Internet was as an information source. It clearly threatened those in power, so this was exactly the sort of Fourth Estate a free people needed. Thanks to the Internet, some claimed, we were now truly free and had the power to hold leaders accountable.112 In fact, the WikiLeaks episode demonstrates precisely the opposite. WikiLeaks was not a journalistic organization. It released secret documents to the public, but the “documents languished online and only came to the public’s attention when they were written up by professional journalists,” as Heather Brooke put it.

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The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day

Herold, Online Society in China: creating, celebrating and instrumentalising the online carnival, London: Routledge, 2011, pp. 53–68. 29J. Ng, Blocked on Weibo, New York NY: The New Press, 2013, p. 186. Chapter 16 1A. Barr, ‘Email to Karen Burke’, HBGary emails, 5 February 2011, WikiLeaks, https://wikileaks.org/hbgary-emails/emailid/39192 2‘Anonymous hacktivists say WikiLeaks war to continue’, BBC News, 9 December 2010, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-11935539 3N. Anderson, ‘How one man tracked down Anonymous – and paid a heavy price’, Ars Technica, 10 February 2011, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/02/how-one-security-firm-tracked-anonymousand-paid-a-heavy-price/ 4Untitled, ‘Anonymous IRC chat log’, Pastebin, 7 February 2011, https://pastebin.com/x69Akp5L 5J.

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ISPs in the country would have been mandated to block all sites on the list, the contents of which were kept secret, making effective democratic oversight incredibly difficult. While few people would argue against blocking child porn, when WikiLeaks published a copy of the proposed blacklist in 2009, it was revealed to have included gambling services, YouTube videos, regular porn, a dog boarding kennel, and WikiLeaks itself.23 The Australian politicians behind the policy may have been acting in good faith to protect children, even if they obstinately ignored much of the criticism that finally sank the bill, but democratic leaders aren’t immune from controlling the internet to protect their own power.

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Fuller, ‘New Chinese rules could redirect profits in financial news sector’, International Herald Tribune, 12 September 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/technology/12iht-rules.2781524.html 37X. Xin, How the Market Is Changing China’s News: the case of Xinhua news agency, Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2012, p. 128. 38D. Sedney, ‘Austr Stratford discusses Xinhua regulations with Xinhua News Vp Lu Wei’, WikiLeaks, 23 March 2007, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07BEIJING2009_a.html Chapter 7 1Author interview with Dan Haig, September 2017. 2J. Cool, ‘Communities of innovation: cyborganic and the birth of networked social media’, PhD thesis, University of Southern California, 2008, p.166. 3Author interview with Thubten Samdup, September 2017. 4W.

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The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics by Ben Buchanan

active measures, air gap, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nate Silver, operational security, post-truth, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, technoutopianism, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, zero day

Among other things, they noted overlaps in the hacking infrastructure used to target the Democratic organizations and other operations attributed to Russia, including a notable one against the German Parliament.29 As an amusing extra sign that something was amiss, when a journalist interviewing Guccifer online asked him to switch over to his native Romanian, it quickly became apparent that he did not speak the language.30 Enter WikiLeaks. Even prior to the Democrats’ announcement and Guccifier’s creation, the group’s founder, Julian Assange, had sought to be relevant to the 2016 election. On June 12, he promised that WikiLeaks would release damaging Democratic emails. Why he said this remains a mystery, since the first known direct contact between the GRU and WikiLeaks occurred on June 14, though it is possible there had been a previous undetected transfer of information through intermediaries.31 The GRU and WikiLeaks continued to talk. On June 22, WikiLeaks messaged Guccifer, requesting access to any new material.

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Even Podesta’s advice on how best to cook risotto garnered many media mentions, as if the country had no bigger things to worry about.49 The Access Hollywood tape, and certainly the United States government’s condemnation of the Russian activity, were yesterday’s news. It is hard to say whether WikiLeaks timed the Podesta leaks to bury the other stories that were less favorable to Trump. The available evidence suggests both that WikiLeaks had long planned for an October operation independent of other events and that senior officials in the Trump campaign knew about it. In the days prior to the October 7 email dump, Trump’s friend Stone told an unnamed senior Trump campaign official and other Trump supporters that WikiLeaks would imminently dump many more embarrassing files, and would commence with weekly releases.

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On June 22, WikiLeaks messaged Guccifer, requesting access to any new material. WikiLeaks promised to distribute it with a higher profile and impact than Guccifer could. On July 6, the group reached out to Guccifer again, highlighting the upcoming Democratic convention and asking for any information related to the Clinton campaign. Time was of the essence, the message said, because the damaging material had to leak before Hillary Clinton could win over Bernie Sanders supporters in her run toward the general election.32 On July 14, the GRU provided WikiLeaks with a large encrypted batch of hacked files in an email with the subject “big archive” and the message “a new attempt.”33 After all the discussion, Assange delivered for the GRU.

The Data Journalism Handbook by Jonathan Gray, Lucy Chambers, Liliana Bounegru

Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, business intelligence, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, eurozone crisis, fail fast, Firefox, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, game design, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, John Snow's cholera map, Julian Assange, linked data, machine readable, moral hazard, MVC pattern, New Journalism, openstreetmap, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Silicon Valley, social graph, Solyndra, SPARQL, text mining, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks

But the game-changer for data journalism happened in spring 2010, beginning with one spreadsheet: 92,201 rows of data, each one containing a detailed breakdown of a military event in Afghanistan. This was the WikiLeaks war logs. Part one, that is. There were to be two more episodes to follow: Iraq and the cables. The official term for the first two parts was SIGACTS: the US military Significant Actions Database. News organizations are all about geography—and proximity to the news desk. If you’re close, it’s easy to suggest stories and become part of the process; conversely, out of sight is literally out of mind. Before WikiLeaks, we were placed on a different floor, with graphics. Since WikiLeaks, we have sat on the same floor, next to the newsdesk.

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It also served to help users understand specific cases where local candidates had landslide victories in the provinces. — Mariano Blejman, Mariana Berruezo, Sergio Sorín, Andy Tow, and Martín Sarsale from Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires Data in the News: WikiLeaks It began with one of the investigative reporting team asking, “You’re good with spreadsheets, aren’t you?” And this was one hell of a spreadsheet: 92,201 rows of data, each one containing a detailed breakdown of a military event in Afghanistan. This was the WikiLeaks war logs. Part one, that is. There were to be two more episodes to follow: Iraq and the cables. The official term was SIGACTS: the US military Significant Actions Database.

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This also helps to convince our colleagues about the value of what we’re doing. That and the big data-driven stories that we’ve worked on that everyone else in the newsroom knows: COINS, WikiLeaks, and the UK riots. For the COINS spending data, we had 5-6 specialist reporters at the Guardian working to give their views about the data when it was released by the UK government. We also had another team of 5-6 when the UK government spending over £25k data was released—including well-known reporters like Polly Curtis. WikiLeaks was also obviously very big, with lots of stories about Iraq and Afghanistan. The riots were also pretty big, with over 550k hits in two days.

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Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Apparently, “local laws” and “other requests” prevail. • • • In the case of WikiLeaks, although no judicial process supported it, many companies either pulled their services or refused to support the organization after it linked to thousands of leaked U.S. State Department cables. In December 2010, its domain name service provider, EveryDNS, ceased DNS-resolution services for http://www.wikileaks.org, severely hampering its ability to communicate. EveryDNS cited the ongoing denial-of-service attacks against WikiLeaks as the reason for its cessation of services, but most suspect the U.S. company was wary of political repercussions in the event of continued service.

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EveryDNS cited the ongoing denial-of-service attacks against WikiLeaks as the reason for its cessation of services, but most suspect the U.S. company was wary of political repercussions in the event of continued service. Another American hosting company, Amazon, also dropped WikiLeaks as a customer. And, around the same time, several credit card and financial services companies – Bank of America, Visa, Western Union, MasterCard, PayPal, and Amazon – stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks. PayPal claimed it did so because WikiLeaks violated its terms of service, which states, “Our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.” One PayPal executive, Osama Bedier, claimed the company took the measure after a letter was circulated by the State Department that referred to WikiLeaks being in illegal possession of documents.

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One of them, Palantir – a company whose origins lie in the PayPal fraud detection unit and whose founders were given early advice by Poindexter – has become a darling of the defence and intelligence community, but a bit of an outcast among civil libertarians. In February 2011, an Anonymous operation breached the networks of the security company HBGary, and then publicly disclosed plans they had uncovered involving HBGary, the Bank of America, Palantir, and others to attack WikiLeaks servers, and spread misinformation about Wikileaks supporters, including the journalist Glen Greenwald. Although Palantir’s CEO apologized and then distanced his company from the misguided plan, the taint of the association still lingers among many. (Full disclosure: In 2008, Palantir donated a version of their analytical platform to the Citizen Lab, and we employed it only as a minor research tool during the GhostNet and Shadows investigations.)

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No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald

air gap, airport security, anti-communist, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, Edward Snowden, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Rubik’s Cube, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Ted Kaczynski, WikiLeaks

Or perhaps it had come from someone who sought to damage our credibility by passing on fraudulent documents to publish. We discussed all these possibilities. We knew that a 2008 secret report by the US Army had declared WikiLeaks an enemy of the state and proposed ways to “damage and potentially destroy” the organization. The report (ironically leaked to WikiLeaks) discussed the possibility of passing on fraudulent documents. If WikiLeaks published them as authentic, it would suffer a serious blow to its credibility. Laura and I were aware of all the pitfalls but we discounted them, relying instead on our intuition. Something intangible yet powerful about those emails convinced us that their author was genuine.

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This surprised me because, especially since 9/11 (though before that as well), the US media in general had been jingoistic and intensely loyal to the government and thus hostile, sometimes viciously so, to anyone who exposed its secrets. When WikiLeaks began publishing classified documents related to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and especially diplomatic cables, calls for the prosecution of WikiLeaks were led by American journalists themselves, which was in itself astounding behavior. The very institution ostensibly devoted to bringing transparency to the actions of the powerful not only denounced but attempted to criminalize one of the most significant acts of transparency in many years. What WikiLeaks did—receiving classified information from a source within the government and then revealing it to the world—is essentially what media organizations do all the time.

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It is true that the New York Times published large troves of documents in partnership with WikiLeaks, but soon after, former executive editor Bill Keller took pains to distance the paper from its partner: he publicly contrasted the Obama administration’s anger toward WikiLeaks with its appreciation of the Times and its “responsible” reporting. Keller proudly trumpeted his paper’s relationship with Washington on other occasions, too. During a 2010 appearance on the BBC discussing telegrams obtained by WikiLeaks, Keller explained that the Times takes direction from the US government about what it should and shouldn’t publish.

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The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth by Tom Burgis

Airbus A320, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Livingstone, I presume, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, purchasing power parity, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The presence of Israeli and South African instructors at the training camps in Forecariah is also reported elsewhere, such as US Embassy in Rabat, ‘Guinea: Update on Dadis Camara’s Health’, diplomatic cable, 17 December 2009, WikiLeaks, 4 December 2010, https://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/12/09RABAT988.html. 34. Israel Ziv, LinkedIn profile, http://il.linkedin.com/in/zivisrael, accessed 2 May 2014. 35. Global CST website, accessed 2 May 2014; US Embassy in Bogota, ‘Colombian Defense Ministry Sours on Israeli Defense Firm,’ diplomatic cable, 1 December 2009, WikiLeaks, 6 April 2011, http://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/12/09BOGOTA3483.html. 36. Multiple interviews with people who have investigated Global CST and Dadis’s ethnic militia as well as associates of Kenan yielded an incomplete picture of the work the company did in Guinea.

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Northern Nigerian sources speaking to US embassy officials, as reported in US Embassy Cable, ‘Nigeria: Kano Businessman Alleges Yar’Adua Corruption’, 21 February 2008, WikiLeaks, 8 December 2010, www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08ABUJA320_a.html. A textile industry consultant corroborates the estimated fee. 9. Ibid. 10. Nasir El-Rufai, interview with author, Abuja, April 2013. 11. Former EFCC official, interview with author, Abuja, April 2013. A November 2008 cable from the US embassy in Abuja, published in September 2011 by WikiLeaks, reported, ‘Ribadu also expressed concern for his former EFCC colleague and friend, Ibrahim Magu; he claims Magu is in danger because of his specific knowledge of the President’s relationship with Dahiru Mangal (an influential wealthy northern businessman who is currently under investigation and has ties to the Yar’Adua family and administration) and a money laundering operation which fronts as a legitimate company.’

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The Monuc team recorded that Anvil accepted that the army used its vehicles but denied that they were used to transport loot or corpses, and that it admitted paying some of the soldiers. 29. Bill Turner, e-mail exchange with author, October 2014. 30. US Embassy Kinshasa, ‘Augustin Katumba, President’s Alleged Treasurer and Enforcer, Steps Down as Head of National Assembly’s Ruling Coalition; His Influence Could Remain’, 14 December 2009, WikiLeaks, 1 September 2011, www.wikileaks.org/cable/2009/12/09KINSHASA1080.html. 31. UN Security Council, ‘Fourth Special Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’, 21 November 2008, www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/DRC%20S%202008%20728.pdf. 32.

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Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, Brian Krebs, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Doomsday Clock, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, false flag, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Earth, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, pre–internet, RAND corporation, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, Stuxnet, Timothy McVeigh, two and twenty, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2011), 141–47. 26 Karl Vick, “Iran’s President Calls Holocaust ‘Myth’ in Latest Assault on Jews,” Washington Post, Foreign Service, December 15, 2005. 27 “06Kuwait71, Kuwait’s Country Wide Radiation Monitoring System,” US State Department cable from the US embassy in Kuwait to the State Department in Washington, DC, January 2006. Published by WikiLeaks at wikileaks.org/cable/2006/01/06KUWAIT71.html. 28 The assessment comes from Ariel (Eli) Levite, deputy director general of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, in a September 2005 US State Department cable from the Tel Aviv embassy, published by WikiLeaks at wikileaks.org/cable/2005/09/05TELAVIV5705.html. 29 “06TelAviv293, Iran: Congressman Ackerman’s January 5 Meeting at,” US State Department cable from the US embassy in Tel Aviv, January 2006. Published by WikiLeaks at wikileaks.org/cable/2006/01/06TELAVIV293.html. See this page in this book for an explanation of the problems. 30 Privately, Israel and Russia both told the United States they believed Iran could actually master its enrichment difficulties within six months.

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See “06Cairo601, Iran; Centrifuge Briefing to Egyptian MFA,” US State Department cable, February 2006, published by WikiLeaks at wikileaks.org/cable/2006/02/06CAIRO601.html. 31 “06TelAviv688, Iran-IAEA: Israeli Atomic Energy Commission,” US State Department cable, February 2006, published by WikiLeaks at wikileaks.org/cable/2006/02/06TELAVIV688.html. 32 Ibid. 33 “Iran Defiant on Nuclear Deadline,” BBC News, August 1, 2006, available at news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5236010.stm. 34 “07Berlins1450, Treasury Under Secretary Levey Discusses Next,” US State Department cable from the embassy in Berlin, July 2007, published by WikiLeaks at wikileaks.org/cable/2007/07/07BERLIN1450.html.

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Steven Lee Myers, “An Assessment Jars a Foreign Policy Debate About Iran,” New York Times, December 4, 2007. 43 Germany’s deputy national security adviser Rolf Nikel told US officials in early 2008 that the NIE report complicated efforts to convince the German public and German companies that sanctions against Iran had merit. US State Department cable, February 2008, published by WikiLeaks at wikileaks.org/cable/2008/02/08BERLIN180.html. See also wikileaks.org/cable/2007/12/07BERLIN2157.html. With regard to the Israeli comments, according to a US State Department cable published by WikiLeaks in May 2009, IDF intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin made the comments to Congressman Robert Wexler. See wikileaks.cabledrum.net/cable/2009/05/09TELAVIV. The NIE had other repercussions. A German-Iranian trader named Mohsen Vanaki was on trial in Germany for smuggling dual-use equipment to Iran.

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Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, carried interest, circulation of elites, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kenneth Arrow, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

The video precipitated outcries from across the globe and intense coverage in the foreign press. At home, it prompted an explosion of commentary and debate in the blogosphere and, after WikiLeaks produced seventy thousand classified documents on the Afghanistan war, a harsh condemnation from the Department of Defense: “We deplore WikiLeaks for inducing individuals to break the law, leak classified documents, and then cavalierly share that secret information with the world, including our enemies.” But those were just the first tremors. In December 2010, WikiLeaks sent shock waves through governments around the globe when it posted 6,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables (out of a total of 150,000 in its possession) revealing, among other embarrassing details of U.S. statecraft, that the United States was waging a more or less secret war in Yemen and that Hillary Clinton had directed diplomatic staff abroad to spy on foreign officials (in contravention of the UN charter).

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In Tunisia, anti-regime activists read with interest U.S. diplomats’ description of the egregious corruption and self-dealing by the country’s ruling strongman Ben Ali (he would be dislodged by a popular uprising one month later). Republican congressman Peter King called for WikiLeaks to be designated a foreign terrorist organization and for Assange to be criminally prosecuted. Bill O’Reilly fantasized on air about Assange being killed by a U.S. predator drone. Vice President Joe Biden called WikiLeaks “terrorists,” and reports surfaced that Attorney General Eric Holder had commissioned an inquiry to see if Assange could be tried under the 1917 Espionage Act. WikiLeaks’ defenders pointed to a simple, powerful principle: Citizens of a democratic republic have a right to know what their government is doing.

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If you look at polls, everyone hates Congress, they hate the Democrats, they hate the Republicans even more, they hate big business; they hate banks and they distrust scientists, so why should we believe what these pointy-headed elitists are telling us? We don’t trust anything else, we don’t trust them.” Even Assange himself has come, I think, to recognize this central problem. An early manifesto he wrote about WikiLeaks activities in 2006 called “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” laid out a truly radical vision in which the goal of WikiLeaks was to destroy the “authoritarian conspiracy” that lay behind what he called “unjust regimes.” By leaking information from within, WikiLeaks would lead these institutions to grow paranoid and no longer able to communicate with themselves, spelling their demise. But by 2011, Assange’s views had evolved.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Among the few who saw the threat clearly was computer scientist Jaron Lanier, who, in 2010, warned the public of a new danger: WikiLeaks. At the time, free speech advocates were hailing WikiLeaks, and its founder, Julian Assange, as defenders of government transparency. Their lionization of the leaker organization was largely due to frustration with the criminal impunity of the Bush administration. In February 2010, soldier Chelsea Manning exposed war crimes by sending classified documents to WikiLeaks, which WikiLeaks then published online. The emphasis on civilian victims led human rights advocates to believe that WikiLeaks would prove a formidable opponent for autocratic regimes. But after WikiLeaks dropped hacked documents from the US State Department in November, Lanier predicted the opposite—that WikiLeaks would ultimately ally with dictators and that social media networks would abet them: The WikiLeaks method punishes a nation—or any human undertaking—that falls short of absolute, total transparency, which is all human undertakings, but perversely rewards an absolute lack of transparency.

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But after WikiLeaks dropped hacked documents from the US State Department in November, Lanier predicted the opposite—that WikiLeaks would ultimately ally with dictators and that social media networks would abet them: The WikiLeaks method punishes a nation—or any human undertaking—that falls short of absolute, total transparency, which is all human undertakings, but perversely rewards an absolute lack of transparency. Thus an iron-shut government doesn’t have leaks to the site, but a mostly-open government does. If the political world becomes a mirror of the Internet as we know it today, then the world will be restructured around opaque, digitally delineated power centers surrounded by a sea of chaotic, underachieving openness.

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Sarah Kendzior, “The Strange Saga of a Made-Up Activist and Her Life—and Death—as a Hoax,” The Atlantic, December 20, 2011, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/the-strange-saga-of-a-made-up-activist-and-her-life-and-death-as-a-hoax/250203/. 9. Jaron Lanier, “The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of WikiLeaks,” The Atlantic, December 20, 2010, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/the-hazards-of-nerd-supremacy-the-case-of-WikiLeaks/68217/. 10. Malcolm Nance, The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and his Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West (New York: Hachette Books, 2018). 11. Ivan Sigal, Public Radio International, “Syria’s war may be the most documented ever.

pages: 422 words: 104,457

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin

AltaVista, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Graeber, Debian, disinformation, Edward Snowden, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, medical residency, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, prediction markets, price discrimination, randomized controlled trial, RFID, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, sparse data, Steven Levy, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

At his military court proceedings: Bradley Manning, “Bradley Manning’s Statement Taking Responsibility for Releasing Documents to WikiLeaks,” February 28, 2013, http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/bradley-mannings-statement-taking-responsibility-for-releasing-documents-to-wikileaks. He was betrayed by a friend: Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter, “U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe,” Wired, Threat Level (blog), June 6, 2010, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/leak/. Government investigators later found traces: Eva Blum-Dumontet, “Bradley Manning Legal Proceedings: Fact Sheet,” WikiLeaks Press, March 31, 2012, http://wikileaks-press.org/bradley-manning-legal-procedures-fact-sheet/.

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The amazing thing about Tails is that it is designed from the ground up for privacy, so there are no settings to jiggle or opt-outs required. Using Tails was my only and best glimpse into an alternate universe where privacy could be the default. At his military court proceedings, Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private who leaked documents to WikiLeaks, described how he connected with WikiLeaks using Tor and Jabber for encrypted chats. “The anonymity provided by TOR and the Jabber client and the WLO’s [WikiLeaks Organization’s] policy allowed me to feel I could just be myself, free of the concerns of social labeling and perceptions that are often placed upon me in real life,” Manning said in his statement to the court. Of course, encryption ultimately didn’t save Manning.

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Longer passwords that contain many types of symbols, letters, and numbers often have larger entropy because it takes more guesses to figure them out. Julian Assange knew this when he created the following password to the WikiLeaks cables database: AcollectionOfDiplomaticHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay#. It is fifty-eight characters long, with very few symbols, and easy to remember. Of course, the reason we know his password is that the Guardian newspaper published it in a book about WikiLeaks. So, obviously, it wasn’t a secure password in other respects. Entropy is frustratingly difficult to estimate. A long password can have low entropy if it is comprised of simple words and easy grammar.

pages: 277 words: 70,506

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News by Eliot Higgins

4chan, active measures, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, anti-globalists, barriers to entry, belling the cat, Bellingcat, bitcoin, blockchain, citizen journalism, Columbine, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, fake news, false flag, gamification, George Floyd, Google Earth, hive mind, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, post-truth, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Tactical Technology Collective, the scientific method, WikiLeaks

This was termed ‘digilantism’, a reckless version of open-source investigation where scaremongering masqueraded as122 detective work. Others wondered if open-source investigation was what WikiLeaks did. Absolutely not. WikiLeaks was about leaking classified information, while open-source investigators analyse what sits in public. The secrecy of WikiLeaks placed vast power into its hands, which became problematic when Julian Assange exhibited strong political preferences, timing drops to harm those he despised, notably Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.123 Another problem with WikiLeaks is that it is hard to verify huge data dumps of shadowy origin. Are the floods of diplomatic cables legitimate?

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url=http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/11/28/the_fp_top_100_global_thinkers?page=0,23 122 academic.oup.com/bjc/article/57/2/341/2623876 123 Wikileaks had their Twitter group chat logs leaked by a former member in 2018. In those chat logs, the Wikileaks account – perhaps even run by Julian Assange himself – speculated that Britain’s Ministry of Defence funded Bellingcat, a totally false claim. emma.best/2018/07/29/11000-messages-from-private-wikileaks-chat-released/ 2 BECOMING BELLINGCAT 1 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ukrainian_aircraft_losses_during_the_Ukrainian_crisis 2 www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-separatist-leader-boasts-downing-plane/25460930.html 3 youtu.be/MiI9s-zWLs4 4 republic.ru/posts/l/1129893 5 rusvesna.su/news/1405676334 6 www.pressgazette.co.uk/russia-today-london-correspondent-resigns-protest-disrespect-facts-over-malaysian-plane-crash www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/russia-today-correspondent-resigns-over-coverage-of-ukranian?

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But in June 2016, months before the presidential election pitting Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump, news reports emerged that a Russian military intelligence cyber-espionage unit, nicknamed Fancy Bear by security experts, had sought to derail Clinton’s election bid. Wikileaks took stolen emails from ‘Guccifer 2.0’ – purportedly a Romanian hacker but actually Russians1 – and counselled this Kremlin front operation on how to have the greatest impact on American voters, according to a US indictment.2 In July 2016, WikiLeaks released tens of thousands of emails before the Democratic National Convention, stirring dissent in the party and undermining Clinton. Cybersecurity companies such as ThreatConnect and CrowdStrike were building a picture of what was going on, explaining how this cyber-espionage unit used fake Google password alerts.3 The poor syntax of a spoof email caught my attention – we had received messages like that, going back more than a year.

pages: 387 words: 112,868

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, banking crisis, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buy and hold, capital controls, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, life extension, litecoin, lone genius, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, QR code, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Startup school, stealth mode startup, the payments system, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

These problems became particularly pronounced after Bitcoin’s next big jump into the spotlight. In November, WikiLeaks, the organization founded by a regular participant in the old Cypherpunk movement, Julian Assange, released a vast trove of confidential American diplomatic documents that revealed previously secret operations around the world. The large credit card companies and PayPal came under immediate political pressure to cut off donations to WikiLeaks, which they did in early December, in what became known as the WikiLeaks blockade. This move pointed to the potentially troubling nexus between the financial industry and the government.

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The financial industry seemed to provide politicians with an extralegal way to crack down on dissent. The WikiLeaks blockade went to the core of some of the concerns that had motivated the original Cypherpunks. Bitcoin, in turn, seemed to have the potential to counteract the problem. Each person on the network controlled his or her coins with his or her private key. There was no central organization that could freeze a person’s Bitcoin address or stop coins from being sent from a particular address. A few days after the WikiLeaks blockade began, PCWorld wrote a widely circulated story that noted the obvious utility of Bitcoin in the situation: “Nobody can stop the Bitcoin system or censor it, short of turning off the entire Internet.

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Here was a broader philosophical issue that could attract a wider audience, and the forums were full of new members who had been drawn in by the attention. One new user, a young man in England named Amir Taaki, proposed making Bitcoin donations to WikiLeaks. Amir argued this could raise Bitcoin’s profile at the same time that it could help WikiLeaks raise money. This kicked off a vigorous debate on the forum. A number of programmers worried that the Bitcoin network was not ready for all the traffic—and government scrutiny—that might come if it started to be used for controversial donations. “It is extraordinarily unwise to make Bitcoin such a highly visible target, at such an early stage in this project.

pages: 233 words: 73,772

The Secret World of Oil by Ken Silverstein

business intelligence, clean water, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, financial engineering, Global Witness, Google Earth, John Deuss, offshore financial centre, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Oscar Wyatt, paper trading, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Later Gutseriev went into the energy business—he was understatedly described in a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks as “not known for his transparent corporate governance.” He did well. He regularly appears on Forbes’s list of the richest Russians, with a fortune estimated in 2012 at around $6.7 billion. A decade earlier, though, Gutseriev was down and seemingly out. In 2002, the Kremlin fired him as the head of state-owned oil firm Slavneft for resisting the company’s privatization, according to the WikiLeaked cable. That same year, however, he sought to regain his position by arranging for three busloads of armed guards to take over its Moscow offices.

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Competition with China for influence in the region and growing trade ties—the United States buys more than half of Cambodia’s apparel production, its primary export—are among the factors behind the political warming. But a US diplomatic cable written in 2007 and released by WikiLeaks pointed to another reason for the rapprochement: the discovery of massive extractable resources, including gold, bauxite, and other minerals, plus potentially large reserves of oil and gas. Doing business in Cambodia is not easy, though. The WikiLeaks cable said corruption in the country was “systemic and pervasive” and expressed concern that Cambodia might become “the Nigeria of Southeast Asia.” One Western investor I talked to described the situation as “a nightmare,” saying, “Anything having to do with licenses, natural resources, or concessions—that’s where you have problems and where you always have military and government officials looking for money.”

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The group was headed by David Goldwyn, who worked at the Energy Department under Clinton and who, after retiring from government to run a consulting firm that provided “political and business intelligence” to industry, returned to public service as the State Department’s coordinator for international energy affairs during the Obama administration. A few others featured in this book include: • Former British prime minister Tony Blair, who netted about $150,000 for a twenty-minute speech in Azerbaijan, in which he said that President Ilham Aliyev was a leader with a “very positive and exciting vision for the future of the country.” A WikiLeaked cable offered a less flattering description of Aliyev, comparing him to Sonny Corleone, the fictional mobster from The Godfather. • Neil Bush, the son of one American president and the brother of another, who one newspaper observed ran numerous business ventures that had “a history of crashing and burning in spectacular fashion.”

pages: 283 words: 77,272

With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful by Glenn Greenwald

Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Clive Stafford Smith, collateralized debt obligation, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Brooks, deskilling, financial deregulation, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, Julian Assange, mandatory minimum, nuremberg principles, Ponzi scheme, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, too big to fail, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

Obama’s administration, once again, showed no interest in holding the perpetrators of these outrages responsible. Instead, the administration did something else entirely: it launched an all-out war on WikiLeaks itself. Numerous reports quickly surfaced that the Obama DOJ was actively attempting to indict WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, under the Espionage Act of 1917—which, if successful, would be the first time in U.S. history that a nongovernment employee was convicted of espionage for publishing classified material. Meanwhile, a very sophisticated cyberattack temporarily drove WikiLeaks offline. Overt pressure from American government officials resulted in Australia threatening to revoke Assange’s passport.

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Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, publicly warned companies not to associate with WikiLeaks in any way, after which the assets of WikiLeaks were frozen and the organization’s accounts with MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and Bank of America were terminated, impeding the group’s ability to raise funds. What’s more, when a handful of teenage hackers targeted a few of these companies with some trivial “denial of service” attacks, Attorney General Holder announced that the DOJ was criminally investigating those attacks—but not the far more sophisticated and damaging cyber-attacks that had caused WikiLeaks to lose its Internet home. To recap “Obama justice,” then: if you create a worldwide torture regime, illegally spy on Americans without warrants, abduct people with no legal authority, or invade and destroy another country based on false claims, then you are fully protected.

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He said, “I don’t want to get involved in hypotheticals.” What he didn’t disclose was that the Obama administration, working with Republicans, was actively pressuring the Spaniards to drop the investigation. Those efforts apparently paid off, and, as this WikiLeaks-released cable shows, Gonzales, Haynes, Feith, Bybee, Addington, and Yoo owed Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thank-you notes. The release of the WikiLeaks cable prompted the Philadelphia Daily News’s Will Bunch to write a scathing column titled “The Day That Barack Obama Lied to Me.” Recalling his interview with the candidate who had committed to look into Bush crimes, Bunch wrote: “The breakdown of justice in this country is far from exceptional.

pages: 340 words: 96,149

@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex by Shane Harris

air gap, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Brian Krebs, centralized clearinghouse, Citizen Lab, clean water, computer age, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, Firefox, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, peer-to-peer, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Stuxnet, systems thinking, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

The CEO of HBGary, Aaron Barr, said the team should collect information about WikiLeaks’ “global following and volunteer staff,” along with the group’s donors, in order to intimidate them. “Need to get people to understand that if they support the organization we will come after them,” Barr wrote in an e-mail. He suggested submitting fake documents to WikiLeaks in hopes that the site would publish them and then be discredited. Barr also urged targeting “people like Glenn Greenwald,” the blogger and vocal WikiLeaks supporter, and he said he wanted to launch “cyberattacks” on a server WikiLeaks was using in Sweden, in order to “get data” about WikiLeaks’ anonymous sources and expose them.

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Hunton & Williams asked the trio, which operated under the name Team Themis, if they could do the same job for supporters of WikiLeaks, and also if they could locate where the organization was storing classified information it got from its anonymous sources. “Apparently, if they can show that WikiLeaks is hosting data in certain countries, it will make prosecution easier,” a member of the trio wrote in an e-mail to his colleagues. Justice Department officials were looking for information they could use to indict WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, who had posted classified military intelligence reports and State Department cables.

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The Los Angeles Police Department is another Palantir customer, as is the New York Police Department, which runs an intelligence and counterterrorism unit that many experts believe is more sophisticated than the FBI’s or the CIA’s. Though Team Themis failed, the US government has turned to other private cyber sleuths to go after WikiLeaks and help with other investigations. Tiversa, a Pittsburgh-based company, grabbed headlines in 2011 when it accused WikiLeaks of using peer-to-peer file-sharing systems, like those used to swap music downloads, to obtain classified US military documents. WikiLeaks, which claims only to publish documents that it receives from whistleblowers, called the allegations “completely false.” Tiversa gave its findings to government investigators, who had been trying to build a case against Assange.

pages: 579 words: 160,351

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, country house hotel, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, future of journalism, G4S, high net worth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, natural language processing, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-truth, pre–internet, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The claim is that WikiLeaks was essentially laundering information that might have been hacked by Russian intelligence with the purpose of destabilising the election of a foreign power.9 Assange’s defence about what he described (using the language of newspapers) as an ‘epic scoop’ was straight down the line: the classic right to know. In a statement released on the WikiLeaks website in November 2016 he elaborated: ‘It is an open model of journalism that gatekeepers are uncomfortable with, but which is perfectly harmonious with the First Amendment . . . It would be unconscionable for WikiLeaks to withhold such an archive from the public during an election.’

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The opponents of publication made repeated assertions of the harm caused by the release. Some years later, I was sitting with a senior intelligence figure as he predicted grave consequences of the Snowden revelations. We’d have blood on our hands, he told us. ‘But you argued that over WikiLeaks,’ I protested. He waved his hand dismissively. WikiLeaks was insignificant. ‘But that’s not what you said at the time!’ * The Iraq documents and diplomatic cables were, to date, easily the biggest leak of classified material in history. The relationship with Assange did not survive – quite the opposite. He became the bitterest of critics, protesting (in the third person) on Twitter that he had suffered ‘five years being detained [as ‘editor’] without charge after you invited him to the UK to be your source’7 – a very Assangeist mingling of causes and effects.

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But – years later – Assange, solitary and reclusive, intervened in the 2016 US presidential election in ways that troubled many. In the month before voters went to the polls WikiLeaks assiduously published a steady barrage of hacked emails – more than 100,000 in all – from the campaign (the Democratic National Committee leaks) and Hillary Clinton’s team (the Podesta emails). Clinton had been seven points ahead of Donald Trump at the beginning of October. In December 2016, she singled out both the WikiLeaks documents and FBI director James Comey’s announcement that he had re-opened enquiries into her communications as significant contributions to her defeat.

pages: 470 words: 125,992

The Laundromat : Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, central bank independence, Charlie Hebdo massacre, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, high net worth, income inequality, independent contractor, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

., September 23, 2003. 67 its principal beneficiary was listed as Imre Barmanbek: Source of Funds/Wealth Declaration, November 5, 2015. 68 how Yalçındağ worked hard to ingratiate himself with Erdoğan: Amberin Zaman, “WikiLeaks Dump Casts Rare Light on Erdogan Inner Circle,” Al-Monitor, December 6, 2016, http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/12/erdogan-albayrak-wikileaks.html#ixzz4m5CoQZu. 69 a complete list of Turks and their companies: https://wikileaks.org/berats-box/emailid/27681. EPILOGUE 1 the partners’ original idea was to sell the firm: Author interview with Ramón Fonseca, Panama City, August 2016. 2 the British Virgin Islands fined the firm $440,000: British Virgin Islands Financial Services Commission, Enforcement Action, http://www.bvifsc.vg/Publications/EnforcementAction/tabid/378/ctl/EnforcementSummary/mid/1188/actionId/17069/language/en-AU/Default.aspx. 3 Company incorporations in the jurisdiction dropped 30 percent: “British Virgin Islands: Have They Cleaned Up Since the Panama Papers?

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Weekly calls and email conversations between the Germans and ICIJ discussed how to handle the problem. Ryle had dealt with similar tensions from his source during Offshore Leaks. All Obermayer could do was offer reassurances to John Doe. These were not enough. John Doe contacted WikiLeaks to see if the organization would be interested in the files. With months of work by hundreds of journalists hanging in the balance, WikiLeaks failed to answer its tip line. The Mossfon files stayed with Prometheus.17 In late January 2016, Brazilian federal police raided Mossfon’s office in São Paulo. The operation was part of a fast-growing inquiry into bribery allegations involving the Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht, the state oil company Petrobras, and Brazil’s top political leadership.

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Hamilton, “Contested Modigliani Seized from Freeport as Swiss Open Investigation,” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, April 11, 2016, https://panamapapers.icij.org/blog/20160411-swiss-art-freeport-search.html. 15 After three days of prevarications, Cameron finally admitted: Robert Booth, Holly Watt, and David Pegg, “David Cameron Admits He Profited from Father’s Panama Offshore Trust,” Guardian, April 7, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/07/david-cameron-admits-he-profited-fathers-offshore-fund-panama-papers. 16 “It should be noted that these documents”: “For Communication Media, ‘Panama Papers,’” Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Comunicación, Venezuela, April 4, 2016, translated by the author. 17 Macri was listed as a decadelong director of Fleg Trading: https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/15002701. 18 “The Kirchneristas accused us”: Author interview with Mariel Fitz Patrick, June 2017. 19 La Nación itself was in the data: “La Nación a sus lectores,” La Nación, April 10, 2016, http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1887983-la-nacion-a-sus-lectores. 20 allowing the publication of the businessmen’s names: Iván Ruiz, Maia Jastre-blansky, and Hugo Alconada Mon, “Panamá Papers: Aparecen grandes empresarios locales,” La Nación, April 19, 2016, http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1890675-panama-papers-aparecen-grandes-empresarios-locales. 21 government supporters demonstrated outside El Comercio and El Universo: “Panama Papers: Harassment of Journalists in Ecuador and Venezuela Must End,” IFEX, April 22, 2016, https://www.ifex.org/ecuador/2016/04/22/panama_papers/. 22 the country’s attorney general, the president’s cousin: “Panama Papers: The Power Players,” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, https://panamapapers.icij.org/the_power_players/. 23 As part of his efforts to rein in the media: Freedom House, “Freedom of the Press 2015: Ecuador,” https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2015/ecuador. 24 “If you censor more than 99% of the documents”: Timothy Bertrand, “WikiLeaks Had Some Snarky Tweets About the Panama Papers,” Social News Daily, April 7, 2016, http://socialnewsdaily.com/62059/wikileaks-panama-papers-tweets/. 25 Several quick-witted techies put the URL online: narkopolo, Twitter post, April 5, 2016, https://twitter.com/nark0polo/status/717473567286411266. 26 Hundreds of reporters, editors, and free-speech activists: “Hundreds Join Protest over Sacking of Ming Pao Editor,” Hong Kong Free Press, May 2, 2016, https://www.hongkongfp.com/2016/05/02/hundreds-join-protest-sacking-ming-pao-editor/. 27 the “ginger protest”: Ibid. 28 Caraballo confiscated copies of Mossfon’s computer data: Martha M.

pages: 349 words: 114,038

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

Big sites need hosting, and that costs money. WikiLeaks was the target of this in 2010, with US credit card processors cutting off all donations to the site. Despite not getting money from US contributors, WikiLeaks survived and got good press from being the victim of clearly abusive conduct by the US government and financial industry. So attacking a site will often just make it stronger. The very fact that authorities target a leaks site promotes its accuracy and importance. It is also technically hard to sustain. In 2011, Bank of America hired three firms to attack Wikileaks. One of the firms, HBGary Federal, was hacked by Anonymous, and the plan was discovered.

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The most obvious and widely used is to attack any website that acts as a broker for leaks. WikiLeaks drew a massive amount of fire and fury for declaring its mission to be a broker for leaks, in 2006, leading to its founder Julian Assange infamously holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, with Hollywood painting him in 2013 as a glory-seeking egomaniac. Threaten the powers that be, and you will pay. While it can be tricky to arrest and disappear a public figure, it is trivial to launch a "distributed denial of service attack," or DDoS, on any troublesome website. One simply tells hundreds of thousands of slave PCs to request the main page of the website, say wikileaks.org, at the same time.

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This makes them hard to fight using the traditional weapons of the marketplace, namely marketing, aggressive pricing, buyouts, and so on. Let's look at some major old industries that cling on, and see what challenges they're facing from new forms of organization: The old news industry faces social networks, WikiLeaks, Reddit, mobile phones. The old advertising industry faces Google. The old music industry faces file-sharing, home studios, and mixing. The old telecoms industry faces Google and Facebook, Skype, email. The old academic industry faces Wikipedia. The old software industry faces free software and ad-sponsored mobile applications.

pages: 363 words: 105,039

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, air gap, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, Citizen Lab, clean water, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, false flag, global supply chain, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, machine readable, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, open borders, pirate software, pre–internet, profit motive, ransomware, RFID, speech recognition, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, tech worker, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

The site, of course: Raphael Satter, “Inside Story: How Russia Hacked the Democrats’ Email,” Associated Press, Nov. 4, 2017, www.apnews.com. Another seemed to call for “open borders”: “HRC Paid Speeches,” email via WikiLeaks, sent Jan. 25, 2016, wikileaks.org, archived at bit.ly/2RRtcNA. The security firm Secureworks found the link: “Threat Group 4127 Targets Hillary Clinton Presidential Campaign,” June 16, 2016, www.secureworks.com, archived at bit.ly/2RecMtu. “I love WikiLeaks!”: Mark Hensch, “Trump: ‘I Love WikiLeaks,’ ” Hill, Oct. 10, 2016, thehill.com. But for the most part, Trump: Andy Greenberg, “A Timeline of Trump’s Strange, Contradictory Statements on Russian Hacking,” Wired, Jan. 4, 2017, www.wired.com.

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The hackers sent the news site Gawker the Trump opposition research document, and it published a story on the file that received half a million clicks, robbing the Democrats of the ability to time the release of their Trump dirt. Soon, as promised, WikiLeaks began to publish a steady trickle of the hackers’ stolen data, too; after all, Julian Assange’s secret-spilling group had never been very particular about whether its “leaks” came from whistle-blowers or hackers. The documents, now with WikiLeaks’ stamp of credibility, began to be picked up by news outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Politico, BuzzFeed, and The Intercept. The revelations were very real: It turned out the DNC had secretly favored the candidate Hillary Clinton over her opponent Bernie Sanders as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, despite the committee’s purported role as a neutral arbiter for the party.

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But one of Fancy Bear’s crudest tactics turned out to be its most effective of all: a rudimentary spoofed log-in page. On October 7, WikiLeaks began publishing a new series of leaks, this time stolen directly from the email account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta. The previous March, Podesta had fallen prey to a basic phishing email, directing him to a fake Gmail site that asked for his username and password, which he handed over. The site, of course, was a Fancy Bear trap. WikiLeaks would trickle out its resulting stash of Clinton campaign kompromat for weeks to come. The revelations included eighty pages of closely guarded speeches Clinton had given to private Wall Street audiences.

pages: 271 words: 52,814

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy by Melanie Swan

23andMe, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, banking crisis, basic income, bioinformatics, bitcoin, blockchain, capital controls, cellular automata, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative editing, Conway's Game of Life, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital divide, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, friendly AI, Hernando de Soto, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, operational security, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, personalized medicine, post scarcity, power law, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, sharing economy, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, software as a service, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the long tail, Turing complete, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks

It is possible that blockchain mechanisms might be the most efficient and equitable models for administering all transnational public goods, particularly due to their participative, democratic, and distributed nature. A notable case in which jurisdictional nation-state entities were able to effect centralized and biased control is WikiLeaks. In the Edward Snowden whistle-blowing case in 2010, individuals were trying to make financial contributions in support of the WikiLeaks organization but, strongarmed by centralized government agendas, credit card payment networks and PayPal, refused to accept such contributions, and WikiLeaks was effectively embargoed.75 Bitcoin contributions, had they been possible at the time, would have been direct, and possibly produced a different outcome.

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Broader Perspective blog, August 23, 2009. http://futurememes.blogspot.com/2009/08/automatic-markets.html. 74 Hearn, M. “Future of Money (and Everything Else).” Edinburgh Turing Festival. YouTube, August 23, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu4PAMFPo5Y. 75 Moshinsky, B. et al. “WikiLeaks Finds Snowden Cash Bump Elusive.” Bloomberg Businessweek, July 11, 2013. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-11/wikileaks-finds-snowden-cash-bump-elusive. 76 Gilson, D. “What Are Namecoins and .bit Domains?” CoinDesk, June 18, 2013. http://www.coindesk.com/what-are-namecoins-and-bit-domains/. 77 ———. “Developers Attempt to Resurrect Namecoin After Fundamental Flaw Discovered.”

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Currency, Contracts, and Applications beyond Financial Markets The potential benefits of the blockchain are more than just economic—they extend into political, humanitarian, social, and scientific domains—and the technological capacity of the blockchain is already being harnessed by specific groups to address real-world problems. For example, to counter repressive political regimes, blockchain technology can be used to enact in a decentralized cloud functions that previously needed administration by jurisdictionally bound organizations. This is obviously useful for organizations like WikiLeaks (where national governments prevented credit card processors from accepting donations in the sensitive Edward Snowden situation) as well as organizations that are transnational in scope and neutral in political outlook, like Internet standards group ICANN and DNS services. Beyond these situations in which a public interest must transcend governmental power structures, other industry sectors and classes can be freed from skewed regulatory and licensing schemes subject to the hierarchical power structures and influence of strongly backed special interest groups on governments, enabling new disintermediated business models.

pages: 565 words: 134,138

The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources by Javier Blas, Jack Farchy

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, book value, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, electricity market, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, foreign exchange controls, Great Grain Robbery, invisible hand, John Deuss, junk bonds, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Oscar Wyatt, price anchoring, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stakhanovite, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

Elias was at the time the secretary of Transworld Oil Ltd. 5 7 ‘Energy: JOC Oil Bona Fides’, US State Department, cable from US embassy in Valletta, Malta; Washington, May 1974, via WikiLeaks, accessed: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1974VALLET00848_b.html . 58 ‘Request for Information on Petroleum Company’, US State Department, cable from US embassy in Gaborone, Botswana; Washington, January 1975, via WikiLeaks, accessed: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1975GABORO00154_b.html . 59 ‘Request for Background Information on World Oil Bank’, US State Department, cable from US embassy in Ankara, Turkey; Washington, May 1978, via WikiLeaks, accessed: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1978ANKARA03599_d.html . 60 ‘Iran-Contra Investigation’, US Senate, appendix B, vol. 25, Deposition of Theodore G.

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cid=275&newsid=843557 . 37 ‘Subpoena from United States Department of Justice’, Glencore press release, 3 July 2018, accessed: https://www.glencore.com/media-and-insights/news/Subpoena-from-United-States-Department-of-Justice . 38 ‘Puma International Financing SA, $750,000,000 5% Senior Notes due 2026 Prospectus’, Puma Energy, 31 January 2018, and ‘Share Purchase Agreement’, Puma Energy LLC, 21 August 2013. 39 Trafigura’s annual reports 2014–2018. 40 Torbjörn Törnqvist, interview with the authors, Geneva, August 2019. 41 ‘Banknote Shortage Still Acute’, US State Department, cable from US embassy in Harare, Zimbabwe, Washington, 28 July 2003, via WikiLeaks, accessed: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/03HARARE1521_a.html . 42 ‘Cargill closes local cotton business’, The Herald , 15 October 2014, accessed: https://www.herald.co.zw/cargill-closes-local-cotton-business/ . 43 ‘Cargill Makes Bootleg Currency’, US State Department, cable from US embassy in Harare, Zimbabwe, Washington, 6 August 2003, via WikiLeaks, accessed: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/03HARARE1577_a.html . 44 ‘Zimbabwe plunging toward total collapse’, Chicago Tribune , 8 June 2003. 45 David MacLennan, interview with the authors, Minneapolis, August 2019. 46 ‘Cargill Makes Bootleg Currency’, US State Department, 6 August 2003. 4 7 ‘Commodities: Destination Africa’, Financial Times , 11 November 2013, accessed: https://www.ft.com/content/817df4c2-35c0-11e3-952b-00144feab7de . 48 ‘Dirty Diesel: How Swiss Traders Flood Africa with Toxic Fuels’, Public Eye , September 2016, accessed: https://www.publiceye.ch/fileadmin/doc/Rohstoffe/2016_PublicEye_DirtyDiesel_EN_Report.pdf . 49 ‘Rapport de la Commission Nationale d’Enquête sur les Déchets Toxiques dans le District d’Abidjan’, Republic of CÔte d’Ivoire, pp. 27–28, accessed: https://www.trafigura.com/media/1440/2006_trafigura_rapport_commission_nationale_enqu%C3%AAte_district_abidjan_french.pdf . 50 ‘Trafigura & the Probo Koala’, Trafigura, pp.8–9, accessed: https://www.trafigura.com/media/1372/2016_trafigura_and_the_probo_koala_english.pdf . 51 ‘Trafigura Beheer BV Investor Presentation’, Trafigura, March 2010. 52 Trafigura email dated 27 December 2005, 4.54 PM, from James McNicol to other oil traders, accessed: https://www.trafigura.com/media/1374/2009_trafigura_emails_published_by_the_guardian_english.pdf . 53 Trafigura email dated 27 December 2005, 1.12 PM, from James McNicol to other oil traders. 54 Trafigura email dated 28 December 2005, 9.30 AM, from James McNicol to other executives. 55 Trafigura email dated 27 December 2005, 7.29 PM, from Naeem Ahmed to other executives. 56 Trafigura email dated 28 December 2005, 9.30 AM, from James McNicol. 57 Trafigura email dated 13 March 2006, 9.15 AM, from Toula Gerakis to other executives. 58 Email from Probo Koala captain acknowledging receipt of instructions, 15 April 2006, 4.26 PM. 59 Second Interim Report, Probo Koala Inquiry, conducted by Lord Fraser Carmyllie, accessed: https://www.trafigura.com/media/1382/2010_trafigura_second_interim_report_of_lord_fraser_of_carmyllie_qc_probo_koala_report_english.pdf . 6 0 Trafigura report on the Probo Koala , 2016, p. 8. 61 ‘Rapport de la Commission Nationale d’Enquête sur les Déchets Toxiques dans le District d’Abidjan’, Republic of CÔte d’Ivoire, p. 46. 62 Ibid., p. 45. 63 ‘Neglect and Fraud Blamed for Toxic Dumping in Ivory Coast’, New York Times , 24 November 2006, accessed: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/24/world/africa/24ivory.html . 64 The contract between Trafigura and Compagnie Tommy is quoted in full (in French) in ‘Rapport de la Commission Nationale d’Enquête sur les Déchets Toxiques dans le District d’Abidjan’, Republic of CÔte d’Ivoire, p. 19.

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Accessed: https://www.transparency.org/cpi2018 . 33 The French government’s Chad expert described Déby’s ‘chronic over-indulgence in Chivaz Regal [sic]’ in a conversation described in a US diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks, 16 November 2005, accessed: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05PARIS7792_a.html . 34 US diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks, 13 December 2005, accessed: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05NDJAMENA1761_a.html . 35 World Bank data for 2018. Only the Central African Republic and Lesotho had a lower life expectancy. Accessed: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sp.dyn.le00.in?

pages: 521 words: 118,183

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Democratic senators talked up Hillary’s accomplishments and speakers like Khizr Khan—the Gold Star father of a fallen Muslim army captain—excoriated Trump.22 When Hillary made a surprise appearance to embrace Obama, the convention hall erupted in cheers.23 There was a video showing all the presidents, followed by Hillary symbolically “breaking” a glass ceiling.24 Yet there was also a disconcerting undercurrent. Just a few days before the Democratic convention, the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks dumped a number of emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee, some of which seemed to show the DNC’s preference for Hillary over her main primary rival, Bernie Sanders.25 The emails fueled intraparty feuds at a moment when the Democrats most hoped to be coming together. The WikiLeaks dump merged with the media’s merciless, seemingly 24/7 discussion of “Hillary’s emails,” the controversy over Hillary’s decision to use a private email account and server while secretary of state.

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id=41043609. 23 Mary McNamara, “The hug that will go down in history,” Los Angeles Times, July 28, 2016, https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-obama-clinton-hug-20160728-snap-story.html. 24 Christopher Allen, “User Clip: Hillary Clinton Breaks the Glass Ceiling,” C-SPAN, August 1, 2016, https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4616537/user-clip-hillary-clinton-breaks-glass-ceiling. 25 Tom Hamburger and Karen Tumulty, “WikiLeaks releases thousands of documents about Clinton and internal deliberations,” Washington Post, July 22, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/07/22/on-eve-of-democratic-convention-wikileaks-releases-thousands-of-documents-about-clinton-the-campaign-and-internal-deliberations/. 26 Rebecca Shabad, “Donald Trump: I hope Russia finds Hillary Clinton’s emails,” CBS News, July 27, 2016, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-i-hope-russia-finds-hillary-clintons-emails/. 27 David A.

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Fahrenthold, “Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005,” Washington Post, October 8, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in-2005/2016/10/07/3b9ce776-8cb4-11e6-bf8a-3d26847eeed4_story.html. 28 Aaron Sharockman, “On Oct. 7, the Access Hollywood tape comes out. One hour later, WikiLeaks starts dropping my emails,” PolitiFact, December 18, 2016, https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/dec/18/john-podesta/its-true-wikileaks-dumped-podesta-emails-hour-afte/. 29 “Hillary Clinton has a 91% chance to win,” New York Times, October 18, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2016/10/18/presidential-forecast-updates/newsletter.html. 30 “World’s Most Admired Companies 2016,” Fortune, 2016, https://fortune.com/worlds-most-admired-companies/2016/. 31 Alexis C.

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The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger

active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

But worse yet, he fueled our suspicions that at a minimum he was perfectly comfortable with what was clearly Russian interference in the election. And he made us wonder whether, wittingly or unwittingly, he had become Putin’s agent of influence. * * * — The leaked emails apparently weren’t producing as much news as the GRU-linked hackers had hoped. So the next level of the plan kicked in: activating WikiLeaks. The first WikiLeaks dump was massive: 44,000 emails, more than 17,000 attachments. And not coincidentally, the deluge started just days after our interview with Trump, and right before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The most politically potent of the emails made clear that the DNC leadership was doing whatever it could to make sure Hillary Clinton got the nomination and Bernie Sanders did not.

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The Times was on the wrong side of his wrath in 2009, when I revealed in an article that President Bush, in turning down the Israeli request for bunker-busting bombs to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, initiated a secret program to attack the country’s computer networks—what later became “Olympic Games.” “HOLY SHIT, WTF NYTIMES,” Snowden wrote that day in 2009. “Are they TRYING to start a war? Jesus Christ. They’re like WikiLeaks.” The man who would later revel in revealing scores of sensitive programs sounded incensed. “Who the fuck are the anonymous sources telling them this? Those people should be shot in the balls.” But somewhere along the line Snowden’s views about the importance of shining a light on America’s hidden battles in cyberspace underwent a radical transformation.

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Most important, the NSA has never had to account for the fact that it ignored so many warnings about its well-documented vulnerabilities to a new era of insider threats. The warnings had been quite public. Only three years before the Snowden breach, an army private now known as Chelsea Manning had gotten away with essentially the same thing in Iraq—downloading hundreds of thousands of military videos and State Department cables and handing them off to WikiLeaks. Shortly after the Snowden fiasco, the agency announced new safeguards: No longer would systems administrators with access to vast databases be able to download documents by themselves. There would now be a “two-man rule”—reminiscent of the dual keepers of the keys for the launch of nuclear weapons—to protect against lone actors.

pages: 258 words: 63,367

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Frank Gehry, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, liberation theology, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, precariat, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, working poor

The vibrant democracy movement in Tunisia was directed against “a police state, with little freedom of expression or association, and serious human rights problems,” ruled by a dictator whose family was hated for their venality. This was the assessment by U.S. Ambassador Robert Godec in a July 2009 cable released by WikiLeaks. Relying on such assessments, some observers hold that the WikiLeaks “documents should create a comforting feeling among the American public that officials aren’t asleep at the switch”—indeed, the cables are so supportive of U.S. policies that it is almost as if Obama is leaking them himself (or so Jacob Heilbrunn writes in The National Interest).

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Instead of taking practical steps toward reducing the nightmarish threat of nuclear weapons proliferation in Iran or elsewhere, the United States is moving to reinforce control of the vital Middle Eastern oil-producing regions, by violence if other means do not succeed. The War in Afghanistan: Echoes of Vietnam August 1, 2010 The War Logs—a six-year archive of classified military documents about the war in Afghanistan, released on the Internet by the organization WikiLeaks—documents a grim struggle becoming grimmer, from the U.S. perspective. And for the Afghans, a mounting horror. The War Logs, however valuable, may contribute to the unfortunate and prevailing doctrine that wars are wrong only if they aren’t successful—rather like the Nazis felt after Stalingrad.

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Army poll in April [2010], the military operation is opposed by 95 percent of the population, and five out of six regard the Taliban as “our Afghan brothers”—again, echoes of earlier conquests. The Kandahar plans were delayed, part of the background for McChrystal’s leave-taking. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that U.S. authorities are concerned that domestic public support for the war in Afghanistan may erode even further. In May [2010], WikiLeaks released a March [2010] CIA memorandum about how to sustain Western Europe’s support for the war. The memorandum’s subtitle: “Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough.” “The Afghanistan mission’s low public salience has allowed French and German leaders to disregard popular opposition and steadily increase their troop contributions to the International Security Assistance Force [ISAF],” the memorandum states.

pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Tsyrklevich picked up a Hacking Team purchase of a Microsoft Office email exploit from an Indian company in Jaipur called Leo Impact Security, the first time in memory that an Indian company selling zero-days appeared on the radar. The prescient email from Vincenzetti to his team, in which he wrote, “Imagine this: a leak on WikiLeaks showing YOU explaining the evilest technology on earth! ☺” is still available on WikiLeaks at wikileaks.org/hackingteam/emails/emailid/1029632. Desautels’ announcement that he would cease Netragard’s zero-day side business was covered by Dan Goodin for Ars Technica, “Firm Stops Selling Exploits after Delivering Flash 0-Day to Hacking Team,” July 20, 2015.

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Unsatisfied with the traction the DNC’s purloined emails were getting on WikiLeaks, Russia’s hackers started pushing out Democrats’ stolen emails on their own channels. The DNC’s emails started popping up on a new site called DCLeaks—which had conspicuously been registered back in June—a sign that the Russians had prepared to weaponize the Democrats’ emails months earlier. Facebook users with American names like “Katherine Fulton” and “Alice Donovan” emerged out of thin air and pushed DCLeaks to their followers. And one month ahead of the election, WikiLeaks published the motherlode: John Podesta’s personal emails, which included eighty pages worth of controversial speeches Clinton had been paid to deliver to Wall Street.

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Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we learned in 2015 that the NSA was among Vupen’s customers. See Kim Zetter, “US Used Zero-Day Exploits Before It Had Policies for Them,” Wired, March 30, 2015. An entirely new window into the zero-day market arrived when Hacking Team was hacked by the enigmatic hacker “Phineas Fisher” in 2015. Hacking Team’s leaked documents are searchable on WikiLeaks here: wikileaks.org/hackingteam/emails. Contemporary accounts of the hack can be read on the Vice Motherboard blog here: Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, “Spy Tech Company ‘Hacking Team’ Gets Hacked,” July 5, 2015; Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, “The Vigilante Who Hacked Hacking Team Explains How He Did It,” April 15, 2016; Franceschi-Bicchierai, “Hacking Team Hacker Phineas Fisher Has Gotten Away With It,” November 12, 2018; and at David Kushner, “Fear This Man,” Foreign Policy, April 26, 2016; Ryan Gallagher, “Hacking Team Emails Expose Proposed Death Squad Deal, Secret U.K.

pages: 186 words: 49,595

Revolution in the Age of Social Media: The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet by Linda Herrera

citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, decentralized internet, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Google Earth, informal economy, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, RAND corporation, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, WikiLeaks

Tunisia’s cyberwars escalated to even greater heights when Anonymous, the decentralized internet group that promotes online freedom, launched Operation Tunisia. During the Tunisian uprising, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released a series of incriminating cables detailing embezzlement and nepotism by the Ben Ali oligarchy, information that further fueled the revolt. When the government tried to block access to the cables, Operation Tunisia used the Twitter hashtag #OpTunisia to inform Tunisians about backdoor ways to access the WikiLeaks cables and protect themselves online. Anonymous also managed to hack and take down high-profile Tunisian governmental websites, including those of the stock exchange, the government Internet Agency, the Office of the President and Prime Minister, the Ministry of Industry, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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Abbas contacted YouTube directly to reinstate the videos, but to no avail. He then reached out to the US Embassy in Cairo and requested that they contact Google, which owns YouTube, on his behalf. The details of Abbas’s request to the embassy appear in an embassy cable dated December 2007, which was made public by WikiLeaks. It reads: Prominent Egyptian blogger, human rights activist and winner of the 2007 Knight-Ridder International Journalism Award, Wael Abbas, contacted us November 17 to report that YouTube removed from his website two videos exposing police abuses—one of a Sinai bedouin allegedly shot by police and thrown in a garbage dump during the past week’s violence … and the other of a woman being tortured in a police station.

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In September 2013, Abbas was one of thirty-five activists, including the founders of the 6th of April Facebook page, named in a complaint to the Egyptian public prosecutor. He was called in for questioning on suspicion of treason and working with a foreign government. The names of the activists were taken from a confidential US embassy memo from 2007 entitled “Outreach to Egyptian Democracy and Human Rights Activists,” made public by WikiLeaks in August 2011. This memo details meetings with Egyptian activists from the blogosphere, civil society, and the opposition press. At the time of writing, the fate of those activists remains unclear. What is certain is that activists often risk their own security, credibility, and public standing when they are on record as working with the US government.

pages: 389 words: 108,344

Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn

airport security, anti-communist, Bletchley Park, drone strike, Edward Snowden, friendly fire, Google Earth, license plate recognition, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, RAND corporation, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, Teledyne, too big to fail, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

Defense Secretary Gates, for example, was beguiled by Task Force ODIN’s videos: Gates, op. cit., p. 126. “no detectable effect”: Interview with Rex Rivolo, Washington, DC, February 10, 2011. May 5, 2006, report on the shooting of Allah Harboni: War diaries, BN HVI KILLED BY 3-187 IVO IVO SAMARRA: 1 AIF KIA, 0 CF INJ/DAMAGE 2006-05-08 02:10:00, Wikileaks. https://wardiaries.wikileaks.org/id/70F15038-6A38-4257-8495-1E09F15B677B/. Be Happy Day as an initiative to raise morale: Interview with former military intelligence officer, Los Angeles, CA, September 19, 2012. “Conclusion: HVI Strategy, our principal strategy in Iraq, is counter-productive”: Interview with Rex Rivolo, Washington, DC, February 10, 2011.

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Three of the victims were children: Rod Nordland and Habib Zahori, “Killing of Afghan Journalist and Family Members Stuns Media Peers,” New York Times, March 26, 2014. “It just shows you”: Email, March 14, 2014. The Taliban, said Lavoy, were making significant gains: U.S. State Department Cable, “Allies find briefing on Afghanistan NIE ‘Gloomy’ but focus on recommendations to improve situation,” Secret—NOFORN, December 5, 2008: Wikileaks, Public Library of U.S. Diplomacy. http://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08USNATO453_a.html. “I simply doubt our ability”: Email from Matthew Hoh, April 3, 2014. “I have yet to see one of those out here”: Email, April 9, 2014. 12 | Drones, Baby, Drones! The Richard M. Helms Award dinner: CIA Officers Memorial Foundation: “Richard M.

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In fact, given reports that the rival Mehsud and Wazir tribes: Azhar Masood, “Pakistani Tribesmen Settle Scores Through US Drones,” Arab News, May 24, 2011. ISI … were supplying the targeting information: Patrick Cockburn, “Revenger’s Tragedy: The Forgotten Conflict in Pakistan,” Independent, May 10, 2010. Ahmed Wali Karzai: Wikileaks, “Ahmed Wali Karzai Seeking to Define Himself as US Partner,” February 25, 2010. https://wikileaks.org/cable/2010/02/10KABUL693.html. “very precise precision strikes”: David Jackson, “Obama Defends Drone Strikes,” State Department Cable, USA Today, January 31, 2012. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta echoed the sentiment: U.S. Department of Defense, Press Operations, “Remarks by Secretary Panetta at the Center for a New American Security,” November 20, 2012.

pages: 324 words: 106,699

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, disinformation, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, information security, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, peak oil, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, trade route, WikiLeaks, zero day

It might be hard to remember, or even to imagine, but at the time when I first considered coming forward, the whistleblower’s forum of choice was WikiLeaks. Back then, it operated in many respects like a traditional publisher, albeit one that was radically skeptical of state power. WikiLeaks regularly joined up with leading international publications like the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El País to publish the documents provided by its sources. The work that these partner news organizations accomplished over the course of 2010 and 2011 suggested to me that WikiLeaks was most valuable as a go-between that connected sources with journalists, and as a firewall that preserved sources’ anonymity. WikiLeaks’ practices changed following its publication of disclosures by US Army private Chelsea Manning—huge caches of US military field logs pertaining to the Iraq and Afghan wars, information about detainees at Guantanamo Bay, along with US diplomatic cables.

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WikiLeaks’ practices changed following its publication of disclosures by US Army private Chelsea Manning—huge caches of US military field logs pertaining to the Iraq and Afghan wars, information about detainees at Guantanamo Bay, along with US diplomatic cables. Due to the governmental backlash and media controversy surrounding the site’s redaction of the Manning materials, WikiLeaks decided to change course and publish future leaks as they received them: pristine and unredacted. This switch to a policy of total transparency meant that publishing with WikiLeaks would not meet my needs. Effectually, it would have been the same for me as self-publishing, a route I’d already rejected as insufficient. I knew that the story the NSA documents told about a global system of mass surveillance deployed in the deepest secrecy was a difficult one to understand—a story so tangled and technical that I was increasingly convinced it could not be presented all at once in a “document dump,” but only by the patient and careful work of journalists, undertaken, in the best scenario I could conceive of, with the support of multiple independent press institutions.

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Though I felt some relief once I’d resolved to disclose directly to journalists, I still had some lingering reservations. Most of them involved my country’s most prestigious publications—particularly America’s newspaper of record, the New York Times. Whenever I thought about contacting the Times, I found myself hesitating. While the paper had shown some willingness to displease the US government with its WikiLeaks reporting, I couldn’t stop reminding myself of its earlier conduct involving an important article on the government’s warrantless wiretapping program by Eric Lichtblau and James Risen. Those two journalists, by combining information from Justice Department whistleblowers with their own reporting, had managed to uncover one aspect of STELLARWIND—the NSA’s original-recipe post-9/11 surveillance initiative—and had produced a fully written, edited, and fact-checked article about it, ready to go to press by mid-2004.

pages: 226 words: 71,540

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web by Cole Stryker

4chan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, eternal september, Firefox, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, informal economy, Internet Archive, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, pre–internet, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social bookmarking, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, TED Talk, wage slave, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Then Anonymous went after the RIAA because it sought legal action against file sharing site Limewire. In December 2010, Amazon, Paypal, Bank of America, PostFinance, MasterCard, and Visa decided to stop processing donations for the global news leak network WikiLeaks, which had recently caused global controversy by posting sensitive internal documents. These payment-processing sites had bowed to political pressure, refusing to work with WikiLeaks. In retaliation, Anonymous launched DDoS attacks against several of these companies, successfully bringing down the websites for MasterCard and Visa. A 16-year-old boy from the Netherlands was arrested in relation to the attack, and the FBI is probably still investigating.

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Last modified January 5, 2011. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-500803_162-20027506-500803.html. Doctorow, Cory. “Anonymous infighting: IRC servers compromised, IP addresses dumped, claims of coup and counter-coup.” Boing Boing. Last modified May 10, 2011. http://boingboing.net/2011/05/10/anonymous-infighting.html. Emmett, Laura. “WikiLeaks revelations only tip of iceberg – Assange.” RT. Last modified May 3, 2011. http://rt.com/news/wikileaks-revelations-assange-interview/. Encyclopedia Dramatica. “Hal Turner.” http://encyclopediadramatica.ch/Hal_Turner. Fark post. “Judge determines unsolicited finger in anus is crude, but not criminal.” Last modified March 12, 2004. http://www.fark.com/cgi/comments.pl?

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“Q&A With the Founder of Channel 2,” in “Japan Media Review” via the Online Journalism Review. Last modified October 22, 2003. http://www.ojr.org/japan/internet/1061505583.php. Greenberg, Andy. “Amid Digital Blackout, Anonymous Mass-Faxes WikiLeaks Cables To Egypt.” Forbes. Last modified January 28, 2011. http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2011/01/28/amid-digital-blackout-anonymous-mass-faxes-wikileaks-cables-to-egypt/. Grossman, Wendy M. “alt.scientology.war.” Wired. December 1995. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.12/alt.scientology.war.html. Harold C. “Hal” Turner v. 4chan.org et al. Filed January 19, 2007. http://dockets.justia.com/docket/new-jersey/njdce/2:2007cv00306/198438/.

pages: 476 words: 139,761

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis

active measures, Anton Chekhov, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, failed state, fake news, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Julian Assange, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, WikiLeaks

., p.211 in contact with an official from the criminal division of the Interior Ministry: A leaked entry dated 1986 from the Interior Ministry files describes Mogilevich’s current criminal enterprise and past convictions and says he has been ‘in contact’ with an official deal with German intelligence: Friedman, Red Mafiya, p.210 danced with Bob Levinson: Levinson’s reports of the US law enforcement meetings with Mogilevich; Barry Meier, Missing Man, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016, p.59 intelligence file disappeared: Friedman, Red Mafiya, p.211 in a bar nearby: Glenny, McMafia, pp.87–9; Friedman, Red Mafiya, pp.215–16; transcript of Tom Mangold’s interview with Mogilevich for ‘The Billion Dollar Don’, Panorama, 1999 annual profits: Roman Olearchyk, Haig Simonian and Stefan Wagstyl, ‘Energy fears highlight trade’s murky side’, Financial Times, January 9, 2009 his cable: ‘USG concerns over Austrian banking operations’, cable sent by US embassy in Austria on February 17, 2006, later published by WikiLeaks, wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06VIENNA515_a.html bearer shares: Andrew E. Kramer, ‘Ukraine gas deal draws attention to secretive importer’, New York Times, February 1, 2006, nytimes.com/2006/02/01/business/worldbusiness/ukraine-gas-deal-draws-attention-to-secretive.html Seva’s blessing: ‘Ukraine: Firtash makes his case to the USG’, December 10, 2008, later published by WikiLeaks, wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08KYIV2414_a.html. The cable contains the ambassador’s record of his conversation with Firtash: ‘He acknowledged ties to Russian organized crime figure Seymon [sic] Mogilevich, stating he needed Mogilevich’s approval to get into business in the first place.

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However, the ruling also records that the document was accompanied by a cover letter from the Ministry of Industry and Energy of the Russian Federation to TNK-BP billions of dollars: Alexander Kots, ‘FSB catches energy spies’, Komsomolskaya Pravda, March 20, 2008, kp.ru/daily/24067/307041 (in Russian) told American diplomats: ‘Update on GOR investigation of TNK-BP’, US state department cable published by WikiLeaks, wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW816_a.html ‘the FSB suspects’: Vera Surzhenko and Alexey Nikolsky, ‘Lubyanka does not sleep’, March 20, 2008, Vedomosti (in Russian), vedomosti.ru/newspaper/articles/2008/03/21/lubyanka-ne-dremlet business cards of CIA officers: Asked about this by the author, McCormick neither confirmed nor denied that the cards were his seventeen hours: McCormick later told Lough in an email that the interrogation had lasted seventeen hours.

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The author asked McCormick, who confirmed he does not speak Russian, the basis of his assertion to the contrary. He declined to respond He said Lough ‘supervised’ Zaslavskiy: On March 23, 2008, McCormick spoke with US diplomats in Moscow. This conversation is recorded in a cable subsequently published by WikiLeaks (wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW816_a.html). The cable reported that ‘McCormick said Zaslavsky returned to the company to work in TNK-BP’s Gas Division, where he worked under the supervision of two UK citizens, Alistair Ferguson (the section head) and John Lough, on what was called the “Gazprom project.”’

pages: 464 words: 121,983

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe by Antony Loewenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, British Empire, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, do well by doing good, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, private military company, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, Scramble for Africa, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, the medium is the message, trade liberalization, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

New York Times, May 28, 2014. 46Saskia Sassen, “European Economy’s Invisible Transformation: Expulsions and Predatory Capitalism,” London School of Economics and Political Science, July 3, 2014, at blogs.lse.ac.uk. 47Harriet Alexander, “Greece’s Great Fire Sale,” Telegraph, April 20, 2013. 48“Privatization of Athens Water Utility Ruled Unconstitutional,” Press Project, May 28, 2014, at thepressproject.net. 49Niki Kitsantonis, “Greece Wars with Courts over Ways to Slash Budget,” New York Times, June 12, 2014. 50Daniel Trilling, “Shock Therapy and the Gold Mine,” New Statesman, June 18, 2013. 51“Europe’s Failed Course,” New York Times, February 17, 2012. 52Joanna Kakissis, “36 hours in Athens,” New York Times, October 19, 2014. 53Yiannis Baboulias, “Our Big Fat Greek Privatisation Scandals,” Al Jazeera English, June 10, 2014. 54Helen Smith, “Greece Begins 50 Billion Euro Privatisation Drive,” Guardian, August 1, 2010. 55Slavoj Žižek, “Save Us from the Saviours,” London Review of Books, May 28, 2012. 56Alexander, “Greece’s Fire Sale.” 57Ibid. 58Katie Allen, “Austerity in Greece Caused More than 500 Male Suicides, Say Researchers,” Guardian, April 21, 2014. 59Mark Lowen, “Greek’s Million Unpaid Workers,” BBC News, December 5, 2013. 60“Sisa: Cocaine of the Poor,” Vice News, May 22, 2013, at vice.com. 61Liz Alderman, “Societal Ills Spike in Crisis-Stricken Greece,” New York Times, May 22, 2013. 3Haiti 1Mark Schuller and Pablo Morales, eds, Tectonic Shifts (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2012). 2Ibid., p. 2. 3Ansel Herz and Kim Ives, “Wikileaks Haiti: The Post-Quake ‘Gold Rush’ for Reconstruction Contracts,” Nation, June 15, 2011. 4Deepa Panchang, Beverly Bell, and Tory Field, “Disaster Capitalism: Profiting from Crisis in Post-Earthquake Haiti,” Truthout, February 16, 2011, at truth-out.org. 5Herz and Ives, “Wikileaks Haiti.” 6The AshBritt company was accused of questionable practices in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the CEPR revealing that a “2006 congressional report examining federal contract waste and abuse noted AshBritt used multiple layers of subcontractors, each of whom got paid while passing on the actual work.”

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Market speculators pressurize fragile nations such as Greece, whose citizens are forced to survive with fewer public services.9 British citizens living on the margins face eviction or spiraling rent increases because global fund managers, such as Westbrook—based in the United States—purchase homes as assets to be milked for profit.10 The International Monetary Fund (IMF) traverses the world with the backing of Western elites, strong-arming nations into privatizing their resources and opening up their markets to multinationals. Resistance to this bitter medicine is only one reason that large swathes of Latin America have become more independent since the 2000s. The mass privatization that results—a central plank of US foreign policy—guarantees corruption in autocracies. Wikileaks’ State Department cables offer countless examples of this, including in Egypt under former president Hosni Mubarak.11 The World Bank is equally complicit and equally unaccountable. In 2015 it admitted that it had no idea how many people had been forced off their lands around the world due to its resettlement policies.

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Today, there are 4 million US citizens who hold Top Secret security clearance, of whom 500,000 are contractors.31 Robert Greiner, who was the CIA station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, at the time of the 9/11 attacks, said in 2010 that he believed at least half of the staff working at the CIA’s counterterrorism center were private contractors.32 Former NSA employee Edward Snowden exposed the dangers of mass surveillance being managed by private enterprise when he leaked documents in 2013 proving how easy it was for firms such as Booz Allen Hamilton to view and store information on citizens. It is nothing less than a privatized, modern-day Stasi. The claim that “the world is a battlefield” reflects a military ideology pursued by both Democrat and Republican administrations, as has been detailed by investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill. This view is only bolstered by WikiLeaks documents, released in 2010, that uncovered a large number of previously unreported murders committed by privatized security and intelligence forces in the Afghan and Iraq conflict zones.33 These ghost-figures operate in the shadows in dozens of countries, kidnapping, interrogating, and killing suspects without oversight.34 Modern-day mercenary companies, justified by the state as essential in fighting terrorism, have been completely integrated into America’s endless war.

pages: 246 words: 70,404

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free by Cody Wilson

3D printing, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, active measures, Airbnb, airport security, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, assortative mating, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Cody Wilson, digital rights, disintermediation, DIY culture, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, Google Glasses, gun show loophole, jimmy wales, lifelogging, Mason jar, means of production, Menlo Park, Minecraft, national security letter, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, printed gun, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Skype, Streisand effect, thinkpad, WikiLeaks, working poor

Wilson There is much more to be hoped for in an excess of information or of weapons than in the restriction of information or arms control. —Jean Baudrillard CONTENTS PROLOGUE WikiLeaks, Solid Imaging, and Open Source PART I Wiki Weapon PART II Ministry of Defense PART III The Gun Printer PART IV Terror PART V Danger PART VI Jarhead Angel PART VII John PART VIII Modern Politics PART IX Dropping the Liberator PART X Old Street PART XI Who Does What to Whom PART XII Wine-Dark PART XIII Undetectable PART XIV REDACTED EPILOGUE Nine Months of Night About Cody Wilson PROLOGUE WikiLeaks, Solid Imaging, and Open Source At high summer, we gathered in Little Rock at the Peabody.

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I lured any who might listen to this marvelous set piece with the grandest exhortations—Would you be remembered?—and here made a ritual of holding a fiendish court. At one of these twilight salons sat Chris Hancock, an old classmate of mine, his tangled black hair brushed from his face. He had brought a friend. “You remember WikiLeaks!” I insisted to them both. “Do you recall the insurance files?” “WikiLeaks sends everything they’ve got out to the public in advance. It’s all published and torrented but protected from reading by some long password, right?” Chris answered. “Exactly,” I said, losing the word on my breath. “And in the event the states move in for some final shutdown, only then do they release the password.

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It was in publishing. In one moment it solidified for me: we could produce a gun with the most widely available 3D printing technology and then freely distribute the plans over the Internet. We’d share the designs as open-source software. Go for the brass ring of system failure. Ben had given us WikiLeaks for guns. * * * “Defense Distributed,” I said to him the next evening. “Ha-ha, oh, yeah?” “Yeah, that’s what we’ll call it. We’ll do it with an organization.” “Defense Distributed,” Ben said, as much to himself as to me. “I like the alliteration. I like what it suggests. It’s a not-so-subtle negation, isn’t it?”

pages: 329 words: 95,309

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank by Chris Skinner

algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, bank run, Basel III, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, demand response, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, gamification, Google Glasses, high net worth, informal economy, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, margin call, mass affluent, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Pingit, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, quantitative easing, ransomware, reserve currency, RFID, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, software as a service, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, the long tail, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K

There are many other examples of how the mobile, social internet is impacting banks such as the Wikileaks and Anonymous attacks on PayPal, Visa and MasterCard. At the time, American firms such as MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and Amazon, were trying to close down funding to Wikileaks, due to the websites leaks of top secret US Government information. The leaks included films of American bombings in Iraq that killed two Reuters journalists, something the US Government had denied happening, and so the government were publicly shamed and embarrassed and used their influence on PayPal, Visa and MasterCard to stop funding for the Wikileaks services. The real shock was the reaction of Wikileaks supporters to this action however.

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The real shock was the reaction of Wikileaks supporters to this action however. Supporters of Wikileaks targeted MasterCard and brought their web services to a halt using a simple Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). The attack targets the bandwidth of the website, sending TCP, UDP, or HTTP requests to the site until it goes down. This hit MasterCard’s 3D Secure and broadband payments services, and went viral using the term Operation Payback: “an anonymous, decentralized movement which fights against censorship and copywrong.” As can be seen, the power of today’s internet must not be underestimated, as who would have thought that Gadaffi, Mubarak and others would have been deposed due to the fire of Mohammed Bouazizi, a Tunisian market stall holder and his note left on Facebook?

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It has no central issuing authority and, if you trust it and can use it, means that you can trade anywhere, anytime with anyone, with no interference. Technically, it’s an open-source payment tool. Like BitTorrent - a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol – Bitcoin allows the peer-to-peer sharing of value securely globally. The problem is that authorities do not like open source P2P services like BitTorrent and Wikileaks as it undermines traditional forms of commerce as the currency can be used for both good and bad things. In fact, most of the association of Bitcoins is with crime, according to government authorities, being used for drugs and terrorism. This is not actually the case as Bitcoin does not fuel crime, just as the internet does not fuel crime.

pages: 322 words: 84,752

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

Symantec, Norton Report 2013: Cost per Cybercrime Victim Up 50 Percent (Mountain View, CA: Symantec, October 2013), accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.symantec.com/about/news/release/article.jsp?prid=20131001_01. 28. Luke Harding, “WikiLeaks Cables: Russian Government ‘Using Mafia for Its Dirty Work,’” Guardian, December 1, 2010, accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-cable-spain-russian-mafia. 29. Homi Kharas and Andrew Rogerson, Horizon 2025: Creative Destruction in the Aid Industry (London: Overseas Development Institute, July 2012), accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.aidmonitor.org.np/reports/horizon%202012.pdf. 30.

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Dean Nelson, “China ‘Hacking Websites in Hunt for Tibetan Dissidents,’” Telegraph, August 13, 2013, accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10240404/China-hacking-websites-in-hunt-for-Tibetan-dissidents.html. 28. Iain Thomson, “AntiLeaks Boss: We’ll Keep Pummeling WikiLeaks and Assange,” Register, August 13, 2012, accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/13/antileaks_wikileaks_attack_response/. 29. Brian Krebs, “Amnesty International Site Serving Java Exploit,” Krebs on Security, December 22, 2011, accessed September 30, 2014, http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/12/amnesty-international-site-serving-java-exploit/. 30.

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See UglyGorilla wars: announced on Twitter, 59–60; informational attacks during, 34 weak states, 80–84, 94 weaponry, defining periods of political history, 153 We Are All Khaled Said, 79 We Are All Laila, 239 “We Are All” meme, 78–79 Wen Jiabao, 192 West, media targets in, 116–17 whistle blowers, 235–36, 237, 238. See also Assange, Julian; Manning, Chelsea; Snowden, Edward; WikiLeaks wicked problems, 112 WikiLeaks, 13, 43–44, 201, 216 Wilson, Chris, 121 Witness Project, 20 World Bank, 55, 56, 251 World Social Forum, 49–50 Xi Jinping, 192 Xinhua news agency, 191 Yahoo!, 248 Yang, Guobin, 186 Yeltsin, Boris, 37 youth, attraction of, to digital media, 239–40 YouTube, 8–9, 45; in Turkey, 116; white supremacist videos on, 217 Zapatistas (Zapatista Liberation Army), 38, 47–53, 135, 229 zero-day exploits, 236 Zhang, Haiyan, 177a Zimbabwe, 92; anarchy in, 94; infrastructure deals with China, 114; receiving Chinese training on networks, 215 ZTE, 113–14 Zuckerman, Ethan, 138

pages: 295 words: 84,843

There's a War Going on but No One Can See It by Huib Modderkolk

AltaVista, ASML, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, call centre, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Google Chrome, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine translation, millennium bug, NSO Group, ransomware, Skype, smart meter, speech recognition, Stuxnet, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

Though not a member himself, he hung out on their chat channels. These were exciting times in the hacking world. Members of Anonymous had been targeting a succession of organisations and declaring their solidarity with WikiLeaks, which was publishing hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic communications. When Julian Assange’s whistleblower website was blocked by the payment services PayPal, Mastercard and VISA, cutting off lots of donations to WikiLeaks, Anonymous struck back with a DDoS attack that took out the PayPal and Mastercard websites and inflicted an estimated $5.5 million in losses. One member would ultimately wind up doing eighteen months in prison in England.

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The area was divided into clusters with names like Rainbow Island and Noisy Square. The latter was the domain of hardcore hackers, of men and women in black T-shirts with sticker-covered MacBooks. As I stood taking it all in, a four-propeller quadcopter, aka a delivery drone, zoomed by on its way to drop off a pizza. I listened to speeches. I watched a video interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, in which he talked about a fast-proliferating system of surveillance by corporations and governments trying to control the internet. Assange called the system ‘the national security state’, talking in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘It’s hurtling towards a dystopia,’ he predicted, and ‘it is dragging many of us along with it.’

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Another said, ‘I’d definitely check the cabinets where the cables are hooked up. That’s where you want to be.’ One person informed me that besides being the perfect place from which to eavesdrop, the AMS-IX had also switched early on to hardware made by Glimmerglass, a US-based company. Could that be a lead? While browsing the Spy Files (leaked espionage documents) on WikiLeaks, I ran across a folder about Glimmerglass. It said their equipment was also popular with US intelligence. Bingo! I thought. Until someone else pointed out that having Glimmerglass hardware isn’t significant in itself: what matters is how it’s installed and who has access to it. Which took me right back to square one.

pages: 598 words: 134,339

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

Another NSA database, MYSTIC: Ryan Devereaux, Glenn Greenwald, and Laura Poitras (19 May 2014), “Data pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA is recording every cell phone call in the Bahamas,” Intercept, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/05/19/data-pirates-caribbean-nsa-recording-every-cell-phone-call-bahamas. Julian Assange (23 May 2014), “WikiLeaks statement on the mass recording of Afghan telephone calls by the NSA,” WikiLeaks, https://wikileaks.org/WikiLeaks-statement-on-the-mass.html. The NSA stores telephone metadata: David Kravets (17 Jan 2014), “Obama revamps NSA phone metadata spying program,” Wired, http://www.wired.com/2014/01/obama-nsa. If you use encryption: I do not know whether this includes all encrypted SSL sessions.

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we know it is doing so: Ryan Devereaux, Glenn Greenwald, and Laura Poitras (19 May 2014), “Data pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA is recording every cell phone call in the Bahamas,” Intercept, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/05/19/data-pirates-caribbean-nsa-recording-every-cell-phone-call-bahamas. Julian Assange (23 May 2014), “WikiLeaks statement on the mass recording of Afghan telephone calls by the NSA,” WikiLeaks, https://wikileaks.org/WikiLeaks-statement-on-the-mass.html. The agency’s 2013 budget: Barton Gellman and Greg Miller (29 Aug 2013), “‘Black budget’ summary details U.S. spy network’s successes, failures and objectives,” Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black-budget-summary-details-us-spy-networks-successes-failures-and-objectives/2013/08/29/7e57bb78-10ab-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_story.html.

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Anthony Faiola (28 Sep 2013), “Britain’s harsh crackdown on Internet porn prompts free-speech debate,” Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/britains-harsh-crackdown-on-internet-porn-prompts-free-speech-debate/2013/09/28/d1f5caf8-2781-11e3-9372-92606241ae9c_story.html. the US censored WikiLeaks: Ewen MacAskill (1 Dec 2010), “WikiLeaks website pulled by Amazon after U.S. political pressure,” Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-website-cables-servers-amazon. Russian law requiring bloggers: Neil MacFarquhar (6 May 2014), “Russia quietly tightens reins on web with ‘Bloggers Law,’” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/world/europe/russia-quietly-tightens-reinson-web-with-bloggers-law.html.

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy B. Zegart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, air gap, airport security, Apollo 13, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, failed state, feminist movement, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Gene Kranz, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, index card, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Network effects, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, operational security, Parler "social media", post-truth, power law, principal–agent problem, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, uber lyft, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Memorandum from the Undersecretary of Defense, “Notice to DoD Employees and Contractors on Protecting Classification Information and the Integrity of Unclassified Government Information Technology (IT) Systems,” January 11, 2011, https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/dod/wl-notice.pdf (accessed May 5, 2020); Eric Schmitt, “Air Force Blocks Sites That Posted Secret Cables,” New York Times, December 15, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/15/us/15wiki.html; Spencer Ackerman, “Airmen, it’s illegal for your kids to read Wikileaks,” Wired, February 7, 2011, https://www.wired.com/2011/02/air-force-its-illegal-for-your-kids-to-read-wikileaks/ (accessed June 16, 2020); John Cook, “State Department Bars Employees from Reading Wikileaks on ‘Personal Time,’ ” Gawker, December 15, 2010, https://gawker.com/5713964/state-department-bars-employees-from-reading-wikileaks-on-personal-time?skyline=true&s=i (accessed April 10, 2020). 100. Ackerman, “Airmen, it’s illegal”; Schmitt, “Air Force Blocks Sites.” 101.

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Just the phrase itself.92 In September 2011, when President Obama announced the killing of an American terrorist in Yemen named Anwar al-Awlaki, the president could not say the words drone or CIA in his speech.93 That information was classified94 even though the CIA’s drone program had already been widely covered in the press.95 In early 2010, Army PFC Chelsea Manning illegally downloaded hundreds of thousands of classified documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan onto a fake Lady Gaga CD while lip syncing to the song “Telephone” and handed them over to WikiLeaks.96 The trove included sensitive diplomatic cables with foreign partners; the names of Iraqi and Afghan civilians who had been working with U.S. troops, putting their lives at risk;97 and video of a U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad that mistakenly killed civilians, including two journalists.98 U.S. government personnel with security clearances were told not to click on the WikiLeaks files, even though they were plastered all over the news.99 Diplomats, soldiers, and others weren’t supposed to read the documents on their home computers or on their personal time, either; at one point, the Air Force even tried to ban the children of Air Force personnel from accessing the Manning WikiLeaks files at home and blocked the New York Times and twenty-five other sites that were running news stories about the documents from unclassified office computers.100 Why all the fuss?

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Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

In mid-June, Guccifer 2.0 leaked documents that had been stolen from the Democratic National Committee. A week later, just three days before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks published thousands of stolen emails, opening rifts between Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who resigned almost immediately. And, of course, Nix eventually began asking around about Clinton’s emails at the behest of Rebekah Mercer, eventually offering Cambridge Analytica’s services to WikiLeaks to help disseminate the hacked material. I found out about this from a former colleague who was still with the firm and thought everything was getting out of hand.

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I’m flanked by my lawyers and my friend Shahmir Sanni, a fellow whistleblower. We give the Republicans a few minutes to show up. They never do. It’s June 2018, and I’m in Washington to testify to the U.S. Congress about Cambridge Analytica, a military contractor and psychological warfare firm where I used to work, and a complex web involving Facebook, Russia, WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign, and the Brexit referendum. As the former director of research, I’ve brought with me evidence of how Facebook’s data was weaponized by the firm, and how the systems they built left millions of Americans vulnerable to the propaganda operations of hostile foreign states. Schiff leads the questioning.

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Did the data used by Cambridge Analytica ever get into the hands of potential Russian agents? Yes. Do you believe there was a nexus of Russian state-sponsored activity in London during the 2016 presidential election and Brexit campaigns? Yes. Was there communication between Cambridge Analytica and WikiLeaks? Yes. I finally saw glimmers of understanding coming into the committee members’ eyes. Facebook is no longer just a company, I told them. It’s a doorway into the minds of the American people, and Mark Zuckerberg left that door wide open for Cambridge Analytica, the Russians, and who knows how many others.

pages: 317 words: 87,048

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks was perfect for the task. First, it had a mission of disclosing confidential documents. Second, its founder, Julian Assange, bore a personal grudge against Clinton, who had been in charge of the US response to the State Department cables the site had released in 2010. Finally, though it’s not clear whether the Russian hackers were aware of this, Assange had an interest in Trump winning the election, believing he would be much likelier to drop any possible prosecution or extradition bid over WikiLeaks’ activities. Later in the race, it emerged that WikiLeaks had been communicating with Donald Trump Jr over its handling of the leaks, even proposing that Trump should suggest Assange for an ambassadorial post.38 No one knows if Assange was aware that the documents he was receiving were the result of Russian state hacking (he has denied that they were), but he was certainly not about to spend too much time asking inconvenient questions of his anonymous source.

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With hindsight, helping those who stayed on the board, which is to say those for whom life never really got started, and preventing the effect they’d have on the next generation of teens arriving, could have staved off many disasters. In practice, I never really left 4chan for very long. My early jobs as a journalist tended to lean hard on my experience with tech and internet culture – especially hacker culture and Anonymous – not least because for a time I worked for WikiLeaks and lived with its enigmatic founder Julian Assange. As a result, not long after leaving 4chan as a regular user, I was keeping an eye on it as a journalist, and saw it change from something chaotic but fundamentally innocent into something far darker. From mass hoaxing to mass action Even in its early incarnation, 4chan had its dark side.

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Some took exception to the new, worthy, political version of Anonymous, condemning users as ‘moralfags’,32 and trying once again to ruin the reputation of 4chan, even releasing videos intending to cause photo-epileptic seizures onto support forums for people with epilepsy.33 Anonymous, rather than becoming a consistent movement, would rise and fall from the headlines – popping up to support WikiLeaks, or the Arab Spring, or to release details from a hack of Sony Pictures carried out by North Korea in protest of the movie The Interview.34 The seeds Operation Chanology planted for the longer term are much easier to see with hindsight, as Coleman notes. ‘On the one hand Anonymous did convert people into social justice movements,’ she says, before adding that because Anonymous was never a movement united behind a particular ideology, such as anti-capitalism, it never coalesced into something solid.

pages: 268 words: 76,702

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

Particular thanks are also due to Nick Hancock and his current fiancée for actually giving up their home permanently during the reporting of the book. Several chapters of this book draw from previous reporting projects I’ve been lucky to have been part of. On WikiLeaks, David Leigh and Luke Harding were a pleasure to work with and their book is a valuable reminder of the time. LSE’s Charlie Beckett was a joy to co-write an academic book with on the era. As to those within WikiLeaks itself, the good ones know who they are, even if the world doesn’t – and Chelsea Manning deserves to be a free woman. I discovered the surprisingly strange world of ICANN thanks to a story idea from Merope Mills, and worked with Laurence Mathieu-Léger reporting the feature and the video, which was a joy.

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., The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, Anchor, 2009. Bartlett, J., People Vs Tech, Ebury Press, 2018. Beckett, C., and Ball, J., Wikileaks: News in the Networked Era, Polity, 2012. Blum, A., Tubes, Viking, 2019. Greenwald, G., No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State, Penguin UK, 2015. Harding, L., The Snowden Files, Guardian Faber Publishing, 2016. Leigh, D., Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, Guardian Books, 2010. Miller, C., The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab, Windmill Books, 2019. Susskind, J., Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech, Oxford University Press, 2018.

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The reach and scale of the internet would enable a ‘long tail’ of small and independent producers to flourish. Online companies were launched talking in earnest terms of changing the world, with ‘don’t be evil’ mantras alongside – and generous share options making even their office decorators rich. For a long time, you could convince yourself it was all the real deal. At the start of the last decade, WikiLeaks used its unique online platform to challenge the world’s biggest superpower with an unprecedented series of leaks. Shortly afterwards, the world’s biggest social media companies were credited with boosting Arab Spring protests against corrupt and dictatorial governments. Such was the mood towards the internet that the exultant opening ceremony to the 2012 London Olympics culminated in a seventeen-minute dance sequence celebrating Tim Berners-Lee for creating the World Wide Web and giving it to the world for free.

pages: 577 words: 149,554

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey by Michael Huemer

Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Phillip Zimbardo, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Stanford prison experiment, systematic bias, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, unbiased observer, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

The government brought twelve felony counts against Ellsberg (ultimately dismissed), and President Nixon ordered illegal wiretaps and a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in an effort to find information to discredit Ellsberg.31 A more recent case is that of Wikileaks, which published thousands of government documents in 2010, most of which concerned the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, including videos showing U.S. troops killing civilians. The uniform reaction from American politicians on both the left and the right was one of outrage at both Wikileaks and its sources. Vice President Biden called Wikileaks founder Julian Assange a terrorist and promised that the Justice Department would be looking for ways to prosecute him. Former Arkansas governor and sometime presidential candidate Mike Huckabee called Wikileaks’ source a traitor and called for his execution.

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‘Deaths by Mass Unpleasantness: Estimated Totals for the Entire Twentieth Century’, http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat8.htm. Accessed February 13, 2012. Wikileaks. 2010. Collateral Murder (video), www.collateralmurder.com/. Accessed March 10, 2011. Williams, Juan. 1987. Eyes on the Prize. New York: Viking Penguin. Wilson, Edward O. 2000. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, 25th anniversary ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilson, James Q. 1990. ‘Against the Legalization of Drugs’, Commentary 89: 21–8. Wing, Nick. 2010. ‘Mike Huckabee: WikiLeaks Source Should Be Executed’, Huffington Post, November 30, www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/30/mike-huckabee-wikileaks-execution_n_789964.html. Accessed March 10, 2011.

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Though this might occur in a society populated by economists, no other society would consider, for example, sending a legislator to prison for failing to read a bill before voting on it. 30 Harper 2008. 31 Kernis 2011. Ellsberg is the subject of the popular documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America. 32 For the famous ‘Collateral Murder’ video released by Wikileaks, see Wikileaks 2010. For Biden’s remarks, see Mandel 2010. On Huckabee, see Wing 2010. On the charges against Manning, see CBS News 2011. 33 See Converse (1990, 377–83), who coined the phrase ‘miracle of aggregation’. See Caplan 2007b, Chapters 1, for criticism of the theory. 34 Using statistical analysis, Bartels (1996) found that poorly informed people tend to vote for incumbents and Democrats more often than people who are more informed but otherwise similar in age, race, social class, and so on.

Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression by Geoff Cox, Alex McLean

4chan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, bash_history, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, finite state, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Conference 1984, Ian Bogost, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, Larry Wall, late capitalism, means of production, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, power law, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Slavoj Žižek, social software, social web, software studies, speech recognition, SQL injection, stem cell, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, Turing machine, Turing test, Vilfredo Pareto, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

It is interesting to note that at the time of writing now (summer and autumn of 2011), the enduring power of social movements and public action has been proved again, as witnessed by the various “pro-democracy” campaigns in North Africa and the Near East (so-called “Arab Spring”), movements opposing state budget cuts to the public sector, protests against the marketization of education, and the political agenda around Internet freedom and the controversies surrounding WikiLeaks.5 An example of the latter is the recent “denial of service” attacks by the loosely organized group of “hacktivists” called Anonymous.6 Emerging from the online message forum 4chan,7 the group coordinated various distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks using forums and social media websites, where instructions were disseminated on how to download attack software to bombard websites with data to try to throw them offline, and target sites were publicized such as the organizations that had cut ties with WikiLeaks (such as MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal, through “operation payback”).

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Embracing the notion of free speech on the Internet, the website SpeakersCorner contained articles (such as the one mentioned above), videos, and an online radio show (available at http://www.speakerscorner.net/). 57. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an organization dedicated to protecting freedom of speech on the Internet. See http://www.eff.org/. 58. A summary of WikiLeaks is available at http://wikileaks.org/About.html. 59. Key to this project were the ten Macy conferences held between 1946 and 1953, which developed ideas around informational systems and a universal theory of regulation and control that would be applicable to humans as well as to machines, to economic systems as well as to behavior.

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Algorithms are numeric combinations that inscribe in themselves operational functions, formatting and performing the real developments of the human world. x Foreword But the pragmatic effects of the code are not deterministic, as far as the code is the product of code writing, and code writing is affected by social, political, cultural, and emotional processes. This is a key point that is highlighted in this book. Hacking, free software, WikiLeaks . . . are the names of lines of escape from the determinism of code. From this point of view, Speaking Code is a timely intervention. It again raises the question of pragmatics previously debated by authors like J. L. Austin (How to Do Things with Words, 1962), Paul Watzlawick (Pragmatics of Human Communication, 1967), and Félix Guattari (L’inconscient machinique, 1979), but in this book, for the first time, the problem of pragmatics is investigated at the level of code.

pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

This notion of the almost God-given superiority of networks informs Shirky’s interpretation of WikiLeaks, the one transnational network to rule them all. Thus, in a later speech, Shirky argues that “there was no way the State Department could go to WikiLeaks and have a conversation that hinged on or even involved anything called the national interest. Julian [Assange] is not a U.S. citizen, he is an Australian citizen. He was not operating on U.S. soil, he was in Iceland. The Pentagon Papers conversation took place entirely within the national matrix, and the WikiLeaks conversation took place outside of it.” Groups win; nation-states lose.

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PayPal may have obviated the theoretical need for banks—but its investors still need a bank to cash their checks from PayPal, so no technoescape actually takes place. Consider the role that PayPal has played in the WikiLeaks saga: yes, it was initially a great tool to raise money for Assange’s cause, but the moment WikiLeaks took on the US government, PayPal ran away from Assange (freezing WikiLeaks’s account) in much the same way that Peter Thiel wants to run from reality. Likewise, as of July 2012, PayPal had revised how it deals with file-sharing sites, requiring any sites that want to use PayPal to solicit membership fees from users to ensure that they host no illegal files.

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The problem here is that Clay Shirky believes that global affairs now work according to the demands of “the Internet,” while, in reality, the story is much more complicated. A conversation about the national interest between the transglobal network that is (was?) WikiLeaks and the US government actually did take place. In fact, according to at least some credible reports, WikiLeaks did offer the State Department the opportunity to review the diplomatic cables and highlight what should be redacted—an opportunity that the ugly and messy hierarchy of the State Department reportedly declined (Mark Stephens, one of Assange’s numerous ex-lawyers, once claimed that two cables were actually removed at their request).

pages: 372 words: 109,536

The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money by Frederik Obermaier

air gap, banking crisis, blood diamond, book value, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, family office, Global Witness, high net worth, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, mega-rich, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, out of africa, race to the bottom, vertical integration, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

Another year during which Mossfon apparently broke a US embargo.23 6 From the Waffen-SS to the CIA and Panama 259 gigabytes. 260. 261. This makes our mountain of data the largest leak in the history of journalism. Larger than Offshore Secrets. By way of comparison, the diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks amounted to 1.7 gigabytes; the HSBC Files, based on Hervé Falciani’s documents, 3.3 gigabytes; the Luxembourg Tax Files 4 gigabytes; the WikiLeaks Afghanistan protocols 1.4 gigabytes. Of course, it isn’t the size of a leak that matters. 260 gigabytes of meaningless files are, in the final analysis, no more than meaningless files. Also, it is very hard to imagine 260 gigabytes.

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It doesn’t have a mission and it isn’t looking to deceive you. It’s simply there, and you can check it. Every good dataset can be collated with reality and that’s exactly what you must do as a journalist before you start to write. At some stage you also have to consider very carefully which part of the data you’re going to exploit. WikiLeaks was different. The coordinators of that whistle-blowing website simply posted data on the Internet without any journalists filtering the information. That was the basic idea – and not a bad one at that. [Obermayer]: How would we get the data? [john doe]: I would like to assist but there are a couple of conditions.

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Rami and Bashar played together when they were young, and today they are close allies – one the head of state, the other the businessman on whose money and connections Assad can count at all times. The US State Department classifies Rami Makhlouf as a ‘financier of the regime’, as one can read in a diplomatic cable sent in 2007 that was published by WikiLeaks. As far as anyone can tell, Makhlouf’s wealth has less to do with diligence and hard work than with unscrupulousness and brutality. ‘Rami Makhlouf has used intimidation and his close ties to the Assad regime to obtain improper business advantages at the expense of ordinary Syrians,’ said Stuart Levey in 2008, who was under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the US Department of the Treasury and who, in an ironic twist, now works for HSBC – the very bank that the ICIJ’s HSBC Files investigation revealed had done business with Makhlouf for many years.

pages: 391 words: 123,597

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

And I found Assange’s choice to leak documents on the U.S. military’s involvement in war crimes in Iraq heroic—in fact, as I’ve mentioned, I had written my graduate thesis for my LLM (or “master of laws”) on war crimes using WikiLeaks’s data dumps as my primary source material. And in 2011, when WikiLeaks donations were blocked by major credit card companies, the nonprofit had launched a widget to donate using Bitcoin instead—I donated a couple of hundred dollars’ worth in recognition of the research the organization had allowed me to do. While I was incredibly skeptical of Wikileaks’ choice to leak Hillary Clinton’s emails during the election, at first I felt there had to have been a reason for the organization to do so.

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I had never believed a thing she’d reported because every single thing she’d ever written about me had been so inaccurate and speculative, to say the least. Later that year, Carole would cite an anonymous source stating that I was “funneling” Bitcoin to fund Wikileaks (I guess she’s referring to my student-budget donation in 2011) and had gone to visit Julian Assange to discuss the U.S. elections. Her theory and inference that I could be Guccifer 2.0, the conduit between Russia, the DNC hack, and Wikileaks, was a bit much to take in. Her allegations against me had real collateral damage: I was subpoenaed by Mueller the next day, which she then printed nine months later, conveniently leaving out the date and touting it as though it had just happened, further confusing the world and obfuscating the truth.

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While Cambridge, she allowed, had never officially worked for Lukoil—Wylie had a copy of that proposal, which I myself had seen in my early days at SCL—Cadwalladr wanted to tie it all together, despite having no causal evidence. This features writer posing as an investigator wanted to connect CA with WikiLeaks, with the downfall of Hillary and the rise of Trump, and she presumed that both Julian Assange and Alexander Nix had been lying when each said that they had not in fact ended up working together when Alexander reached out to WikiLeaks in search of Hillary Clinton’s emails. Carole wanted so desperately to find a smoking gun that she blew smoke everywhere, with larger-than-life characters such as Chris Wylie and villainous companies such as Cambridge Analytica, which she described as deploying psyops and operating much like MI6.

pages: 1,590 words: 353,834

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican by Gerald Posner

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, book value, Bretton Woods, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, credit crunch, disinformation, dividend-yielding stocks, European colonialism, forensic accounting, God and Mammon, Index librorum prohibitorum, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, liberation theology, low interest rates, medical malpractice, Murano, Venice glass, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, power law, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Riazat Butt, “Vatican to Be Sued over Sex Abuse Claims,” The Guardian, December 15, 2008, 23. 87 As for the Sodano-Rice meeting, see 11-25-05 WikiLeaks Vatican Unhappy with Lawsuits Cable, 05VATICAN538_a; https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05VATICAN538_a.html. 88 Ibid, WikiLeaks. Also, “Vatican’s Global Importance Evident In Leaked Cables,” EWTN, Catholic News Agency, December 14, 2010. “Pope Wants Exemption from U.S. Law,” Vermont Guardian (Texas), May 31, 2005. 89 Ibid, “Vatican’s Global Importance Evident In Leaked Cables,” EWTN; See 01-08-02 WikiLeaks, “Vatican PM Wants His Money Cable, See also Berry, Render Unto Rome, 119-20. 02VATICAN83_a; https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/02VATICAN83_a.html. 90 John L.

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In the State Department that year, 1973, there was a flurry of diplomatic cable traffic over the “Vatican’s ‘contacts’ with Communists” in Vietnam. It was about fears the Pope might reach out to the Vietcong. See generally 09-25-73 WikiLeaks Vatican “Contacts” with Communists Cable: 1973ROME10199_b; https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1973ROME10199_b.html; also 09-28-73 WikiLeaks Audience with Pope Paul VI (Held at Vatican Suggestion) Cable: 1973ROME10410_b; https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1973ROME10410_b.html. 2 “Two Bombings in Milan,” The New York Times, January 16, 1973, 14. 3 Paul Hofmann, “El Al Employe [sic] in Rome Is Shot to Death by an Arab: 3 Seized at Beirut Airport,” The New York Times, April 28, 1973, 6. 4 Paul Hofmann, “Italian Neo-Fascists Are Linked to a Synagogue Fire in Padua,” The New York Times, April 30, 1973, 3. 5 “Anarchist Seized in Blast in Milan,” The New York Times, May 18, 1972, 7. 6 Paul Hofmann, “If Surge of Gunfire Is a Sign, Sicilian Mafia Is in Trouble,” The New York Times, May 15, 1973, 41. 7 Paul Hofmann, “Italians Suspect Violence Is Plot: International Police Aid Is Asked After Milan Blast,” The New York Times, May 21, 1973, 9. 8 “Again Italy’s Premier: Mariano Rumor,” The New York Times, July 9, 1973, 3. 9 Ibid. 10 “Milan Offices Bombed,” The New York Times, July 29, 1973, 3. 11 “Libyan Jets Attack an Italian Warship off African Coast,” The New York Times, September 22, 1973, 2. 12 William D.

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., Tremlett, “Nazi Gold Taints Fatima.” 81 Pope John Paul quoted in Jocelyn Noveck, “In Historic Speech at Holocaust Memorial, Pope Says Church Deeply Saddened,” Associated Press, International News, Jerusalem, March 23, 2000. 82 Author interview with Elan Steinberg, April 2, 2006. 83 See 10-31-02 WikiLeaks Vatican Archives: Archivist Confirms Partial Opening for Nazi Germany and WWII Documents Cable: 02Vatican5356_a, https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/02VATICAN5356_a.html; and 03-13-03 WikiLeaks Holocaust Museum Delegation Works in Secret Archives, Offers Collaboration to Catalogue Closed Records Cable: 03vatican1046_a, https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/03Vatican1046_a.html. 84 Authers and Wolffe, The Victim’s Fortune, 321–23. 85 Joseph B. Treaster, “Settlement Approved in Holocaust Victims’ Suit Against Italian Insurer,” The New York Times, February 28, 2007, reporting on a federal judge’s approval of the settlement reached in 2006.

Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side by Simon McCarthy-Jones

affirmative action, Atul Gawande, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Extinction Rebellion, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, loss aversion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, p-value, profit maximization, rent-seeking, rewilding, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks

Berman, “Who Will Grab the Bernie-or-Bust and the Never-Trump Vote?,” The Atlantic, June 9, 2016, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/who-will-grab-the-bernie-or-bust-and-the-never-trump-vote/486254/. 35. D. Roberts, “Latest WikiLeaks Dump Ties Clinton Foundation to Personal Enrichment Claims,” The Guardian, October 27, 2016, www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/27/wikileaks-bill-clinton-foundation-emails. 36. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), “The system is rigged,” Twitter, July 5, 2016, 8:37 a.m., https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/750352884106223616. 37. Bordo, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton, 65. 38.

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Reilly, “Beyoncé Reclaims Hillary Clinton’s ‘Baked Cookies’ Comment at Rally,” Time, November 5, 2016, https://time.com/4559565/hillary-clinton-beyonce-cookies-teas-comment/. 42. Bordo, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton, 45. 43. Associated Press, “WikiLeaks: Clinton Avoided Criticism of Wall Street in Goldman Sachs Speeches,” The Guardian, October 16, 2016, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/16/wikileaks-hillary-clinton-wall-street-goldman-sachs-speeches. 44. H. R. Clinton, What Happened (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), 413. 45. B. Weiss, “Jonathan Haidt on the Cultural Roots of Campus Rage,” Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2017, www.wsj.com/articles/jonathan-haidt-on-the-cultural-roots-of-campus-rage-1491000676. 46.

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But after the superdelegates cast their ballots, the roll call registered “Clinton 76, Sanders 67.”15 Similarly, Sanders received 60 percent of the popular vote in New Hampshire, yet, thanks to superdelegates, New Hampshire’s votes were split evenly between Sanders and Clinton at the convention.16 Sanders himself complained that this “rigged system” blocked his path to the nomination. Whether true or not, the effect of his statement played straight into the narrative arc of Donald Trump, which we will come to momentarily. WikiLeaks raised more fairness concerns by releasing emails, given to them by Russian intelligence, showing that senior Democratic National Committee members were keen to undermine the Sanders campaign.17 Methods broached included targeting his religious faith.18 The Democratic National Committee apologized, but the donkey had already bolted.

pages: 204 words: 53,261

The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Chelsea Manning, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deskilling, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Minsky moment, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, performance metric, price mechanism, RAND corporation, Salesforce, school choice, scientific management, Second Machine Age, selection bias, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, WikiLeaks

See also time loss transparency, 3–4, 17–18, 113; diplomacy and intelligence, 162–65; as enemy of performance, 159–65; in government, 160–62 “Twice-Revised Code, The,” 30 Tyco, 144 Uniform Crime Report, 127–28 unintended consequences of metric fixation: costs in employee time, 170; costs to productivity, 173; degradation of work, 172–73; diminishing utility, 170; discouraging cooperation and common purpose, 172; discouraging innovation, 140, 150–51, 171–72; discouraging risk-taking, 62, 117–18, 171; goals displacement, 169–70; by No Child Left Behind, 92–94; rewarding of luck, 171; rule cascades, 171; short-termism, 170 U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), 155, 156 US News and World Report, 76–77, 81, 115 value-added testing, 92–93 value agenda, 107 Vermeulen, Freek, 138 Veterans Administration, 104 Vietnam War, 35, 131 Wells Fargo, 142–43 Wikileakism, 164 Wikileaks, 162–63 Wire, The, 1–2, 92, 129 Witch Doctors, The, 13 Wolf, Alison, 68, 72 Woodford, Neil, 139 Woodford Investment Management, 139 Woolridge, Adrian, 13 World Bank, 34 WorldCom, 144 World Health Organization, 105–6 “World Health Report 2000,” 105

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There are increasing pressures to make those publicly available as well: whether through legal means such as Freedom of Information Act requests; or congressional demands, as in the case of congressional committees demanding the email correspondence of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the case of the Benghazi investigations; or illegal means such as the electronic theft and dissemination of internal government documents by organizations such as Wikileaks. Making internal deliberations open to public disclosure—that is, transparent—is counterproductive, Sunstein argues, since if government officials know that all of their ideas and positions may be made public, it inhibits openness, candor, and trust in communications. The predictable result will be for government officials to commit ever less information to writing, either in print or in the form of emails.

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DIPLOMACY AND INTELLIGENCE Transparency is also a hazard in diplomacy, and is fatal to the gathering of intelligence. In 2010, Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst in the American Army, took it upon himself to disclose hundreds of thousands of sensitive military and State Department documents through WikiLeaks.5 One result was the publication of the names of confidential informants, including political dissidents, who had spoken with American diplomats in Iran, China, Afghanistan, the Arab world, and elsewhere.6 As a consequence, some of these individuals had to be relocated to protect their lives. More importantly, the revelations made it more difficult for American diplomats to acquire human intelligence in the future, since the confidentiality of conversations could not be relied upon.

pages: 188 words: 54,942

Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control by Medea Benjamin

air gap, airport security, autonomous vehicles, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Clive Stafford Smith, crowdsourcing, drone strike, friendly fire, illegal immigration, Jeff Hawkins, Khyber Pass, megacity, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, nuremberg principles, performance metric, private military company, Ralph Nader, WikiLeaks

Less than a month later, Awlaki’s sixteen-year-old son, Abdulrahman, was also killed in a drone strike.114 Ironically, the CIA is forbidden under US law from spying on Americans—that’s left to the FBI. It seems that the agency can, however, murder Americans overseas at the behest of the president without so much as a whimper of “impeachment.” According to a State Department cable released by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, the bombings in Yemen were conducted with the approval of the long-time dictator of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who in January 2010 reassured US officials that he would “continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.”115 That promise is credited as one of the reasons the Yemeni people rose up against Saleh’s repressive regime in 2011, despite the specter of frequently violent and bloody crackdowns, and forced him to leave the country in January 2012.

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Not to worry, though: while armed drones were reportedly not yet based in Ethiopia, the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reported in the fall of 2011 that the US was operating unmanned aircraft at a base in the island nation of Seychelles, an archipelago located off the coast of East Africa, and was considering weaponizing them.123 US and Seychelles officials originally said that the primary mission of the drones was to track pirates in regional waters. But classified US diplomatic cables showed that the plan was also to conduct counterterrorism missions over Somalia, about eight hundred miles to the northwest.124 The cables, obtained by WikiLeaks, revealed that US officials asked leaders in the Seychelles to keep the counterterrorism missions secret, something the president of the Seychelles was more than happy to do. A US military spokesman refused, on security grounds, to tell the Washington Post if the Reapers in the Seychelles have ever been armed but noted that they “can be configured for both surveillance and strike.”125 According to the BBC in June 2011, the US expanded its reach even further into Africa by sending four drones to Uganda and Burundi.126 This constellation of bases for drones in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula was designed to create overlapping circles of surveillance in a region where the CIA thought Al Qaeda offshoots could continue to emerge.

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According to a leaked US State Department cable, the dictator of Yemen agreed to allow drones and other American aircraft to launch strikes within his country, famously saying, “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.”237 The position of the Pakistani government was more complicated. At first, they consented privately but made public condemnations. A US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks quoted Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani saying, “I don’t care if they do it as long as they get the right people. We’ll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it.”238 In late 2011, even that tacit consent was withdrawn after a NATO airstrike mistakenly killed twenty-four Pakistani soldiers.239 The Pakistani government responded by evicting a CIA drone base near its border with Afghanistan and threatening to shoot down any drones that violated its airspace.

pages: 87 words: 25,823

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism by David Golumbia

3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Californian Ideology, Cody Wilson, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, digital rights, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, printed gun, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart contracts, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Travis Kalanick, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

Whatever its success as a currency, Bitcoin has proved incredibly useful for spreading these views, to some extent shorn of the marks of their political origins, but no less useful for the powerful corporate interests who benefit from other aspects of rightist discourse. Widespread interest in Bitcoin first emerged from its utility as a means to bypass the “WikiLeaks blockade.” As put in 2012 by Jon Matonis, founding board member and executive director of the Bitcoin Foundation until he resigned in October 2014 (Casey 2014) and one of Bitcoin’s most vocal advocates: Following a massive release of secret U.S. diplomatic cables in November 2010, donations to WikiLeaks were blocked by Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, and Western Union on December 7th, 2010. Although private companies certainly have a right to select which transactions to process or not, the political environment produced less than a fair and objective decision.

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It was coordinated pressure exerted in a politicized climate by the U.S. government and it won’t be the last time that we see this type of pressure. Fortunately, there is way around this and other financial blockades with a global payment method immune to political pressure and monetary censorship. (Matonis 2012b) Bitcoin made it possible for individuals to donate to WikiLeaks despite it being a violation of U.S. law to do so. In Matonis’s view, corporations participating with U.S. government laws is illegitimate and amounts to “censorship” and “political pressure”: there is simply no consideration of the idea that it might be appropriate for financial providers to cooperate with the government against efforts that directly and purposely contravene perfectly valid law (regardless of whether one agrees with that law).

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Vice Motherboard (June 29). http://motherboard.vice.com/. Marx, Jared Paul. 2015. “Bitcoin as a Commodity: What the CFTC’s Ruling Means.” CoinDesk (September 21). http://www.coindesk.com/. Matonis, Jon. 2012a. “Bitcoin Prevents Monetary Tyranny.” Forbes (October). http://www.forbes.com/. —. 2012b. “WikiLeaks Bypasses Financial Blockade with Bitcoin.” Forbes (August). http://www.forbes.com/. Maurer, Bill, Taylor C. Nelms, and Lana Swartz. 2013. “‘When Perhaps the Real Problem Is Money Itself!’: The Practical Materiality of Bitcoin.” Social Semiotics 23, no. 2: 261–77. May, Timothy C. 1992. “The Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto.”

pages: 390 words: 109,519

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

29 Apple has since dropped the specific rule against “content that ridicules public figures,” and many rejected apps were subsequently approved.30 But apps continue to be rejected or removed for their political content. An unofficial WikiLeaks app was removed in 2010, just after WikiLeaks released its trove of U.S. diplomatic cables; while the app was not designed or sponsored by WikiLeaks, it streamlined access to WikiLeaks documents and donated part of the price of the app to WikiLeaks, as a proxy user donation.31 Apple executives (like those at other companies at the time, including Amazon, PayPal, and Mastercard) worried that supporting the app and donations would open the company to criminal liability.

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See also “Average App Store Review Times,” http://appreviewtimes.com/. 25Laura McGann, “Mark Fiore Can Win a Pulitzer Prize, but He Can’t Get his iPhone Cartoon App Past Apple’s Satire Police,” Nieman Lab, April 15, 2010. http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/04/mark-fiore-can-win-a-pulitzer-prize-but-he-cant-get-his-iphone-cartoon-app-past-apples-satire-police/. 26Gabe Jacobs, “Bushisms iPhone App Rejected,” Gabe Jacobs Blog, September 13, 2008, http://www.gabejacobsblog.com/2008/09/13/bushisms-iphone-app-rejected/ (no longer available online); Alec, “Freedom Time Rejected by Apple for App Store,” Juggleware Dev Blog, September 21, 2008, https://www.juggleware.com/blog/2008/09/freedomtime-rejected-by-apple-for-app-store/. 27Robin Wauters, “Apple Rejects Obama Trampoline iPhone App, Leaves Us Puzzled,” TechCrunch, February 7, 2009, http://techcrunch.com/2009/02/07/apple-rejects-obama-trampoline-iphone-app-leaves-us-puzzled/; Don Bora, “Rejected App (Biden’s Teeth),” Eight Bit Blog, June 6, 2009, http://blog.eightbitstudios.com/rejected-app. 28“iSinglePayer iPhone App Censored by Apple,” Lambda Jive, September 26, 2009, http://lambdajive.wordpress.com/2009/09/. 29Alec, “Steve Jobs Responds,” Juggleware Dev Blog, September 23, 2008, http://www.juggleware.com/blog/2008/09/steve-jobs-writes-back/. 30Ryan Singel, “Jobs Rewrites History about Apple Ban on Satire,” Wired, June 3, 2010, https://www.wired.com/2010/06/jobs-apple-satire-ban/. 31Alexia Tsotsis, “WikiLeaks iPhone App Made $5,840 before Pulled by Apple, $1 From Each Sale Will Be Donated to WikiLeaks,” TechCrunch, December 22, 2010, https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/22/wikileaks-2/. 32Rebecca Greenfield, “Apple Rejected the Drone Tracker App Because It Could,” Atlantic, August 30, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/apple-rejected-drone-tracker-app-because-it-could/324120/. 33Ryan Chittum, “Apple’s Speech Policies Should Still Worry the Press,” Columbia Journalism Review, April 20, 2010, http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/apples_speech_policies_should.php. 34Charles Christensen, “iPad Publishing No Savior for Small Press, LGBT Comics Creators,” Prism Comics, June 2010, http://prismcomics.org/display.php?

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Terrorism Act of 2006, (i) U.S. 2016 presidential election, (i), (ii), (iii) Usenet, (i), (ii)n61 Utne Reader, (i) van Dijck, José, (i) The Verge, (i) Vimeo (video sharing platform), (i), (ii) Vine (Twitter) (video sharing platform), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Violet Blue, (i) visibility, politics of, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) web: before social media, (i), (ii), (iii); fantasy of the open web, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v); and the ideal of the virtual community, (i), (ii) webmasters, (i), (ii), (iii) West, Sarah Myers, (i)n85 Whisper (anonymous discussion platform), (i), (ii) WikiLeaks, (i) Wikipedia, (i) Wired, (i), (ii) Wittes, Ben, (i) Women Action and the Media, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n5 word filters, (i), (ii), (iii) Xbox (Microsoft), (i), (ii) Yahoo, (i), (ii), (iii). See also Tumblr Yelp, (i), (ii) York, Jillian, (i) YouTube: revenue sharing, (i); ContentID, (i), (ii)n83; community guidelines, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); and flagging, (i), (ii); approach to moderation, (i); and filtering, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n78; and automated detection, (i), (ii).

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The 99.998271% by Simon Wood

banking crisis, clean water, drone strike, equal pay for equal work, Julian Assange, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Steve Jobs, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

These corporations pay workers in Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, which is still struggling to recover from a devastating earthquake, extremely low wages to sew clothes in their sweatshops. A Wikileaks cable showed that the corporations lobbied the US State Department, who then had the US ambassador put pressure on Haiti’s president. The result? A new minimum wage of 31 cents an hour. This may never have been revealed had it not been released in a Wikileaks cable, demonstrating that the US government acts in secrecy. The justification for secrecy is usually national security interest, but it would be hard for anyone to place this in such a category.

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Unless this madness is stopped, tragedies like the following will continue to occur: on 15th March 2006, during a house raid in Iraq by US forces, a family and their children were handcuffed and then summarily executed with shots to the head. Philip Alston, the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, wrote the following in a letter (exposed by Wikileaks) to the then Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice: “It would appear that when the MNF [Multinational Forces] approached the house,” Alston wrote, “shots were fired from it and a confrontation ensued” before the “troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them.” Mr. Faiz Hratt Khalaf, (aged 28), his wife Sumay’ya Abdul Razzaq Khuther (aged 24), their three children Hawra’a (aged 5) Aisha ( aged 3) and Husam (5 months old), Faiz’s mother Ms.

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It has all the money and owns most of the media and a large number of politicians. How long will it take before a way is found to limit the internet as well? As soon as it can be shown to be a credible threat to the status quo, how can we be sure it will not be taken out? Anyone who stands up to the empire is swatted down, as can be seen in the hysterical reaction to Wikileaks and Julian Assange, who could be extradited to the US where he can be held in indefinite detention. The Occupy Wall Street movement, at first ignored completely by the establishment media, is now feeling the full force of the propaganda mill, with protestors smeared as ‘hippies’ and ‘pot smokers’ with ‘no direction in their lives’ and so on. 41 The author of this book is not a professional journalist, so I hereby request that professional journalists in the media point out to me the part of the course in journalism they studied at college which says that journalists are supposed to criticize, insult, judge and demean the subjects of the stories they cover.

pages: 562 words: 153,825

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State by Barton Gellman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, active measures, air gap, Anton Chekhov, Big Tech, bitcoin, Cass Sunstein, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, Debian, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, financial independence, Firefox, GnuPG, Google Hangouts, housing justice, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, off-the-grid, operational security, planetary scale, private military company, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Robert Gordon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, standardized shipping container, Steven Levy, TED Talk, telepresence, the long tail, undersea cable, Wayback Machine, web of trust, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

“[I]n an act of supreme arrogance”: Ash Carter, Inside the Five-Sided Box: Lessons from a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon (New York: Penguin, 2019), 338. “national security porn”: Ledgett was paraphrasing James Comey, who used the term “intelligence porn” to describe large-scale document dumps by WikiLeaks, not Snowden or the NSA journalists. See Tessa Berenson, “James Comey: WikiLeaks Is ‘Intelligence Porn,’ Not Journalism,” Time, May 3, 2017, https://time.com/4765358/fbi-james-comey-hearing-wikileaks/. “6,998,329,787 is a small number”: In another version of the presentation, delivered earlier, the figure was slightly lower (6,987,139,094) and explicitly labeled “World Population” on Hunt’s presentation slide.

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He was referring, as he had done with me before, to a “dead man’s switch,” a device or arrangement according to which the most sensitive files in his possession would somehow come to light automatically in circumstances he did not specify. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks had made an explicit arrangement like this in 2011, distributing online an encrypted “insurance file” and threatening to release the decryption key if the U.S. government did anything to harm him or shut down WikiLeaks. Snowden never made this kind of threat himself, but Glenn Greenwald did so in a published interview. “Snowden has enough information to cause more harm to the U.S. government in a single minute than any other person has ever had,” Greenwald told the Argentinian daily La Nación.

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If this guy was not for real, I wrote, “I will be very surprised.” * * * — When Poitras introduced us, Verax needed convincing about me. He was suspicious of the Washington Post, where I grew up as a journalist. He knew it chiefly by its opinion pages, where op-ed columns and unsigned editorials—the voice of the publisher—denounced WikiLeaks, pressed for war in Iraq, and defended other excesses, as he saw them, of President George W. Bush’s “global war on terror.” Verax wanted “adversarial” voices to tell his story, and he had chosen them already. Poitras had proved herself both a skeptic and a target of the wartime establishment, and her short film on another NSA critic had caught Verax’s attention.

pages: 328 words: 100,381

Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State by Dana Priest, William M. Arkin

airport security, business intelligence, company town, dark matter, disinformation, drone strike, friendly fire, Google Earth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, information security, Julian Assange, operational security, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, WikiLeaks

That is one lesson from the WikiLeaks disclosures. The leaked State Department cables were allegedly first available to a disgruntled army private with a history of instability because the government wasn’t giving even a basic level of protection to those documents, and because his colleagues allowed him to bring a rewritable CD-ROM with Lady Gaga’s music into work, not realizing it could act as the black bag into which a quarter of a million sensitive diplomatic cables could be dumped and carted away. In the government-wide security and counterintelligence investigation that has followed the WikiLeaks disclosures, government experts have learned that most federal agencies have little understanding of how to protect their sensitive information, according to people involved in the review.

…

In August 2007, eighteen FBI agents, some with their guns drawn, burst into his home with only his wife and children present, to raid his files during an investigation into his alleged role in helping the New York Times develop its seminal warrantless surveillance story in 2004. The government dropped his case nearly four years later, in April 2011, after Tamm’s career had been ruined and he faced financial peril. The Justice Department is also mulling an indictment on espionage charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing tens of thousands of pages of classified U.S. diplomatic cables and war-related field reports, some of them allegedly provided by a young army private first class, who is also under arrest. Regardless of Assange’s publicly stated bias against U.S. policies and the allegations against his personal behavior, this unprecedented trove of material has allowed reporters around the world to write some of the most insightful and revealing stories of our time.

…

As he did so, Arkin started to count government organizations and private companies working at the “secret” level of classification. Something is classified secret5 if its unauthorized disclosure would cause “serious damage” to national security. For instance, many of the State Department cables published by WikiLeaks are classified secret because they provide candid assessments of foreign leaders and agreements. Routine field reports from military units are also classified secret on the theory that they might provide useful tidbits to an enemy. He was quickly overwhelmed by the volume. There were simply too many organizations and companies to track.

pages: 420 words: 100,811

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves by John Cheney-Lippold

algorithmic bias, bioinformatics, business logic, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer vision, critical race theory, dark matter, data science, digital capitalism, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, informal economy, iterative process, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, lifelogging, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, price discrimination, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software studies, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological singularity, technoutopianism, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Turing machine, uber lyft, web application, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

Although it was met with skeptical comments such as “Is this supposed to be white irony Or this Actually happening?” and “Is this real?,” the guest list filled up weeks before the event.1 Assange, famed for founding WikiLeaks and defamed by sexual assault charges in Sweden, was in de facto detention in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. But, thanks to broadband video chat, his face was temporarily freed and beamed onto the gallery’s walls for a conversation with those guests who believed enough in the event to RSVP.2 During the party, a discussion sparked by Assange’s book, When Google Met WikiLeaks, highlighted the striking similarity between the mission statements of Google and the U.S.’s National Security Agency.

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Wood, “Gender, Race, and Authenticity: Celebrity Women Tweeting for the Gaze,” in Feminist Surveillance Studies, ed. Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana Amielle Magnet (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 10. Joseph Turow, The Daily You: How the Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); WikiLeaks, The Spy Files, 2011–2014, https://wikileaks.org. 11. Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson, introduction to “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, ed. Lisa Gitelman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 3. Introduction 1. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 22. 2.

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And while Google users might not grace the covers of magazines, they do produce an unprecedented amount of information about themselves, their desires, and their patterns of life. This data is a different type of raw material according to a different kind of industry—what media scholar Joseph Turrow calls the “new advertising industry” and WikiLeaks described as the “global mass surveillance industry.”10 That is to say, “Google famous” may not equal famous, but “Google famous” influences which search results get censored and which lives are deemed available for public consumption. It orders the discourses of, and access to, personal privacy rights.

pages: 283 words: 85,824

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

.… But once you factor in money spent on schooling, the earnings I’ve received outside of aggregation-oriented writing positions is still in the bloodiest shade of red imaginable. It’s unlikely the numbers will ever even out.”43 4 UNEQUAL UPTAKE Not long after WikiLeaks released its enormous cache of classified diplomatic cables, making the private observations of jaded attachés public for all to see, I spent a Saturday afternoon at a quickly assembled conference trying to make sense of the implications. The conversation hinged on the tangled theme of media, technology, and politics. Does WikiLeaks represent a new kind of transnational investigative journalism? Has the Web made us all reporters? Is transparency an unambiguous good?

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Even Julian Assange had been unable to act independently, joining up with major news organizations like the New York Times and the Guardian to release the thousands of cables. WikiLeaks had been organized initially around the premise that the public would sift through and interpret raw data, collaboratively writing necessary analysis, making sense of the issues and evidence without professional censors and meddling middlemen. That turned out to be “not at all true,” Assange lamented. “Media are the only channels that have the motivation and resources required to have a real impact.” It wasn’t that the WikiLeaks mastermind had lost faith in people to think for themselves; rather, he recognized that they lacked the time the task required and the power to legitimize and publicize the results.

…

I think those two things can be married, but it’s going to be a long time before it’s figured out.” Nick Davies is a prominent journalist who has been outspoken about the shortcomings of his chosen profession. An award-winning investigative reporter who brokered the Guardian’s collaboration with WikiLeaks to publish the Afghanistan war logs and broke the phone-hacking scandal that prompted an ongoing investigation into Rupert Murdoch’s empire, his 2008 book Flat Earth News (subtitled An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media) exhaustively documents how contemporary journalism has been corrupted by ever-intensifying commercial pressure.28 When clear returns are demanded, risks cannot be taken.

pages: 743 words: 201,651

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

The US supports such technologies to promote the spread of good things (democracy, human rights, free speech) and opposes them to prevent the spread of bad ones (terrorism, cybercrime, child pornography, infringements of intellectual property). But who decides what is good or bad? The United States. A State Department spokesperson, asked to explain the apparent inconsistency between her criticism of the Indian government for blocking sites the Indian government considered dangerous and Washington’s own stance on Wikileaks, said: ‘WikiLeaks didn’t have to do with freedom of the internet. It had to do with . . . the compromise of US Government classified information’.87 While governments must naturally assert perfect consistency, there is a tension here, as America’s left hand points in a different direction to and sometimes wrestles with its right.

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US District Court for the Eastern District of Columbia, sworn affidavit dated 21 June 2011 in the case of US v Jeffrey Alexander Sterling (with some passages redacted), http://perma.cc/3VHS-H7UZ 78. see photograph and text in New York Times, ‘The War Logs’, 26 July 2010, A8 79. but see Matt Sledge, ‘Bradley Manning Sentencing Testimony Suggests WikiLeaks Not Responsible for Any Deaths’, Huffington Post, 8 March 2013, http://perma.cc/3SCZ-73DC 80. see Timothy Garton Ash, ‘WikiLeaks Has Altered the Leaking Game for Good. Secrets Must Be Fewer, But Better Kept’, The Guardian, 30 March 2011, http://perma.cc/6V73-QMSR 81. see the editorial ‘The Times and Iraq’, New York Times, 26 May 2004. See also Margaret Sullivan, ‘The Disconnect on Anonymous Sources’, New York Times, 12 October 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/opinion/sunday/the-public-editor-the-disconnect-on-anonymous-sources.html, which reports that back in 2004 the use of anonymous sources had been the top concern of Times readers 82. see Margaret Sullivan, ‘The Disconnect on Anonymous Sources’, New York Times, 12 October 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/opinion/sunday/the-public-editor-the-disconnect-on-anonymous-sources.html?

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Even as the State Department has funded the development of circumvention technologies, to help dissidents get round the firewalls of Iran or China, other arms of the US government, such as the Departments of Homeland Security, Defense and Commerce, have tried to prevent the use of such technologies against the US, or what they see as American interests. When Wikileaks published a vast trove of State Department diplomatic despatches, one of the tools it used was Tor, a software to facilitate online anonymity developed with US government funding. Washington was, so to speak, hoist with its own cyberpetard. It is, of course, possible to claim consistency in this position.

pages: 239 words: 73,178

The Narcissist You Know by Joseph Burgo

Albert Einstein, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, megaproject, Paul Graham, Peoples Temple, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

He enjoys the experience of thumbing his nose at authority and taking charge himself. With the founding of WikiLeaks, Assange found an even larger stage upon which to express his grandiose sense of self. He surely felt a passionate devotion to his cause—uncovering the government lies that preserve its power over the individual—but as the enterprise gained notoriety and he became a cult hero to millions, he increasingly saw himself as a sort of celebrity guru, often insisting that one person or another was in love with him, or wanted to be him. In his account of their years together at WikiLeaks, Daniel Domscheit-Berg paints a portrait of Assange as a man obsessed with his image, unwilling to share credit with collaborators, hostile to those who didn’t accord him due respect, and contemptuous of even those who supported him.14 He treated his collaborators as if they were his subjects.

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Both men turned out to be masters of cultivating public perception. Although their charitable foundations, LiveStrong and the Central Asia Institute, did much good, a closer look at the psychology of these men reveals the features of Extreme Narcissism and points toward core shame.9 Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks and tireless crusader against the secrecy of entrenched power, for a time appeared to be another hero in our feckless world. Standing up for truth, transparency, and the rights of the individual to access secret government information, Assange at first seemed to be a selfless advocate for the little man.

…

He identified with historical figures who had been persecuted, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian dissident, or even Jesus Christ. One of his favorite activities was to scour the Internet for references to himself, especially by his detractors, and he seemed to have an “unending capacity to worry about his enemies.”15 Even before the founder of WikiLeaks became famous, he often insisted that government agents were trailing him or eavesdropping on his phone calls. Once the Afghanistan War logs were released and he may actually have been trailed, Assange routinely demanded that followers search the bushes for “assassins” before he would emerge from the car.

pages: 434 words: 77,974

Mastering Blockchain: Unlocking the Power of Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts by Lorne Lantz, Daniel Cawrey

air gap, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, call centre, capital controls, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, currency peg, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, global reserve currency, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Kubernetes, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, margin call, MITM: man-in-the-middle, multilevel marketing, Network effects, offshore financial centre, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, Steve Wozniak, tulip mania, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, web application, WebSocket, WikiLeaks

In December 2010, some members of the Bitcoin community began to advocate for the cryptocurrency to be used as a donation mechanism for the nonprofit news-leaking organization WikiLeaks, which was struggling with traditional payment processing. The idea was that Bitcoin could help WikiLeaks fill a void. Satoshi disagreed via a post on a popular forum, arguing that WikiLeaks would prove to be too controversial and that they believed focusing on technical progression was more important. Within a week of the WikiLeaks idea surfacing, on December 13, 2010, Satoshi posted their last message announcing a minor new release of the Bitcoin software client.

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And since all bitcoin transactions are public, there is an entire transaction history, so it’s possible to determine relationships between different addresses. There are many different ways to associate a Bitcoin address with an identity, including the following: People may publicly identify themselves as the owner of a Bitcoin address. For example, some charities (and even WikiLeaks) post their crypto addresses for people to send donations to. Another example is Hal Finney, who posted on an online forum about how he had participated in the first bitcoin transaction, receiving 10 BTC from Satoshi Nakamoto. Studying this transaction reveals further information about Satoshi’s relationships, as shown in Figure 8-2.

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fungible and nonfungible tokens, Fungible and Nonfungible Tokens many different types of, Fungible and Nonfungible Tokens Ethereum Requests for Comment (ERCs), Understanding Ethereum Requests for Comment-ERC-1155ERC-20, ERC-20 ERC-721, ERC-721-ERC-777 listing on decentralized versus centralized exchanges, Token listing multi-collateral, DAI, DAI sending/receiving on decentralized exchanges, Decentralized Exchange Contracts Tether use case for tokenization, Tether token economics in ICOs, Token Economics tokenizing everything, Tokenize Everything use to create new cryptocurrencies on blockchain protocols, Understanding Omni Layer Torcoin, Alternative methods trading bots and exchange APIs, Exchange APIs and Trading Bots-Market Aggregators trading technology, open source, Open Source Trading Tech TradingView, Analytics transaction fees, Transactionsin coinbase transaction, The Coinbase Transaction transaction flows, Transaction flows transaction malleability problem, SegWit, Lightning nodes and wallets transactions, Transactions-Bitcoin Transaction Securitycoinbase, The Coinbase Transaction Corda, Corda ledger difficulty of changing past transactions, Storing Data in a Chain of Blocks Ethereum versus Bitcoin, Ether and Gas events in execution of bitcoin transaction, Transactions funding, Funding transactions generating on Bitcoin, Generating transactions Libra, structure of, Transactions life cycle, Transaction life cycle Merkle root, The Merkle Root-The Merkle Root Monero, privacy of details, Blockchains to Watch off-chain, Off-chain transactions Omni transaction on Bitcoin, Adding custom logic push and pull, for ERC-20 tokens, ERC-777 in Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper, The Whitepaper security on Bitcoin, Bitcoin Transaction Security signature generation, replay attacks on hard forks, Replay attacks signing and validating, Signing and Validating Transactions signing, ring signatures, Ring Signatures Tether transaction in Omniexplorer, Adding custom logic UTXO model, The UTXO Model-The UTXO Model view in blockchain explorer, Analytics transparencygreater, on decentralized exchanges, Decentralized Exchange Contracts ICOs and multisignature wallet code, Multisignature Contracts lack of, in 2008 financial crisis, The 2008 Financial Crisis transaction transparency, How Corda works Travel Rule (FATF), The FATF and the Travel Rule triangular arbitrage, Arbitrage Trading TrueUSD (TUSD) stablecoin, TrueUSD Truffle Suite tools for smart contracts, Authoring a smart contract trustblockchain's effort to reestablish, Electronic Systems and Trust challenge of, Bitcoin's effort to overcome, Storing Data in a Chain of Blocks intermediary, Electronic Systems and Trust issuance, Electronic Systems and Trust trustless sidechains, Sidechains Tulip Mania, Fundamental Cryptocurrency Analysis 2.0 chains, “2.0” Chains two-factor authentication, Security Fundamentals U Ulbricht, Ross, Catch Me If You Can unconfirmed/mempool (transactions on Bitcoin), Transaction life cycle uniqueness consensus, Corda consensus Uniswap exchange, Decentralized Exchangesbackend/database differences between centralized exchanges and, Infrastructure frontend differences between centralized exchanges and, Infrastructure publicly viewable record of method call to Uniswap smart contract, Custody and counterparty risk-Exchange rate smart contract viewable on Ethereum, Infrastructure token listing on, Token listing Unobtainium, More Altcoin Experiments unspent transaction output (see UTXO model) US agencies and regulatory bodies regulating cryptocurrencies, FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation US Dollar Coin (USDC), USDC US Federal Reserveblockchain implementation, US Federal Reserve raising interest rates to control housing bubbles, The 2008 Financial Crisis USDT, Tether users, ownership of their data, Identity and the Dangers of Hacking utility tokens, Different Token Types, Token Economics UTXO model, Generating transactions, The UTXO Model-The UTXO Modelon Corda, Corda consensus Ethereum's version of, Ether and Gas V validator nodes (Libra), How the Libra Protocol Works validators, Proof-of-Stakein Ethereum 2.0, Ethereum Scaling Honest validator framework, Ethereum Scaling validity consensus, Corda consensus valuebitcoin as store of, Improving Bitcoin’s Limited Functionality in Bitcoin, Compelling Components transfer of, with dapps, Use Cases venture capital-backed startups, founder motivations versus those of ICOs, Whitepaper verifiable data audit, Health Care verifying transaction signatures, Signing and Validating Transactions virtual asset service providers (VASPs), requirement to provide user data on transactions, The FATF and the Travel Rule VmWare blockchain, Blockchain as a Service volatility of cryptocurrencies, Fungible and Nonfungible TokensMaker creating stable asset from volatile markets, DAI Voorhees, Erik, Skirting the Laws voting-based consensus, Alternative methods W wallets, Wallet Types: Custodial Versus Noncustodial-Wallet Type Variationscustodial versus noncustodial, Wallet Types: Custodial Versus Noncustodial Ethereum, interacting with smart contracts, Authoring a smart contract for funds deposited into exchanges, Counterparty Risk Lightning, Lightning nodes and wallets Liquid multisignature wallet, Liquid MetaMask, browser-based Ethereum wallet, ConsenSys multisignature, Multisignature Contracts-Multisignature Contracts necessity for using DeFi services, Wallets Novi wallet, development by Facebook, Novi private keys, Private Keys security vulnerability in Parity multi-signature wallets, Parity variations on primary wallet types, Wallet Type Variations warm wallets, Counterparty Risk wash trading, Wash Trading Web 3.0, Web 3.0 web browsers, giving away user data, Web 3.0 web wallets, Wallet Type Variations Web3.js library, Interacting with Code WebSocket versus REST APIs, REST Versus WebSocket whales, Whales whitelisting addresses, Counterparty Risk whitepapers“Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” , The Whitepaper for ICOs, Whitepaper WikiLeaks, Bitcoin and, Storing Data in a Chain of Blocks withdrawals wallet, Counterparty Risk wrapped tokens, Important Definitions, The Fulcrum Exploit X XCP cryptocurrency, Counterparty XRP consensus protocol, Ripple XRP cryptocurrency, Ripple Z Zcash, Zcash, Zcash Zero Knowledge (ZK) Rollups, Other Altchain Solutions zero-knowledge proof, Zero-Knowledge ProofBulletproofs, Mimblewimble, Beam, and Grin Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge (see zk-SNARKs) Zether, Quorum zk-SNARKs, zk-SNARKs, Nightfall, STARKs ZoKrates functions, Nightfall About the Authors Lorne Lantz is the founder of Breadcrumbs, the blockchain investigation tool.

pages: 503 words: 131,064

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

On the other hand, Microsoft probably has better systems in place to prevent infiltration by rogue programmers. WikiLeaks is another stateless organization. WikiLeaks sits somewhere between a loose organization of activists and the personal mission of a single individual named Julian Assange. It exposes information that governments and powerful corporations would rather keep secret. In this way it is very much like an organization of journalists. But because it is not a commercial enterprise, and because it is not moored within a country, it's much more difficult to corral. And this scares countries like the United States. Compare WikiLeaks to a traditional newspaper. That newspaper is in a societal dilemma with all the other newspapers in that country.

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In mid-2004, the New York Times learned about the NSA's illegal wiretapping of American citizens without a warrant, but delayed publishing the information for over a year—until well after the presidential election. Presumably there are things the New York Times has learned about and decided not to publish, period. WikiLeaks changes that dynamic. It's not an American company. It's not even a for-profit company. It's not a company at all. And it's not really located in any legal jurisdiction. It simply isn't subject to the same pressures that the New York Times is. This means the government can't rely on the partial cooperation of WikiLeaks in the same way it can rely on that of traditional newspapers.5 In a blog post about the topic, Clay Shirky referred to the Supreme Court ruling in the Pentagon Papers case that said it's illegal to leak secrets but not illegal to publish leaks: The legal bargain from 1971 simply does not and cannot produce the outcome it used to.

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In 2005, Captain Ian Fishback exposed the U.S.'s use of torture in Iraq because of his religious convictions. Similarly, Bradley Manning had to deal with two competing societal dilemmas in 2010 when he allegedly became a whistle-blower and sent 250,000 secret State Department cables to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, which made them public.5 Like the Libyan pilots, he chose to defect from the government and cooperate with what he perceived as the country as a whole. His subsequent treatment by the U.S. government—which incarcerated him, stripped him of due process, and tortured him—is in part a societal pressure by the government to prevent copycat defections.

On the Road: Adventures From Nixon to Trump by James Naughtie

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Julian Assange, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, plutocrats, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

It was the kind of thing of which any mainstream political campaign, operating out of dingy rooms in New York or Chicago or Atlanta, would be proud. Except it was coming from St Petersburg – at least 123 million Facebook posts – and, with the help of WikiLeaks, it was directed, secretly, at achieving one outcome, the disruptive one that would most please the man who could then deal with Trump: Vladimir Putin. That campaign cry – ‘I love WikiLeaks!’ from Trump – rolled down the years. There is no doubt about where Julian Assange of WikiLeaks stood on this question. In a 2015 Twitter comment he confirmed that they believed it would be better for their purpose – widespread disruption, the aim he shared with Putin – if the Republican candidate were to win.

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The investigation into Clinton’s use of a personal email server when she was secretary of state from 2008 to 2011 was enough. It was perfect conspiracy material, because the less that was known about what the emails contained, the more sinister Trump could make them sound. At every stop he urged WikiLeaks, which said it had a huge cache of hacked Democratic emails, to publish them. ‘I love WikiLeaks!’ he would say. And if the Russians were holding emails too? ‘Bring it on! Publish!’ The campaign was to be as much an attack on his opponent as a set of promises, with assistance welcome from anyone who would join the fun, for whatever reason. At rally after rally, he responded to the crowd’s chant with remarks like this one, in Pennsylvania – ‘Lock her up is right!

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We were on a very solid footing until the Russian co-operation with WikiLeaks and the weaponising of those emails that were stolen, and not only that, as Mueller points out in his second indictment, the Russians hacked into the cloud where very valuable information that the Democratic Party – and my campaign – had stored, and they stole it. We always were wondering how did they know who to target on Facebook. Who were these people that they were clearly going after? And however he knew it, Trump knew it. He mentioned WikiLeaks 161 times between the day that they dropped the emails and the day of the election.

pages: 409 words: 112,055

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

Joshua Schulte, a CIA employee, was arrested by the FBI in August 2017 and charged with passing over eight thousand pages of highly classified information to Julian Assange, who subsequently posted them publicly on the WikiLeaks website. Assange, an Australian who had taken refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy, has been accused by numerous American authorities of acting in cooperation with Russian intelligence. The CIA documents were called Vault 7 by WikiLeaks, and they too revealed numerous zero-day exploits of widely used software, including products of Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung (e.g., allegedly a tool to listen to rooms in which Samsung televisions were installed, even when the television appeared to be turned off).

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in the Vault 7 documents: Semantic Security Response, “Longhorn: Tools used by cyberespionage group linked to Vault 7,” Symantec Official Blog, April 10, 2017, www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/longhorn-tools-used-cyberespionage-group-linked-vault-7. groups known as APT 3 and APT 10: Andrew Griffin, “Wikileaks Files Detail CIA ‘Umbrage’ Project, Which Would Allow Spies to Pin Attacks on Other Countries,” Independent, March 8, 2017, www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/wikileaks-files-cia-umbrage-hacker-secret-spies-explained-countries-donald-trump-russia-a7618661.html. most “reckless and indiscriminate”: This quote is attributed to British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson, said at a meeting with U.S.

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If the government does not tell them, then it can hack into interesting foreign networks using the vulnerability in order to learn things to protect the country. (The government creates an “exploit,” a hacking tool that takes advantage of the poorly written computer code.) After Edward Snowden stole sensitive NSA information and gave it to WikiLeaks (and the Russians), Obama appointed a five-man group to investigate and make recommendations. Dick Clarke was one of the group that became known as the Five Guys, after the Washington hamburger chain. The Five Guys’ recommendations were all made public, every single word of them, by the Obama White House.

pages: 138 words: 41,353

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, high net worth, illegal immigration, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, technoutopianism, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

In the final decade of his life, Garry Davis saw non-state actors such as Al Qaeda force nations to redefine the ways they wage war. Organizations like WikiLeaks and Anonymous challenge these wars with troves upon troves of information. Looming environmental crises reveal the cracks in our system of international governance, and threaten the very existence of many countries as we know them. Davis saw it all coming, and the world was his stage. Before tax-free zones, freeports, and airports became indispensable cogs in the machinery of globalization, Davis found ways to exploit them. It’s essentially the same loophole that has allowed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to seek refuge at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where, as of this writing, he languishes still.

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_r=0 42human rights organizations had issued tersely worded recommendations: “Without Citizenship: Statelessness, discrimination and repression in Kuwait,” Refugees International and Open Society Justice Initiative. http://refugeesinternational.org/policy/in-depth-report/kuwait-without-citizenship 51there wasn’t a strong, pre-existing sense of unifying Emirati nationalism: “Nationalism in the Gulf States,” by Neil Patrick, October 2009, Kuwait Programme on Development, Governance and Globalisation in the Gulf States. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/55257/1/Patrick_2009.pdf 55fewer than 5,000 bidoon: “Arab Spring energises Gulf’s stateless,” by Rania El Gamal and Sylvia Westall, Reuters, Dec. 19, 2012. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/19/gulf-stateless-idUSL5E8NDAGU20121219 56a stateless man doused himself in gasoline: “Immolation in Riyadh exposes plight of Arab stateless in Saudi Arabia,” by Angus McDowall, Reuters, June 26, 2013. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/26/us-saudi-immolation-poverty-idUSBRE95P0RX20130626 57Emirati citizens receive benefits that would make a Scandinavian social democracy blush: “U.A.E.’s Drive for Emirati-Run Economy Is Thwarted by Handouts,” by Matthew Brown, Bloomberg, Oct. 3, 2007. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=axmdijbZMi5k 582009 U.S. diplomatic cable: “Kuwait’s Stateless Bidoon: Background and Recent Promising Developments,” WikiLeaks, June 3, 2009. https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09KUWAIT558_a.html 59According to a 1995 Human Rights Watch report: “The Bedoons of Kuwait: Citizens Without Citizenship,” Human Rights Watch, August 1995. http://www.hrw.org/reports/1995/Kuwait.htm 5925 percent of Kuwait’s army of 20,000 were bidoon: ibid. 62“traitor without a nation”: “Arrested UAE Blogger Accused of Possessing Alcohol,” Reuters, April 12, 2011. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/12/us-emirates-activists-idUSTRE73B2EP20110412 63“waving the country’s flag and clutching pictures of the Emir”: “Kuwait’s Stateless Bidun Demand Greater Rights,” by Simon Atkinson, BBC News, July 19, 2011. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-14185365 63dispensing cash bonuses: “The ‘Arab Spring’ in the Kingdoms,” by Zoltan Barany, Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, Sept. 2012. http://english.dohainstitute.org/file/get/e02ce87b-f3ab-45d3-bfd8-3f3e97f6a6a9.pdf 63life was good for Emirati citizens: “Why the Arab Spring Never Came to the U.A.E.,” by Angela Shah, Time, July 18, 2011. http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2083768,00.html 64stage of the Edinburgh festival: “Comedians and Writers Lead Amnesty Campaign to Free Jailed UAE Activists,” by Severin Carrell, The Guardian, August 7, 2011. http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/aug/07/amnesty-uae-activists-edinburgh-festival?

pages: 301 words: 85,263

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

Our demands for clarity and openness may appear to be a counter to opacity and classification, but they end up asserting the same logics. Under this analysis, the National Security Agency and Wikileaks share the same worldview, with differing ends. Both essentially believe that there is some secret at the heart of the world that, if only it can be known, will make everything better. Wikileaks wants transparency for all; the NSA only wants transparency for some – its enemies; but both function according to the same philosophy. Wikileaks’ original intent was not to become a kind of mirror to the NSA, but to break the whole machine. In 2006, in the very early days of Wikileaks, Julian Assange wrote an analysis of conspiratorial systems of government and how they can be attacked, entitled ‘Conspiracy as Governance’.

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For Assange, all authoritarian systems are conspiracies because their power depends on keeping secrets from their peoples. Leaks undermine their power, not because of what is leaked, but because increased internal fear and paranoia degrades the system’s ability to conspire. What is damaging is the act of leaking itself, not the contents of any specific leak.38 As Wikileaks entered the public eye and Assange himself became an increasingly powerful and arrogant figure, the organisation became involved in a series of feuds with the intelligence agencies – and ultimately a tool for states to attack one another – and this realisation was lost. What replaced it was a mistaken belief in the power of the ‘smoking gun’: the single source or piece of evidence that would bring down authority.

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,’ 28 ENIAC, 27–30. 33. 27 Harvard Mark I machine, 30 Hippo programme, 32 as inventor of calculating machines, 27 on nuclear warfare and weather control, 28 writing to Zworykin, 26–7 von Neumann, Klára Dán, 28–9 VOR (VHF omnidirectional radio range) installations, 104 W Wallace, Alfred Russel, 78 Wang, Joz, 142–3 warehouse tracking systems, 118 Watson, Thomas J., 30 wealth, disparities in, 112–3 weather about, 50 control of, 28 modifications to, 193 ‘Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025’ report, 193, 207 Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (Richardson), 21–3 Whirlwind I, 32–3 Wi-Fi, 62–3 Wiggles, 223 Wikileaks, 183 Williams, Paul, 68–9 Williamson, Malcolm, 167 Willis, Bob, 175 winglets, 71 wiretapping, 234 Woods, Mary Lee, 78 Woolf, Virginia, 11–2 Three Guineas, 12 workers, robots vs., 116 World Meterological Organization, 195 World Wide Web, 78–9, 81 X Xiaolin Wu, 140–1 Xi Zhang, 140–1 XKeyscore, 173–4 Y Yahoo Messenger, 174 Yamal Peninsula, 48 YouTube, 217–32, 238 Z Zazzle, 125 Zeitgeist conference, 241–2 ‘zero-shot’ translation, 156 Zworykin, Vladimir ‘Outline of Weather Proposal,’ 25–6 von Neumann writing to, 26–7

pages: 297 words: 83,651

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal, Penguin: New York, 2013, p. 327. 26. The Justice Department demanded access. . . Kevin Poulsen, ‘Prosecutors Defend Probe of WikiLeaks-related Twitter Accounts’, Wired, 8 April 2011. 27. The security state’s ancient dream had been . . . David Sanger, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age, Penguin Random House: New York, 2018, pp. 227–8. 28. Twitter fought the Justice Department on its demands . . . Kevin Poulsen, ‘Judge Rules Feds Can Have WikiLeaks Associates’ Twitter Data’, Wired, 10 November 2011; ‘You Don’t Sacrifice Your Privacy Rights When You Use Twitter’, ACLU, 6 March 2013. 29.

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However, it was also complicated. It was easy enough for the White House to gloat about free information if it inconvenienced Iran. It was easy for the State Department to lobby Twitter to hold off maintenance work during Iran’s Green Movement, telling them that a ‘Twitter revolution’ was happening.25 But when WikiLeaks shared a virtual library of classified State Department documents, the results were embarrassing. It was hardly mind-blowing that US diplomats fawned over dictators like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. But these revelations came as the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt were about to fall to popular revolutions.

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The US supported the Saudi invasion of Bahrain and aerial assault on Yemen, crushing both of those uprisings. It used limited military force to intervene in the Libyan uprising and to pilot a pro-US leadership to power, with ultimately disastrous results. And amid its embarrassment and its perplexity, the administration sought to indict everyone associated with the WikiLeaks revelations. This, for the old Washington establishment, exemplified the bad, irresponsible side of the internet. It was the net as Assange or Pirate Party activists fantasized it could be: a stateless anarchy, without intellectual property rights. The fact that they made leaking ‘sexy’, as security experts put it, and that the enormously modish trolling group Anonymous had joined the war on secrecy, raised the stakes and demanded examples be set.

pages: 277 words: 85,191

Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China by Desmond Shum

Asian financial crisis, call centre, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, family office, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, high-speed rail, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, pirate software, plutocrats, race to the bottom, rolodex, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South China Sea, special economic zone, walking around money, WikiLeaks

Morgan paid Fullmark $1.8 million: David Barboza, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, and Ben Protess, “JPMorgan’s Fruitful Ties to a Member of China’s Elite,” New York Times, November 13, 2013, https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/11/13/a-banks-fruitful-ties-to-a-member-of-chinas-elite/. “disgusted with his family’s activities”: Consulate Shanghai, “Carlyle Group Representative on Leadership Issues.” Wikileaks Cable: 07SHANGHAI622_a. Dated September 20, 2007. https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07SHANGHAI622_a.html. “constrained by the prominence of his position”: Consulate Shanghai, “Carlyle Group Representative on Leadership Issues.” Wikileaks Cable: 07SHANGHAI622_a. Dated September 20, 2007. Rumors swirled that much of Xu’s wealth was ill-gotten: Michael Forsythe, “Chinese Businessman Linked to Corruption Scandals Dies in Prison, Reports Say,” New York Times, December 6, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/07/world/asia/china-xu-ming-dies-prison.html.

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identified in the Panama Papers as the sole shareholder: Juliette Garside and David Pegg, “Panama Papers reveal offshore secrets of China’s red nobility,” Guardian, April 6, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/06/panama-papers-reveal-offshore-secrets-china-red-nobility-big-business. cables also linked Yu to a questionable loan: Consulate Shanghai “Pension Scandal Claims More, Politics as Usual.” Wikileaks Cable 06SHANGHAI16957_a. Dated Oct. 27, 2006, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06SHANGHAI6957_a.html. Chapter Sixteen the Wen family was worth close to $3 billion: David Barboza, “Billions in Hidden Riches for Family of Chinese Leader,” New York Times, October 25, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/business/global/family-of-wen-jiabao-holds-a-hidden-fortune-in-china.html.

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Bush’s 1992 visit to a grocery store and his puzzled reaction to a barcode scanner. The day-to-day lives of average people seemed a mystery to Premier Wen. Others had a more jaundiced view: they rejected the notion that Wen had been snookered by his family and concluded he’d chosen not to act. In September 2007, according to documents released by Wikileaks, the head of the China operation of the Carlyle Group, a major American investment firm, told US diplomats that Wen was “disgusted with his family’s activities, but is either unable or unwilling to curtail them.” The businessman passed on a rumor that Wen had considered a divorce but was “constrained by the prominence of his position.”

pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Ars Technica, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/is-your-refrigerator-really-part-of-a-massive-spam-sending-botnet. 76Attackers have bricked IoT devices: Pierluigi Paganini (12 Apr 2017), “The rise of the IoT botnet: Beyond the Mirai bot,” InfoSec Institute, http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/rise-iot-botnet-beyond-mirai-bot. 76Dick Cheney’s heart defibrillator: Dana Ford (24 Aug 2013), “Cheney’s defibrillator was modified to prevent hacking,” CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/20/us/dick-cheney-gupta-interview/index.html. 76In 2017, a man sent a tweet: David Kravets (17 Mar 2017), “Man accused of sending a seizure-inducing tweet charged with cyberstalking,” Ars Technica, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/man-arrested-for-allegedly-sending-newsweek-writer-a-seizure-inducing-tweet. 77Also in 2017, WikiLeaks published information: Steve Overly (8 Mar 2017), “What we know about car hacking, the CIA and those WikiLeaks claims,” Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/03/08/what-we-know-about-car-hacking-the-cia-and-those-wikileaks-claims. 77Hackers have demonstrated ransomware: Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai (7 Aug 2016), “Hackers make the first-ever ransomware for smart thermostats,” Vice Motherboard, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aekj9j/Internet-of-things-ransomware-smart-thermostat. 77In 2017, an Austrian hotel: David Z.

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., https://hackerone.com/torproject. 162the cyberweapons manufacturer Zerodium: Zerodium (13 Sep 2017; expired 1 Dec 2017), “Tor browser zero-day exploits bounty (expired),” https://zerodium.com/tor.html. 163“Every offensive weapon is”: Jack Goldsmith (12 Apr 2014), “Cyber paradox: Every offensive weapon is a (potential) chink in our defense—and vice versa,” Lawfare, http://www.lawfareblog.com/2014/04/cyber-paradox-every-offensive-weapon-is-a-potential-chink-in-our-defense-and-vice-versa. 163Many people have weighed in: Joel Brenner (14 Apr 2014), “The policy tension on zero-days will not go away,” Lawfare, http://www.lawfareblog.com/2014/04/the-policy-tension-on-zero-days-will-not-go-away. 163Activist and author Cory Doctorow: Cory Doctorow (11 Mar 2014), “If GCHQ wants to improve national security it must fix our technology,” Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/11/gchq-national-security-technology. 163I have said similar things: Bruce Schneier (20 Feb 2014), “It’s time to break up the NSA,” CNN, http://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/20/opinion/schneier-nsa-too-big/index.html. 163Computer security expert Dan Geer: Dan Geer (3 Apr 2013), “Three policies,” http://geer.tinho.net/three.policies.2013Apr03Wed.PDF. 163Both Microsoft’s Brad Smith: Brad Smith (14 May 2017), “The need for urgent collective action to keep people safe online: Lessons from last week’s cyberattack,” Microsoft on the Issues, https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2017/05/14/need-urgent-collective-action-keep-people-safe-online-lessons-last-weeks-cyberattack. 163and Mozilla: Heather West (7 Mar 2017), “Mozilla statement on CIA/WikiLeaks,” Open Policy & Advocacy, https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2017/03/07/mozilla-statement-on-cia-wikileaks. Jochai Ben-Avie (3 Oct 2017), “Vulnerability disclosure should be part of new EU cybersecurity strategy,” Open Policy & Advocacy, https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2017/10/03/vulnerability-disclosure-should-be-in-new-eu-cybersecurity-strategy. 163“We recommend that the National Security Council”: Richard A.

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Lillian Ablon and Timothy Bogart (9 Mar 2017), “Zero days, thousands of nights: The life and times of zero-day vulnerabilities and their exploits,” RAND Corporation, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1751.html. 165Plus, NOBUS doesn’t take into account: Scott Shane, Matthew Rosenberg, and Andrew W. Lehren (7 Mar 2017), “WikiLeaks releases trove of alleged C.I.A. hacking documents,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/world/europe/wikileaks-cia-hacking.html.https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/us/nsa-shadow-brokers.html. Scott Shane, Nicole Perlroth, and David E. Sanger (12 Nov 2017), “Security breach and spilled secrets have shaken the N.S.A. to its core,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/us/nsa-shadow-brokers.html. 165These included some pretty nasty: Bruce Schneier (28 Jul 2017), “Zero-day vulnerabilities against Windows in the NSA tools released by the Shadow Brokers,” Schneier on Security, https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/07/zero-day_vulner.html. 165Maybe nobody else could have: Dan Goodin (16 Apr 2017), “Mysterious Microsoft patch killed 0-days released by NSA-leaking Shadow Brokers,” Ars Technica, https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/04/purported-shadow-brokers-0days-were-in-fact-killed-by-mysterious-patch. 165In 2015, we learned that: National Security Agency/Central Security Service (30 Oct 2015), “Discovering IT problems, developing solutions, sharing expertise,” https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/news-stories/2015/discovering-solving-sharing-it-solutions.shtml. 165“Every year the government only keeps”: Jason Healey (1 Nov 2016), “The U.S. government and zero-day vulnerabilities: From pre-Heartbleed to the Shadow Brokers,” Columbia Journal of International Affairs, https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/online-articles/healey_vulnerability_equities_process. 166It’s clear to many observers: Bruce Schneier (19 May 2014), “Should U.S. hackers fix cybersecurity holes or exploit them?”

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

The notion of a single, vast conspiracy seemed to answer liberals’ desperate question of how Donald Trump could have been elected president. Russia clearly had helped. The WikiLeaks hack-and-dump operation was a crucial factor among many in a very close election. You didn’t need to believe all the details in the Dossier to know those things. But perhaps I should have thought a little more about WikiLeaks and anticipated that the people might share the document free of any context. A couple of weeks before the 2016 election, I’d attended a Trump rally in Edison, New Jersey, and on my way in I encountered a solitary Trump supporter chanting, “WikiLeaks! WikiLeaks!” I’d spent quite a bit of time reading through the midlevel campaign chatter, and I asked him which specific documents he thought painted Hillary Clinton in such a bad light.

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We noted in court that we’d published the Dossier while holding it at arm’s length, noting that we hadn’t been able to stand up or knock down its claims—even if we had inadvertently launched a million conspiracy theories in the process. And that’s the part of the Dossier’s strange career that remains most disturbing to me. It’s not simply, as Strzok notes, that the document helped Trump shrug off less extreme allegations about Russian assistance and other malfeasance. The document, like WikiLeaks’ Clinton material, became a social media totem for the anti-Trump resistance. The reality of America in the late 2010s had rebutted Nick’s and my win-win assurance that people could be trusted with a complex, contradictory set of information, and that journalists should simply print what they had, and revel, guilt-free, in the traffic.

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., 32, 41, 44, 102, 284 Business Insider, 61, 149, 269 BusinessWeek, 66 BuzzFeed and AOL’s purchase of Huffington Post, 149 “Buzz Detection” tool, 74 BuzzFeed News feature, 238, 247, 299 and competition with old media, 145 and devaluation of traffic, 264–70 Disney purchase negotiations, 195–202 and Facebook’s political content, 238–40, 244–45 and Gawker’s competition, 139 and Gionet, 297 and growth of Twitter, 115 launch of BuzzFeed Politics, 165 layoffs and labor tensions, 279–85 and meetings with New York Times board, 219–20, 223 news and social content, 157–64, 165–69, 172–73 origins of, 72–76 and product marketing, 287–89 and Ratter’s launch, 217 relationship with Huffington Post, 78–79, 107 reliance on Google searches, 151–54, 154–56 and revival of legacy media, 228–30 and right-wing media, 185–88, 190–94, 290–94 rivalry with Gawker, 170–71, 174 and social engagement on Facebook, 271–77 SPAC deal, 300–303, 324n302 and splintering of internet media, 299 and the Steele Dossier, 247, 249, 250–52, 254, 256–57, 260 and tech financing boom, 147 and “the Dress” viral post, 209–12 traffic growth, 122–27, 129–30, 203–12 and Upworthy, 179–83 Zuckerberg’s purchase offer for, 160–62, 165 “BuzzFeed Meme Machine” (memo), 123 C cable networks, 127–28, 269 Calacanis, Jason, 216 Cambridge Analytica, 242, 261 Camp, Garrett, 150–51 Campbell, Pamela, 231 Camp Bowery, 19, 54, 138 Canada, 226 Canvas Networks, 127 Carlson, Nicholas, 84–85, 120 Carson, Ben, 240 Case, Steve, 25 censorship, 211, 296–97 Cerami, Kassie, 112, 114 Charles, Michael, 188 Charlottesville rally, 294 Chartbeat, 204 Chateau Marmont, 199 Chatroulette, 151 Cheney, Dick, 71 Chinese Communist Party, 211 Chomsky, Noam, 4 Christie, Chris, 239 Claremont Middle School, 5 clickbait, 182–83 “click meter” tool, 105 Clinton, Bill, 27, 32, 94, 110, 119 Clinton, Hillary Rodham and Facebook’s political content, 239–42, 244–45 and Gionet, 293 presidential primary campaign, 102–3, 106 and the Steele Dossier, 248, 250, 253–54 support from women’s media, 94 and Weiner scandal, 144 WikiLeaks email controversy, 254, 259 Clooney, George, 56 CNET News, 41 CNN, 127–28, 167, 243, 249–51, 253 Coen, Jessica and author’s background, 246 and Denton’s parties, 53–56 and Denton’s wedding, 174 and Durst sex tape scandal, 63–64 and Gawker’s sexual content, 140 and Huffington Post’s traffic, 68–69 influence at Gawker, 53–56 and Jezebel’s style and content, 87, 95 Cohen, Michael, 250 Colbert, Stephen, 152 Coleman, Greg, 266 College Preparatory School, 5 Columbia Journalism School, 53 Comcast, 269 Comey, James, 249 Complex, 300 Comscore, 150, 179, 287 Condé Nast, 54, 88, 94, 156, 218 Conspiracy (Holiday), 234, 262 conspiracy theories and websites, 184, 258 Contagious Media, 27–28, 47–51, 71–72, 103 content management systems, 82 Conway, Ron, 285–86 Coppins, McKay, 166 Cormier, Anthony, 254, 257 Couric, Katie, 3–4, 8 COVID-19 pandemic, 299 Cox, Ana Marie, 29–31 Cox, Chris, 162–63, 206, 211 CPM (cost per thousand views) measure, 22–23, 45, 83, 169 Craigslist, 281 Cronkite, Walter, 28 CrowdTangle, 275 Cruz, Ted, 239, 240 Crying while Eating meme, 49, 50 cryptocurrency, 283, 299 Cuban, Mark, 216 Cube, the, 2, 11, 47 culture jamming, 9, 27 curiosity gap, 181, 205.

pages: 210 words: 65,833

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain by William Davies

Airbnb, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, centre right, Chelsea Manning, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, ghettoisation, gig economy, global pandemic, global village, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, mass immigration, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Northern Rock, old-boy network, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, prediction markets, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

One year later, there was another leak from a vast archive of government data: in 2010, WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of US military field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan. With the assistance of newspapers including the New York Times, Der Spiegel, the Guardian and Le Monde, these ‘war logs’ disclosed horrifying details about the conduct of US forces and revealed the Pentagon had falsely denied knowledge of various abuses. While some politicians expressed moral revulsion at what had been exposed, the US and British governments blamed Wiki-Leaks for endangering their troops, and the leaker, Chelsea Manning, was jailed for espionage.

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Sure enough, four senior executives were suspended the same month and three were charged with fraud two years later. A year later, it emerged that Volkswagen had systematically and deliberately tinkered with emissions controls in their vehicles, so as to dupe regulators in tests, but then pollute liberally the rest of the time. The CEO, Martin Winterkorn, resigned. ‘We didn’t really learn anything from WikiLeaks we didn’t already presume to be true’, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek observed in 2014. ‘But it is one thing to know it in general and another to get concrete data.’11 The nature of all these scandals suggests the emergence of a new form of ‘facts’, in the shape of a leaked archive – one that, crucially, does not depend on trusting the second-hand report of a journalist or official.

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On the contrary, the discovery that ‘elites’ have been blocking access to a mine of incriminating data is perfect fodder for conspiracy theories. In his 2010 memoir, A Journey, Tony Blair confessed that legislating for freedom of information was one of his biggest regrets, which gave a glimpse of how transparency is viewed from the centre of power. Following the release of the war logs by WikiLeaks, nobody in any position of power claimed that the data wasn’t accurate (it was, after all, the data, and not a journalistic report). Nor did they offer any moral justification for what was revealed. Defence departments were left making the flimsiest of arguments – that it was better for everyone if they didn’t know how war was conducted.

Because We Say So by Noam Chomsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, Chelsea Manning, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, high-speed rail, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Slavoj Žižek, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Joining the Vietnamese appeal against Dow are the government of India, the Indian Olympic Association, and the survivors of the horrendous 1984 Bhopal gas leak, one of history’s worst industrial disasters, which killed thousands and injured more than half a million. Union Carbide, the corporation responsible for the disaster, was taken over by Dow, for whom the matter is of no slight concern. In February, Wikileaks revealed that Dow hired the U.S. private investigative agency Stratfor to monitor activists seeking compensation for the victims and prosecution of those responsible. Another major crime with very serious persisting effects is the Marine assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in November 2004. Women and children were permitted to escape if they could.

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The United States will “chase him to the ends of the earth,” Senator Lindsey Graham warned. But U.S. government spokespersons assured the world that Snowden will be granted the full protection of American law—referring to those same laws that have kept U.S. Army soldier Bradley Manning (who released a vast archive of U.S. military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks) in prison for three years, much of it in solitary confinement under humiliating conditions. Long gone is the archaic notion of a speedy trial before a jury of peers. On July 30 a military judge found Manning guilty of charges that could lead to a maximum sentence of 136 years. Like Snowden, Manning committed the crime of revealing to Americans—and others—what their government is doing.

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These instruments are regularly negotiated in secret, like the current Trans-Pacific Partnership—not entirely in secret, of course. They aren’t secret from the hundreds of corporate lobbyists and lawyers who are writing the detailed provisions, with an impact revealed by the few parts that have reached the public through WikiLeaks. As the economist Joseph E. Stiglitz reasonably concludes, with the U.S. Trade Representative’s office “representing corporate interests,” not those of the public, “The likelihood that what emerges from the coming talks will serve ordinary Americans’ interests is low; the outlook for ordinary citizens in other countries is even bleaker.”

pages: 299 words: 88,375

Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy by Eric O'Neill

active measures, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, computer age, cryptocurrency, deep learning, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, fear of failure, full text search, index card, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, PalmPilot, ransomware, rent control, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, thinkpad, Timothy McVeigh, web application, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, young professional

Less than a year later, the CIA lost the keys to what WikiLeaks named Vault 7—the CIA’s cyberoffensive stockpile. In one of the largest document leaks in the CIA’s history, WikiLeaks released thousands of pages outlining sophisticated tools and techniques the agency allegedly used to break into mobile phones, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and computers. The leaks are a catalog of offensive hacking tools that include instructions for compromising a wide range of common devices and computer programs, including Skype, Wi-Fi networks, PDFs, and even virus scanners. If you believe WikiLeaks, the entire archive of stolen CIA material consists of several hundred million lines of computer code.

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The Russians had already stolen what they needed. When you don’t hunt the threat, the threat hunts you. Democrats wrung their hands as private emails and confidential memoranda appeared online like revenants, resurrected to destroy the party. In July, WikiLeaks published nearly 20,000 emails from the DCCC and DNC’s servers. As an encore, WikiLeaks distributed nearly 60,000 pages of emails from Podesta’s account in October and November 2016. The fallout included the resignation of the DNC chairwoman and most of her top party aides, a scandal that sidelined a number of leading Democrats, weeks of negative press that called into question the honesty and integrity of the Hillary campaign, and unlimited fodder for Trump’s Twitter account.

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To carve out happiness in family and friends, children, and achievement. But some want more. Robert Philip Hanssen was the greatest spy in US history. His reign lasted over two decades in a time when espionage required immense skill and patience. Breaking his record will be next to impossible in a world of WikiLeaks and ransomware. Hanssen’s dreams demanded greatness. Heroes work and toil to scrape out their place in history. Villains take shortcuts. But both heroes and villains stretch to touch the infinite. Spying made Hanssen feel that he belonged to something far greater than himself. To the Russians he was an unknown national hero.

pages: 307 words: 88,745

War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Etonian, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, school choice, side project, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

a stream of other official meetings: Clover, Black Wind, White Snow. See also Marlène Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). See also Dugin’s private Facebook page. a WikiLeaks release: “PUTIN VISITS TURKEY: RUSSIA BIDS TO TURN TURKEY FROM WEST; TURKS KEEPING OPTIONS OPEN,” WikiLeaks, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/04ANKARA6887_a.html. rewrote the introduction: “PUTIN VISIT TO TURKEY SEPTEMBER 2–3,” WikiLeaks, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/04ANKARA4887_a.html. a network of individuals: Marlène Laruelle, “Alexander Dugin and Eurasianism.” In ed. Mark Sedgwick, Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 155–79.

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Sometimes it was the result of friends with money: he acquired the financial and logistical support of Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, who himself was functioning as an unofficial Kremlin fixer, dealing out aid and financing projects with ostensibly private money that was nonetheless funneled his way by the Russian government. One covert move got out, though. According to U.S. intelligence, in 2004, Putin himself sent Dugin to Turkey in anticipation of his own official state visit, all in the hopes of convincing Turkey to move away from its Western NATO allies and toward closer ties with Russia. It took a WikiLeaks release of a classified U.S. embassy report to confirm this years later. Dugin’s official status throughout all this remained that of a philosopher. His appearance, fittingly, had come to resemble that of Grigori Rasputin, thanks to Dugin’s long beard in the style of Russian Orthodox priests. And his chief diplomatic intervention with Turkey, in the eyes of U.S. intelligence, for example, came when he rewrote the introduction to one of his books to describe a vision for a Eurasia more open to the Turkic world.

pages: 319 words: 89,192

Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies by Barry Meier

Airbnb, business intelligence, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, global pandemic, Global Witness, index card, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Londongrad, medical malpractice, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

Several corporate investigators were unable to identify the firm that produced them. In a subsequent report: “Operation Hellenic” report dated November 2, 2007. a 2009 State Department cable: The cable, which is dated January 13, 2009, was among the trove of documents disclosed by WikiLeaks. The U.S. ambassador in Kazakhstan was then Richard Hoagland. with the help of Baker and Hostetler LLC: This State Department document was released by Wikileaks. Over the years, Baker and Hostetler has used differing styles for its corporate name. It currently uses BakerHostetler and I have used it throughout. CHAPTER 2: “LAPDANCE ISLAND” When a freelance private spy named Rob Moore: I first wrote about Rob Moore’s work for K2 Intelligence in The New York Times on April 27, 2018, “A Spy’s Tale: The TV Prankster Who Says He Became a Double Agent.”

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SOME OF THE JOURNALISTS who met with Christopher Steele at the Tabard Inn thought he was right. Since the start of the 2016 campaign, Trump had kowtowed toward Vladimir Putin with a subservience that suggested that the Russian leader had a hold over him. There also seemed to be plenty of signs pointing to collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow. By the fall of 2016, for instance, WikiLeaks was unleashing a nonstop barrage of hacked Clinton campaign emails and Russian operatives were deploying social media bots aimed at swaying American voters toward Trump. However, believing that the Trump campaign was colluding with the Kremlin was one thing: proving it was very different. And for the reporters who met with Steele at the Tabard Inn, deciding what to do next was a big problem.

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The trouble was that, as Allason saw it, Steele’s code-named sources seemed to be suffering from the spy world equivalent of multiple personality disorder. According to Allason’s analysis, one of Steele’s sources—who was code-named Source “E”—was described in differing memos by the former MI6 spy as 1) someone who had access to the staff of the Ritz-Carlton hotel, as 2) someone who knew about the Kremlin’s involvement with WikiLeaks, and as 3) someone who knew about the use of Russian diplomatic missions for spying. In the end, Allason came to believe that Steele or his sources were fabricating information. “There may be only one ‘trusted compatriot’ [sic] reporting on his private conversations,” Allason wrote. “There is no indication of the reliability of this individual.”

pages: 200 words: 47,378

The Internet of Money by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global reserve currency, information security, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, Marc Andreessen, Oculus Rift, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, QR code, ransomware, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, the medium is the message, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, underbanked, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

That’s not really that interesting. What I am talking about are simple things — for example, donating to an activist organization like WikiLeaks. A few years ago, WikiLeaks was completely cut off from the world’s financial system simply with extrajudicial pressure applied on the few major payment providers: Visa, MasterCard, the banking transfer system, PayPal, etc. Without any legal process, without any conviction, and perhaps, in my opinion, without absolutely any crime other than revealing the truth of crime, WikiLeaks was cut off from the world’s financial system. This is now happening not just to activist organizations; it’s happening to entire countries.

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We subject ourselves to this mechanism that has now streamlined itself, and like the factory that can only produce little red firetrucks, this is a system that can only deliver privileged financial services for a tiny elite sliver of the population worldwide, with totalitarian surveillance tied up in regulations of each country, with barriers on the borders not permitting international trade. A financial system where the government can apply pressure to stop you trading with WikiLeaks, because they don’t like them, but you can still send donations to the Ku Klux Klan—and that’s not a joke. That’s exactly what happened. They have built a system that can only do one thing: enslave us. That can only do one thing: impoverish us. That system removes freedom in the most efficient possible way to deliver profits.

pages: 172 words: 48,747

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, gentrification, George Santayana, glass ceiling, income inequality, independent contractor, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, payday loans, pink-collar, post-work, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that seeks to protect free speech online, decried it as offering insufficient protection for independent bloggers, reiterating its earlier argument that “Congress should link shield law protections to the practice of journalism as opposed to the profession.” The Senate debate over who is a “journalist” arose in the aftermath of WikiLeaks, whose activity has been defined as both journalism and espionage. Expanding the definition of a journalist means expanding the legal protection journalists receive. “I can’t support it if everyone who has a blog has a special privilege … or if Edward Snowden were to sit down and write this stuff, he would have a privilege.

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But in a prestige economy, the privilege to protect the confidentiality of sources is not the only privilege at play. Journalism is increasingly a profession only the wealthy can enter. To narrow the definition of “journalist” to those affiliated with established news organizations denies legal protection not only to organizations like WikiLeaks, but also to the writers and bloggers who cannot afford the exorbitant credentials and unpaid internships that provide entry into the trade. “The journalists who can tell my story—the story of urban or inner-city America—have taken a job in marketing while disseminating their opinions on blogs,” writes freelance journalist David Dennis.

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Do not protect them, because what they offer is not worth protecting—although it may be worth prosecuting. Credibility is not something that can be bought, but credentials are. Using affiliation as a criterion to define “journalist” means only the privileged get journalistic privilege. The Senate’s target may be WikiLeaks, but their proposed ruling gives a de facto demotion to writers locked out for economic reasons. Journalists of prior generations worked their way up. Today, journalists are expected to start with an elite status and accept wages that have dwindled to nothing. The result is that journalism is a profession which most Americans cannot afford to formally enter.

pages: 269 words: 79,285

Silk Road by Eileen Ormsby

4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, disinformation, drug harm reduction, Edward Snowden, fiat currency, Firefox, incognito mode, Julian Assange, litecoin, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, off-the-grid, operational security, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, power law, profit motive, Right to Buy, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, stealth mode startup, Ted Nelson, trade route, Turing test, web application, WikiLeaks

A reference number on the deposit slip would alert the trader to send the bitcoin to a specific bitcoin address, which had been supplied to the trader by anonymous email. Although Nakamoto’s initial posts had described his vision for an absence of regulation, his later posts remained technical and academic until WikiLeaks began to canvass the viability of accepting bitcoin. Nakamoto was adamant that he did not want his creation associated with the whistleblowing site. ‘No, don’t “bring it on”,’ he wrote. ‘I make this appeal to WikiLeaks not to try to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.’

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‘Tor’s original design was to give users privacy and anonymity online and that’s still the core of what we do,’ Lewman said. ‘The vast majority of Tor usage is by normal people who are just looking to not give out all their information; who they are, where they are and every website they visit. Of course jerks and criminals do use Tor but frankly they have far better options.’ WikiLeaks is one example of an organisation that took advantage of darknets to maintain the integrity of its submissions, recommending that those who required anonymity when whistleblowing use Tor. Even if a server were to be confiscated, there would be little risk to users of the site, because there would be no IP trail and no typical user traffic trails that led out of the server.

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Nakamoto’s only other political statement was unearthed by cryptographers and was embedded in the source code of bitcoin itself, a little Easter egg for determined crypto-sleuths. Hidden in the code, he had provided a hint to his motivation by reproducing a headline from The Times from January 2009: ‘Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks’. It would seem that someone who was wary about WikiLeaks bringing ‘heat’ to his invention would certainly have some issues with it being used as the cornerstone of dark-web markets. But he never made any statement about them. Nakamoto’s appearances, postings and emails became increasingly sporadic, and then, in early 2011, he quietly disappeared, surfacing only for the briefest of moments in April 2011 to tell a bitcoin developer that he had ‘moved on to other things’.

pages: 320 words: 87,853

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

THE HIDDEN LOGICS OF SEARCH 77 Topics break into the Trends list when the volume of Tweets about that topic at a given moment dramatically increases. . . . Sometimes, popular terms don’t make the Trends list because the velocity of conversation isn’t increasing quickly enough, relative to the baseline level of conversation happening on an average day; this is what happened with #wikileaks this week.109 The #wikileaks and #occupy controversies died down quickly after Twitter offered these explanations. But when a site called Thunderclap attempted to hold a trending topic in reserve until it could unleash its followers all at once, timing all their tweets for maximum impact, Twitter suspended Thunderclap’s access to its API.110 Media studies scholar Tarleton Gillespie analyzed the company’s position in a widely shared blog post titled “Can an Algorithm Be Wrong?”

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Organizers and sympathizers began to accuse Twitter of overriding its trending topics algorithm to suppress those terms, and therefore of censoring their politically controversial movement.107 @TheNewDeal (@ identifies a Twitter username) put it bluntly on October 1: “It is Official, @ witter is Censoring #OccupyWallStreet There is No Way in Hell That it is Not the #1 Trending Topic in America.”108 The response from the company was swift: no censorship was occurring. Sean Garrett, head of communications at Twitter, replied to @TheNewDeal that “Twitter is not blocking #OccupyWallStreet from trending. Trends are based on velocity not popularity.” Twitter also pointed to a similar situation in 2010, when people had been complaining that #wikileaks did not appear prominently enough in Trending Topics. At that time, the company explained: Twitter Trends are automatically generated by an algorithm that . . . captures the hottest emerging topics, not just what’s most popu lar. Put another way, Twitter favors novelty over popularity. . . . THE HIDDEN LOGICS OF SEARCH 77 Topics break into the Trends list when the volume of Tweets about that topic at a given moment dramatically increases. . . .

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As programmer/philosopher David Auerbach has observed: The government may be further behind than we think; FBI director Robert Mueller admitted in the 9/11 hearings that FBI databases only searched one word at a time: “flight” or “school” but not “fl ight school.” More recently, the cables released by 160 THE BLACK BOX SOCIETY WikiLeaks at the end of 2010 each contain a handful of tags, à la Twitter. The CBC observed that one cable discussing Canada was tagged “CN” rather than “CA,” designating Comoros instead of Canada, and a few cables were tagged with the nonexistent tag “CAN.” It’s safe to assume that these tags were also assigned manually.

pages: 309 words: 54,839

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts by David Gerard

altcoin, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, Californian Ideology, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Dr. Strangelove, drug harm reduction, Dunning–Kruger effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, functional programming, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, margin call, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, operational security, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Satoshi Nakamoto, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, slashdot, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

The famous first commercial transaction (two pizzas, cost $30 including tip, for 10,000 BTC54) was a few months later, on 22 May 2010.55 From there the price rose steadily to 1c in July 2010. Bitcoin version 0.3 was mentioned on 11 July by tech news site Slashdot, gaining it some notice in the technology world, and inspiring the founding of the Mt. Gox exchange. In November 2010, WikiLeaks released the US diplomatic cables dump; the site was cut off from Visa, Mastercard and PayPal shortly after at the behest of the US government, but could still receive donations in Bitcoin. The price of a bitcoin hit $1 by February 2011. In April 2011, anarcho-capitalist and businessman Roger Ver, who had made his fortune with computer parts business Memory Dealers, heard a segment about Bitcoin on the libertarian podcast Free Talk Live.

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Imagine someone writing this if they had invented Bitcoin two years before. The first time Wright is known to have spoken of Bitcoin was in the comments of his August 2011 post on The Conversation, “LulzSec, Anonymous … freedom fighters or the new face of evil?” in which he wrote of “Bit Coin” as a solution to WikiLeaks’ problems receiving donations.157 Wright started buying bitcoins on Mt. Gox in April 2013, including 17.24 BTC at the peak of the bubble in November for $1198 each.158 Some time in 2013, he posted backdated entries to his personal blog with references to Bitcoin and Bitcoin-related concepts: A post dated August 2008 mentions he will be releasing a “cryptocurrency paper” and references “Triple Entry Accounting,”159 a 2005 paper by financial cryptographer Ian Grigg.

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Petersburg Bowl 77 Status 95, 98 Stellar 48 Stephenson, Neal 19 streaming 127 Szabo, Nick 19, 32, 59, 101, 102, 105, 107 TAO, The 135 TechUK 115 Telstra 73 Temkin, Max 75 Thiel, Peter 18 Thornburg, Jonathan 23 Tiny Human 129 Today (Radio 4) 67 Todd, Peter 59, 68 Top500 65 Tor 49, 59 Tual, Stephen 109 Tucker, Jeffrey 40 Tulip Mania 35 Tulip Trust 64 Turing completeness 107 Ujo Music 129 UK Government Office for Science 123 Ukash 73 Ulbricht, Lyn 53 Ulbricht, Ross 26, 48, 64 unbanked 29 Underhanded C Contest 106 Underhanded Solidity Coding Contest 106 Venezuela 31 Ver, Roger 17, 37, 44, 47, 48, 50 virtual reality 135 Visa 28, 36 wallet 12 Walpole, Sir Mark 123 WannaCry 73 Washington Post 32 Wells Fargo 87 Western Union 28 Westwood, Adam 64 WhollyHemp 76 WikiLeaks 36, 62 Wikimedia Foundation 76 Wikipedia 76 Wilcke, Jeffrey 94 Willybot 82 Winter Olympics 93 Wired 64 Wise, Josh 93 Wood, Gavin 94 WordPress 75 Wright Family Trust 63 Wright, Craig 61, 139 Yapizon 89 YouTube 137 Zamovskiy, Andrey 120 Zero Hedge 24 Zhoutong 83 Notes [1] Satoshi Nakamoto.

pages: 274 words: 85,557

DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You by Misha Glenny

Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, BRICs, call centre, Chelsea Manning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, James Watt: steam engine, Julian Assange, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pirate software, Potemkin village, power law, reserve currency, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Stuxnet, urban sprawl, white flight, WikiLeaks, zero day

Successive US governments have granted greater powers to law enforcement than most European governments would contemplate, allowing officers easier access to data from private companies, in the name of fighting crime and terrorism. The implications of this are both profound and, for the moment, impenetrable. Concerns about crime, surveillance, privacy, the accumulation of data by both private and state institutions, freedom of speech (step forward WikiLeaks), ease of access to websites (the so-called net neutrality debate), social networking as a political tool, and national-security interests constantly bump up against one another in cyberspace. One might argue, for example, that Google’s multi-platform, multitasking omnipresence violates the principles of America’s anti-trust legislation and that the agglomeration of all that personal data is both an opportunity for criminals and a threat to civil liberties.

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That evening the websites of Estonia’s President and several government ministries started receiving inordinate amounts of spam email, while the Prime Minister’s photo on his party’s website was defaced. Russian-language chat rooms began to exhort hackers to launch attacks on Estonian sites and were distributing the software to do so. According to sources quoted in a US Embassy telegram to Washington (c/o WikiLeaks), the initial attacks were technically unsophisticated and ‘seemed more like a cyber riot than a cyber war’. Over the weekend, however, the attacks escalated from spam showers to DDoS attacks. Hackers had created dozens of those pesky botnets, suborning infected zombie computers around the world and forcing them to request Estonian websites.

…

So even if you have an unbreachable digital fortress, you have only overcome one of several major security challenges. Similarly, these days it is much easier to perpetrate an inside job in a company because of the ease with which data can be collected and stored. We know that Bradley Manning, the man accused of having removed the US diplomatic cables that were subsequently published on WikiLeaks’ website, managed to download all the material onto a CD marked as a Lady Gaga album. We also know that Stuxnet – to date the world’s most sophisticated virus – must have been planted on its apparent target in Iran’s nuclear facilities by somebody (wittingly or otherwise) infecting the computer systems with a memory stick or CD.

pages: 409 words: 105,551

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, Chris Fussell

Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Chelsea Manning, clockwork universe, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, Ida Tarbell, information security, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, job automation, job satisfaction, John Nash: game theory, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pneumatic tube, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The question was how that potential risk stacked up against the benefits. WHAT ABOUT WIKILEAKS? On January 5, 2010, a twenty-two-year-old Army specialist walked out of a secure—or supposedly secure—room on Forward Operating Base Hammer, forty miles east of Baghdad, with nearly 400,000 highly classified military reports from the war in Iraq, all saved on CDs he had marked “LADY GAGA.” Three days later, he popped the CDs into his work computer and downloaded 91,000 reports on Afghanistan. Over the next several months, he repeated the same stunt, eventually gathering 250,000 classified State Department cables, which he passed on to WikiLeaks. By November, all had been released on the Internet to the global public.

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Saval, Cubed, 220. “This disclosure is not just” . . . “Remarks to the Press on Release of Purportedly Confidential Documents by Wikileaks,” U.S. State Department, November 29, 2010, http://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2010/11/152078.htm. “all this leaked information” . . . James P. Pinkerton, “America Needs Willpower—and the Right Leaders,” Fox News, July 29, 2010, http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/07/29/james-pinkerton-world-trade-centre-arizona-alqaeda-wikileaks-ground-zero-mosque. 854,000 people . . . Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 158.

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In the short run, this kind of education may not seem worth the opportunity cost. In military, governmental, and corporate sectors, an increased concern for secrecy has caused further sequestering of information. We have secrets, and secrets need to be guarded. In the wrong hands, information may do great damage, as the recent Snowden and WikiLeaks scandals have shown. In the absence of a compelling reason to do otherwise, it makes sense to confine information by the borders of its relevance. As growing volumes of data flood institutions divided into increasingly specialized departments, the systems for keeping information safe have become more and more complicated.

pages: 403 words: 105,550

The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark, Will Louch

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, high net worth, impact investing, income inequality, Jeffrey Epstein, Kickstarter, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, trade route, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, young professional

Government Printing Office, 2000, www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-106shrg61699/html/CHRG-106shrg61699.htm the letter said: “Abraaj Goes Public with Some of Its Juicy Secrets,” News Pakistan, October 30, 2008, www.thenews.com.pk/archive/print/660404-abraaj-goes-public-with-some-of-its-juicy-secrets “seek Consulate Dubai’s assistance”: Wikileaks, “Encouraging Gulf Investment in Karachi’s Power System,” August 25, 2009, wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09ISLAMABAD2022_a.html adventure capitalism: Wikileaks, “Tuning out Politics, Abraaj Capital Tries to Rebuild Karachi Electrical Supply Company,” September 3, 2009, wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09DUBAI367_a.html U.S. politicians pledged: Peter Spiegel and Zahid Hussain, “U.S. Tries to Soothe Pakistan Worries on Aid,” Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2009, www.wsj.com/articles/SB125548290488483937 running toward him: Nyla Aleem Ansari, “Downsize or Rightsize?

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v=l1yEIWjMVhc within an hour: Melodena Stephens Balakrishnan and Ian Michael, “Abraaj Capital: Celebration of Entrepreneurship,” Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 1 no. 4, 2011, 19. an enthusiastic article: Christopher Schroeder, “Dubai, a New Locus of Entrepreneurial Energy,” Washington Post, November 26, 2010, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/25/AR2010112502227.html event in Dubai: Wikileaks, “Outcome of the Entrepreneurship Summit,” November 29, 2011, wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/1057 sang his praises: Judith McHale, “Remarks at the Global Technology Symposium,” Menlo Park, California, March 24, 2011, 2009-2017.state.gov/r/remarks/2011/159141.htm modernize Pakistan: Pakistan 2020, Center for Global Affairs, New York University, 2011.

pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

Duncan Hunter Resigns after Corruption Conviction,” AP, January 7, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/21f9320c1ab116538a9244941c11192b. dig up damaging posts: Nate Anderson, “Spy Games: Inside the Convoluted Plot to Bring Down WikiLeaks,” Wired, February 14, 2011, https://www.wired.com/2011/02/spy/. “The right to free speech”: Andy Greenberg, “Palantir Apologizes for Wikileaks Attack Proposal, Cuts Ties with HBGary,” Forbes, February 11, 2011, https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/02/11/palantir-apologizes-for-wikileaks-attack-proposal-cuts-ties-with-hbgary/?sh=6b6b7055585e. rare exception was Gawker: Nitasha Tiku, “Leaked Emails Show How Palantir Founder Recruits for Global Domination,” Valleywag, October 17, 2013, http://valleywag.gawker.com/leaked-emails-show-how-palantir-founder-recruits-for-gl-1443665496; Sharon Weinberger, “Techie Software Soldier Spy,” New York, September 28, 2020, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/inside-palantir-technologies-peter-thiel-alex-karp.html.

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In 2010, Palantir employees began working with two other security firms, HBGary and Berico, to win a $2 million a month contract to help build an intelligence operation to dig up damaging posts on social media by critics of the Chamber of Commerce. While working on the proposal, the trio also pitched Bank of America on a similar operation, aimed at Wikileaks. Palantir had proposed pressuring pro-Wikileaks journalists, including Pulitzer Prize winner Glenn Greenwald. “These are established professionals that have a liberal bent,” a slide from a Palantir presentation read, “but ultimately most of them if pushed will choose professional preservation over cause.” To the outside, the project, which became public when members of Anonymous, the hacker group, published emails from the HBGary CEO in February 2011, was scandalous.

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Over the next several months, misinformation on Facebook—much of it in Trump’s favor—outperformed real news. The most popular election headline on Facebook during that period, according to one study, was pope francis shocks the world, endorses donald trump for president, which, of course, never happened. Another claimed falsely that Wikileaks emails revealed that Hillary Clinton had sold weapons to Islamic State terrorists. Zuckerberg would eventually apologize—sort of. “We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake,” he’d later tell Congress when called to answer questions about the ways that Facebook had been used to manipulate the election campaign.

9-11 by Noam Chomsky

Berlin Wall, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

Anatol Lieven, “A Mutiny Grows in Punjab,” National Interest, March/April 2011, http://nationalinterest.org/article/mutiny-grows-punjab-4889. 6. The fullest discussion of this critically important material is by Fred Branfman, who had exposed the grotesque U.S. war against the peasants of northern Laos at the time; “Wikileaks Exposes the Danger of Pakistan’s Nukes,” Truthdig, January 13, 2011, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/wikileaks_exposes_the_danger_of_pakistans_nukes_20110113/. 7. “James Lamont and Farhan Bokhari, “Murder of Pakistani journalist raises awkward questions inside the regime,” Financial Times, June 3, 2011, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7b440aae-8e08-11e0-bee5-00144feab49a.html#axzz1PwOPdzye. 8.

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Lieven summarizes by remarking that “U.S. and British soldiers are in effect dying in Afghanistan in order to make the world more dangerous for American and British peoples.”5 The threat that U.S. operations in what has been christened “Afpak”—Afghanistan-Pakistan—might destabilize and radicalize Pakistan is surely understood in Washington. The most significant documents to have been released so far from Wikileaks are the cables from Islamabad from U.S. Ambassador Patterson, who supports U.S. actions in Afpak but warns that they “risk destabilizing the Pakistani state, alienating both the civilian government and military leadership, and provoking a broader governance crisis in Pakistan without finally achieving the goal,” and that there is a possibility that “someone working in [Pakistani government] facilities could gradually smuggle enough fissile material out to eventually make a weapon,” a danger enhanced by “the vulnerability of weapons in transit.”6 A few weeks ago the tortured corpse of Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad was found, probably murdered by the ISI, Pakistan’s powerful intelligence services.

pages: 397 words: 110,130

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

the FBI violated the law thousands of times: “Patterns of Misconduct: FBI Intelligence Violations from 2001–2008,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 23, 2011, accessed March 26, 2013, www.eff.org/wp/patterns-misconduct-fbi-intelligence-violations. Amazon and Paypal cut off Wikileaks: Rebecca MacKinnon, “WikiLeaks, Amazon and the New Threat to Internet Speech,” CNN, December 3, 2010, accessed March 26, 2013, www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/12/02/mackinnon.wikileaks.amazon/. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”: John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” February 8, 1996, accessed March 26, 2013, projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html.

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Democratic countries are hardly immune to the temptations of tracking citizens illicitly; a study by the Electronic Frontier Foundation found, for example, that the FBI violated the law thousands of times while requesting digital information on citizens. Though the U.S. government loves to talk about the free flow of information, when the Web site Wikileaks released internal diplomatic documents and footage of the military killing civilians, politicians and pundits fulminated so ferociously that major U.S. firms like Amazon and Paypal cut off Wikileaks, probably worried about being on the wrong side of a political fight. In 1996, writer and electronic activist John Perry Barlow proclaimed “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Addressing old-school governments—“you weary giants of flesh and steel”—he proclaimed, “You are not welcome among us.

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Library of Congress, 47 Vaingorten, Yaaqov, 162 Vaughn, Katherine, 255 Vibe, 81 video games, 147–51 collective knowledge applied to, 149–51 complexity, development of, 147–49 history/geography, learning, 199–202 scientific method, learning through, 196–99 video literacy, 94–105 collaborative projects, 101 future view, 106 popular tools, 96, 99 techniques used, 99–104 versus text-based ideas, 102–3 TV program analysis, 94–97 video sites, 99 Viégas, Fernanda, 91 Villasenor, John, 270–71 Virtual Fighter 3 (video game), 149 VK, 47 Voltolina, Laurentius de, 178–79 Wagenaar, Willem, 24–25 Wales, Jimmy, 163–64 Walk, Hunter, 103–4 Wang, Tricia, 212 Warhol, Andy, 238 Warner, Michael, 258 Watson supercomputer, 277–83, 286–88 Wattenberg, Martin, 91–92 wearable computer, 138–44 Wegener, Jonathan, 37–39 Wegner, Daniel, 124–26 Weibo, 109 Weinberg, Gabriel, 52–54, 56 Weinberger, David, 70 Weiner, Charles, 6 Wellman, Barry, 231 Weston, Edward, 110 Wikileaks, 273 Wikimedia Foundation, 161 Wikipedia and audience effect, 55–56 contributors, types of, 161 debate and article creation, 70–71 Five Pillars, 163 microcontributions, scale of, 161 reliability/error rates, 70 success, factors in, 163 Wikitorial, 159 Wilde, Oscar, 54 Williams, Heather, 88 wisdom of the crowds, 155–56 WITNESS, 274 Wittaker, Steve, 34–35 women’s magazines, photomanipulation in, 108 Wood, Matt T., 150–51 Woods, Andrew K., 253 word cloud, 88–89 Wordle, 88–89 WordPress, 47 word processor, 98–99 workplace e-mail free companies, 220 online distractions, 10 World of Warcraft (video game), 150, 196–97, 203 writing online, 45–82.

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, anti-globalists, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, crony capitalism, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, fake news, gentrification, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, John Markoff, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, Robert Mercer, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Transnistria, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

According to American authorities then and since, this hack was an element of a Russian cyberwar. The Trump campaign, however, supported Russia’s effort. Trump publicly requested that Moscow find and release more emails from Hillary Clinton. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. was in personal communication with WikiLeaks, the proxy that facilitated some of the email dumps. WikiLeaks asked Trump Jr. to have his father publicize one leak—“Hey Donald, great to see your dad talking about our publications. Strongly suggest your dad tweet this link if he mentions us”—which Trump Sr. in fact did, fifteen minutes after the request was made. With his millions of Twitter followers, Trump was among the most important distribution channels of the Russian hacking operation.

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For example, in an email hacked and stolen by Russia, Hillary Clinton wrote a few words about “decision fatigue.” This term describes the increasing difficulty of making decisions as the day goes on. Decision fatigue is an observation of psychologists about the workplace, not an illness. Once it was stolen by Russia, the email was released by WikiLeaks, and then promoted by the Russian propaganda sender Sputnik as evidence that Clinton was suffering from a debilitating disease. In this form, the story was picked up by InfoWars. Russians exploited American gullibility. Anyone who paid attention to the Facebook page for a (nonexistent) group called Heart of Texas should have noticed that its authors were not native speakers of English.

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See also U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Issuance of Amended Executive Order 13694; Cyber-Related Sanctions Designations,” Dec. 29, 2016. Trump Jr. and Trump Sr. participation: Jack Shafer, “Week 26,” Politico, Nov. 18, 2017. Quotations: Marshall Cohen, “What we know about Trump Jr.’s exchanges with WikiLeaks,” CNN, Nov. 14, 2017. Trump’s denials: Kurt Eichenwald, “Why Vladimir Putin’s Russia Is Backing Donald Trump,” NW, Nov. 4, 2016. Leaked emails Guiding to Podesta: “Russia Twitter trolls rushed to deflect Trump bad news,” AP, Nov. 9, 2017. Thirty minutes: Adam Entous and Ellen Nakashima, “Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia,” WP, June 23, 2017.

pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

(The next five sentences then repeat the oldest and most conventional calls for general well-being through measured oversight.) By comparison Assange's When Google Met Wikileaks is a fascinating, self-contradictory, hyperactive tangle of ideas, accusations, and bizarre rationalizations. Within critical Google discourse it is in a league of its own, for both better or worse. Julian Assange, When Google Met Wikileaks (New York: OR Books, 2014). 64. See Julian Assange, “The Banality of ‘Don't Be Evil,’” New York Times, June 1, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-banality-of-googles-dont-be-evil.html It was later republished in Assange, When WikiLeaks Met Google. 65. As recently occurred in Turkey, when the AK Party tried to shut down Twitter, and the government also tried to shut off access to Google DNS as well.

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See Danielle Citron, “Bright Ideas: Anita Allen's Unpopular Privacy,” Concurring Opinions, January 13, 2012, http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2012/01/bright-ideas-anita-allens-unpopular-privacy.html. 65. Jacob Applebaum, Andy Mueller-Maguhn, Jeremie Zimmermann, and Julian Assange, “Episode 8, Part 1,” WikiLeaks World Tomorrow, April 2012, https://worldtomorrow.wikileaks.org/episode-8.html.If you look at it from a market perspective, I'm convinced that there is a market in privacy that has been mostly left unexplored, so maybe there will be an economic drive for companies to develop tools that will give users the in-dividual ability to control their data and communication.

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We see it in a politics of radial transparency aligned with another politics of radical privacy, in journalists’ self-congratulation at the use of social media in the Arab Spring as supposedly outlining an anterior stratum of crowds and power (absent in their coverage of the shock economies of Haiti, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Louisiana, for example), in how Wikipedia formalizes taxonomic consensus from a heteroglossia of interests and how WikiLeaks inverted the ocular and occult body of the state, or in how Google cloud services both circumvent and circumscribe state authority in China and in how much of China's direct perception of computational supply chains is invisible to Californian search engines. Both events and pseudoevents are plentiful and it's hard to know what signals a new situation and what is trivial: the Google Earth stand-off between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Prism and Data.Gov, hyperbolic packet-routing topologies, Dot-P2P and OpenDNS, net neutrality and the golden shield, downloadable guns 3D printed out of synthetic biopolymers paid for with Bitcoins, the National Security Agency (NSA) versus Unit 6139, NSA versus Anonymous, Anonymous versus Syrian Electronic Army, NSA versus Syrian Electronic Army versus ISIL versus FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) versus North Korea versus Samsung versus Apple versus European Parliament, and on and on.

pages: 352 words: 90,622

Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security by Sarah Chayes

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Celtic Tiger, colonial rule, crony capitalism, drone strike, failed state, high-speed rail, income inequality, microcredit, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, structural adjustment programs, trade route, ultimatum game, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional

Appointment May Reflect Concerns About the Future,” September 18, 2008, WikiLeaks, http://bit.ly/1dauvNN. 20. Camille Polloni, “La justice française s’intéresse a la fille du dictateur ouzbek,” Le nouvel observateur, July 31, 2013, http://bit.ly/1p8bF9D. 21. John Davy, former Ucell CFO, on Swedish Public Television’s Uppdrag granskning (Mission Investigate), broadcast May 22, 2013, http://bit.ly/1l0La8I. See among other cables, “Skytel Scandal: Fiasco in the Making,” WikiLeaks, February 24, 2005, http://bit.ly/1hx3AZc 22. U.S. Embassy cable, “Gulnora Karimova Provides Grants in Hope of Improving Image,” November 3, 2005, http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/11/05TASHKENT3019 .html.

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Embassy cable, “Gulnora Karimova Provides Grants in Hope of Improving Image,” November 3, 2005, http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/11/05TASHKENT3019 .html. In February 2013, when I was in Tashkent, U.S. officials and major donor agencies attended a gala event organized by Karimova for one of these organizations, the Fund Forum. 23. U.S. Embassy cable, “First Daughter Lola (Karimova) Cuts Loose,” November 26, 2004, http://wikileaks.org/cable/2004/11/04/TASHKENT3180.html. 24. The 2010 liquidation of the Karimova-controlled conglomerate Zeromax, with significant energy holdings, may indicate competition by the SNB for the natural resource sector. 25. “Corruption is used on a systematic basis as a mechanism of direct and indirect administrative control over higher education institutions.

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Workers at the GM plant also had to go, or risk losing their jobs if they refused, according to an unpublished Cotton Campaign interview with a GM worker. See also Le travail forcé des enfants en Ouzbékistan: des changements mais sans amélioration (Grenoble: École de Management, Centre d’Études en Géopolitique et Gouvernance, March 2012); and U.S. Embassy cable, “Uzbekistan: UNICEF Shares Results of Child Labor Assessment,” October 30, 2008, WikiLeaks, http://bit.ly/1nBlstt. For a surreal assessment of the Uzbek cotton industry, in which no mention is made of forced labor, see Stephen MacDonald, Economic Policy and Cotton in Uzbekistan (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, October 2012), http://1.usa .gov/1cVUh84.

pages: 326 words: 91,532

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

1 In central London there is no such ATM shortage, but that didn’t help Julian Assange back in 2010 when he gave himself up to the British police over charges he faced in Sweden. Assange was also wanted in the USA over ‘Cablegate’: his organisation, Wikileaks, had published several hundred thousand leaked messages between the US State Department and its embassies. It was as a result of this that PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and others had started to refuse to process donations to Wikileaks.2 Unable to access funds, neither the organisation nor Assange could pay their bills, not least for the servers that hosted the leaked information. Whatever you think of Assange or Wikileaks, he had at that point only been accused of a crime; it was unrelated to money and no judicial process had actually taken place – and yet private companies chose to rescind his access to payments.

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Whatever you think of Assange or Wikileaks, he had at that point only been accused of a crime; it was unrelated to money and no judicial process had actually taken place – and yet private companies chose to rescind his access to payments. Alongside Assange and Wikileaks, the likes of InfoWars (the American far right ‘news’ website) and Pornhub have been subject to similar ‘payment blocking’. Whatever you think of this crew, consider that such moves effectively put censorship in the hands of private enterprise. For most of us, access to payments is unlikely to be high on the list of things we worry about – or have even thought to think about. Be honest – have you ever worried about whether you or anyone else can pay or be paid in practical terms?

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Russell) 4 printing money 34 private keys see public-private key encryption Promontory 257 public-private key encryption 16, 189–91, 195, 200, 214, 215 Puerto Rico 36–7 Punjab National Bank (PNB) 115 Q QR codes 75, 76, 84 QuadrigaCX 200 Qualcomm 226, 271 R railway design 68, 71 Ransomware 195 Rato, Rodrigo 262 Reagan, Ronald 65 real-time gross settlement (RTGS) 126–30, 240 Red Cross 150 red envelope tradition, Chinese 76 Red Packet digital gift 77 Reed, John 220 refugees and immigrants 265, 266 regulation authorities, financial 135, 156, 179, 184, 198, 208, 212, 217, 223–4, 225–6, 229, 230–6, 237–42, 265, 267, 268, 271–2, 273 Ren Zhengfei 251 Reserve Bank of India 86 retail payment flows 120, 122 retail payment instruments 18 retailer lawsuit against card networks, US 56–7 revaluation of currency 30 Revolut 89, 158, 159 Rickards, Jim 31 Ripple/XRP 197–8, 199 risk, payment 15–16, 19, 108, 112–16, 121, 122, 214 robbery, bank 107–8, 112–16 Rogen, Seth 112 Romania 172 Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) 150 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) 131 Russell, Bertrand 4 Russia 25, 89, 243, 253–4 Russian Central Bank 256–7 S Safaricom 74 Safeway 56 Sampo Bank 256, 257 sanctions 144, 213, 243, 244–5, 246, 249, 250–1, 252, 253, 254, 258, 266, 270 Sandinista National Liberation Front 65 Sands, Peter 28 Saxo 159 Scandinavia 67 Schneider, Ralph 40 Schuijff, Arnout 165 screen-scrapers 181–2 scrip 170, 219–20 Sears 56 Second World War 7–8, 12, 249 secondary sanctions, US 250, 253 Securities and Exchange Commission, US 198 securities market 132, 140, 247 semi-open payment systems 222 settlement risk 15–16 shopping channels 50 Shor, Ilan 261 shorting 188 Siemiatkowski, Sebastian 174 Signature cards 49–50, 57, 58, 69 Simmons, Matty 40 Simple 159 Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) 60, 240 Single Euro Payments Regulation 98 Singles Day, China 76 size and methods, payment 120–1, 217, 272 small economies 5–6 smart contracts 194–6, 198–9 smuggling 27 Snowden, Edward 234 social media 110, 119, 179, 206 social media fraud 110 Sofort 180–1, 183 ‘soft’ credit checks 175 Sony Pictures 112 Soros, George 226 sort codes, bank 65–6 South Korea 112 sovereign gold coins 203 Soviet bloc countries, former 24–5, 257 Space Shuttle 71 Spain 81, 261–2 spear-phishing 110 Special Drawing Right (SDR), IMF’s 202 Specially Designated Nationals (SDNs) 250, 251, 252 spies, government 233–4 Spotify 202, 225 Spring Festival Gala, CCT’s 77 Square 155, 162–3, 164–5, 216, 269 Sri Lanka 113 stablecoins 196, 201 Standard Chartered 258–9, 260, 270 standing orders 82 Starling 158 Stephenson, George 68, 71 STET (Systèmes Technologiques d’Échange et de Traitement) 119 Stiftung Warentest 89 stimulus package payments, US 66 store of value, Libra as 206 store of value, money 202 Stripe 15, 162, 163–5, 216 sub-prime mortgages 132 Sun 119 Sunak, Rishi 35 Swartz, Lana 177 Sweden 32–3, 35–6, 58, 172 Swift network 102, 111, 113 114, 115, 140, 141–2, 147, 220, 222, 233–4 Swiss bank accounts 66 Switzerland 23, 67, 201, 260 Syria 266 T tabu 8 TARGET 86, 240–1 Target (US retailer) 109 TARGET2 241 TARGET2 Securities 241 targeted markets 179 tax evasion 27, 29, 258, 260 telegraphs 141 telex 141 Tencent 76, 77 Tenpay 73, 75, 76, 78–9, 85, 100, 161, 178, 216, 217, 220, 221, 222, 235, 270–1 terrorism 232–3, 250, 266 Tether (THT) 196–7, 199 Tez payment app 185 theft risk, payment gateways as 15–16, 108, 112–16, 121 three-corner model 174 Three Mobile 119 TIBER-EU 233 tokens – temporary digital identifiers 109, 189–90, 191, 195, 196, 205, 214 TOR (The Onion Router) 199 TransferWise 89, 146, 216, 241 Transport for London 11 travel shops 90 tribal societies, early 9 truck systems 219–20 Truman, Harry S. 249 Trump, Donald 115, 229, 243–5 tulip bulbs 6 Tumpel-Gugerell, Gertrude 241 Twitter 155 U Uber 82–3, 165, 169, 202 Ubiquity Networks 110–11 UBS 260 UFC-Que Choisir 89 unbanked people 6–7, 38, 212 underground/criminal economy 25, 27–8, 29–30, 199–200 see also financial crime; illegal activities; money-laundering ‘unicorn’ start-ups 146 Unified Payment Interface (UPI) 82–5, 182, 271 Union Pay 55, 59 unit of account, money as 202–4 United Kingdom cheques 117 credit card debt 101 decline of cash 32, 36 digital IDs 270 Faster Payments Service (FPS) 82, 83, 84, 86 GCHQ – National Cyber Security Centre 233 GCHQ – spies 234 HM Treasury 86 INSTEX transactions 245 JCPOA 243 United Kingdom (continued) neo-banks 158 Payment Systems Regulator 237 prepaid cards 37–8 Truck Act (1831) 220 United States of America $100 dollar bills 23, 24, 108 bank fines and financial crime 258–60, 270 checking accounts 91 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 65, 149, 264 Congress 57 credit card debt 45, 100 Currency Education Program (CEP) 25 Department of Homeland Security 232–3 Department of State 267 dollars as global reserve currency 246–7, 252 dollars circulating abroad 24–5, 30 domestic securities market 247 Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) 220 Federal Reserve 12, 36, 37, 113–14, 131, 232, 259 free banking era (1837–63) 208 international power of the dollar 246–54 JCPOA 243–4, 252, 254 National Security Agency (NSA) 114, 233, 234, 255 National Security Council (NSC) 64–5, 244, 264 Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) 249–50, 252, 253, 255, 259 open banking 182 paying to pay 97, 101 regulation agencies 231–2 removal of access to WeChat app 270–1 sanctions 213, 243, 244–5, 246, 249, 250–1, 252, 253, 254, 258–9, 270 Securities and Exchange Commission 198 State Department 3–4 Treasury 9, 248, 249–50, 255, 260, 265 use of cheques/checks 63, 117 utility coins 193 V V-pay 58 van der Does, Pieter 165 van Hall, Walraven 7–8 Venezuela 213 Venmo 177 venture capital money 157 Verifone 48 Verizon 130–1 Vestager, Margrethe 224, 225–6 VHS vs Betamax 71, 221 Visa 3–4, 41, 42, 47, 49, 50, 53, 55, 56, 57–9, 90, 102, 161, 162, 174, 201–2, 204, 223, 269 Visa Europe 58–9 Visa Inc. 58–9 W Wal-Mart 56, 57 Watergate scandal 255 WeChat Pay app 270–1, 229 Weidmann, Jens 28 Western Union 144, 216 WhatsApp 184, 202 Which? 66, 89 wholesale payment flows 121 Wikileaks 3–4 Williams, Joe 45–6 wire transfers 141 Wirecard 37–8, 166–7 Woodward, Bob 255 World Bank 17, 32, 150, 211 World Economic Forum, Davos 187–8, 226 WorldPay 165 X, Y, Z Xoom 111 Yuebao 77, 206 ZON credit card authorisation 48 First published 2021 by Elliott and Thompson Limited 2 John Street London WC1N 2ES www.eandtbooks.com Epub ISBN: 978-1-78396-607-3 Copyright © Gottfried Leibbrandt and Natasha de Terán 2021 The Authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this Work.

pages: 234 words: 63,149

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World by Ian Bremmer

airport security, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, clean water, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, Parag Khanna, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, trade route, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Finally comes the threat posed by info-anarchists and technically sophisticated criminals. In 2010, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange barely missed becoming Time magazine’s Person of the Year after the release of thousands of politically sensitive documents badly embarrassed Washington and other governments around the world.5 In 2011, efforts by several governments to shut him and WikiLeaks down made him the world’s first cybermartyr. In response, an army of info-anarchists operating under the name Anonymous launched cyberattacks on those governments and denial-of-service attacks on financial services companies PayPal and MasterCard after they severed ties with WikiLeaks. Other companies have become targets of online criminals.

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climate change and, 94 as debtor nation, 65, 158, 187 decline of, 63–66 defense program of, 12, 71, 76, 186, 191 entitlement programs in, 12–13, 65, 190 federal debt of, 3, 12, 34, 38, 51, 60, 62, 81, 172, 186, 189 fiscal stimulus in, 11 in G2 with China, 155–84 growing divergence with Chinese economic policies, 62–63, 77 intellectual property laws and, 84 Internet protocol in, 89 leadership role of, 3, 5, 14–15, 24, 25, 40–41, 111, 129, 154, 195 loss of manufacturing jobs in, 64 military commitments of, 187 nuclear program of, 59 oil exported by, 47–48 outsourcing by, 126–27 Pakistan’s relationship with, 115 pollution caused by, 158 poor infrastructure of, 186, 189 possibility of Chinese war with, 170–74 reduced role of, 194, 195 smart grids in, 73 taxes in, 190 trade by, 116–17, 120, 143, 153, 154, 158, 163 unemployment in, 77 in withdrawal from Iraq, 32 in world currency and debt crises, 38 United States and the World Economy, The (Bergsten), 157–58 urbanization, 52, 99, 104–5, 118 Uzbekistan, 135 Varyag, 23 vegetable oil, 100 Venezuela, 25, 48, 138, 168, 177, 182 state capitalism in, 78 Vietnam, 23, 70, 114, 121, 129, 140–41, 194 multinationals in, 80 rice exported by, 102 water security in, 105 Vietnam War, 49 Voice of America, 92 WAPI, 86 war on terror, 11 wars, 123 prevention of, 68 Warsaw Pact, 53 Washington, George, 7 Washington Consensus, 42, 46, 174 water, 68 security of, 3, 5, 97, 104–7, 129–30, 140, 147 Wells, H. G., 86–87 Wen Jiabao, 8, 12, 21, 143 Western Europe, 46–47 oil imported by, 47 West Germany, 45, 46, 47, 53, 82, 165 Wi-Fi, 86 WikiLeaks, 75 World Bank, 4, 28, 29–30, 99, 104, 118, 134, 135 American and European influence in, 42, 43–44 creation of, 39, 43 in world currency and debt crises, 38 World Brain (Wells), 86–87 World Trade Organization, 60 Doha Round, 103 World War I, 3, 11, 40, 141, 167, 170 World War II, 11, 38–40, 56–57, 151, 170, 187 Xinhua, 8, 62, 70 Yanukovych, Viktor, 138 Yeltsin, Boris, 54 Yemen, 14, 67, 114 chaos in, 112, 175, 183 yen, 83 Yom Kippur War, 48–49 yuan: China accused of manipulation of, 79–80, 154, 161–62 as international currency, 83 Yugoslavia, 32 Zambia, 119, 120 Zimbabwe, 7–8, 130, 131–32 Zoellick, Robert, 157 ALSO BY IAN BREMMER The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?

pages: 470 words: 148,444

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, demand response, different worldview, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, intangible asset, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Paris climate accords, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

In response, Obama canceled a planned state visit to Moscow. He didn’t want to navigate the sideshow of Snowden being in the same city, but he also saw no point in attending a summit where nothing was going to be accomplished. I also noticed an unusual coziness among the Russians, Snowden, and Wikileaks—the way in which Wikileaks connected with Snowden, who was clearly being monitored by the Russians; the way in which the disclosures coincided largely with Russian interests, including the leaks from Snowden’s stolen cache that seemed focused on sabotaging America’s relationships abroad—particularly our alliance with Germany.

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It began with the spectacle of Edward Snowden releasing a devastating cache of classified information in June, fleeing to Hong Kong, and then somehow boarding a plane to Moscow even though he had no passport. There were weeks of drip-drip-drip revelations about U.S. surveillance, the same tactic that would shadow the run-up to our 2016 elections, involving the same people: Russia, Wikileaks. I had to spend my days explaining to our liberal base that Obama wasn’t running a surveillance state because of the activities of the NSA, which we couldn’t really talk about. Then came the Egypt coup, which we refused to call a coup. Instead of carrying out an affirmative agenda, I felt I spent my days in a defensive crouch.

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* * * — IT HARDLY CAME AS a surprise that the Russians hacked into the DNC. From my first day at work, I’d been told to assume that any unclassified email I sent, any nonsecure phone call I made, could be intercepted by the Russians. They’d already hacked into U.S. government servers. But just before the Democratic convention, Wikileaks dumped thousands of DNC emails into the public domain in an effort to sow discord within the Democratic Party. This was new, something of far greater scale and consequence than releasing intercepted phone calls in Ukraine. Debbie Wasserman Schultz had resigned as chair in the face of outrage from Bernie Sanders supporters who saw, in the emails, that she’d shown favoritism for the Clinton campaign.

pages: 274 words: 75,846

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Thomas Law Review 21 (2009): 109–41, 110, www.stephenhalbrook.com/law_review_articles/Halbrook_macro_final_3_29.pdf. 145 the cloud “is actually just a handful of companies”: Clive Thompson, interview with author, Brooklyn, NY, Aug. 13, 2010. 145 there was nowhere to go: Peter Svensson, “WikiLeaks Down? Cables Go Offline After Site Switches Servers,” Huffington Post, Dec. 1, 2010, accessed Feb. 9, 2011, www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/01/wikileaks-down-cables-go-_n_790589.html. 145 “lose your constitutional protections immediately”: Christopher Ketcham and Travis Kelly, “The More You Use Google, the More Google Knows About You,” AlterNet, Apr. 9, 2010, accessed Dec. 17, 2010, www.alternet.org/investigations/146398/total_information_awareness:_the_more_you_use_google,_the_more_google_knows_about_you _?

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Amazon Web Services, one of the major players in the space, hosts thousands of Web sites and Web servers and undoubtedly stores the personal data of millions. On one hand, the cloud gives every kid in his or her basement access to nearly unlimited computing power to quickly scale up a new online service. On the other, as Clive Thompson pointed out to me, the cloud “is actually just a handful of companies.” When Amazon booted the activist Web site WikiLeaks off its servers under political pressure in 2010, the site immediately collapsed—there was nowhere to go. Personal data stored in the cloud is also actually much easier for the government to search than information on a home computer. The FBI needs a warrant from a judge to search your laptop. But if you use Yahoo or Gmail or Hotmail for your e-mail, you “lose your constitutional protections immediately,” according to a lawyer for the Electronic Freedom Foundation.

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Walker social capital social graph Social Graph Symposium Social Network, The Solove, Daniel solution horizon Startup School Steitz, Mark stereotyping Stewart, Neal Stryker, Charlie Sullivan, Danny Sunstein, Cass systematization Taleb, Nassim Nicholas Tapestry TargusInfo Taylor, Bret technodeterminism technology television advertising on mean world syndrome and Tetlock, Philip Thiel, Peter This American Life Thompson, Clive Time Tocqueville, Alexis de Torvalds, Linus town hall meetings traffic transparency Trotsky, Leon Turner, Fred Twitter Facebook compared with Últimas Noticias Unabomber uncanny valley Upshot Vaidhyanathan, Siva video games Wales, Jimmy Wall Street Journal Walmart Washington Post Web site morphing Westen, Drew Where Good Ideas Come From (Johnson) Whole Earth Catalog WikiLeaks Wikipedia Winer, Dave Winner, Langdon Winograd, Terry Wired Wiseman, Richard Woolworth, Andy Wright, David Wu, Tim Yahoo News Upshot Y Combinator Yeager, Sam Yelp You Tube LeanBack Zittrain, Jonathan Zuckerberg, Mark Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Introduction Chapter 1 - The Race for Relevance Chapter 2 - The User Is the Content Chapter 3 - The Adderall Society Chapter 4 - The You Loop Chapter 5 - The Public Is Irrelevant Chapter 6 - Hello, World!

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

The former chief technology officer for the CIA, Ira “Gus” Hunt, summed up the government’s philosophy when he said, “We try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.”72 Through his disclosures about NSA spying, particularly the NSA’s PRISM program (given the green light by the Patriot Act), Snowden showed Americans how they are subject to what Schneier calls “ubiquitous mass surveillance.”73 The NSA collects internet communications from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube, AOL, Skype, Apple, and many other tech companies whose services millions of Americans rely on. Meanwhile, the CIA’s Mobile Devices Branch has perfected a wide range of hacking systems, malware, and viruses that it uses to track people through their smartphones. Documents from WikiLeaks show that both the NSA and the CIA can bypass encryption.74 “Corporate and government surveillance interests have converged,” Schneier contends. “Both now want to know everything about everyone. The motivations are different but the methodologies are the same.”75 The digital frontier rests on this convergence.

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Sledge, “CIA’s Gus Hunt on Big Data.” 73. Schneier, Data and Goliath, 5. 74. This doesn’t mean that the CIA can break encryption. It means that the agency has developed tools to access devices themselves so they can gather information before it is encrypted. For a useful discussion, see Gillis, “Wikileaks Only Told You Half the Story.” 75. Schneier, Data and Goliath, 25. 76. Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud, 66, 124, 11. 77. Belkhir and Elmeligi, “Assessing ICT Global Emissions Footprint.” Google toyed with the idea of a more eco-friendly, modular smartphone with replaceable parts (Project Ara), but it abandoned the idea in 2016.

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“Beyond the Producer-Driven/Buyer-Driven Dichotomy: The Evolution of Global Value Chains in the Internet Era.” IDS Bulletin 32, no. 3 (2001). Gertner, Jon. The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. New York: Penguin Books, 2012. Ghose, Anindya. Tap: Unlocking the Mobile Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Gillis, Tom. “Wikileaks Only Told You Half the Story—Why Encryption Matters More Than Ever.” Forbes, March 21, 2017. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959. Goodman, J. David. “Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Headquarters.” New York Times, February 14, 2019. Gosselin, Peter.

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The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, business climate, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, Joseph Schumpeter, land bank, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, Meghnad Desai, middle-income trap, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, special economic zone, spectrum auction, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism, young professional

Mayawati, the Dalit leader of UP’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), enjoyed a reputation for especially inventive fund-raising schemes during her own periods in power. One involved the alleged sale of “tickets,” meaning the right to represent her party in parliament. Although this is something Mayawati has denied, a leaked US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks suggested that the going rate for a BSP ticket during the 2009 national elections came to “roughly 250,000 dollars.”22 The same cable, poetically entitled “Mayawati: Portrait of a Lady,” made further allegations concerning the excesses of her various spells as UP’s chief minister. “When she needed new sandals, her private jet flew empty to Mumbai to retrieve her preferred brand,” the author claimed.

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Business leaders were similarly phlegmatic, viewing her kind of corruption as akin to a tax: a cost of doing business, but a predictable and manageable one. “They prefer Jayalalithaa because her AIADMK is more efficient at delivering once paid,” one American government official wrote in a diplomatic cable, leaked by WikiLeaks. The author also quoted a local tycoon, who complimented Jayalalithaa’s style of governing: “If I pay her, I know my job will get done.”24 The Andhrapreneurs From a distance India’s parliament building looks serene: a squat amphitheater ringed with columns, its outline visible through the thickest New Delhi smog.

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Among the most prominent was a huge irrigation plan known as Jalayagnam, later dubbed “the mother of all frauds” by the Times of India.34 Auditors found many billions of dollars had gone missing from contracts handed out to half a dozen politically connected local companies. An American diplomatic cable, released by WikiLeaks, noted dryly how “corruption beyond the pale (even for India)” had become a hallmark of YSR’s rule.35 “We thought Naidu was bad,” the same document quotes a local newspaper editor as saying, “but that was child’s play compared with what is happening now.” At one level this reputation for adventurous cronyism did Andhra Pradesh little harm.

pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

It does not take a seasoned FBI investigator to realize that the story simply did not add up, especially once one factors in the reality that he was the leaker that provided Kim Dotcom with information from the DNC that proved that Bernie Sanders’ nomination was suppressed by Hillary Clinton and others in the Democratic National Convention.179 This information was sent to Wikileaks and Julian Assange, and leads to another story that lacked in substance, but was universally portrayed to be of a legitimate origin: the narrative that Russia hacked the 2016 election. The mainstream media has been polishing that turd for so long that it says more about their lack of actual pull within the establishment political apparatus that despite 24/7 coverage and a unified front by the Democrats and their partners at CNN and MSNBC, they still have not been able to convince the public that Russia actually had any role in Trump’s election victory because it is so plainly obvious to anyone that Hillary Clinton was the reason why Hillary Clinton lost the election.

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One thing that is becoming clear to many people after almost two straight decades of war in the region is that the United States and its allies are not there to spread democracy and liberate the Middle East from terrorists. They did not invade these countries to bring peace, they brought war, and it is becoming more obvious by the day that the American military has no intention of ever leaving. According to Wikileaks on September 21st, 2018, the US Senate voted 93-7 for a $674 billion military spending bill, again choosing to spend more than half of the federal discretionary budget on the military and spies. Every single Senate Democrat supported the bill, so it seems pretty clear that the myth of Democrats being anti-war should be finally put to rest.

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This is silly, insulting to the intelligence of the American people, and a colossal waste of time and money. Why doesn’t Janet Napolitano explain to the American people why any of them should trust her? Edward Snowden came forward and “said something”, how is that working out for him? Chelsea Manning “saw something” and they gave her 30 years in prison. Thanks to Wikileaks, the world knows how dirty the war in Iraq was, and how criminal the people running the show actually are. Where are his great thanks from the Department of Homeland Security? Hillary Clinton’s only question was “can’t we just drone this guy?”, which should be considered conspiracy to commit murder if the government decides to actually enforce any of these laws that they have imposed.

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MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

In just a few short years, WikiLeaks has released more than a million confidential documents from highly classified military secrets to text messages of those killed in the 9/11 attacks. Not a great deal is known about its founders, except that WikiLeaks describes the group as comprising Chinese dissidents, hackers, computer programmers, lawyers, and journalists.6 To protect their sources (and their own identities), they spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world to activate protective laws in different national jurisdictions. But who watches WikiLeaks? Can it be fully trusted?

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Can it be fully trusted? The jury is out, but so far its track record is good. And when you put WikiLeaks together with the events in Iran and other places you can begin to see why dictators everywhere are wondering when this new citizen power is going to come knocking on their door. Indeed, the Pentagon may wonder whether WikiLeaks can be held to account when sensitive information leaks to the public. But the question we’re asking in this chapter is whether these developments are a prelude to an inevitable wave of democratization around the world—a wave generated by an explosive combination of youthful demographics, the spread of the Internet, and the lure of opportunity in the global economy.

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They collaborate with like-minded groups around the world, sharing critical resources and seeking common cause so as to acquire strength in numbers. They fight for integrity and justice, which gives them a moral edge in a battle that is increasingly about hearts and minds rather than bullets and roadside bombs. And they are always innovating—using the latest Internet-based technologies to amplify their impact. Take WikiLeaks, a self-proclaimed “intelligence service of the people” with a mission to abolish official secrecy. The whistle-blowing site made headlines when in April 2010 an anonymous tipster posted a video the Pentagon claimed to have lost of U.S. helicopter crews enthusiastically killing Iraqis on a Baghdad street in 2007.

pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

In geopolitics, small players—whether “minor” countries or nonstate entities—have acquired new opportunities to veto, interfere in, redirect, and generally stymie the concerted efforts of “big powers” and multilateral organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). To name just a few instances: Poland’s vetoing of the EU’s low-carbon policy, the attempts by Turkey and Brazil to derail the big powers’ negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, Wikileaks’ disclosure of US diplomatic secrets, the Gates Foundation’s contesting of the World Health Organization leadership in the fight against malaria, and spoilers of various stripes and sizes in global negotiations on trade, climate change, and numerous other issues. These newly and increasingly relevant “small players” are vastly different from one another, as are the fields they compete in.

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Kenyan lawyer Ory Okolloh and a blogger called “M” launched a watchdog site in 2006 on Kenya’s corrupt political scene.34 Iranian-American Kelly Golnoush Niknejad started TehranBureau.com to gather and spread news directly from fellow Iranians during the popular uprising after the 2009 presidential elections, with foreign journalists banned from the country.35 Sami Ben Gharbia, a blogger and civil society activist, helped incite anti-regime demonstrations in Tunisia by using his group blog to spread devastating tales of corruption contained in the US diplomatic cables released through WikiLeaks. These new actors are enriching the scope of political discourse around the world. They operate outside the channels and beyond the control of traditional political organizations, both government- and party-related. They are ubiquitous and, when facing repression, they can also be highly elusive.

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The bigger picture is a cascading diffusion of power that has put individuals in an unprecedented position not only to bypass political institutions developed over decades but also to influence, persuade, or constrain “real” politicians more directly and more effectively than any classical political theorist could have imagined. HEDGE FUNDS AND HACKTIVISTS Left in a room together, John Paulson and Julian Assange might soon be at each other’s throats. Paulson runs Paulson & Co, one of the world’s largest hedge funds. Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks, the Web-based organization that specializes in divulging the secret information of governments and corporations. And yet they have one very significant thing in common: both symbolize a new breed of actors who are transforming national politics by limiting the power of governments. With their ability to move billions of dollars at the speed of light away from a country whose economic policies they distrust, hedge funds are just one of the many financial institutions whose decisions constrain the power of governments.

The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

Even the French yellow vest protests and the gains made by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the British general election of 2017 have been attributed to Russian machinations online.3 The “Russiagate” scandal began before Trump’s election as the Clinton campaign, some anti-Trump Republicans, elements in the Obama administration, and various members of the US law enforcement and national security establishments spread rumors of alleged links between Russia and the Trump campaign to the media, including the false story that Trump was being blackmailed by Moscow with a videotape of him consorting with Russian prostitutes. When Trump won, his political enemies in the Democratic and Republican parties claimed that Russia had swung the election against Clinton. Putin had installed his puppet in the White House, it was widely asserted, by one of two methods (or both). One was Russian assistance to the website WikiLeaks, which leaked material damaging to Clinton and her allies. The other method of Russian interference in the 2016 election took the form of propaganda on Facebook, YouTube, and other social media platforms to suppress black voters and encourage some white voters who had voted for Obama in 2012 to vote for Trump in 2016.

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Russian nationalists and many populists in Europe and the US share a common hostility to the transnational European Union as well as contemporary transatlantic social liberalism. In addition, Western intelligence authorities claim that Russian intelligence operatives have engaged in trying to promote conflict in the US and other countries by helping whistle-blowers like WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden leak stolen or classified information and by bombarding carefully targeted audiences with Internet memes and ads. Let us stipulate that this is all true. It was also true in the 1950s that there really were a small number of communists in the US, including a few high-ranking government officials, who spied for the Soviet Union, as well as many more Soviet sympathizers.

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., xii Trump, Donald, xi, xiii, 20, 61, 68, 69, 74–75, 79, 80, 82, 83, 86–87, 107, 111, 112, 131, 132, 135, 157 bigoted remarks of, 80, 102 Charlottesville rally and, 100–103 described as fascist, , 99–100, 103, 108–9 elected president, ix, 68, 75, 90–99, 103 Latinos and, xiii “Resistance” term and, 90 see also authoritarian personality theory Ullrich, Volker, 103–4 unions, see labor, organized universal basic income (UBI), 122–25, 127 university-credentialed managers and professionals, see overclass van den Berghe, Pierre, 80 Veblen, Thorstein, 6 Ventura, Jesse, 61 Viereck, Peter, 105 voting rights, 163–64 Wagner Act, 35 Wallace, George, 69 war and social reform, 32–38, 167–68 wards, 136–38 War Industries Board (WIB), 33–35 Warren, Donald, 73 Watanuki, Joji, 50 Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 32 Weinberg, George, 111 welfare, 23, 26, 34, 36, 38, 123, 125, 152–54 immigrants and, 154–55 Wells, H. G., 32 white supremacists, white nationalists, 23, 26, 73, 79–81, 100–103, 109, 113 Wiener, Jon, 106 WikiLeaks, 93–94 Wille, Anchrit, 6 Wilson, Glenn, 105 Wilson, Woodrow, 33, 34, 39 Woo-Cumings, Meredith, 149 Woodward, C. Vann, 106 workers, working class, xi–xv, 1, 2, 4, 9, 10, 37, 45–46, 47, 67, 89, 98, 150, 165, 169, 170 Apple and, 57–58, 118, 151 becoming something other than workers, 128 and competition for public goods, 23, 26, 79, 81, 153–54 division in, 10–12 fastest-growing occupations and, 118–19 geographic relocation and, 121, 139 in heartland, 14–27 immigration and, xii, xiii, xv, 11–12, 15–16, 21–23, 26, 59–60, 79, 111, 122, 124, 129–30, 148, 155–65 income and, see income and wages labor arbitrage and, 55–59, 79, 126, 148, 151–53, 157 and large vs. small employers, 125–30 membership institutions and, 135–45 offshoring and, xii, 20, 55–56, 59, 68, 79, 98, 118, 122, 124, 127, 148, 151, 153, 168 political spectrum of, 72–73 power of numbers and, 134 skill-based technological change theory and, 118 split labor markets and, 11–12, 26, 162, 164 STEM skills and, 118–19 wages and, see income and wages white, 81, 90, 95, 117, 157 women, 56–57, 117 worker-to-retiree ratio, 161–62 working conditions and, 33, 35, 37, 57, 136, 137, 159 see also labor, organized World Trade Organization (WTO), 53, 57, 146 World War I, 32, 33–35, 167 World War II, xi–xii, 32, 36–37, 39, 44–45, 131, 167 Wright, Gavin, 11 yellow vest protests, x, 19–20, 68, 92, 135 Yglesias, Matthew, 158–59 Yorty, Sam, 82 Zuckerberg, Mark, 160 ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ About the Author Michael Lind is the author of more than a dozen books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, including The Next American Nation and Land of Promise.

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The Connected Company by Dave Gray, Thomas Vander Wal

A Pattern Language, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, folksonomy, Googley, index card, industrial cluster, interchangeable parts, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, loose coupling, low cost airline, market design, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, power law, profit maximization, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Vanguard fund, web application, WikiLeaks, work culture , Zipcar

So ask yourself: who controls the media today? And which way are the trends heading? In February 2010, a nonprofit organization called WikiLeaks began releasing classified cables between the US State Department and its consulates, embassies, and diplomatic missions around the world. It was the largest leak of classified material in the history of the world, and there was nothing the US government could do about it. Once information is released to a network, it can’t be pulled back. Wikileaks has demonstrated definitively that no secret, corporate or political, is safe for long. We’ve been saying the customer is king so long that it has become a cliché.

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More connections create more opportunities to bypass these control nodes, reducing the degree to which the control nodes can limit the flow of information and connection, thus limiting their power. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz could do nothing to stop executives from leaking his confidential memo. A restaurant can’t change a Yelp review. If you release a movie and it gets bad reviews, that’s life. And even the President of the United States can’t stop Wikileaks from distributing confidential documents. That’s the power of the network. At the same time that networks tend to reduce the inherent power of betweenness, they also offer more opportunities for nodes to increase their degree and closeness—the number of connections they can easily make with other nodes.

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(Gerstner), How IBM Rediscovered Customers, Top-Down, Leader-Driven Change Whole Foods Market, Whole Foods, an Agile Team of Agile Teams–Whole Foods, an Agile Team of Agile Teams, Whole Foods, an Agile Team of Agile Teams, It Takes Trust to Build Relationships agile management and, Whole Foods, an Agile Team of Agile Teams–Whole Foods, an Agile Team of Agile Teams, Whole Foods, an Agile Team of Agile Teams Golden Rule and, It Takes Trust to Build Relationships WikiLeaks (organization), Power in the Network Wikipedia site, What is a Platform? Wladawsky-Berger, Irving, People First X Xerox (company), How Xerox Missed the PC Revolution, How Xerox Missed the PC Revolution, What Kinds of Companies have been Successful with a Podular Approach? Z Zale Jewelers, Whole Foods, an Agile Team of Agile Teams Zappos (company), Balancing the Front Stage and the Back Stage, Moral Authority Amazon and, Balancing the Front Stage and the Back Stage moral authority and, Moral Authority Appendix B.

pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

he asked with some asperity. “I won’t ever forget it. It was December 2010. Julian Assange, my virtual colleague on the Cypherpunks list, blazed on the covers of all the news magazines. He was charged with treason. People talked of bitcoin as an important facilitator for WikiLeaks. It would have been nice to get all this attention in any other context. But WikiLeaks had kicked the hornets’ nest, and now the swarm was headed toward us. “We had to get away from the swarm. Bitcoin’s success depends on being distributed and peer-to-peer,” concluded Satoshi. Bitcoin relied, so I surmised, on the absence of billionaire embodiments and hierarchical handles.

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Aren’t you a threat to the entire monetary world, to central banks and G8 summits and International Monetary Fund mandates, to five-point-one trillion dollars a day of oceanic currency trading, to preening financial strategists in Washington and New York, London and Davos, Tokyo and San Francisco, of tax collectors and financial regulators around the world?” “We do not want to lead with ‘anonymous currency’ or ‘currency outside the reach of any government.’ ” Satoshi said. “I am definitely not making such a taunt or assertion. Some people say, ‘Bring it on, WikiLeaks.’ I say, ‘No, don’t bring it on, WikiLeaks!’ The bitcoin project needs to grow gradually, so the software can be strengthened along the way.” “But in the initial ‘Genesis Block’ of bitcoin, you did put a headline from the Times of London declaring that the ‘Chancellor was bailing out the banks again,’ ” I said. “That was kind of a poke at the hive.”

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Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

., ‘Mobutu: a rich man in poor standing’, Washington Post, 3 October 1991, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/10/03/mobutu-a-rich-man-in-poor-standing/49e66628-3149-47b8-827f-159dff8ac1cd/. 11 Stearns, J., Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (New York, PublicAffairs, 2012), p. 165. 12 US Embassy Cable, Wikileaks, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/01KINSHASA1610_a.html. 13 Wilson, T., ‘DRC president Joseph Kabila defends Glencore and former partner Gertler’, Financial Times, 10 December 2018. 14 ‘Cutting-edge diplomacy’, Africa Confidential, 24 October 2003, www.africa-confidential.com/article-preview/id/189/Cutting-edge_diplomacy. 15 Melman and Carmel, ‘Diamond in the rough’. 16 ‘The mineral industry of Congo (Kinshasa)’, United States Geological Survey, 1997, https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/country/1997/9244097.pdf. 17 Stearns, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, p. 289. 18 Ibid., p. 319. 19 Heaps, T., ‘Tea with the FT: young blood’, Financial Times, 7 April 2006. 20 Mahtani, D., ‘Transparency fears lead to review of Congo contracts’, Financial Times, 3 January 2007. 21 ‘Deciphering the $440 million discount for Glencore’s DR Congo mines’, Resource Matters, November 2017, https://resourcematters.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Resource-Matters-The-440-million-discount-2017-11-29-FINAL-1.pdf. 22 ‘Fleurette and Glencore complete merger of Mutanda and Kansuki mining operations’, PR Newswire, 25 July 2013, www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/fleurette-and-glencore-complete-merger-of-mutanda-and-kansuki-mining-operations-216882021.html. 23 ‘Glencore and the gatekeeper, how the world’s largest commodities trader made a friend of Congo’s president $67 million richer’, Global Witness, May 2014, www.globalwitness.org/en/archive/glencore-and-gatekeeper/. 24 Hearn, A., ‘EXCLUSIVE: Tycoon pays £46m for London flat (plus £3m more in stamp duty)’, Evening Standard, 7 January 2015. 25 Oz Africa Plea Agreement and Statement of Facts, 29 September 2016, www.justice.gov/opa/pr/och-ziff-capital-management-admits-role-africa-bribery-conspiracies-and-agrees-pay-213.

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., ‘Sustainability of artisanal mining of cobalt in DR Congo’, Nature Sustainability, 1 (2018), 495–504, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0139-4. 8 ‘Metal mining and birth defects: a case-control study in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo’, The Lancet Planetary Health, April 2020, www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(20)30059-0/fulltext. 9 Van Reybrouck, Congo, p. 526. 10 Ibid., p. 527. 11 Carroll, R., ‘Return of mining brings hope of peace and prosperity to ravaged Congo’, Guardian, 5 July 2006. 12 US diplomatic cable, 29 April 2005, Wikileaks, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05KINSHASA731_a.html. 13 Kabemba, C., Bokondu, G., Cihunda, J., ‘Overexploitation and injustice against artisanal miners in the Congolese cobalt supply chain’, Southern Africa Resource Watch, Resource Insight, 18 (January 2020), www.sarwatch.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Cobalt-Report-v2-English_compressed.pdf. 14 Quoted in Liwanga, Child Mining, p. 22. 15 Clark, S., Smith, M., Wild, F., ‘China lets child miners die digging in Congo mines for copper’, Bloomberg News, 23 July 2008. 16 ‘This is what we die for, human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo power the global trade in cobalt’, Amnesty International, 19 January 2016, www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr62/3183/2016/en/. 17 ‘Exposed: child labour behind smart phone and electric car batteries’, Amnesty, 19 January 2016. 18 Pakenham, T., The Scramble for Africa (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), p. 588. 19 Jasanoff, M., The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (London, William Collins, 2017), p. 210. 20 Ibid., p. 213. 21 Ibid., p. 213. 22 Sovacool, B.K., Hook, A., Martiskainen, M., Brock, A., Turnheim, B., ‘The decarbonisation divide: Contextualizing landscapes of low-carbon exploitation and toxicity in Africa’, Global Environmental Change, 60 (2020), 102028. 23 Xing, X., ‘A video allegedly staged by UK journalists in DR Congo has nobody fooled about Sino-Congolese relations’, Global Times, 20 December 2017, www.globaltimes.cn/content/1081258.shtml. 24 Sanderson, H., ‘Glencore warns on child labour in Congo’s cobalt mining’, Financial Times, 16 April 2018. 25 ‘Eurasian Resources Group joins with leading businesses and international organisations to launch the Global Battery Alliance’, Eurasian Resources Group, 20 September 2019, https://eurasianresources.lu/en/news/eurasian-resources-group-joins-with-leading-businesses-and-. 26 Sanderson, H., ‘NGOs hit out at LME’s cobalt sourcing plans’, Financial Times, 7 February 2019. 27 ‘Glencore fails to disclose royalty payments for US-sanctioned businessman Dan Gertler’, Resource Matters, 24 April 2019, https://resourcematters.org/glencore-fails-disclose-royalty-payments-us-sanctioned-businessman-dan-gertler/.

pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Joshua Davis, “The Crypto-Currency,” New Yorker, October 10, 2011. 5.Note, for example, that the putsch establishing the fundamentalist Christian Republic of Gilead, in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, was accomplished by locking all users flagged as women out of the continental digital transaction network. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1985. 6.WikiLeaks. “Banking Blockade,” June 28, 2011, wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html. 7.Hashcash, hashcash.org. 8.David Chaum, “Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments,” Advances in Cryptology Proceedings of Crypto 82, 1983, pp. 199–203. 9.See Dolartoday, dolartoday.com/indicadores/. 10.In practice, this is not a trivial undertaking.

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As a consequence, there is tremendous fear that whoever controls the mint would have the power to prevent some transactions from taking place entirely, for whatever arbitrary reasons they chose.5 The notion that the governing body of a mint might take it upon themselves to choke off payments to parties that have fallen into disfavor for political or other reasons isn’t just a theoretical possibility, either. The effective 2010 blockade on contributions to WikiLeaks that was imposed by Bank of America, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union is the most prominent example of this sort of thing, but it’s far from the only one.6 Conversely, by deleting debits from their accounts from the ledger, the mint could effectively enable favored parties to use the same money more than once, and nobody else would be any the wiser.

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But when the string identifying your Bitcoin wallet resides alongside your own encoded fingerprints, on a phone that bears a unique IMEI number, you are inherently at risk of being connected to whatever pattern of transactions you’ve left behind in the blockchain.19 And even without access to the physical device, or anything it may contain, parties to transactions may find that their identities can be pinpointed with surprising ease. As early as 2011, for example, security researchers were able to cross-reference forum posts, Twitter handles and the blockchain’s own record of public transaction data to determine the identity of “anonymous” donors to WikiLeaks.20 The sources of potentially identifying information are legion, and not all that easy for a user to clamp down on. The blockchain itself, of course, retains everything, and shares it on demand with anyone who asks. By their very nature, exchanges and wallet providers have access to still-greater stores of compromising data, making them necessary but worrisome points of friction for the privacy-minded.

pages: 312 words: 93,504

Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia by Dariusz Jemielniak

Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), citation needed, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, Debian, deskilling, digital Maoism, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Google Glasses, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Menlo Park, moral hazard, online collectivism, pirate software, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, Wikivoyage, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

However, he was laid off because of lack of funds in 2002, after which he apparently lost faith in the project (in his farewell message he skeptically wrote that “Wikipedia still might succeed brilliantly”; Berstein, 2011). Since then he has been very critical of it. In 2007 he launched his own online encyclopedia website, Citizendium. Clearly, both being let go from Wikipedia and having his cofounder status questioned left Sanger resentful. Nonetheless, as late as December 2010, when criticizing WikiLeaks and addressing Julian Assange, he mentioned his former affiliation rather than his later projects: “Speaking as Wikipedia’s co-founder, I consider you enemies of the U.S.—not just the government, but the people” (Crovitz, 2010). Identifying himself as Wikipedia’s cofounder might have created the impression that he was speaking for the Wikipedia community or the Wikimedia Foundation, but his view was far from unanimously shared by Wikipedians.

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([[User_talk:Jimbo_Wales/Archive_122]]) At the time of this writing, discussion of the changes is still under way, yet it is quite clear that Wales recognized that his resignation from operational influence has further legitimized his strategic authority. 1 7 4 L e a d e r s h i p T r a n s f o r m e d Modes of Leadership in Open Collaboration While the founder’s exit has been shown to be a natural stage in organizational development, in this case the limitation of Wales’s involvement was both consciously planned and a contingent process of management models and philosophies open-community leadership, both to some extent present in the free/ libre and open-source-software (F/LOSS) environment. E. G. Coleman (2011) points out that digital-generation communities may be governed by principles as diverse as those of WikiLeaks (with one charismatic leader making all decisions and monopolizing the limelight) to those of Anonymous (an antileader and anticelebrity group). Even though rarely falling on the extremes of that continuum, large open-collaboration projects tend to rely on two kinds of models: a democratic community-decision-making process (elections, representation) and “benevolent dictatorship” (Raymond, 1998, 1999/2004).

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Reputation building is also rapidly growing in importance in everyday life because of the increased popularity of collaborative consumption (Botsman & Rogers, 2010). 4. Wikipedias are the most popular projects within the Wikimedia Foundation, but there are many others, such as Wiktionaries, Wikinews, Wikiversities, Wikibooks, and Wikiquotes, all organized on the basis of similar community principles and run from Wikimedia Foundation computer servers. Wikileaks.org has no relation with Wikimedia projects and since 2010 does not even use MediaWiki software. For the purposes of this book, “Wikipedia” refers to the English and the Polish Wikipedias, and “Wikimedia” 2 2 8 No t e s t o t h e i n t ro d u c t io n a n d c h a p t er 1 refers to all projects run under the Wikimedia Foundation umbrella.

pages: 788 words: 223,004

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alexander Shulgin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death of newspapers, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Snowden, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, haute couture, hive mind, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Paris climate accords, performance metric, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pre–internet, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social intelligence, social web, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, vertical integration, WeWork, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

To editors who were brought up on journalistic ethics and knew all too well how costly it was to fund original reporting, the ascendance of bootleggers was beyond galling. I remember my own horror in 2010 after the Times published an exclusive story based on mountains of leaked, classified data from Wikileaks, which had taken us months to report. The Huffington Post’s version of the story, with the same headline, appeared almost simultaneously, with no original reporting—and ranked above the Times on Google. As the Times and other publishers prepared cease-and-desist letters and considered suing for copyright infringement, the old guard’s leading lights came forward to denounce Huffington’s heist.

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Now I was seeing firsthand how video and data brought journalism to life, especially in a series about a military unit returning from the Afghanistan war. At a narrative journalism conference at Boston University, after I showed a video clip of a soldier on leave taking his sons to a barber to get the same buzz cut he had, hard-bitten editors in the audience were crying. After the Times received the massive Wikileaks files, Pilhofer, an expert on storing and housing data, was the first editor I consulted in order to make the material searchable. During my immersion, I also became determined to unite the web newsroom with the print operation. It was ridiculous and costly to have separate news meetings and separate editing systems.

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Gellman’s source, who turned out to be Snowden, had decided not to take his stolen documents to the New York Times, having seen them hold their earlier NSA story so long. Through filmmaker Laura Poitras, a national security expert, Snowden had also approached the Guardian, the British paper that had published Wikileaks. Gellman wanted institutional backing in the U.S., and it made sense to bring the story to his former employer. Baron had been at the Post only a few months when Gellman handed him the kind of story editors dream of. He had come into a cache of classified documents, he told the new executive editor, and would use them to tell an earth-shattering story, but only on the condition that he, Gellman, got final say as to which papers the public saw and which editors would be assigned to him.

pages: 230 words: 61,702

The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data by Michael P. Lynch

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Mechanical Turk, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, data science, Edward Snowden, Firefox, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, Internet of things, John von Neumann, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patient HM, prediction markets, RFID, sharing economy, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

The most obvious and controversial example of this is WikiLeaks, a nonprofit organization that publishes news leaks and classified governmental information online. Its disclosure of videos and documents related to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in 2010 and 2011 caused a worldwide uproar. Supporters defended it as a tool for exposing the important facts that are relevant and needed in order for citizens to make informed democratic decisions. Critics denounced the organization as putting the lives of soldiers and diplomats at risk. Of course, both of these claims can be true—and whether or not WikiLeaks is ultimately beneficial or harmful, it is just the most visible example of the use of the Internet to enforce or encourage transparency.

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., 93, 122–23 Surowiecki, James, 120 Syria, 83 “system 1” cognitive processing, 29 “system 2” cognitive processing, 39 tablets, xvii, 9 taboos, 52, 53 targeted advertising, 9, 90, 91, 105 technê, 170 technology: changes in, 73 debate over advances of, xvii and ethical values, 89–90 and understanding, 179–84 unthinking commitment to, 11–12 telepathy: communication by, 192 thought experiment on, 96–97, 104 teleportation, Internet as, xvi television, 167–68 terrorism, as justification for abuses of privacy, 92, 100 testimony: of experts, 35, 120 knowledge through, 24–25, 114–16 misplaced trust in, 33 reliability of, 123–25, 181 restriction on legal, 147 Texas, Republican Party platform in, 61–62 “things in themselves,” 85 “Third Industrial Revolution,” 8 This American Life, 78 Threadless, 136–37 Tibet, Chinese relations with, 81 time travel, written word as, xv–xvi “tokens,” 69 topology, 112–13 Torah, 48 tracking, see data mining transparency, 85–86 of knowledge, 90, 109, 137–38 and power, 107–9 trends, 157 tribes, 43–46 TripAdvisor, 116 trust: basis for, 14, 36–38, 179 credibility in, 40, 46, 50, 119–20, 126, 131 epistemic, 195 in Google-knowing, 24–25 in receptive knowledge, 28, 30, 37, 131 in testimony, 33 trust-tags, 40 truth: attitudes toward, 75–77 bias and, 43–50, 84–86 control and distortion of, 65–67 devaluing of, 58, 74, 111, 148 discerning and determining, 17–19, 67–74, 83–86, 90, 130 falsifying facts in the name of, 78–83 and freedom, 62 Internet in personal search for, 65–66 obscured, 75–76 skeptical challenges to accepted, 34 see also objectivity, objective truth T-shirt design, 137 Tube map, 112–13 Turing, Alan, 81–82 Turkers, 136, 141 Twitter, tweeting, xvii, 8, 24, 31–32, 43, 81–82 in political activism, 65–66 tracking by, 160–61 understanding: creativity in reaching, 174–77, 181, 183 in digital form of life, 155–78 through experience, 16, 173–74 and explaining, 165–67, 182 knowledge based on, 15–17 knowledge vs. other forms of knowledge, 6, 16–17, 90, 154, 164–65, 181 moment of sudden insight in, 175, 176–77 as personally cognitive, 176–77, 181–82, 184 and procedural knowledge, 167–74 process of, 163–67, 174–77 reciprocal relationship between motor skills and, 167–74 as reflexive, 183–84 technology and, 179–84 universal and particular in, 171 United Nations, 143 universities, 148–54 value judgment, 51–55, 57 verification, 83 “veritic luck,” 203 video map of cultural history, 161–62 Vienna Circle, 128–29 Virginia, University of, 151 von Neumann, John, 116 voting patterns, 121, 123 “wag the dog” illusion, 52 Warren, Samuel, 89–90, 94, 101 Washington Post, 95, 99 Web 1.0, 7 Web 2.0, 74, 134–36, 143, 144, 148, 167, 174 defined, xvii, 7 Web 3.0 (“smart Web”), 7, 155 Websites, 69 Weibo, 65 Weinberger, David, 84–85, 111, 119, 125–28, 131 Westen, Drew, 51 “What is Justified Belief” (Goldman), 194 Wieseltier, Leon, 11 WikiLeaks, 137–38 Wikipedia, 24, 31, 133, 135 in fact-checking, 56, 130 as joint enterprise, 119 wikis, defined, 129 Wired, 136, 156 wiretapping, 101, 109 wisdom, 16–17 knowledge vs., xvii, 4 Wisdom of Crowds, The (Surowiecki), 120 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 10 World Wide Web: as a construction, 69, 70, 129 privacy policies on, 105 written word: digital knowledge compared to, xv–xvi, 125–26, 127–28 print revolution in, 134 as static, 85 X-Men, 96 YouTube, 8, 32, 128 zero marginal cost economy, 140 Zöllner, Johann Friedrich, 58–59 Also by Michael Patrick Lynch In Praise of Reason: Why Rationality Matters for Democracy Truth as One and Many True to Life: Why Truth Matters Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity About the Author Michael Patrick Lynch is a professor of philosophy and the director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut.

pages: 402 words: 129,876

Bad Pharma: How Medicine Is Broken, and How We Can Fix It by Ben Goldacre

behavioural economics, classic study, data acquisition, framing effect, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income per capita, meta-analysis, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Simon Singh, sugar pill, systematic bias, WikiLeaks

Available from: http://www.americanbar.org/newsletter/publications/aba_healt h_esource_home/Volume5_02_smith.html 22 WikiLeaks cables: Pfizer ‘used dirty tricks to avoid clinical trial payout’ – Business – The Guardian [Internet]. [cited 2012 Feb 11]. Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/dec/09/wikileaks-cables-pfizer-nigeria 23 US embassy cable Monday 20 April 2009, 16:00, Abuja 000671 ‘Pfizer reaches preliminary agreement for $75m settlement’ [cited 2012 Feb 11]. Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/203205 24 WikiLeaks cables: Pfizer ‘used dirty tricks to avoid clinical trial payout’ – Business – The Guardian [Internet].

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You may think 1996 was a long time ago, but the facts in these matters are always on a delay, and in contentious or litigated issues the truth can move very slowly. In fact, Pfizer only settled the case out of court in 2009, and several disturbing new elements of what is clearly an ongoing saga emerged in the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables made public in 2010.22 One US diplomatic cable describes a meeting in April 2009 between Pfizer’s country manager and US officials at the American embassy in Abuja, where smears of a Nigerian official involved in the litigation are casually discussed. According to [Pfizer’s country manager], Pfizer had hired investigators to uncover corruption links to Federal Attorney General Michael Aondoakaa to expose him and put pressure on him to drop the federal cases.

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Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/203205 24 WikiLeaks cables: Pfizer ‘used dirty tricks to avoid clinical trial payout’ – Business – The Guardian [Internet]. [cited 2012 Feb11]. Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/dec/09/wikileaks-cables-pfizer-nigeria 25 Jonathan Kimmelman, Charles Weijer, and Eric M Meslin, ‘Helsinki discords: FDA, ethics, and international drug trials,’ The Lancet 373, no. 9657 (January 3, 2009): 13–14. 26 Goodyear MDE, Lemmens T, Sprumont D, Tangwa G. Does the FDA have the authority to trump the Declaration of Helsinki? BMJ. 2009 Apr 21;338(apr21 1):b1559–b1559. Chapter 3: Bad Regulators 1 Royal College of Physicians, London UK. INNOVATING FOR HEALTH. Patients, physicians, the pharmaceutical industry and the NHS.

pages: 538 words: 141,822

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Even when some of them scored a victory in temporarily removing the harmful content from the Internet, they usually helped fuel more interest in what it was they were trying to hide. In fact, an entire organization called WikiLeaks has been built to ensure that all controversial documents that someone wants to get off the Web have a dedicated and well-protected place to stay online. Even the omnipotent American military are finding it hard to take sensitive content off the Internet, as they discovered when WikiLeaks released the video of a 2007 Baghdad air strike that killed several Reuters news staffers as well as a trove of documents related to the war in Afghanistan.

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Even though the notion of “information sovereignty”—the idea that governments might have legitimate concerns over the nationalities and allegiances of those who mediate their information markets—has been somewhat discredited by the fact that so many Chinese and Cuba propaganda officials like to invoke it in their speeches, it is poised to rise in importance in proportion to the role of the Internet in international politics. (Judging by its nervous response to transnational information powerhouses like WikiLeaks, the U.S. government is increasingly concerned about its information sovereignty as well.) Given the amount of research and technology money coming out of America’s defense and intelligence communities, it’s hard to find a technology company that does not have a connection to the CIA or some other three-lettered agency.

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Is it really reasonable to believe that Internet users in authoritarian countries, many of whom have little experience with democratic governance, will suddenly start wearing Thomas Jefferson’s avatar in cyberspace? Isn’t it a bit premature to start touting the benefits of a medium the West itself does not yet know how to comfortably embed into its own political institutions? After all, one can’t be calling for imposing more restrictions on sites like WikiLeaks, as many American policymakers did in the summer of 2010, and be disparaging China and Iran for similar impulses. If it turns out that the Internet does help to stifle dissent, amplify existing inequalities in terms of access to the media, undermine representative democracy, promote mob mentality, erode privacy, and make us less informed, it is not at all obvious how exactly the promotion of so-called Internet freedom is also supposed to assist in the promotion of democracy.

pages: 389 words: 136,320

Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silverglate

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Berlin Wall, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, national security letter, offshore financial centre, pill mill, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technology bubble, urban planning, WikiLeaks

The still unfolding WikiLeaks saga also provided instruction as to how the feds, in trying to pin a crime on their ultimate target, intimidate that target’s supporters. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald noted that his readers, even while believing strongly in WikiLeaks’s cause, were apprehensive about offering their financial support. They worried about being put on a government blacklist, Greenwald wrote, “or, worse, incur[ring] criminal liability for materially supporting a Terrorist organization.”9 While Greenwald pointed out that it would be a stretch to apply this statute to WikiLeaks’s supporters, a Supreme Court ruling in June 2010 nonetheless gave well-informed, rational citizens grounds to fear punishment.

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His sister, Sally Goodson, succinctly and accurately summed up his “crime” in a remembrance of her beloved brother: “Truthful speech to fellow physicians about the off-label use of an FDA-approved drug.” Just as federal prosecutors managed to disrupt the activism of Siobhan Reynolds and derail the medical practice of Dr. Peter Gleason, so the feds in late 2010 took up the task of finding some basis in federal law for putting Julian Assange, founder of the whistleblowing platform WikiLeaks, out of business. The international organization had made 2010 a landmark year for the exposure of government secrets. Among the groundbreaking releases: a video depicting U.S. military forces killing two Reuters journalists and nine Iraqis in 2007; Pentagon files detailing abuse of Iraqi prisoners as well as 15,000 previously unreported civilian deaths; and a steady stream of U.S. diplomatic cables dealing with subjects like Iran’s nuclear program and alleged CIA torture.

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., 53–54 whistleblowers, 88–90, 94 White, Byron, 199 unlawful incitement to violence, 240 White, Kathryn, 17, 19 Urso, Lindy, 163 White, Kevin Hagan, 14–27, 229 336 index White, Patricia, 19, 21 workplace safety, 255–256 white collar sentencing guidelines, 143–144 Wright, Otis D., xxi wiggle room, 37–38 Wrongful Death Accountability Act (proposed), 256 WikiLeaks, xiii–xiv Wu, Tim, l Wilkerson, Dianne, xvii–xviii Williams, Thomas, 163 Xyrem®, xiii, 63–65 Wilmot, Pamela H., 35 Wilson, Joseph, 207 Yeltsin, Boris, xxiii wire fraud Burkle and Stern and, 194 Ferrell and Kurtz and, 234–237 Lay and, 124 Milken and, 99 The New York Times and, 213 Stern, Jared Paul, and, 194 Yukos Oil, xxiii Wiretap Act, 258–260, 263 wiretapping, 257–264 witness bribery, xlvii–xlviii witness cooperation Anzalone and, 19–20, 22 Councilman and, 264 Gleason and, 66, 95–96 Greenberg and, 154–155 journalists and, 205 judges and, 270 KPMG and, 143–147, 149–150 LaFreniere and, 170, 172, 178–179 Martinez and, 7, 10–11 Milken and, 99, 101, 103, 105–106 prosecutorial threats and, xxvi, xlvi–xlix See also plea bargaining Wolf, Mark L., 17 Wood, Kimba, 102–105 Woodlock, Douglas, xvii–xviii, 33, 224–231 Woodrow Wilson Center’s Middle East program, 223 Zehe, Albert, 217–224 Zobel, Rya, 242 Zoladex®, 91

pages: 402 words: 98,760

Deep Sea and Foreign Going by Rose George

Admiral Zheng, air freight, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, bank run, cable laying ship, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Costa Concordia, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Filipino sailors, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, intermodal, Jones Act, London Whale, Malacca Straits, Panamax, pattern recognition, profit maximization, Skype, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

’ – Brings their profoundly impoverished country millions of dollars a year The embassy of Liberia in London offers a figure of $18 million for the revenues provided by the Liberian International Ship and Corporate Register (LISCR) to the government of Liberia, but that dates from 2000. Cables captured by Wikileaks talk of gross revenues to LISCR in 2007 as $38 million, with the revenues then disbursed to the Liberian government of $13 million, or six per cent of the country’s GDP. The latest figures on LISCR’s website put the number of ships flying the Liberian flag at 3750. http://www.liscr.com, cable reference 09MONROVIA70 accessed via http://www.cablegatesearch. net/cable.php?id=09MONROVIA70, cable dated 21 January 2009. – Sovereign Ventures In another cable captured by Wikileaks, a local maritime official describes Sovereign Ventures as ‘pretty cunning’, and mentions an all-expenses-paid trip to Singapore made by the transport minister of Tuvalu, a small Pacific island nation also approached by Sovereign Ventures.

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– By guess and by God House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, op. cit., Ev. 17. 10 Assaulted by deckchairs Matthias Gebauer and Dietmar Hipp, ‘Passengers fought pirates with tables and deck chairs’, Spiegel Online, 28 April 2009. 11 In a monkey house Parker, op. cit., p.13. 12 Which way is it to Somalia? US embassy cable captured by Wikileaks, accessed via http://www.cablegatesearch.net, cable reference 09PORTLOUISE146 – Combat trauma, explosive and intelligence-gathering Captain Alexander Martin, US Marine Corps, ‘Pirates Beware: Force recon has your number’, published on US Naval Institute website, http://www.usni.org, 24 July 2010. 13 USS Nicholas ‘US sentences Somali pirates to life’, Al Jazeera, 15 March 2011

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– Abduwali Abdiqadir Muse Tom Hays, ‘Somali pirate sentenced in NYC to over 33 years in prison’, NBC, 16 February 2011. – There was a stampede Justin Penrose, ‘Prison officers swap Isle of Wight for the Seychelles… to guard Somali pirates’, Daily Mirror, 12 February 2012. – Model prisoners US embassy cable via Wikileaks, accessed at http:// www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=10PORTLOUIS44&q=high-seas-affairs Chapter 7: No Man’s Land 1 None of these is piracy Hugh Williamson, ‘Piracy at Sea: The Humanitarian Impact’, presentation given at International Conference on Piracy at Sea, 16–18 October 2011, Malmo, Sweden. 2 Yo-Ho-Toe David Willetts, ‘Yo-ho-toe: Navy nab pirate with 24 digits’, Sun, 6 February, 2012

pages: 254 words: 68,133

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

Despite raising over $620 million, assembling a campaign staff ten times larger than Trump’s, and recruiting a gaggle of policy experts to advise her, she not only failed to motivate the electorate, but conveyed a distinct cluelessness, as illustrated by her infamous dismissal of Trump’s supporters as “deplorables.”49 Ironically, at least in his critique of globalization and of America’s penchant for unnecessary wars (if not in his lip service to traditional moral norms), Trump managed to come across as both more forthright and more aware. So blame Russian interference, FBI director James Comey, WikiLeaks, angry white males, and Clinton’s failure to visit key swing states all you want. Her deepest problem was that she made herself the chief exponent of an existing policy consensus that large numbers of Americans were keen to discard. Elect me, she claimed in effect, and the Emerald City will be ours.

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Tim Hains, “Hillary Clinton: Voting for Iraq War Was, ‘From My Perspective, My Mistake,’” RealClear Politics (September 7, 2016). 43. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y, accessed September 10, 2018. 44. “Full Transcript: Democratic Presidential Debate,” New York Times (October 4, 2015). 45. https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/, accessed September 10, 2018. 46. Clinton, What Happened, 236. 47. Office of Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Hillary’s Vision for America,” https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/, accessed September 11, 2018. 48. David Jackson, “Donald Trump Accepts GOP Nomination, Says ‘I Alone Can Fix’ System,” USA Today (July 21, 2016). 49.

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veterans Vietnam War voter turnout wage and price controls Walker, Scott Wallace, Henry Wall Street Wall Street (film) Wall Street Journal Walmart War of 1812 wars American narrative and Bill Clinton and Bush Jr. and citizens vs. soldiers and of exhaustion high-tech Hillary Clinton and Obama and perpetual Trump and Wilson’s promise to end working-class and Warshaw, Robert Washington, George Washington Post Watergate scandal wealthy weapons of mass destruction welfare Western civilization Western liberal democracy white heterosexual males White House Correspondents’ Dinner “White Man’s Burden, The” (Kipling) white supremacy Wicker, Tom WikiLeaks Williams College Willkie, Wendell Wilson, Woodrow Winthrop, John Wolfowitz, Paul women elections of 2016 and military service by rights and Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The (Baum) working class life expectancies and military service and stagnant incomes of “world happiness” standings World Trade Organization World War I World War II end of World War III Worst Years of Our Lives, The (Ehrenreich) Wyler, William xenophobia Xi Jinping Yale University Yemen Yugoslavia, disintegration of ALSO BY ANDREW BACEVICH Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism The Long War: A New History of U.S.

pages: 416 words: 106,532

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Future Shock, general purpose technology, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, high net worth, hype cycle, information security, initial coin offering, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, litecoin, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, packet switching, passive investing, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, smart contracts, social web, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, two and twenty, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y2K

After the network had been up and running for over a month, Satoshi wrote of Bitcoin, “It’s completely decentralized, with no central server or trusted parties, because everything is based on crypto proof instead of trust … I think this is the first time we’re trying a decentralized, non-trust-based system.”30 On December 5, 2010, Satoshi showed an unnervingly human side, pleading that WikiLeaks not accept bitcoin as a means of payment after major credit card networks had blocked users from supporting the site. Satoshi wrote, “No, don’t ‘bring it on’. The project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened along the way. I make this appeal to WikiLeaks not to try to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.”31 Shortly thereafter, Satoshi vanished.

…

Otherwise, investors may be confused when they hear someone claim that Bitcoin is no longer relevant or that it’s been displaced. Neither of these claims is true, but it’s nonetheless helpful to understand the motivations and rationale behind those that say they are. BITCOIN’S EARLY YEARS We left Bitcoin in Chapter 1 with Satoshi pleading on December 5, 2010, for WikiLeaks not to accept bitcoin for donations to its site, because bitcoin was still too young and vulnerable to attack. This was about two years after the birth of Bitcoin’s blockchain, during which it had lived a mostly quiet and nerdy life. That was all about to change. A few months after Satoshi’s plea, a software application was released that would make Bitcoin famous.

…

See also Risk absolute returns and, 100 assets and, 94 bitcoin and, 95, 96, 131 cryptoassets and, 92, 97 Ether and, 130–131 markets and, 131 maturation and, 129 Monero and, 130 prices and, 93 returns and, 97 Ripple and, 130 Volume, 301n24 attention to, 208–209 trading and, 123–125 of transactions, 37 Vontobel, 241 Wall Street Journal, 132, 238 Wallets, 211–229, 302n37 Watts per gigahash (W/GH), 215 Websites fraud and, 215 Smith + Crown as, 287 SpendBitcoins.com as, 198 Wellink, Nout, 145 Western Union, 268 W/GH. See Watts per gigahash White papers, 259 cryptoassets and, 173–174 for Ethereum, 53, 54–55 WikiLeaks, 21 Wilcox, Zooko, 49 Wilson, Fred, 224 Winklevoss, Cameron, 235–238 Winklevoss, Tyler, 235–238 Winklevoss bitcoin ETF, 135, 235–238 Wired magazine, 43 Woo, Willy, 201 Woo’s Law, 201–202 World Bank, 158 World Wide Web, xxii. See also Internet Wright, Craig, 4 Yuan (China), 127 Bitcoin and, 134 value of, 133–134 Zcash (ZEC), 45, 49–50 bubble for, 149–150 Zero-knowledge proof (zk-SNARKs), 49–50 About the Authors CHRIS BURNISKE is a cofounder of Placeholder Ventures, a New York firm that specializes in cryptoassets.

pages: 465 words: 109,653

Free Ride by Robert Levine

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, company town, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

In 1996, when most newspapers were still figuring out how to put stories online, Rusbridger, who had been named top editor the previous year, started the Guardian Online as a separate division. During the dot-com bust, as other newspapers cut online staff, he kept investing in digital journalism. More recently, he delivered some of the smartest coverage of the U.S. diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks, dealing with Julian Assange to get the information and asking readers what was worth searching for in the trove of documents. Although more news outlets have started charging for content, Rusbridger believes Internet “paywalls” could hurt journalism itself. “That might be the right direction in business terms, while simultaneously reducing access and influence in editorial terms,” Rusbridger said in a January 2010 speech at the London College of Communication.

…

The demand for U.S. movies isn’t likely to change soon; countries with homegrown film businesses rarely produce effects-driven popcorn fare like Wolverine. But exporting them relies on international recognition of copyright, which the Internet is eroding. Movies also shape the world’s idea of what the United States stands for, as a cable written by an American diplomat in Saudi Arabia released on WikiLeaks showed. “It’s still all about the War of Ideas here, and the American programming on [the television channels] MBC and Rotana is winning over ordinary Saudis in a way that [the U.S.-funded satellite channel] ‘Al Hurra’ and other U.S. propaganda never could,” read the May 2009 message.25 Titled “David Letterman: Agent of Influence,” it mentioned Friends and Desperate Housewives as being particularly popular.

…

This ratio was used in the March 2010 Terra Consultants study, “Building a Digital Economy: The Importance of Saving Jobs in the EU’s Creative Industries.” 22. According to Nash Information Services. 23. According to BigChampagne. 24. This ratio was also used in the Terra Consultants study. 25. Robert Booth, “WikiLeaks Cable: Jihad? Sorry, I Don’t Want to Miss Desperate Housewives,” Guardian, December 7, 2010. 26. Ricardo H. Cavazos Cepeda, Douglas C. Lippoldt, and Jonathan Senft, “Policy Complements to the Strengthening of IPRs in Developing Countries” (OECD Trade Policy Working Paper No. 104, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, September 14, 2010). 27.

pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

If Facebook favors inflammatory campaigns, democracy suffers. August 2016 brought a new wave of stunning revelations. Press reports confirmed that Russians had been behind the hacks of servers at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). Emails stolen in the DNC hack were distributed by WikiLeaks, causing significant damage to the Clinton campaign. The chairman of the DCCC pleaded with Republicans not to use the stolen data in congressional campaigns. I wondered if it were possible that Russians had played a role in the Facebook issues that had been troubling me earlier. Just before I wrote the op-ed, ProPublica revealed that Facebook’s advertising tools enabled property owners to discriminate based on race, in violation of the Fair Housing Act.

…

Senator Warner asked us to share our thoughts on what had happened during the 2016 election. Tristan and I are not investigators. We didn’t have evidence. What we had were hypotheses that explained what we thought must have happened. Our first hypothesis was that Russia had done much more than break into servers at the DNC and the DCCC and post some of what they took on WikiLeaks. There were too many other Russian connections swirling around the election for the hacks to be the whole story. For example, in 2014, a man named Louis Marinelli launched an effort to have California secede from the United States. He initially called the effort Sovereign California, built a presence on Facebook and Twitter to promote his cause, and then released a 165-page report with that name in 2015.

…

The Group would create a filter bubble, where the troll, the bots, and the other members would coalesce around an idea floated by the troll. We also shared a hypothesis that the lack of data dumps from the DCCC hack meant the data might have been used in congressional campaigns instead. The WikiLeaks email dumps had all come from the DNC hack. The DCCC, by contrast, would have had data that might be used for social media targeting, but more significantly, Democratic Party data from every congressional district. The data would have been the equivalent of inside information about Democratic voters.

pages: 398 words: 105,917

Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism by Richard Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blockchain, BRICs, British Empire, business process, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Strachan, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, energy security, Etonian, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks

Ryan, chairman United Financial Group, quoted in ibid. 8. Tim Osborne, managing director of GML, Yukos’s main shareholder at the time, quoted in Catherine Belton, ‘PwC Withdraws Yukos Audits’, Financial Times, 24 June 2007. 9. US Moscow bureau cable dated 30 December 2009, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09MOSCOW3144_a.html. 10. US Moscow bureau cable dated 27 December 2006, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06MOSCOW13123_a.html. 11. PwC annual worldwide report. Income from Russia and Eastern Europe: 2006 $474m; 2007 $659m; 2008 $861m. 12. Economist, 28 June 2007. 13. National Bank of Ukraine press release, 12 July 2017, https://bank.gov.ua/control/en/publish/article?

…

‘I don’t think anyone is going to believe this is anything other than bowing to pressure from the Kremlin,’ was the reaction of one of the company’s main overseas shareholders. ‘I’m astonished to see such a complete lack of backbone in an organization like that.’8 The exact truth behind the story – whether PwC’s clean audit certificates should not have been issued in the first place, or whether they were improperly withdrawn – never fully emerged. The later Wikileaks episode would, however, reveal a diplomatic cable stating that the evidence ‘may show that PwC received [Russian government] pressure to disavow its prior Yukos audits’.9 The one certainty is that PwC continued to prosper in Russia, auditing such state-controlled monoliths as Gazprom and Sberbank.

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., 48 Wachovia, 257 Walker, Steve, 234 Wall Street Journal, 61 Wall Street, New York, 54, 69, 96, 101, 120–21 Walpole, Robert, 40 Walsh, Peter, 88 Wanderley Olivetti, 243 War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), 38 Warner, Jack, 221, 223–4, 227, 228 Warner, Norman, 208 Washington, George, 53 Washington Mutual, 145 Watergate Scandal (1972–4), 212 Waterhouse, Edwin, 49, 54, 217, 233 Watkins, Sherron, 107 Watson, Mark, 161 Watt, James, 42–3, 44 Weber, Max, 3 Wedgwood, Josiah, 43, 44, 70 Weinberger, Mark, 17 Westec, 63, 79 Westmacott, Peter, 208 Whinney, Smith & Whinney, 87 Whiting, John, 179 Wikileaks, 237 Wilson, Harold, 66, 68 window tax, 153 women, 15, 52, 86, 109 woollen industry, 26, 30 workers’ pay, 76 World Congress of Accountants, 56 World Cup, 220, 221, 223, 225, 227 World Economic Forum, 17–18, 242 World Press Freedom Day, 174 WorldCom, 6, 10, 109, 110, 130, 209, 264, 274, 279 Xerox, 109–10 al-Yamamah, Saudi Arabia, 212 York & North Midland Railway, 45 Young, Arthur, 56 Yukos, 237 zaibatsu, 235 Zen-Ruffinen, Michel, 222, 226–8 zero coupon convertible bond (ZCCB), 167, 169 Zug, Switzerland, 220 Zuma, Jacob, 250 Zurich, Switzerland, 219, 224, 225, 227, 228

pages: 371 words: 109,320

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

Fisk alleged in his article on 23 May 2019, however, that the OPCW had deliberately concealed a dissenting fifteen-page assessment which claimed that the damning evidence was more probably placed manually. To Fisk, this was a dangerous act of censorship and a piece of outrageous deceit. ‘It can lead to only one conclusion: that we must resort once more to the Assanges and the Chelsea Mannings – “traitors” who harm Western security in the eyes of their enemies – and the revelations of groups like Wikileaks, if we want to know the truth of what happens in our world and the real story behind the official reports.’ This is a remarkable statement by a man who had been working for a national newspaper for the best part of fifty years. Was Fisk onto something with his report in April 2018? Or was he highly selective in his presentation of what he found?

…

The two most powerful gatekeepers of the day were the press barons Lords Rothermere and Beaverbrook, who stitched up a deal with their fellow proprietors that nothing would be printed (SEE: PROPRIETORS). It was left to an obscure bishop – the Bishop of Bradford – to spill the beans in an address to his clergy. The dam then broke. Our own age has thrown up characters who challenge, subvert and undermine the idea of gatekeepers. In starting Wikileaks, Julian Assange wanted to scatter information around the digital ecosphere – at times in a quite anarchic way (SEE: JOURNALIST). He would occasionally (and generally unhappily) partner with mainstream media organisations in redacting, editing and releasing a small selection of the material he possessed.

…

Although Pilger finds fewer outlets for his written journalism, he continues to make attention-grabbing films, aided now by his loyal fanbase. His last two films have been successfully crowdfunded. His friends include Roger Waters, of Pink Floyd – they have a shared interest in Palestine – and Julian Assange, whom he stands by even though he forfeited his share of the bail money when the Wikileaks founder fled. Pilger’s continuing hard-core appeal is undoubted. His films are rightly critically fêted even when reviewers bemoan a level of Lear-like ranting. In an age when authenticity is a much sought after quality his ‘revolutionary romanticism’ brings him respect. Even if he comes in at too high a volume and with no tone or balance control, the message is unmistakable.

pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

., Law, J., Leaver, A. and Williams, K. (2012) ‘Scapegoats aren’t enough: a Leveson for the banks?’, CRESC Discussion Paper, p 8. 121 Canada, US, Mexico, Peru, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Japan. 122 Wikileaks (2013) ‘Secret Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP)’, https://wikileaks.org/tpp/pressrelease.html. 123 Wikileaks (2013). 124 Monbiot, G. (2013) ‘The lies behind this transatlantic trade deal’, Guardian, 2 December, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/02/transatlantic-free-trade-deal-regulation-by-lawyers-eu-us. 125 Corporate Europe Observatory (2013) ‘A transatlantic corporate bill of rights’, 3 June, http://corporateeurope.org/trade/2013/06/transatlantic-corporate-bill-rights. 126 McDonagh, T. (2013) ‘Unfair, unsustainable and under the radar’, San Francisco: Democracy Center, http://democracyctr.org/new-report-unfair-unsustainable-and-under-the-radar/.

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It has been previously revealed that only three individuals in each TPP nation have access to the full text of the agreement, while 600 ‘trade advisers’ – lobbyists guarding the interests of large US corporations such as Chevron, Halliburton, Monsanto and Walmart – are granted privileged access to crucial sections of the treaty text.122 In Australia the government refused the Senate access to the secret text of the trade deal it was negotiating in Singapore, saying it would be made public only after it had been signed. Similarly, TTIP negotiations have been proceeding largely in secrecy, with all the important information withheld from the public and any democratic debate. Significantly, Wikileaks has been the main source of information about them. While the European Commission has held just 8 meetings with civil society groups about the TTIP, it has had 119 with corporations and their lobbyists. These trade pacts seek to augment the intellectual property of companies, prolonging patents beyond 20 years, enabling them to extract more rent for longer from ‘their’ products.

…

Internet service providers will be required to filter and block content – thereby giving companies control over users’ use of ‘their’ products, stopping sharing or reverse engineering and adaptation. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the internet, may have said ‘this is for everyone’, but some major companies want to privatise and control it for their own interests. Julian Assange of Wikileaks comments: If instituted, the TPP’s intellectual property regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you’re ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs.123 Most alarming of all are the ‘investor–state dispute settlement’ mechanisms: these allow big corporations to sue governments before secretive arbitration panels composed of corporate lawyers, bypassing domestic courts and overriding the will of parliaments!

pages: 525 words: 142,027

CIOs at Work by Ed Yourdon

8-hour work day, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, distributed generation, Donald Knuth, fail fast, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Googley, Grace Hopper, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, Julian Assange, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Multics, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Zipcar

And he rode through CIA and accessed files, which he had no business accessing, but nobody knew. Yourdon: Is he the one that provided it to the WikiLeaks guy, to [Julian] Assange? Or is that someone else? Strassmann: No, Ames provided to the Russians. Yourdon: Yeah. I thought he was the more traditional one. Who is the guy who gave all of the Wiki stuff? Strassmann: Oh, you know, a low-level sergeant. Yourdon: But the same problem? Strassmann: Same problem, exfiltration. And by the way, the stuff that is being reported is defective. The stuff that is reported that he downloaded, he cut a CD, and sent out by mail for WikiLeaks. Yourdon: Really? Strassmann: So now you are dealing with a problem.

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Strassmann: So now you are dealing with a problem. I have several trays in there [pointing to his desktop computer] with CDs. Now, are you going to permit people to burn their own CDs? And, you know, today on a DVD, you can put a big database. Right now, WikiLeaks has a list of all the people who had accounts in the Cayman Islands. You know, that’s a three-million download. Yourdon: Right. [laughter] Amazing. Any other significant changes and developments that you think have really been worth mentioning over your career? Strassmann: Yeah, the awareness of money. You see, it used to be that everybody was budgeting the cost of money.

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., 87 attributes, 108 capital market community, 91 cash/actual trading business, 88 channel marketing departments, 92 cloud computing, 97 CNBC, 89 collaborative technology, 95 collective intelligence, 95 communication skills, 102, 106 conference organizations, 99 consumer marketplace, 94 data center, 90 decision making, 105, 108 economy standpoint, 100 e-mail, 100 Fidelity Investments, 105 financial services, 92 IEEE, 101 innovative impression, 94 Internet, 98 iPad, 97 iPod device, 91 labor laws, 110 listening skills, 106 logical progression, 104 Mac, 96 mainframe, 104 management and leadership, 104, 105 market data system, 89 micro-second response time, 89 mobile applications, 94 multidisciplinary approach, 103 multimedia, 97 multi-national projects, 110 multiprocessing options, 99 network operating system, 103 NYSE Euronext, 87 open outside system, 88 parallel programming models, 99 personal satisfaction, 109 PR function, 106 proclaimed workaholic, 109 real estate business, 88 regulatory and security standpoint, 96 Rolodex, 94 Rubin, Howard, 99 server department, 97 software development, 89 sophisticated technology, 101 technology business, 88 technology integration, 91 trading engines, 90 typewriter ribbon, 94 virtualization, 98 Windows 7, 96 younger generation video games, 93 visual interfaces, 93 Rumsfeld, Donald, 222 S San Diego Fire Department, 224 Santa Clara University, 36 SAS programs, 131 Scott, Tony, 10, 33, 236 Android, 43 Apple Computer, 35 architectural flaw, 44 BASIC and Pascal, 35 Bristol-Myers Squibb, 33 Bunch, Rick (role model), 34 business groups, 42 COO, 39 Corporate Vice President, 33 Corvus disk drive, 36 CSC, 35 Defense department, 45 dogfooding, 37, 38 games and arcades, 35 General Motors, 33 IBM's role, 37 information systems management, 36 integrity factor, 40 Internet, 44 iPhone, 43 IT lifecycle management process, 37 leadership capability, 40 leisure studies, 34 macro-architectural threats, 44 Marriott's Great America, 35 math models, 36 Microsoft Corporation, 33, 36, 38, 41, 44, 46 Microsoft's operational enterprise risk management, 33 parks and recreation, 34 Petri dish, 44 playground leader, 42 product groups, 42 quality and business excellence team, 33 Santa Clara University, 36 Senior Vice President, 33 smartphone, 43 social computing, 38 Sun Microsystems, 36 theme park industry, 35 University of Illinois, 34 University of San Francisco, 36 value-added business, 33 Walt Disney Company, 33 Senior Leadership Technology and Product Marketing, 71 Shakespeare, 30 Shirky, Clay, 220 Sierra Ventures, 191 Silicon Valley companies, 68 Silicon Valley software factories, 323 Skype, 118 Smart Grid Advisory Committee, 177 Smartphones, 20, 27, 43, 54, 217, 238 Social care computer electronic record system, 279 Social computing, 38, 320 Social networking, 51, 53, 56, 58 Society trails technology, 21 SPSS programs, 131 Sridhara, Mittu, 71 Amazon, 76 American Airlines, 72 back-end computation and presentation, 80 banking, 77 B2B and B2C, 85 business/product departments, 82 business work context, 74 buzzword, 77 career aspiration, 73 career spans, 73 coders, 72 cognitive surplus, 79 competitive differentiation, 74 computing power, 78 contribution and energy, 85 convergence, 75 CPU cycles, 78 cross-channel digital business, 71 cultural and geographic implementation, 72 customer experience, 84, 85 customer profile, 76 data visualization, 79, 80 DDoS protection, 81 economies of scale, 77 elements of technology, 72 encryption, 82 end customer, 83 entertainment, 75 ERP system, 72 Facebook, 84 finance and accounting, 73 foster innovation and open culture, 81 friends/mentors/role models, 74 FSA, 76 gambling acts, 81 games, 79 gaming machines, 80 GDS, 72 global organization, 71 Google, 75, 84, 85 Group CIO, Ladbrokes PLC, 71 industry-standard technologies, 77 integrity and competence, 83 IT, 74, 82 KickOff app, 71 land-based casinos, 79 live streaming, 78 London Business School, 73 mobile computing, 78 multimedia, 84 new generation, 84 on-the-job training, 73 open-source computing, 79 opportunity, 80, 83 PCA-compliant, 81 personalization, 76 real-time systems, 74 re-evaluation, 81 reliability and availability, 77 security threats, 80 smart mobile device, 75 technology-intense customer, 85 top-line revenue, 74 trader apps, 82 true context, 73 underpinning business process, 76 virtualization, 78 Visa/MasterCard transactions, 78 Web 3.0 business, 76 web-emerging web channel, 76 Wikipedia, 79, 85 Word documents and e-mail, 82 work-life balance, 84 young body with high miles, 72 Zuckerberg, Mark, 73 Stead, Jerry, 214 Storefront engineering, 212 Strassmann, Paul, 228, 309 agile development, 340 Amazon EC2, 314 America information processors, 322 Annapolis, 340 AT&T, 332 backstabbing culture, 339 BlackBerry, 317 block houses, 319 CFO/CEO position, 337 CIM program, 309 Citibank, 337 Citicorp, 313, 339 cloud computing, 310, 311, 313 coding infrastructure, 341 communication infrastructure, 341 corporate information management, 329 Corporate Information Officer, 309 counterintelligence, 320 cyber-operations, 338 Dell server, 314 Department of Defense, 329, 332 Director of Defense Information, 309 employee-owned technology, 316 enterprise architecture, 316 exfiltration, 313 financial organizations, 320 firewalls and antiviruses, 312 General Foods, 309, 326–328 General Motors, 321, 329, 332 George Mason School of Information Technology, 309 Google apps, 314 government-supported activities, 326 Harvard Business School, 331 HR-related issues, 331 IBM manpower, 311 infiltration, 313 Internet, 316, 322 interoperability, 315, 317, 341 Kraft Foods Inc, 309 MacArthur's intelligence officer, 327 Machiavellian view, 327 mash-up, 316 military service, 331 NASA, 309, 333, 334 police department, economics, 312 powerpoint slides, 324 Radio Shack, 319 senior executive position, 334 service-oriented architecture, 316 Silicon Valley software factories, 323 social computing, 320 Strassmann's concentration camp, 318 structured methodologies, 342 U.S. Navy, 318 Virginia Tech, 323 virtualization, 310, 311 VMware, 311 Web 2.0, 325 WikiLeaks, 320 Windows machine, 317 Xerox Corporation, 309, 326, 330, 338 Xerox video center, 318 Sun Microsystems, 36 Supply-demand organization, 157 T Tech Mahindra, 253, 255 Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC), 19 Telephony, 17 Temares, Lewis, 113 adaptability, 128 American Marketing Society, 113 Apple device, 116 ARPANET and Internet, 117 BBA, 126 camera, 124 CIO responsibilities and duties, 127 classroom information, 119 client and terminal, 124 College of Engineering, University of Miami, 113 combination of degrees, 125 communication and business skills, 126 computer conference, 116 customer service, 130 cyber security, 121 day-to-day administration, 128 digital device, 125 document management, 129 electronic hospital record, 115 encyclopedia and Wikipedia, 115 entrepreneurial characteristics, 114 ERP, 123 Facebook, 116, 121 faculty members, 121 financial industry, 123 Fortune 500 commercial land, 114 Google, 117 GPS technology, 117 grocery store, 130 Hewlett-Packard piece, 129 higher education, 114, 122 high-performance computing, 119 IBM data center, 124 independent entrepreneurs, 114 Information Technology (IT), 113, 118 Jones, Sam, 131 leading-edge technology, 119 mainframe computers, 118 marketing, 122 matchmaker.com, 131 matchmakerexecs.com, 131 MBA, 126 MIT and Berkeley, 120 mobile technology, 115 New-Age, technology-savvy kids, 115 online degree, 121 passion, 128 personal computer, 117 philanthropism, 123 presentation skills, 128 project management, 126 rainmaker.com, 131 retail industry, 123 revenue producer, 123 RIM device, 116, 121, 124 Skype, 118 social media, 115, 116 SPSS and SAS programs, 131 telecommunications, 120 telemedicine, 118 TRS-80s, 129 Twitter, 116 up-to-date technology, 119 video entertainment, 116 voice/data integration, 117 Web 2.0 industry, 132 wireless computers, 115 yellow notepaper, 115 YouTube, 120 Texas, 226 The Associates First Capital Corporation, 47 Toyota, 102 Tracy, Michael, 212 Transmission and distribution companies, 47 Turner, Kevin, 39 Twitter, 244 Ellyn, Lynne, 185 Temares, Lewis, 116 U University computing center, 28 University of Chicago, 104 University of Florida, 139 University of Illinois, 34 University of San Francisco, 36 Utilities Telecom Council, 177 V Verizon Communications, 231, 232 Videoconferencing, 12 Virtual corporations, 241 Virtualization, 310, 311 Visicalc, 24 Vivendi Universal, 134 VMware, 311 Vodafone AirTouch, 231 voice capability, 259 Voice-response unit (VRU), 203 W Wakeman, Dan, 151 advanced placement program, 168 back-end systems, 154, 155 business maxims, 159 business peers, 160, 161 cloud computing, 168 collaborative environment, 160 Computer Choice, 170, 171 consumerization, 166, 170 credibility, 160 decision making, 152 defect-free code, 164 demand-supply model, 157 digital nation, 169 disaster recovery, 154 education business, 160 ElastomerSolutions.com, 151 ETS, 151 mission, 162, 163 packaging and selling information, 163 EXP program, 159 Facebook, 169 fair value and reliable assessments, 159 for-profit business, 152 Gartner CIO Academy, 157 Gen-Xer stuff, 169 Google, 170, 172 Heller, Martha, 171 intellectual property, 171 iPad, 169 IT core competency, 172 engine, 163 industry, 156 skills, 154 ITIL version 3, 158 judgment, 162 leadership and personal integrity, 161 McGenesis, Steve, 155 mentor, 155, 156 metrics and quantitative benchmarking, 166 on-demand services, 168 operational excellence, 163 operations and maintenance, 166 Salesforce, 154 scorecard, 164, 165 security budget, 167 security organization, 167 services and packaging, 171 Six Sigma, 164 smart phones, 170 standardization, 164 Taylor, John, 154–156 virtualization and cloud computing, 167, 168 Wallington, Pat, 175 Wall Street, 23 Wall Street Journal, 168 Walmart, 6, 50 Walt Disney Company, 33 WAN, 259 Web 2.0, 244, 325 Web 3.0 business, 76 Web 2.0 companies, 227 Web infrastructure, 215 Wichita, 226 WikiLeaks, 320 Wikipedia, 79, 85, 115, 185, 220, 291, 292, 303 Williams Companies, 232, 233 WillTell, 233 Wilson, Carl, 225, 228, 229 Wilson, Joe, 338 Wireless network, 59 World Wide Web, 266 X Xerox Corporation, 175, 326, 330, 338 Xerox video center, 318 Y Y2K, 222 YouTube, 20, 65

pages: 574 words: 148,233

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Asperger Syndrome, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, estate planning, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, illegal immigration, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, Jones Act, Kevin Roose, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, messenger bag, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", post-truth, QAnon, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, Twitter Arab Spring, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, work culture , Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2 Amy Chozick, Nicholas Confessore, and Michael Barbaro, “Leaked Speech Excerpts Show a Hillary Clinton at Ease with Wall Street,” New York Times, October 8, 2016, U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/politics/hillary-clinton-speeches-wikileaks.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Amy Chozick, Nicholas Confessore, Steve Eder, Yamiche Alcindor, and Farah Stockman, “Highlights from the Clinton Campaign Emails: How to Deal with Sanders and Biden,” New York Times, October 10, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/10/us/politics/hillary-clinton-emails-wikileaks.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Gregor Aisch, Jon Huang, and Cecilia Kang, “Dissecting the #PizzaGate Conspiracy Theories,” New York Times, December 10, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/10/business/media/pizzagate.html.

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But in 2016, thanks to the internet, “an individual user with no track record or reputation can in some cases reach as many readers as Fox News, CNN, or the New York Times,” Allcott and Gentzkow wrote. Pizzagate was stoked by twin events that damaged Clinton in the closing days of the 2016 campaign.[3] In early October, Wikileaks released thousands of pages of emails stolen from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, released, interestingly enough, on the same day as the Access Hollywood video, in which Trump was recorded lewdly boasting about groping women. Some of the emails embarrassed Clinton and the emails’ senders, detailing Clinton’s paid speeches to special interests, staff backbiting, and craven efforts to curry favor.[4] Many of the emails, though, concerned gruntwork like ordering takeout food.

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It’s going to get out there, but at least when you google the new restaurant, it’s not the first thing that comes up, and my staff isn’t getting attacked.” Alefantis’s lawyers went on to represent the family of Seth Rich, a young Democratic National Committee staffer gunned down in July 2016 in what police believe was a botched robbery attempt. Far-right conspiracists wrongly linked Rich to the theft of thousands of DNC emails published by Wikileaks during the campaign, speculating that Hillary Clinton ordered his killing in retribution. Police, Rich’s family, and federal investigators repeatedly debunked those false claims. But the theories persisted, spread by a coterie of Trump confidants, including Roger Stone and Sean Hannity, the Fox News commentator and Trump whisperer.

pages: 840 words: 224,391

Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel by Max Blumenthal

airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, centre right, cognitive dissonance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, European colonialism, facts on the ground, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, intentional community, knowledge economy, megacity, moral panic, Mount Scopus, nuclear ambiguity, open borders, plutocrats, surplus humans, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, urban planning, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

I have relied heavily on Linda Forsell, Joseph Dana, George Hale, Lia Tarachansky, David Sheen, and Jesse Rosenfeld as journalistic colleagues and as friends. This book would not have been possible without them. NOTES CHAPTER 1: TO THE SLAUGHTER 3to the brink of collapse: Wikileaks, “Cashless in Gaza,” Reuters, January 5, 2011, http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/wikileaks-israel-aimed-to-keep-gaza-economy-on-brink-of-collapse-1.335354. According to US officials at the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, Israeli officials wanted Gaza’s economy “functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis.” 3It’s like an appointment: Steven Erlanger, “Hamas Leader Faults Israeli Sanction Plan,” New York Times, February 18, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/18/international/middleeast/18mideast.html?

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v=KntmpoRXFX4. 4will bring upon themselves: “Israeli Minister Warns of Palestinian ‘Holocaust,’” Guardian, February 29, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/29/israelandthepalestinians1. 5massacre and act of criminal aggression: Julia Fitzpatrick, “Gaza on Their Minds: The Effect of ‘Operation Cast Lead’ in Mobilizing Palestinian Action,” Al Nakhlah, Online Journal of Southwest Asia and Islamic Civilization, Spring 2011, p. 6, http://fletcher.tufts.edu/Al-Nakhlah/~/media/6F1D365405694E1B88142EB94DB5D443.pdf. 5Palestinian Authority forces swarmed: Ibid. 5Though Abbas refused: Barak Ravid, “WikiLeaks Exposé: Israel Tried to Coordinate Gaza War with Abbas,” Ha’aretz, November 28, 2010, http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/wikileaks-expose-israel-tried-to-coordinate-gaza-war-with-abbas-1.327487. CHAPTER 2: THE PEACE CAMP 6the sound of knocking: Gidi Weitz, “No Hard Feelings,” Ha’aretz, March 18, 2011, http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/no-hard-feelings-1.350004. 6I am living with the constant tension: Ibid. 6The time has come to act: Cited in Roni Singer-Heruti, “New Meretz Leftist Party Launches Campaign against IDF Operation in Gaza,” Ha’aretz, January 11, 2009, http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/new-meretz-leftist-party-launches-campaign-against-idf-operation-in-gaza-1.267869. 6understandable and acceptable: Johann Hari, “Israel’s Voice of Reason: Amoz Oz on War, Peace, and Life as an Outsider,” Independent, March 19, 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israels-voice-of-reason-amos-oz-on-war-peace-and-life-as-an-outsider-1648254.html. 6not a word about civilian casualties: David Grossman, “Fight Fire with a Ceasefire,” New York Times, December 30, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/opinion/31grossman.html?

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v=S3r6VxDkvjw. 370Don’t Shake Hands with Apartheid: Joseph Dana, “Great-Grandson of S.Y. Agnon Tells Ian McEwan Not to Shake Hands with Apartheid,” Mondoweiss, February 23, 2011, http://mondoweiss.net/2011/02/life-under-the-occupation.html. CHAPTER 67: THE CRAZY VILLAGE 372We don’t do Gandhi: “WikiLeaks: Israel Irked by West Bank Protests,” Ynetnews, September 3, 2011, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4117301,00.html. 372recently seized: James Cunningham, Wikileaks cable reference ID: 10TELA-VIV344, http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=10TELAVIV344. 372even demonstrations: Ibid. 372The Scream: Adam Rawnsley, ‘“The Scream’: Israel Blasts Protestors with Sonic Gun,” Wired, September 23, 2011, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/the-scream-israel-blasts-rioters-with-sonic-gun. 373the realities of the occupation: Max Blumenthal, “In Israel, Non-Violent Solidarity Activist Goes to Prison, Anti-Gay Terrorist Gets Community Service,” MaxBlu-menthal.com, December 28, 2010, http://maxblumenthal.com/2010/12/in-israel-non-violent-solidarity-activist-gets-prison-anti-gay-terrorist-gets-community-service. 373organized army of boys: Yair Altman, “Secrets of Nabi Saleh Protests,” Ynetnews, March 26, 2011, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4047503,00.html. 374You never know their names: Harriet Sherwood, “Former Israeli Soldiers Disclose Routine Mistreatment of Palestinian Children,” Guardian, August 26, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/26/israeli-soldiers-mistreatment-palestinian-children. 374That specific kid: Ibid. 375armed and unarmed: Nabi Saleh resident Ahlam Tamimi escorted a suicide bomber to a pizza parlor in Jerusalem, serving as an accomplice in an attack in which 15 people were killed; see Ben Ehrenreich, “Is This Where the Third Intifada Will Start?”

pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Vermeulen, Bruce M. Campbell, and John S.I. Ingram, “Climate Change and Food Systems,” Annual Review of Environment 37 (2012): 195; personal email communication with Steven Shrybman, April 23, 2014. 32. “Secret Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP)—Environment Consolidated Text,” WikiLeaks, January 15, 2014, https://wikileaks.org; “Summary of U.S. Counterproposal to Consolidated Text of the Environment Chapter,” released by RedGE, February 17, 2014, http://www .redge.org.pe. 33. Traffic refers to containerized port traffic, measured by twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs). From 1994 to 2013 global containerized port traffic increased from 128,320,326 to an estimated 627,930,960 TEUs, an increase of 389.4 percent: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, “Review of Maritime Transport,” various years, available at http://unctad.org.

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., “Nauru,” in Climate Change in the Pacific, Scientific Assessment and New Research, Volume 2: Country Reports, Australian Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO, 2011, pp. 134, 140; “Fresh Water Supplies a Continual Challenge to the Region,” Applied Geoscience and Technology Division, Secretariat of the Pacific Community, press release, January 18, 2011. 15. Glenn Albrecht, “The Age of Solastalgia,” The Conversation, August 7, 2012. 16. Kendall, “Doomed Island.” 17. “Nauru: Phosphate Roller Coaster; Elections with Tough Love Theme,” August 13, 2007, via WikiLeaks, http://www.wikileaks.org. 18. Nick Bryant, “Will New Nauru Asylum Centre Deliver Pacific Solution?” BBC News, June 20, 2013; Rob Taylor, “Ruling Clouds Future of Australia Detention Center,” Wall Street Journal, January 30, 2014; “Nauru Camp a Human Rights Catastrophe with No End in Sight,” Amnesty International, press release, November 23, 2012; “What We Found on Nauru,” Amnesty International, December 17, 2012; “Hundreds Continue 11-Day Nauru Hunger Strike,” ABC News (Australia), November 12, 2012. 19.

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“Trade policy and rules actually drive climate change in a very structural way in respect of food systems,” Shrybman stressed in an interview.31 The habit of willfully erasing the climate crisis from trade agreements continues to this day: for instance, in early 2014, several negotiating documents for the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, a controversial new NAFTA-style trade deal spanning twelve countries, were released to the public via WikiLeaks and the Peruvian human rights group RedGE. A draft of the environment chapter had contained language stating that countries “acknowledge climate change as a global concern that requires collective action and recognize the importance of implementation of their respective commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).”

pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

The number and reach of these highly profitable transnational organized cyber-crime rings have grown, and the security intelligence firm CrowdStrike was actively tracking more than fifty such major organizations globally. Besides transnational organized crime syndicates, hacktivists—politically motivated cyber attackers—represent one of the most influential and powerful groups in cyberspace. Anonymous, LulzSec, AntiSec, WikiLeaks, and the Syrian Electronic Army fall into this group and launch their attacks in retaliation for perceived injustices. Personalities such as Julian Assange, Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, and Edward Snowden have become household names for challenging some of the world’s most powerful institutions and for releasing data that others would most certainly have preferred remain hidden.

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The group’s motto, “We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us,” manifests its organizational ethos: “The corrupt fear us. The honest support us. The heroic join us.” When MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal all agreed to stop funneling donations to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks organization, Anonymous responded by launching a series of effective cyber attacks against the financial firms. Anonymous is strongly against what it perceives to be rigid antipiracy laws, and it took credit for an earlier attack against the Sony PlayStation Network in response to Sony’s support of U.S. antipiracy legislation known as the Stop Online Piracy Act.

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Eventually, your personal details will fall into the hands of criminal cartels, competitors, and even foreign governments. While big data may be the new oil, our personal data are more like weapons-grade plutonium—dangerous, long lasting, and once they are leaked, there’s no getting them back. Even the federal government is realizing it too can fall victim to this problem. Just look at the 2010 WikiLeaks debacle and the hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic cables Private Chelsea (Bradley) Manning was able to steal while working as an army intelligence analyst in Iraq. Of course just a few years later, the world would meet Edward Snowden, who used his skills and access as an NSA system administrator to steal millions of highly classified files from America and its allies and share them with journalists for publication online.

pages: 294 words: 80,084

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact by Steven Kotler

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, Dennis Tito, epigenetics, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, interchangeable parts, Kevin Kelly, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, North Sea oil, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, theory of mind, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

More important, these actions were not isolated; the president’s bedsheets, drinking glasses, and any other objects with which he has contact are routinely gathered — they are later destroyed or sanitized — to try to keep would-be malefactors from stealing his genetic material. And the US isn’t only playing defense. According to a 2010 release of secret cables by Wikileaks, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has directed our overseas embassies to surreptitiously collect DNA samples from foreign heads of state and senior UN officials. Clearly, the United States sees strategic advantage in knowing the specific biology of world leaders; it would be surprising if other nations didn’t feel the same.

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The FBI has far greater resources at its disposal than the Secret Service (almost 36,000 people work there, compared to roughly 6,500 at the Secret Service), yet, five years ago, the FBI concluded the only way it could keep up with biological threats was by involving the whole of the life science community in the endeavor. So why go further? Why take the seemingly radical step of releasing the president’s genome to the rest of the world instead of just a security-cleared group? As the aforementioned Wiki-leaked, State Department cables makes clear, the surreptitious gathering of genetic material has already begun. It would not be surprising if the president’s DNA has already been collected and analyzed and our adversaries are merely waiting for the right opportunity to exploit the results. The assault could even be homegrown, the result of increasingly divisive party politics and the release of unscrupulous attack ads.

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., 168, 171 thorium reactors, 119–20 Three Mile Island, 110, 118 Thurmond, Strom, 213–14 Time on the Cross: An Economic Analysis of American Negro Slavery (Fogel & Engerman), 52–53 Tito, Dennis, 145 Toshiba, 121 Toth, Lou, 85–86 tourism, space, 129–30 transcendent states, 45–47, 165 trans fats, 198 transposable elements, 136–38 traveling wave reactors, 121 Truax, Robert, 101 Truax Engineering, 101 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin, 145 Tsukamoto, Ann, 216 “The Tunnel Under the World” (Pohl), 27 tunnel vision, 41–42 UK Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, 115 United Nations, 217 unity, cosmic, 45–47, 165, 175 US Air Force, 241 US Department of Energy, 119, 228 van Lommel, Pim, 40, 42 Venter, Craig, 228, 230, 231, 247 Vergel, Nelson, 196–97 Virgin Galactic, 129 vision artificial implants for, xiv, xvi, 26, 61–77 cost of artificial, 75–76 effects of electricity on, 79, 80–81 functional mobility in, 67 neuroprosthesis for, 67 religions on, 74 retinal implants for, 66–67 starry-night effect in, 64–65 tunnel, in near-death experiences, 41–42 “The Voice” (Butcher), 37 Walter Reed hospital, 15, 17 Walton, Ernest, 109 water impoundments, 88–90 Waterman, Waldo, 100 Watson (artificial intelligence), 223 weapons of mass destruction, 227, 245–46 Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, 236–37 weightlifters, 189–90 Weiland, James, 76–77 Weissman, Irv, 203–7, 209, 211, 215–17 Weldon, Dave, 215 Weldon Bill, 215 West Nile virus, 133, 134 What Technology Wants (Kelly), xvi–xvii Whinnery, James, 40–42 Wick, Douglas, 213–14 Wikileaks, 224, 242 Wimmer, Eckard, 233 Winkler, Allan, 110 World Health Organization (WHO), 61 Wright Brothers, 72–73 XPRIZE, xi–xiii, 129, 141, 151 yellow fever, 133, 137 Yesalis, Charles, 195 You, Edward, 236–37 Yushchenko, Viktor, 238 Zee-Aero, 105 Zucker, Jerry, 213–14

Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents by Lisa Gitelman

Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, Charles Babbage, computer age, corporate governance, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, national security letter, Neal Stephenson, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, optical character recognition, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Turing test, WikiLeaks, Works Progress Administration

Each episode concerns a different medium for the reproduction of documents, since reproduction is one clear way that documents are affirmed as such: one of the things people do with documents is copy them, whether they get published variously in editions (like the Declaration of Independence, for instance), duplicated for reference (like the photocopy of my passport that I carry in my suitcase), sort of or semipublished for internal circulation (like a restaurant menu), or proliferated online (mirrored and cached like the many documents in Wikileaks). Although reproduction is one of the functions that have helped people to reckon documents as documents—as I hope to elaborate below—the core function of the document genre is something else entirely. The word “document” descends from the Latin root docer, to teach or show, which suggests that the document exists in order to document.

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And as much as the lack of an exemplary pdf may stem from contrasts between analog and digital, it must follow, as well, from the fact that documents in the era of pdf technology have become the objects of relational databases. One of the tasks of this chapter, then, is to broach the question of how or whether documents are somehow different when aggregated and served up by databases rather than collected and fished out of filing cabinets. Consider the size and complexity of Wikileaks, for example, beside the Pentagon Papers. This is of course only partly a question of scale. At the same time that I have failed to identify an exemplary pdf , I have also resisted as much as possible focusing on pdf s solely through the lens of Adobe Systems or the entrepreneurs and engineers who developed the format.

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Works Progress Administration, 13, 60, 62, 64, 75 video store, 109–10 videocassette recorders and home systems (vcrs and vhss), 108–10 Vietnam War, 16, 17, 85–90, 93–94 Voices from the Press: A Collection (Benton), 49–50 Warner, Michael, 8, 9, 149 Warnock, John, 117, 121, 123–25, 130; “The Camelot Project,” 123–24 210 INDEX Watergate, 17, 86, 95–96 Weber, Max, 10, 31, 93 Wells, H. G., 53 Wershler, Darren, 31, 118 Western Union, 33 White, Michelle, 128 Whitman, Walter, 50 Wikileaks, 1, 117 Wikipedia, 18, 74, 75, 100, 101 Williams, E. F., 35 Williams, Raymond, 154n42 Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States, 107, 108 Williams’ Cincinnati Directory, 43 Willinsky, John, 132 Willis, N. P., 50, 51 Winship, Michael, 46, 153n28 Wired, 124, 127 Wissler, Clark, 58, 61 Wong, Angela Pan, 133 Woods, Benjamin, 140 Woods, Rose Mary, 96 Worcester and Nashua Railroad Co., 46 Worcester Music Hall, 46 World Congress of Libraries and Bibliography, 54 W.

pages: 267 words: 82,580

The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

3D printing, 4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, carbon footprint, Cody Wilson, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, degrowth, deindustrialization, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, eternal september, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, global village, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Lewis Mumford, life extension, litecoin, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mondo 2000, moral hazard, moral panic, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, pre–internet, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

His inspiration came from another cypherpunk from the mailing list named John Young, who in 1996 founded the website cryptome.org as a place to publish leaked documents – especially any confidential government records and reports. Assange had contacted Young in 2006, saying ‘you knew me under another name from the cypherpunk days’. He told Young of his plan to create a new organisation, which he called WikiLeaks, which he believed would change the world: ‘New technology and cryptographic ideas permit us to not only encourage document leaking, but to facilitate it directly on a mass scale. We intend to place a new star in the political firmament of man.’ For almost a decade, the cypherpunk mailing list was the centre of the crypto world.

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Today there are hundreds of people like Amir and Miguel working on ingenious ways of keeping online secrets or preventing censorship, often in their own time, and frequently crowdfunded by users sympathetic to the cause. One is Smári McCarthy. Smári is unashamedly geeky: a computer whizz and founding member of the radical Icelandic Pirate Party. He used to work with Julian Assange in the early days of WikiLeaks. Smári isn’t really a cypherpunk – he resists any association with Ayn Rand’s philosophy – but he does believe that privacy online is a fundamental right, and worries about state surveillance of the net. He also believes that crypto is a key part of a political project. He wants you to encrypt all your emails with PGP, even (or especially) those you send to friends and family members.

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To make matters worse, Tor Hidden Services frequently change addresses. To help visitors, there are several ‘index’ pages that list current addresses. In 2013, the most well known of these index pages was called the Hidden Wiki. The Hidden Wiki looks identical to Wikipedia, and lists dozens of the most popular sites in this strange parallel internet: the WikiLeaks cache, censorship-free blogs, hacker chat forums, the New Yorker magazine’s whistleblower drop box. In late 2013 I was browsing the Hidden Wiki, searching for the infamous dark net market Silk Road. As I scrolled down, I suddenly spotted a link for a child pornography website. I stopped. There was nothing strikingly different about it – a simple link to an address comprised of a string of numbers and letters, like every other website listed here.

pages: 296 words: 86,610

The Bitcoin Guidebook: How to Obtain, Invest, and Spend the World's First Decentralized Cryptocurrency by Ian Demartino

3D printing, AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, buy low sell high, capital controls, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, forensic accounting, global village, GnuPG, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, initial coin offering, Jacob Appelbaum, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Oculus Rift, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, printed gun, QR code, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, Skype, smart contracts, Steven Levy, the medium is the message, underbanked, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

This is also a freedom issue. Centralized and legacy systems have the ability to prevent users from sending money to certain entities. At the height of the controversy over a leaked video showing American helicopter pilots joking while shooting people who seemed to be civilians, for instance, whistleblower site Wikileaks lost PayPal and credit card support.7 Although there might not be any legal basis for this type of ban, individual companies can decide to prevent individual people from sending money to support causes they believe in. Bitcoin, along with a strong legal defense, has helped these individuals get around such bans.

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Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World. (New York, Basic Books, 1994, Reprint 1995) 6 Zetter, Kim. “Bullion and Bandits: The Improbable Rise and Fall of E-Gold.” Wired.com. September 6, 2009. Accessed May 20, 2015. http://www.wired.com/2009/06/e-gold/. 7 Barnes, Julian and Jeanne Whalen. “PayPal Drops WikiLeaks Donation Account.” The Wall Street Journal, December 4, 2010. Accessed March 10, 2015. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704767804575654681242073308. 8 “Transfer fees.” The Economist. December 15, 2010. Accessed March 15, 2015. http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/12/remittances. 9 Vigna, Paul, and Michael Casey.

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Many of these sites use the .onion domain extension and have a long string of seemingly random letters and numbers as their URL. Although the number of those who are using the Deep Web for illegal activity undoubtedly increases as you move deeper into it, the Deep Web still serves legitimate purposes. Wikileaks started out as a Deep Web service, and the ability of journalists to communicate with sources and of whistleblowers to release information anonymously is an important tool for freedom that should be protected at all costs. Of course, privacy is an important concern for others besides cypherpunks, Bitcoin enthusiasts, and criminals.

pages: 309 words: 79,414

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

Purpose of time being spent here. Q Conspiracy theories often have obscure origins – some even start as a joke or prank. The Book of Q, an early collection of Q’s messages, suggested that QAnon might be ‘the longest lasting LARP (Live Action Role Play, aka prank)’ in the history of 4chan.20 Several media outlets and Wikileaks have also speculated that QAnon started as a hoax that got out of hand.21 BuzzFeed even ran an article with the headline ‘It’s looking extremely likely that QAnon is a leftist prank on Trump supporters’.22 Anonymous blames 0hour1, a troll who was excluded from the hacker collective.23 There are a few hints.

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Available at https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/man-brother-murder-charge-sword. 20‘The Book of Q: The biggest drop ever’, 20 November 2017. Available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G6guY_q-PzZfdJM4ItzmQIF9gfPrOQxk/view. 21See for example https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/its-looking-extremely-likely-that-qanon-is-probably-a and https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1001139404805738498. 22Ryan Broderick, ‘People Think This Whole QAnon Conspiracy Theory is A Prank on Trump Supporters’, Buzzfeed, 8 August 2018. Available at https://web.archive.org/web/20180806121403/. 23See the Anonymous tweet: https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews/status/1025454095228985349. 24Stewart Home, Mind Invaders: A Reader in Psychic Warfare, Cultural Sabotage and Semiotic Terrorism (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997). 25Will Sommer, ‘Why a Red “X” is the New Symbol of Conservative Twitter’, Daily Beast, 8 October 2018.

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C. here Süddestsche Zeitung here suicide gender paradox here Sunday Times here Suomenuskos here Surabaya bombing here, here Survival Food here swastikas here, here, here, here, here, here Swift, Taylor here Taken in Hand (TiH) here Tarrant, Brenton here, here, here Taylor, Jared here TAZ here Team System DZ here Tech Against Terrorism here tech firms, business models here Terror Agency Sisters here, here, here terrorist instruction manuals here, here Terrorsphära here, here The Red Pill (TRP) here, here, here, here Thompson, Kevin here Thunberg, Greta here Thurston, Nick here Tichys Einblick here Time Warner here Tinder here, here, here, here Törvény, Fehér here Trad Wives here, here, here, here, here Traditional Britain Conference here Traditionalist Worker Party here Traini, Luca here tribalism here, here ‘trigger’ (the word) here Troll Watch here, here trolls, rise of here True Lies QNN here Trump, Donald here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Charlottesville rally and here, here and Great Replacement theory here hackers and here New Balance shoes and here pro-Trump memes here QAnon and here, here, here, here, here retweets Britain First videos here RWU and here Trump Singles here Truth Decay here Tufecki, Zeynep here Twitch here Uhud, Battle of here UKIP here, here, here Unite the Right here, here, here United Cyber Caliphate here, here urban environment, and extremism here US House Intelligence Committee here US National Security Agency here Uyghurs here vaccines here van den Bruck, Arthur Moeller here Van Langenhove, Dries here Vanguard America here Vatican, the here Verma, Sajal here Viacom here Vietnam War here Vigrid here violence, against women here, here, here virtual private networks (VPNs) here, here, here, here visual illusions here VK here Vlaams Belang here Voat here VoIP apps here Vox party here, here VOX-Pol here Wachowski, Lana and Lilly here, here Wallace, Hunter here WannaCry attack here WASP Love here, here, here Waters, Anne Marie here ‘Wave, The’ here Weev (Andrew Auernheimer) here, here Weiss, Michael here Welsh, Edgar here Westminster Bridge, GI banner on here White Date here ‘white genocide’ here, here, here, here, here White Rex here, here Whitesingles here Wiebe, Ed here Wikileaks here Willinger, Markus here Wilson, Andrew here Wintrich, Lucian here Wolfsangel here Wolves of Odin here Women’s March here women’s voting rights here Wright, Matthew P. here Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) here, here, here YouTube, prioritises extremism here Zerohedge here ZOG (Zionist Occupied Government) here, here, here Zuckerberg, Mark here, here A Note on the Author Julia Ebner is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, where she leads projects on online extremism, disinformation and hate speech.

pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Bizarrely, the endgame utopias of even the most ardent high-tech libertarians always seem to take socialist turns. The joys of life will be too cheap to meter, we imagine. So abundance will go ambient. This is what diverse cyber-enlightened business concerns and political groups all share in common, from Facebook to WikiLeaks. Eventually, they imagine, there will be no more secrets, no more barriers to access; all the world will be opened up as if the planet were transformed into a crystal ball. In the meantime, those true believers encrypt their servers even as they seek to gather the rest of the world’s information and find the best way to leverage it.

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Broadly speaking, that narrative counterpoises the inclusiveness, quickness, and sophistication of online social processes against the sluggish, exclusive club of old-fashioned government or corporate power. It’s a narrative that unites activists in the Arab Spring with Chinese and Iranian online dissidents, and with tweeters in the United States, Pirate Parties in Europe, nouveau high-tech billionaires, and “folk hero” rogue outfits like WikiLeaks. That particular idea of revolution misses the point about how power in human affairs really works. It cedes the future of economics and places the entire burden on politics. In our digital revolution, we might depose an old sort of dysfunctional center of power only to erect a new one that is equally dysfunctional.

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CHAPTER 17 Clout Must Underlie Rights, if Rights Are to Persist Melodramas Are Tenacious My conviction that building a strong middle class in the information economy must underlie the pursuit of rights unfortunately pits me against the kinds of rascals I would otherwise tend to feel more organically at home with. It would perhaps feel better to go with the flow and celebrate outfits like WikiLeaks, but I believe that would ultimately be a self-defeating choice. We who are enthusiastic about the Internet love the fact that so many people contribute to it. It’s hard to believe that once upon a time people worried about whether anyone would have anything worthwhile to say online! I have not lost even a tiny bit of this aspect of our formative idealism from decades ago.

pages: 540 words: 119,731

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech by Geoffrey Cain

Andy Rubin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, business intelligence, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double helix, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Hacker News, independent contractor, Internet of things, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, patent troll, Pepsi Challenge, rolodex, Russell Brand, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

Samsung managers warned against: Michell, Samsung Electronics and the Struggle for Leadership, pp. 19–20. “The company made semiconductors”: Lee, Lee Kun-hee Essays, p. 15. “Everything appears well-organized”: U.S. Embassy Seoul “OPIC Finance Projects” (telegram), July 24, 1975, Wikileaks canonical ID 1975SEOUL5571_b, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1975SEOUL05571_b.html. agreed to finance part: Kang, The Samsung Electronics Myth and Its Secret, p. 195. seized B.C.’s broadcasting station: “Closure of TBC,” Dong-A Ilbo, November 29, 1980, https://newslibrary.naver.com/viewer/index.nhn?

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Soon-sil had befriended: Choe Sang-hun, “A Presidential Friendship Has Many South Koreans Crying Foul,” The New York Times, October 27, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/world/asia/south-korea-choi-soon-sil.html. “Rumors are rife that”: Alexander Vershbow (U.S. ambassador to South Korea), cable sent on July 20, 2007, Public Library of U.S. Diplomacy, WikiLeaks, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07SEOUL2178_a.html. Samsung bought an $830,000 racehorse: Kim Min-kyung, Chung Yoo-ra: “I Don’t Think Samsung Was Unaware of Exchanging Horses,” Hankyoreh, July 12, 2017. This source is in Korean. The author’s researcher translated the headline and text into English.

pages: 684 words: 173,622

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright

Albert Einstein, call centre, Columbine, hydroponic farming, Jeff Hawkins, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Peoples Temple, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

, p. 167. 24 “neither Buddha nor Jesus”: Ability, unsigned, undated (probably 1958), issue 81, reprint of an editorial from Certainty, vol. 5, no. 10. 25 “Note several large”: WikiLeaks, “Church of Scientology Collected Operating Thetan Documents,” March 24, 2008, wikileaks.org/wiki/Church_of_Scientology_collected_Operating_Thetan_documents; Revised Declaration of Hana Whitfield, Church of Scientology vs. Steven Fishman and Uwe Geertz, US District Court, Central District of California, April 4, 1994. 26 “Laughter comes from the rear”: WikiLeaks, “Church of Scientology Collected Operating Thetan Documents,” March 24, 2008, wikileaks.org/wiki/Church_of_Scientology_collected_Operating_Thetan_documents. 27 “The material involved”: Hubbard, “Ron’s Journal ’67,” taped lecture. 28 “parlor tricks”: Interview with Jefferson Hawkins. 29 “OT Phenomena”: Advance!

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When Haggis reached OT VII, which was the peak at the time, he still felt confused and unsatisfied. At the top of the OT pyramid, the thetan was promised the ability to control “thought, life, form, matter, energy, space and time, subjective and objective.” The final exercise (according to documents obtained by WikiLeaks—Haggis refused to talk about it) was “Go out to a park, train station or other busy area. Practice placing an intention into individuals until you can successfully and easily place an intention into or on a Being and/or a body.” But even if you could do that, how would you know if you succeeded?

The Secret World: A History of Intelligence by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francisco Pizarro, Google Earth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Julian Assange, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, two and twenty, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, éminence grise

.* That intelligence continues to generate headline news has been due not merely to the prolonged official enquiries into 9/11 and the Iraq War but also to unprecedented amounts of classified material leaked by ‘whistle-blowers’. In 2010 the WikiLeaks website, founded by Julian Assange, began publishing online documents downloaded from State Department and military databases by US Army Private Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning.† The 251,287 confidential documents passed by Manning to WikiLeaks were by far the largest number ever leaked by a whistleblower.67 When Mike Pompeo became the CIA’s director early in 2017, he denounced WikiLeaks as ‘a non-state hostile intelligence service’.68 Like much other reporting on twenty-first-century intelligence, the enormous global publicity given to WikiLeaks has been mostly devoid of historical perspective.

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.† The 251,287 confidential documents passed by Manning to WikiLeaks were by far the largest number ever leaked by a whistleblower.67 When Mike Pompeo became the CIA’s director early in 2017, he denounced WikiLeaks as ‘a non-state hostile intelligence service’.68 Like much other reporting on twenty-first-century intelligence, the enormous global publicity given to WikiLeaks has been mostly devoid of historical perspective. Publication of sensitive American diplomatic documents began, on a far more modest scale, almost one and a half centuries before WikiLeaks – not by the press but by the US government. In the later nineteenth century some American ambassadors became reluctant to send despatches to Washington which criticized their host governments for fear that the State Department would make them public.69 Some of the diplomatic despatches published by WikiLeaks were quite similar to those released by the State Department over a century earlier. One of the best-publicized documents during Tunisia’s ‘Jasmine Revolution’, which overthrew the corrupt authoritarian regime of President Ben Ali at the beginning of the Arab Spring in January 2012, was a report to Washington by the US ambassador to Tunisia, Robert Godec, in July 2009, published by WikiLeaks: Whether it’s cash, services, land, property, or yes, even your yacht, President Ben Ali’s family is rumored to covet it and reportedly gets what it wants . . .

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‘This letter’, he told Blaine, ‘must be treated as perfectly confidential, for your own eye and that of the president alone. My own life would not be safe here for one day if it were made public.’ Fortunately for Christiancy, by the time his letter made newspaper headlines he had left Lima. Whereas nowadays US administrations criticize the media for publishing WikiLeaks and other classified official documents, in the late nineteenth century the roles were reversed. There was widespread support for the attack on the State Department by the New York Herald-Tribune: ‘If it is possible for confidential dispatches to be divulged by so important an office as the State Department, the result will be that ministers will not send such dispatches, but prefer to communicate their substance orally.’

pages: 442 words: 135,006

ZeroZeroZero by Roberto Saviano

Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, call centre, credit crunch, double entry bookkeeping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Kinder Surprise, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open borders, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Another cable, which predates their meeting, talks of potential ties between Firtaš and Mogilevic, suggested by their shared investment in certain offshore companies and the fact that they have the same lawyer. These ties had already been noted in a previous intermediary gas company, Eural Trans Gas. But that same lawyer sues the Guardian for publishing documents circulated by WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange in an article by Luke Harding titled “WikiLeaks Cables Link Russian Mafia Boss to EU Gas Supplies.” In the correction that the London paper was forced to print on December 9, 2010, “to clear up any subsequent mistranslation or misunderstanding of their meeting,” Firtaš denies having any connection to Mogilevic other than a simple acquaintance.

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In 2006 Julija Timošenko had already told the BBC: “We have no doubt that Mogilevic is the person behind the entire RosUkrEnergo operation.” Hers is one of the loudest among the many accusing voices that fell on deaf ears for years, until a document surfaced and caught the notice of public opinion in the West. It’s one of the secret files published by WikiLeaks: a cable from Kiev dated December 10, 2008, from the American ambassador William Taylor. It refers to a meeting with Dmitro Firtaš, the Ukrainian oligarch behind RosUkrEnergo, in which he warned Taylor that Timošenko planned to eliminate his company both for personal interests and internal political conflicts, for which she was willing to make concessions to Putin, thus strengthening his influence in Europe.

…

., 245–46, 254 Trevi, Gloria, 101 Treviño Morales, José, 252–53 Treviño Morales, Miguel Ángel (El Z40), 98, 103, 252 Treviño Morales, Omar (El Z42), 98–99 Trimboli, Rocco, 230 Trinidad Cerón, Luis Alberto (El Guicho), 61 tripulantes (ship’s crew), 291–92, 297, 299, 300 Troika restaurant, 274 tropane alkaloids, 113–14 Trujillo, Carlos (Griselda Blanco’s first husband), 359–60 Truxillo coca, 114 Turatello, Francis (Angel Face), 212 Turin, 298, 331 Turkey, 215, 232 Twenty-first Motorized Cavalry Regiment, Mexican, 60 Ufa (sniffer dog), 345 U Holubů restaurant, 275 Ukraine, 260, 276, 277, 279, 285–87 UniCredit Bank, 193 Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity), 83 Union Frigo Transport Logistic, 196–97 United Nations, 74, 207–9, 250 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 207–9, 250 United Sacred Crown, 296–97 United States: access routes to, 20–23, 39–40, 42, 49, 57, 59 cocaine market of, 34, 38–39, 51–53, 59, 73–77, 127, 289 Colombian relations with, 127, 131, 148–49, 154–66, 189 drug enforcement in, 19–34, 64–65, 97, 148–66, 168, 294–95 extraditions to, 41, 59, 131, 148–51, 162–66, 282, 285, 366 illegal immigration to, 102, 289 Italian relations with, 168, 178, 185–86 Mexican border of, 20–22, 39–40, 44, 53, 57, 60, 61, 69–70, 102, 289–90, 328 Mexican relations with, 28, 31, 41, 58, 158, 366 Russian mafia in, 262, 268, 273–74, 276, 279, 289, 294 war on terror of, 155–57, 187, 242, 254–55 Uralmaševskaja crime group, 269–70 Uribe, Álvaro, 155, 157, 166 Uribe Escobar, Mario, 166 Vado Ligure, Italy, 291, 329 Valdez Villarreal, Edgar (Barbie), 42–43 Valencia, Armando (Maradona), 158 Valencia, Erick (El 85), 67 Vallanzasca, Renato, 212 Valtur vacation resorts, 227 Van Kleef, Leon, 234–36 Varela, Wílber (Soap), 135 Vásquez Romero, Luis Roberto, 353, 354–55 Vega, Baruch, 149–51, 158–59, 162 Vendemini, Valter, 199 Venezuela, 164, 179–80, 202, 233, 238, 291 Ventrans, 180, 196 Ventrici, Francesco (El Gordo; Fatty), 175–76, 177, 180, 182–84, 190, 192, 195–200 Ventura Moussong, Juan Carlos, 365 Veracruz, Mexico, 67–68 Vibonesi group, 193 Vibo Valentia, Italy, 172, 175–76, 183, 191, 204–5, 254 Vida loca, La, 348–56 Vieira, João Bernardo, 316 Villarreal Barragán, Sergio (El Grande), 50 VM Trans, 196–97 Volkov, Aleksandr, 273–74 Vološin, Vladimir, 273–74 Volpiano, Italy, 344 Voltan, Mattia, 297–98, 299 Vory v zakone organization, 264–65, 271, 273, 285 Voz de Durango, La, 368 Voz de Michoacán, La, 64 Voz y Solución, 64 Wachovia Bank, 243–46, 249–50, 253 Wall Street, 247, 254, 273–74 Waridel, Paul Eduard (The Turk), 232–34 “white petrol,” 38, 57 WikiLeaks, 286–87 wiretapping, 181, 202, 228–30, 237, 298, 362 witness protection programs, 157–60, 164, 362 Woods, Martin, 243–46, 249–50, 252, 253 Woods, Ray, 332 Woods M5 Associates, 249 World Drug Report (2012), 207–9 yachts, 296–300 YBM Magnex International, 251, 276–77, 286 YouTube videos, 43, 67, 94 Yugoslavia, 219, 257 Yuma, Ariz., 290 Zacazonapan, Mexico, 68 Zambada García, Ismael (El Mayo), 30, 41, 55–56, 66, 363, 365 Zapata, Emiliano, 62 Zola, Émile, 348 Looking for more?

pages: 436 words: 125,809

The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms by Iain Overton

air freight, airport security, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Columbine, David Attenborough, disinformation, Etonian, Ferguson, Missouri, gender pay gap, gun show loophole, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, More Guns, Less Crime, offshore financial centre, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Julian was at London’s choice venue for hard-bitten hacks and war correspondents, the Frontline Club in Paddington. Heading there, I found him holed up in one of their rooms, being interviewed by CNN. Nervous and a little self-conscious, he was unused to the media spotlight and here he was being asked about a set of documents his whistleblowing organisation, Wikileaks, had just released: a cache of military reports that exposed the truth about America’s war in Afghanistan. Julian had some of the most controversial secret documents ever to find their way to the light of day. Millions of files from the US diplomatic and military operations overseas that had been leaked by US soldier Bradley Manning.

…

He told me about TOR, a system that allows its users to search the internet without their computer’s address being revealed. One that lets you look at websites untraced, because TOR wraps your servers’ information around other servers’ information, hiding you behind peeled layers of anonymity, like an onion. Clearly, the head of Wikileaks needed the anonymity that TOR offers, just like investigative journalists do. But some others do not. Others use TOR not out of need, but desire. For many things lurk deep in the hearts of men, and if you give them a tool to hide their identities they will use it. Within minutes I had access to sites that sold things like $20 syringes full of HIV positive blood, a vendetta’s stabbing tool.

…

It’s no surprise that Whitehall figures put the cost of British funding of the Iraq conflict at $13.7 billion,15 or that, between 2005 and 2008, the annual cost for each American soldier there rose from $490,000 to $800,000.16 Such profits should be weighed against the numbers of lives lost in Iraq. Of the estimated 122,843 civilians killed there between 2003 and 2014, about 55 per cent died from gunfire.17 Years after leaving that military embed, when I was working on Wikileaks’ Iraq War Logs, we found that more than 80 per cent of people shot and killed in incidents at US and coalition checkpoints were civilians. Over 681 innocents died – at least thirty of them children – compared to just 120 Iraqi insurgents.18 There were other, equally terrible times when the sound of murderous gunfire penetrated the fog of war and caught the world’s attention.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Grijalva, Ranking Member, House Committee on Natural Resources, letter to Bruce Benson, President, University of Colorado, February 24, 2015, https://naturalresources.house.gov/imo/media/doc/2015-02-24_RG%20to%20UoC%20re_climate%20research.pdf. 30. John Schwartz, “Lawmakers Seek Information on Funding for Climate Change Critics,” New York Times, February 25, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com. 31. Roger Pielke, Jr., “Wikileaks and Me,” Roger Pielke, Jr., November 14, 2016, https://rogerpielkejr.com/2016/11/14/wikileaks-and-me. Joe Romm, “Obama Science Advisor John Holdren Schools Political Scientist Roger Pielke on Climate and Drought,” ThinkProgress, March 3, 2019, https://thinkprogress.org. Lindsay Abrams, “FiveThirtyEight’s Science Writer Accused of Misrepresenting the Data on Climate Change,” The New Republic, March 19, 2014, https://www.salon.com. 32.

…

Christina Larson and Joshua Keating, “The FP Guide to Climate Skeptics,” Foreign Policy, February 26, 2010, https://foreignpolicy.com. 34. Roger Pielke, Jr., “I Am Under Investigation,” The Climate Fix (blog), February 25, 2015, https://theclimatefix.wordpress.com/2015/02/25/i-am-under-investigation. 35. John Holdren, email to John Podesta, January 5, 2014, WikiLeaks, https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/12098. 36. Congressional Record, Proceedings and Debates of the 113rd Congress, Second Session, vol. 160, part 3, 3977. John Holdren, “Drought and Global Climate Change: An Analysis of Statements by Roger Pielke Jr.,” February 28, 2014, https://www.whistleblower.org. 37.

pages: 354 words: 92,470

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Bush and Tony Blair allegedly prayed together for a successful outcome. While the UK still talks in romantic terms about its ‘special relationship’ with the US, it’s special largely because it is so unequal, as Anthony Eden discovered to his personal cost during the Suez Crisis. And Germany’s relations with the US temporarily soured when Edward Snowden’s WikiLeaks revealed that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone had been hacked by the US National Security Agency. Presumably, Barack Obama was hastily removed from her speed dial. A third way might simply be a moral equivalent of the Washington Consensus. In this case, behaviours should somehow be judged relative to moral norms established by America’s Founding Fathers and subsequently delivered to the world through the benevolent exercise of American ‘soft power’.

…

‘Reshoring’ – thanks to increased automation and robotics – may lead to the rebuilding of economic and financial barriers: nations might then be able to turn themselves into the economic equivalent of ‘gated communities’. Substituting twentieth-century mass warfare for cyber-attacks and cybercrime may, thankfully, hugely reduce the number of battlefield casualties, but it nevertheless leads to heightened mistrust between the world’s superpowers and, via WikiLeaks and other data dumps, threatens personal privacy, intellectual property and ultimately national security. Technology may have helped remove borders, but it could equally well enable those borders to be rebuilt. Part of the problem with technology lies in what might loosely be described as the lack of an ‘editor’ for the information that comes our way.

…

(i) Trump, Donald election as president (i), (ii) his simple explanation (i) isolationism and (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Mexican wall (i), (ii) populist approach of (i) Republican policy and (i) route to White House (i) secures Republican nomination (i) TPP and (i), (ii) Tsipras, Alexis (i) tuberculosis (i) Turkey (i) Turks (i), (ii) see also Ottoman Empire; Seljuk Turks Twitter (i), (ii) Uganda (i), (ii), (iii) Ukraine (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Umayyad Caliphate (i) unemployment (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) United Arab Emirates (i) United Kingdom (UK) see also Brexit; British Empire 16th century (i) bankers to the world (i) Blair and Brown (i) corporate scandals (i) extradition treaty with US (i) IMF and (i) immigration into (i) inflation (i), (ii) internal inequality (i) joins EEC (i) living standards (i) Mossadeq (i) post-First World War (i) social welfare (i) ‘special relationship’ with US (i) Suez (i) Thatcher and Reagan (i) United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) (i), (ii) United Nations (UN) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)n9 United States (US) 1930s bank failures (i) absence of firm leadership (i) brand name companies (i) changing fortunes since Second World War (i) checks and balances (i) China and (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) complaints against (i) corporate scandals (i) dismantling the British Empire (i) dollar see American dollar excess Chinese capital (i) First World War view (i) immigration into (i) imperial activities of (i)n1 (Introduction) inflation through war (i) Iraq (i) living standards (i) Locke and the constitution (i) Marshall Plan (i) Middle East inconsistencies (i) middle-income earners (i) military presence in Europe (i) military spending (i) Moscow Olympics (i) naval power (i) 9/11 (i) PACOM (i) Pearl Harbor (i) Plaza Accord (i) population censuses (i) post-First World War (i) post-Second World War initiatives (i) Reagan and Thatcher (i) social mobility (i) Soviet Union and (i) strength of position (i) sub-prime mortgages (i) taxation (i) TPP and (i), (ii) vetoing UN Security Council (i) ‘Washington Consensus’ (i), (ii), (iii) Uruguay Round (GATT) (i) Uzbekistan (i) Varoufakis, Yanis (i), (ii) Vasco da Gama (i), (ii) Venezuela (i) Venice (i) Versailles, Palace of (i) Versailles, Treaty of (i), (ii) Vickers Report (i) Vienna, Congress of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Vietnam (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Vietnam War (i) Vikings (i), (ii) Visigoths (i) Vladivostok (i) Volcker, Paul (i) Vote Leave (i) Wales (i), (ii) Wall Street (i), (ii) Wall Street Journal (i) Walt Disney Productions (i) ‘War on Terror’ (i) Wars of the Roses (i) warships (i) Washington, DC (i), (ii) ‘Washington Consensus’ (i), (ii), (iii) water shortages (i) Waterloo, Battle of (i) Weimar Republic (i) welfare states (i) Wells, H.G. (i) West Bank (i) West Germany (i) see also Germany West Indians (i), (ii) Westphalia, Peace of (i) White, Harry Dexter (i), (ii), (iii)n4 WikiLeaks (i) Wilhelm I, Kaiser (i) Wilhelm II, Kaiser (i) William of Orange (i) Williamson, John (i)n3 Wilson, Woodrow (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Wirtschaftswunder (i) Wizard of Oz, The (Victor Fleming) (i) Wolfe, Tom (i) World Bank Asian Development Bank and (i) creation of (i), (ii) limitations (i) meetings (i) Millennium Development Goal (i) World Economic Forum (i), (ii) World Trade Organization (WTO) early failure (i) GATT and (i) GOFF and (i) opposition to (i) poorest countries and (i) possible undermining of (i) tobacco companies and (i) Wrocław (i) Xi Jinping (i), (ii) Xiongnu (i) Yamaichi (i) Yaroslavsky (i) Yemen (i), (ii) Yiwu (i) Yom Kippur War (i) Yorubas (i) Yugoslavia (i), (ii) Yunnan province (China) (i), (ii) Zheng, Admiral (i) Zollverein (i) Zoroastrianism (i) Zurich (i)

pages: 347 words: 94,701

Don't Trust, Don't Fear, Don't Beg: The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30 by Ben Stewart

3D printing, Desert Island Discs, Edward Snowden, imposter syndrome, mega-rich, new economy, oil rush, Skype, WikiLeaks

After the Danish navy removed the pod, Frank led a team of eighteen activists who scaled the platform and presented a petition to the captain containing fifty thousand names calling for an end to Arctic oil drilling. Frank and the others were arrested and helicoptered to Greenland, where they were jailed for two weeks. WikiLeaks had just published a quarter of a million cables from US embassies across the world. They showed how the scramble for resources in the Arctic was sparking military tensions in the region – with NATO sources worried about the potential for armed conflict between Russia and the West. The cables showed the extent to which Russia was manoeuvring to claim ownership over huge swathes of the Arctic.

…

Dominique 248 Prirazlomnaya platform: Arctic 30 operation against, see under Arctic 30 activists/crew Arctic Sunrise observes 11–12 history of 132 previous Greenpeace assault on 14, 130 Putin’s video link with 339–40 Pussy Riot 56, 64, 87, 166, 171–2, 343 and Amnesty Bill 329, 331 Putin, Vladimir 166–71, 172–6 passim and Amnesty Bill 330–1 Arctic 30’s case spoken of by 63, 330–1 becomes President 175 becomes Prime Minister 175 blueprint for rule of 175–6 childhood of 174 demonstrations after inauguration of 171 FSB headed by 175 furious with Greenpeace 168 Gazprom congratulated by 339–40 in KGB 174–5 McCartney’s letter to 199–200 Naidoo’s draft letter to 186–9 Nobel laureates write to 199 and Pussy Riot 166 and Russia, Sixsmith’s take on 169–72, 345–6 and Russian economy 169–70 and Winter Olympics 172, 345–6 Putin’s Oil (Sixsmith) 169 Rainbow Warrior, The (film) 248 Rainbow Warrior (vessels) 15, 248, 341, 343 Red-haired Horse, The 238, 241 Remnick, David 96 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai 93 Rogers, Iain 349 leaves Russia 335 Rondal, Fabien 136, 159–60 appointed to lead ground team 52 and Ball’s secreted memory card 163–4 camera memory card handed to 182 and prisoners’ letters 159, 160 Roosevelt, Franklin 90 Russell, Bertrand 93 Russell, Colin: bail applications of 296–9, 326–7; denied 299–300; granted 327 and Russian seizure of Arctic Sunrise, see under Arctic Sunrise in SIZO-1, Murmansk 110 in SIZO-1, St Petersburg 321 Russia: Amnesty Bill in 329–33 Arctic Sunrise occupied and towed by, see under Arctic Sunrise Bolshevik Revolution in 90 Committee for State Security (KGB) in 93, 95, 96, 174–5, 255–6 Dutch year of friendship with 50 energy essential to 169–70, 175 Federal Security Bureau (FSB) in 50, 55, 121, 147, 239–40, 291; drugs-find claim of 189–93; Litvinov interviewed by 207–11, 252–5; and possible raid on Greenpeace office 185–6; Putin appointed to head 175; suspected false intelligence from 168 Germany turns on 91 Investigative Committee in 56, 147, 185, 252 and ITLOS, see International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea Kresty jail in, see SIZO-1, St Petersburg Murmansk SIZO-1 isolation jail in, see SIZO-1 isolation jail, Murmansk Prague entered by tanks of 94 protest against, over Czechoslovakia invasion, see Litvinov, Pavel and Putin, Sixsmith’s take on 169–72, 345–6 seabed flag of 129, 170, 176 state capitalism in 176 and WikiLeaks cables 129 Winter Olympics in 172, 331, 345 Russian Social Democratic Labour Party 89 Saarela, Sini: aboard Ladoga 26–7, 42 abuse directed at 341 and Amnesty Bill 330 appeal of 183 Arctic connection felt by 42 back on Arctic Sunrise 42–3 bail application of 305, 307–8; granted 308 banner demands release of 30 celebrity status of 341 described 13–14 early campaigning of 42 initial interrogation of 57 jail arrivals of, see under Arctic 30 activists/crew jail sentence pronounced on 87 leaves Russia 336–7 letters to 160–1 and Mikhail Ulyanov 339–41, 347–8 postponement of hearing concerning 67–8 Prirazlomnaya platform climbed before by 14, 130 at Prirazlomnaya protest, see under Arctic 30 activists/crew prison transfer of, see under Arctic 30 activists/crew release of, on bail 313–15 in SIZO-1, Murmansk 117, 157–8; and letter to ground team 183–4; letters smuggled to 160–1; open letter from 177; and surplus potatoes 157–8, 161, 177–9, 201, 218–19, 323 in SIZO-5, St Petersburg 282, 283, 291–2, 299–300 Willcox’s reunion with 319 see also Arctic 30 activists/crew Sadri, James 50 Sami people 42 Sasha (inmate) 243–4 Sauven, John 127–8, 165–7, 199 Scaroni, Paolo 199 Schmidt, Andreas 132 Scofield, Paul 93 Seeger, Pete 247 Selma 245–6 Sergei (inmate) 111 Shell 131–2 Simons, Daniel 50, 133–4 and FSB’s drugs-find claim 192 as ITLOS witness 260–1 leaves Russia 185 legal team recruited by 133 secret police harass 133–4 Sinyakov, Denis 35, 343 and Amnesty Bill 331–2, 343 appeal of 183 bail granted to 303 jail sentence pronounced on 64 letter from former cellmate of 345 in SIZO-1, Murmansk 143–4 in SIZO-1, St Petersburg 295 see also Arctic 30 activists/crew Sixsmith, Martin 168–72, 174, 345–6 SIZO-1, Murmansk: activists’ arrival at 68–9 activists leave 268–70 activists’ time in, see individual activists/crew black and red zones if 104 boss cells in 101, 103, 105 deep searches in 225–6 ‘Don’t Trust Don’t Fear Don’t Beg’ motto of 108 gay men in 106 Hewetson’s ‘review’ of 220–2 letters smuggled to and from prisoners in 159–61 library in 143–4 prisoners still fighting regime in 345 rope network (doroga) in 5–10, 75, 85, 99, 102, 103–4, 112–15, 123 routine in 85 surviving, crash course in 102–7 women’s tapping code in 84, 117, 144–5, 204 women’s zone in 107–8 ‘woollen’ cells in 76–7 SIZO-1, St Petersburg (Kresty), see individual activists/crew: activists’ arrival at 278–9 described 276 escapes from 277–8 SIZO-4, St Petersburg: activists’ arrival at 279 officials’ tour of 286 SIZO-5, St Petersburg: activists’ arrival at 279 officials’ tour of 285–6 Slaiby, Pete 138 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 88, 92–3, 143–4, 277, 343 banned works of 93 Speziale, Camila: and Amnesty Bill 332 bail application of 305, 307 cell of 70–1 father’s letter to 271 jail arrivals of, see under Arctic 30 activists/crew jail sentence pronounced on 66 onboard detente orchestrated by 47 platform pod occupied by 16 previous work of 118 at Prirazlomnaya protest, see under Arctic 30 activists/crew prison transfer of, see under Arctic 30 activists/crew release of, on bail 313–14 and Russian seizure of Arctic Sunrise, see under Arctic Sunrise in SIZO-1, Murmansk 68–71, 78, 84, 117–18, 203–4; Harris’s tapping code with 84, 145, 204; and T-shirt gift from family 162 in SIZO-5, St Petersburg 292 Willcox’s reunion with 319 Stalin, Joseph 89–90, 91, 97, 244 Stepan (inmate) 74–5, 79 Stolypin, Pyotr 258 Stravinsky, Igor 93 Suchkov, Andrey 288 Sunday Times 274 Suu Kyi, Aung San 199 Suzie Q (RHIB) 22–3 Teulings, Jasper 50, 136, 260–1, 322 Trotsky, Leon 89 (See also Lev Broshtein) Tsyplenkov, Sergey 185 Turner, James 130 Tutu, Desmond 198 Ukraine 343 Under the Green Roof 87 Vasilieva, Tatiana 189, 194 Vasily (inmate) 279–80, 288, 309 Vettel, Sebastian 160 Vitaly (inmate) 101–3, 104–8, 109–10, 179, 229, 241, 269 Voight, Jon 248 Wałęsa, Lech 199 Wallace, George 245 Weber, Kruso: aboard Ladoga 26, 42 appeal of 180–1 back on Arctic Sunrise 42–3 banner demands release of 30 leaves Russia 336–7 at Prirazlomnaya protest, see under Arctic 30 in SIZO-1, Murmansk 263 see also Arctic 30 activists/crew WikiLeaks 129 Willcox, Elsie 244–5 Willcox, Henry 244 Willcox, Maggy 247, 249, 343 Willcox, Pete: bail granted to 312–13 birth and early life of 244–7; and trip to USSR 246–7 captains Seeger’s boat 247 commandos and coastguard officers faced by 15 described 14 diary entries of: in SIZO-1, Murmansk 243–4, 249–50, 263, 265; in SIZO-1, St Petersburg 281, 285, 295–6, 301, 305, 312–13 earlier arrests of 248 first Greenpeace captaincy of 247 first protest of 245–6 home return of 343 marriages of 249 and Mikhail Ulyanov 341 piracy charges against 247 portrayed in Rainbow Warrior movie 248 at Prirazlomnaya protest, see under Arctic 30 activists/crew Rainbow Warrior captained by 15, 248 release of, on bail 319 and Russian seizure of Arctic Sunrise, see under Arctic Sunrise self-questioning by 313 in SIZO-1, Murmansk, diary entries of 243–4, 249–50, 263, 265 in SIZO-1, St Petersburg 312–13; diary entries of 281, 285, 295–6, 302, 305, 312–13 strip-searched and fingerprinted 60 see also Arctic 30 activists/crew Willcox, Roger 244, 246 Winter Olympics 172, 331, 345 Yakushev, Ruslan 30 Yeltsin, Boris 175, 278 Yuri (inmate) 7, 10, 109, 112–15, 142, 148, 194–5, 203, 206, 207, 252, 267–8, 269 charges against 6 Zaspa, Dr Katya 134 bail application of 302–3; granted 303 Publishing in the Public Interest Thank you for reading this book published by The New Press.

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pages: 291 words: 90,200

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age by Manuel Castells

"World Economic Forum" Davos, access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, call centre, centre right, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Port of Oakland, social software, statistical model, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

I felt the same kind of exhilaration I felt at that time: suddenly, everything appeared to be possible; the world was not necessarily doomed to political cynicism and bureaucratic enforcement of absurd ways of life. The symptoms of a new revolutionary era, an age of revolutions aimed at exploring the meaning of life rather than seizing the state, were apparent everywhere, from Iceland to Tunisia, from WikiLeaks to Anonymous, and, soon, from Athens to Madrid to New York. The crisis of global financial capitalism was not necessarily a dead end – it could even signal a new beginning in unexpected ways. Throughout 2011 I began to collect information on these new social movements, discussed my findings with my students at the University of Southern California, and then gave some lectures to communicate my preliminary thoughts at Northwestern University, at the College d’Etudes Mondiales in Paris, at the Oxford Internet Institute, at Barcelona’s Seminar on Communication and Civil Society in the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and at the London School of Economics.

…

They debated everything – rejecting a rotten government, calling for true democracy, asking for a new electoral regime, defending the rights of the regions against centralism – but also asked for jobs, as a large proportion of the young demonstrators were unemployed and requesting better education. They were outraged by the control of both politics and the economy by the clan of the Trabelsi, the family of the second wife of Ben Ali, whose crooked deals had been exposed in the diplomatic cables revealed by WikiLeaks. They also discussed the role of Islam in providing a moral guide against corruption and abuse. Yet, this was not an Islamic movement, in spite of the presence of a strong Islamist current among the protesters, for the simple reason that there is widespread influence of political Islamism in the Tunisian society.

…

Also, new Facebook facial recognition software can automatically tag people in photographs, and this was resented, given the lack of trust in that Facebook will not protect privacy if subpoenaed by authorities. Therefore, some skilled occupiers were trying to use alternatives to Facebook, such as N-1, Ning or Diaspora. Others engaged in working on an “Occupy Facebook” called Global Square, widely publicized by WikiLeaks. A functional prototype was supposed to be available sometime in 2012. In the words of the developers: The aim of the platform should not be to replace the physical assemblies but rather to empower them by providing the online tools for local and (trans)national organization and collaboration. The ideal would be both to foster individual participation and to structure collective action.

Work! Consume! Die! by Boyle, Frankie

Boris Johnson, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, heat death of the universe, Jeffrey Epstein, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, millennium bug, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, open immigration, pez dispenser, Piper Alpha, presumed consent, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, the medium is the message, trade route, WikiLeaks

North Korea is incredibly secretive – apparently it was they who taught the Chinese how to whisper. That’s what I heard anyway. Of course, in our own way, we’re every bit as secretive. I’m not sure exactly what WikiLeaks is, but it seems to be the political version of Popbitch. They came under a huge cyber attack. That’s what you get if you publish ridiculous claims that governments are involved in cyber attacks. WikiLeaks couldn’t have uncovered more embarrassing material if they’d received hacked messages from Jason Manford’s Bebo account. Hillary Clinton ordered diplomats to collect phone numbers, email addresses and even DNA from UN diplomats.

…

Hillary Clinton ordered diplomats to collect phone numbers, email addresses and even DNA from UN diplomats. Well, just dress like a hooker and I promise within an hour you’ll have all three. Of course, diplomats are two-faced. That’s what diplomacy is. We all do it. ‘Your baby looks lovely,’ ‘I loved your novel,’ ‘Yes, darling, I agree – she did look too thin.’ According to WikiLeaks, Prince Andrew is said to have insulted both the French and the Americans – a shocking breach of protocol for the royal family, as both nations are predominantly white. And I am stunned by the Saudi bribery allegations. To think the sale of electric batons, thumbscrews and explosives should in some way be tainted by financial impropriety.

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The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

Thousands of paid content producers pushed out pro-Trump or anti-Hillary content, flooding feeds and overwhelming serious hashtags with nonsense, making them unusable. Russian hackers ran very big Facebook pages, which created the illusion of grassroots support for Trump. They allegedly hacked Hillary Clinton’s private emails and shared them with the whistleblowing site WikiLeaks – who leaked them slowly over the campaign, and to good effect. They also ran an aggressive campaign of paid advertising on Facebook and Google. I won’t tell this story in full here, because it is still unfolding (at the time of writing, the investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian Government is ongoing).* But it seems that the purpose was obviously the same as Alamo: to win the information war, shape people’s reality and use the internet to subtly shift opinion in new and hidden ways.

…

Anonymous web browsers like Tor, which can browse the net without giving away the user’s location (and are used to access the ‘dark net’, an encrypted network of sites that uses a non-standard protocol), are becoming ever more popular. There are now hundreds of encrypted messaging apps: Signal, WhatsApp, FrozenChat, ChatSecure, Wickr and more. WikiLeaks continues to cause mayhem by exposing state and political secrets. The most popular crypto-anarchy technology at the moment is probably bitcoin. In case you are not familiar with it, bitcoin is a digital currency. I won’t describe in detail how it works here – there are plenty of other good guides available – but here’s the short version: a quantity of bitcoin is stored at a bitcoin address, the key to which is a unique string of letters and numbers that can be kept on a website, desktop, mobile phone or even a piece of paper.

Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

Able Archer 83, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, one-state solution, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, uranium enrichment, wage slave, WikiLeaks, working-age population

In the real world, elite dislike of democracy is the norm. The evidence is overwhelming that democracy is supported only insofar as it contributes to social and economic objectives, a conclusion reluctantly conceded by the more serious scholarship. Elite contempt for democracy was revealed dramatically in the reaction to the WikiLeaks exposures. Those that received the most attention, with euphoric commentary, were cables reporting that Arabs support the U.S. stand on Iran. The reference was to the ruling dictators of Arab nations; the attitude of the public went unmentioned. The operative principle was described by Marwan Muasher, former Jordanian official and later director of Middle East research for the Carnegie Endowment: “The traditional argument put forward in and out of the Arab world is that there is nothing wrong, everything is under control.

…

The wording was unambiguous: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.” With the “Orange Revolution” victory of pro-Western candidates in Ukraine in 2004, State Department representative Daniel Fried rushed there and “emphasized U.S. support for Ukraine’s NATO and Euro-Atlantic aspirations,” as a WikiLeaks report revealed.17 Russia’s concerns are easily understandable. They are outlined by international relations scholar John Mearsheimer in the leading U.S. establishment journal, Foreign Affairs. He writes that “the taproot of the current crisis [over Ukaine] is NATO expansion and Washington’s commitment to move Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit and integrate it into the West,” which Putin viewed as “a direct threat to Russia’s core interests.”

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Supreme Court Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth Uruguay Uzbekistan Valls, Manuel Vane, Henry, the Younger Vatican II Vázquez Carrizosa, Alfredo Veblen, Thorstein Veil (Woodward) Venezuela Vietnam War Vincennes, USS (cruiser) Violent Politics (Polk) Visions of Freedom (Gleijeses) Voices From the Other Side (Bolender) Voices from the Plain of Jars (Branfman) voter apathy Waage, Hilde Henriksen Waal, Alex de wage labor wage stagnation Wahhabi-Salafi doctrines Walker, Scott Wall Street Journal Waltz, Kenneth Warburg, James Warde, Ibrahim Ware, Norman Warner, Geoffrey war on drugs war on terrorism Warren, Steve Warsaw Pact “War Scare Was for Real, The” (intelligence study) Washington, George Washington Post water, privatization of Watergate affair Wealth of Nations (Smith) Weisglass, Dov Weizman, Ezer West Africa West Bank westward expansion whistle-blowers Wieseltier, Leon WikiLeaks Williams, Roger Wilson, Woodrow Winthrop, John Wolf, Martin Wolfowitz, Paul women’s rights Wood, Gordon Woodward, Bob workers. See also labor movement; wage labor World Bank World People’s Conference on Climate Change World War I World War II Yarborough, William Yeltsin, Boris Yemen Yglesias, Matthew Yifrah, Shimon Yugoslavia Zarif, Javad Zarqawi, Abu Musab al- Zawahiri, Ayman al- Zelikow, Philip Zertal, Idith Zionism Zola, Émile Zughayer, Kemal ALSO BY NOAM CHOMSKY Hegemony or Survival Imperial Ambitions Failed States What We Say Goes Power Systems ABOUT THE AUTHOR NOAM CHOMSKY is the author of numerous best-selling political works, including Hegemony or Survival and Failed States.

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Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life by David Mitchell

bank run, Boris Johnson, British Empire, cakes and ale, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, Etonian, eurozone crisis, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Julian Assange, lateral thinking, Northern Rock, Ocado, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, profit motive, Russell Brand, sensible shoes, Skype, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

“The effects of ‘toffee-lung’, ‘cracknell shin’ and ‘vibration white chocolate finger’ on the Oompa-Loompa communities of the Midlands have to be seen to be believed,” Rantzen claimed. A spokesman for Cadbury’s said: “If they could get the chocolate to stick to the Curly Wurlys properly, maybe they’d deserve the minimum wage.” Shock WikiLeaks revelations The debate over transparency and freedom of information intensified in 2019 when WikiLeaks published details of what everyone in the world would be getting for Christmas. “Secrets are used to control people,” said Julian Assange via Skype from his Mars-bound prison rocket. “Wrapping paper is one of the most oppressive inventions in human history.

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But not as much as Nick Clegg, I’m afraid. 1 Weight Watchers 1, 2 West Country 1 West, Kanye 1 West Midlands, desire to evacuate of 1 WH Smith, David Cameron’s incomprehension of the business model of 1 wheelie bins 1, 2 Whisperers, The (Figes) 1 White, Charlene 1 Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? 1 Why Don’t You …? 1 Widdecombe, Ann 1, 2 WikiLeaks 1 Wilby, Peter 1, 2 William I 1 William, Prince, Duke of Cambridge, fictional nudey antics of 1 Williams, Ch. Supt Stuart 1 Witchell, Nicholas, arousal of 1 Wolverhampton 1 Wolverhampton Wanderers FC 1 Woods, Tiger 1 words, new, favourite and not so favourite 1, 2 World Cup 2010 1 world heritage sites 1 World War One 1 and Gove 1 Somme 1, 2, 3 World War Two 1, 2 World’s Most Hated Company 1 X Factor, The 1, 2 X-Men 1 Yarwood, Mike, inferiority to Dustin Hoffman of 1 Yes Minister 1 York, Duchess of 1 Young, Toby 1 Zimbabwe 1 About the Author David Mitchell is a comedian, actor, writer and the polysyllabic member of Mitchell and Webb.

pages: 357 words: 99,684

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions by Paul Mason

anti-globalists, back-to-the-land, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, Chekhov's gun, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, disinformation, do-ocracy, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, informal economy, land tenure, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, Occupy movement, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rising living standards, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, union organizing, We are the 99%, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, young professional

Out of the Open Source movement came the ‘wiki’: a user-editable website which leaves an audit trail of changes, designed to facilitate collaborative work among groups without any prior role-designation or command hierarchy. As a tool it looks like nothing special. But its first two global uses were to prove revolutionary: Wikipedia and WikiLeaks. Wikipedia was not only a commercial challenge to the encyclopaedia business: it expanded the supply of in-depth and dependable knowledge, and reduced the price to zero. And not just knowledge of stable and finished episodes. Shirky points out—and I have personal experience of this—that the Wikipedia page devoted to the London bombings of 7 July 2005 was at all times during the first twenty-four hours more reliable and comprehensive than reports from the mainstream media.

…

I can attest to the fact that the mainstream media noticed this immediately: it was a talking point among my colleagues in press and broadcasting that the “new” version of news was the dispassionate assembly of the facts, easily eclipsing confused rewrites of online “articles” as the detailed events filtered out. The second big wiki—WikiLeaks—has yet to finish exploding in the faces of dictators, spies, torturers, crooks and politicians. But leaving aside its political impact, what’s important here is the creation process itself: what Shirky calls the ‘unmanaged division of labour’. This process did not appear out of the blue; it can trace a direct lineage to the liberation movements of the hippy Sixties.

…

I. 46 Len-len 193–96, 209 Liberal Democrats 43–44, 46 liberalizers 31 Libya 25, 31, 119; National Transitional Council 178 Life and Fate (Grossman) 129 Lilico, Andrew 121 link-shorteners 75 Linux 139–40 @littlemisswilde 41–42, 44, 45, 135–36, 138 living conditions, urban slums 196–99 London: anti-capitalist demonstrations 33; arrests 61–62; Day X, 24 November 2010 41–42, 46–48; the Dubstep Rebellion 48–52; Fortnum & Mason 60–61; HM Revenue and Customs building 51; Hyde Park 60; Millbank riot 42–44; Millbank Tower 43; Museum Tavern 1; National Gallery teach-in 53, 53–54; Oxford Circus 60; Palladium Theatre 51; Parliament Square 49, 51, 52–53; Piccadilly Circus 58; police–student confrontation 50–51; Regent Street 58; Ritz Hotel 60; Tate Modern 53; trade-union demonstration, March 2011 57–61; Trafalgar Square 47; Victoria Street 50; Victorinox 59 London School of Oriental and African Studies, occupation of 44–46 López, Fernando 166–67, 170 Lopez, Gina 200–2 Lopez Inc. 200–2 Loubere, Leo 174 Loukanikos (riot dog) 94, 96 L’Ouverture, Toussaint 149 LulzSec 151 McIntyre, Jody 51 McPherson, James 182 Madison, Wisconsin revolt 184–87 Madrid 33 Mahalla uprising, 2008 10, 71 Maher, Ahmed 83 Mahfouz, Asmaa, @AsmaaMahfouz 11, 177 Mahmoud (Zamalek Sporting Club ultra) 16–17 Makati, Manila 204–6 malnutrition 9 Mandelson, Peter 17, 26, 114 Manila 33; Estero de Paco 200–2; Estero de San Miguel 196–99; Makati 204–6; waterways 200–2 manipulated consciousness 29–30 Manufacturing Consent (Chomsky and Herman) 28–29 Mao Tse Tung 46 Marxism 141–45 Marx, Karl 46, 141–45, 174, 187, 188–89, 190, 192 Masai with a mobile, the 133–34 Masoud, Tarek 27 Masry Shebin El-Kom textile factory 22–23 mass culture 29–30 Matrix, The (film) 29 Meadows, Alfie 51 media, the 28–29 @mehri912 34 Meltdown (Mason) 31–32 memes 75, 150–52, 152 Merkel, Angela 96, 98, 99, 112 Michas, Takis 103 Middle East: balance of power 178; Facebook usage 135; failure of specialist to understand 25–27 Milburn, Alan 114 Miliband, Ed 58, 60, 188 Millbank riot 42–44 Millennium Challenge 2002 82–83 Miller, Henry 128 misery 209 mobile telephony 75–76, 133–34 modernism 28 mortgage-backed securities 106–8 Moses, Jonathan 48 Mousavi, Mir-Hossein 33–34 movement without a name 66 Mubarak, Alaa 17–18 Mubarak, Gamal 8, 10, 17–18, 26 Mubarak, Hosni 9, 10, 14, 15, 18–19, 19–20, 26, 31 Murdoch, Rupert 31, 106, 148–49 Muslim Brotherhood 21, 177 NAFTA 166–67 Napoleon III 172, 191 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 19 National Gallery teach-in 53, 53–54 nationalism 124 Native Americans 162, 163 Negri, Toni 42 Netanyahu, Binyamin 180 network animals 147 networked individualism 130, 130–33, 141 networked protests 81–82, 85 networked revolution, the 79–85; erosion of power relations 80–81; informal hierarchies 83; networked protests 81–82; network relationships 81; swarm tactics 82–83 network effect, the 2, 74–75, 77; erosion of power relations 80–81; strength 83; usefulness 84 network relationships 81 Nevins, Allan 182 New Journalism 3 News Corporation 148—49 News of the World 49; phone hacking scandal 61, 148–49 New Unrest, social roots of 65–66, 85; demographics of revolt 66–73; information tools 75–76; the networked revolution 79–85; organizational format 77–78; technology and 74–79; the urban poor 70–72 New York Times 170 1984 (Orwell) 30, 129 Nomadic Hive Manifesto, The 53–54 @norashalaby 13 North Africa: demographics of revolt 66; students and the urban poor 71 Obama, Barack 72, 116–18, 120, 122, 162, 167, 170, 180, 183, 187 OccupiedLondon blog 88–89 Occupy Wall Street movement, the 139, 144, 187, 210 Office for National Statistics 115 Ogden-Nussbaum, Anna, @eponymousthing 184 Oklahoma 153, 153–56 Oldouz84 36, 37 Olives, Monchet 202–4 online popularity 75 On the Jewish Question (Marx) 143 Open Source software 139–40 Operation Cast Lead 33 organizational format, changing forms of 77–78 Organisation of Labour, The (Blanc) 187 organized labour 71–72, 143 Ortiz, Roseangel 161 Orwell, George 30, 129, 208, 210 Owen, Robert 142 Palafox, Felino 204–5 Palamiotou, Anna 97 Palestine 25, 121, 179, 180 Palin, Sarah 181, 182 PAME (Greek trade union) 90 Papaconstantinou, George 91, 97 Papandreou, George 88, 96 Papayiannidis, Antonis 103 Paris 39; 1968 riots 46; revolution of 1848 171, 172 Paris Commune, the 1, 72–73, 84, 132 PASOK 89, 91, 98, 99 Paulson, Hank 110 Petrache, Ruben 203–4 Philippines: Calauan, Laguna Province 202–4; Estero de Paco, Manila 200–2; Estero de San Miguel, Manila 196–99, 205–6, 206–9; Gapan City 193–96; Makati, Manila 204–6; New People’s Army 203 Philippines Housing Development Corporation 198 philosophy 29 phone hacking scandal 61, 148–49 Picasso, Pablo 127, 128, 132 Pimco 170 Poland 172 police car protester (USA) 4 Policy Exchange think tank 55 political mainstream, youth disengagement from 89–90 popular culture 65, 176 Porter, Brett 154, 155, 156 Port Huron Statement, the 129–30, 145 Portugal 92, 112, 188 postmodernism 28 poverty 121–22, 210, 211 Powell, Walter 77 power, refusal to engage with 3 power relations, erosion of 80–81 Procter & Gamble 23 propaganda of the deed 62 property 48 property bubble collapse 106–8 protectionism 124 protest, changing forms of 54–57 pro-Western dictators, support for 31 Prussia 191 Puente 165 Putnam, Robert 134 Quantitative Easing II 120–23 radicalization 33, 37, 47–48 radical journalists 149 Ramírez, Leticia 165 Real Estate Tax Authority Workers (Egypt) 19 Really Free School, the 1–2 @rebeldog_ath 96 reciprocity 77 Reed Elsevier 146 Reider, Dimi 179 Research and Destroy group 38–39 revolt, demographics of 66, 66–73 revolutionary wave 65 revolution, definition 79–80 revolutions: 1848 171–73, 173–75, 191, 192; 1917 173; 1968 173; 1989 173 Reynalds, Jeremy 159–60, 162–63 rice crops 195 Riches, Jessica, @littlemisswilde 41–42, 44, 45, 135–36, 138 Rimbaud, Arthur 132 River Warriors 201 Roads to Freedom (Sartre) 129 Road to Wigan Pier, The (Orwell) 208 Romer, Christina 117 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 169–70 Rove, Karl 30–31, 32 Rowan, Rory 54 Said, Edward 26–27 Said, Khaled 11, 148 @Sandmonkey 13 Sandra (Joy Junction resident) 160 Santa Cruz, University of California 37–39 Sarkozy, Nicolas 91–92, 98 @sarrahsworld 11–12, 14, 135 Sartre, Jean-Paul 129 Saudi Arabia 121 savings, and investment 107 Savio, Mario 4 SB1070 (USA) 164, 165–66, 166–67 self-esteem, and consumption 80–81 self-interest 111 self-reliance 68 self, the, social networks impact on 136–38 Sennett, Richard 68, 80–81, 131 Sentimental Education (Flaubert) 171 el-Shaar, Mahmoud 22 Shafiq, Mohammed 20–22 Shalit, Gilad 179 shared community 84 Sharp, Gene 83 Sharpton, Al 184 Shirky, Clay 138, 139, 140, 146 Sinclair, Cameron 199, 208 Sioras, Dr Ilias 90–91 Situationist movement 46–47 Situationist Taliban 1 slum-dwellers 68; numbers 198 social capital 134 social democracy 145 social housing 199 Socialist International 19–20 social justice 177, 191, 192, 209, 210 social media 7, 74–75, 77; collective mental arena 137; lack of control 37; power of 34–35; role of 56; and the spread of ideas 151 social micro-history 173 social networks 77, 82; impact of 147; impact on activism 138–41; and the self 136–38 social-republicanism 187 solidaristic slum, the 207 Solidarity 42 ‘Solidarity Forever’ (song) 42 Soviet Union 28 Spain 66, 104, 105, 188 Spanish Civil War 209–10 species-being 143 @spitzenprodukte (art activist) 1 spontaneous horizontalists 44–46 spontaneous replication 55 Starbucks Kids 79 Steinbeck, John 153, 155, 159, 163, 164, 169 Stephenson, Paul 52 Stiglitz, Joseph 118 Strategy Guide (Sharp) 83 Strauss-Kahn, Dominique 188 strongman threat, the 177–78 student occupations 37–39, 44–46, 53, 53–54 students: economic attack on 38; expectations 67–68; population 70 Sudan 25 Suez Canal Port Authority 19 Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) (Egypt) 18, 20 surveillance 148 swarm tactics 82–83 swine flu epidemic 9 Switzerland 123 syndicalism 175–76 synthesis, lack of 57 Syria 25 tactics 54–57 Tahrir Square, Cairo 6, 69, 89, 139; chants 191, 211; Day of Rage, 28 May 15–17; demonstration, 25 January 10–14; numbers 13; Twitter feeds 13; volunteer medics 20–22 Taine, Hippolyte 73 Tantawi, General 19 Tarnac Nine, the 189 Tea Party, the 117–18, 124–25, 180–81 tear gas 93–94, 100–1 technology 65, 66, 74–79, 85, 133–36, 138–39; and the 1848 revolutions 173–74 Tehran, Twitter Revolution 34–37 teleology 131, 152 Tent City jail, Arizona 164–67 Territorial Support Group 50 Thatcher, Margaret 106 @3arabawy 10, 22, 71 Third Way, the 31 Time magazine 36 Tim (human rights activist) 1–2 Tim (Joy Junction resident) 160 Tocqueville, Alexis de 192 totalitarianism 147–48 toxic debt 110–11 trade wars 122, 124–25 transnational culture 69 Transparency International 119 Trichet, Jean-Claude 112 Truman Show, The (film) 29 trust 57 Tunisia: Army 178; economic growth 119; inflation 121; organized workforce 72; revolution 10, 11, 25–26; unemployment 119 Turkle, Sherry 136 Twitpic 75 Twitter and tweets 3, 74, 137–38; #wiunion 184, 185; @Ghonim 13; @mehri912 34; @norashalaby 13; @rebeldog_ath 96; @Sandmonkey 13; Egyptian revolution 13, 14; importance of 135–36; Iranian revolution and 33–37; Madison, Wisconsin revolt 184; news dissemination 75; real-time organization 75; reciprocity 77; user numbers 135; virtual meetings 45 Twitter Revolution, Iran 33–37, 78, 178 Ukraine 177–78 UK Uncut 54–57, 58, 61 ultra-social relations 138 unemployment: America 159–63; Egypt 119; Spain 105; Tunisia 119; youth 66, 105, 119–20 UN-Habitat 199 Unison 57 United Nations, The Challenge of Slums 198–99 United States of America: agriculture 154–56; Albuquerque 159, 159–63; Arizona 164–67, 183; armed struggle 181–83; Bakersfield, California 168–70; budget cuts 156, 161, 167, 170; California 168–70; campus revolts, 1964 4; Canadian River 159; cattle prices 156; collapse of bipartisan politics 116–19; culture wars 179, 180–84; current-account deficit 107; debt 118; deportations 166; devaluation 123; Dodd–Frank Act 167; the Dust Bowl 154–55; economic decline 183–84; economic growth 170; Federal budget 156, 161; fiscal management 183; fiscal stimulus 117–18; fruit pickers 169; hamburger trade 156; healthcare bill 180, 183; homeless children 160; homelessness 159–63; Indiana 116–17, 125; Interstate 40 157, 170; job market 161; Joy Junction, Albuquerque 159–63; Madison, Wisconsin revolt 184–87; minimum wage workers 158; the Mogollon Rim 163; motels 157–58, 162–63; the New Deal 169–70; Oklahoma 153, 153–56; Phoenix, Arizona 164–67; police car protester 4; political breakdown, 1850s 182–83; property bubble 106–8; Quantitative Easing II 120–23; radical blogosphere 184; the religious right 118; repossessions 168; Route 66 157–59; San Joaquin valley 169; SB1070 164, 165–66, 166–67; State Department 178; states’ rights 183; student occupation movement 37–39; the Tea Party 117–18, 124–25, 180–81, 186; Tent City jail, Arizona 164–67; Tucson, Arizona 182; undocumented migrants 164–67; unemployment 159–63; wages 108; war spending 162; welfare benefits 162, 170 Unite Union 55 university fees 44, 47, 50, 54 urban poor 70–72 urban slums 191; Calauan, Laguna Province 202–4; clearance policies 198–99; education levels 207; Estero de Paco, Manila 200–2; Estero de San Miguel, Manila 196–99, 205–6, 206–9; Gapan City, Philippines 193–96; improvement policies 199, 205–6; internet access 207; labour force 208; living conditions 196–99; Moqattam, Cairo 6–10; population numbers 198 Vail, Theodore 74 Vanderboegh, Mike 181 Van Riper, Lieutenant General Paul 82 Venizelos, Evangelos 97–98 Vietnam War 129 virtual meetings 45 virtual societies 134 Vodafone 54–55 Vradis, Antonis 87–89 wages 108, 112 Walker, Scott 184 Walorski, Jackie 116–17 Walt, Stephen M. 26 war, threat of 178 Warwick University, Economics Conference 67–68 Washington Times 35 Wasim (Masry Shebin El-Kom delegate) 23 water supplies 194 wave creation 78 wealth, monopolization of 108 We Are Social 148 Weeks, Lin, @weeks89 184 Wellman, Barry 130 Wertheim, Margaret 136 White House, the 92 ‘Why the Tunisian revolution won’t spread’ (Walt) 26 WikiLeaks 140 Wikipedia 46, 140 wikis 140–41 #wiunion 184, 185 Wobblies 176 Women’s liberation 132 Woods, Alan 33 Woollard, Edward 43 working class 68, 71–72, 79–80, 145; culture 72; revolutions, 1848 172–73 World of Yesterday, The (Zweig) 128 World Trade Organization 122 Yemen 25, 119, 121 youth 68; alienation 62; British 41–42, 44, 53–54; culture 70; disconnected 190; disengagement from political mainstream 89–90; radicalization 33, 37, 47–48; unemployment 66, 119–20 YouTube 75; Egyptian revolution on 11, 14, 15; Iranian revolution on 34, 35 Zamalek Sporting Club, ultras 16–17 Zapatistas 1 Zekry, Musa 5–6, 7, 23–24 Zola, Emil 191 Zweig, Stefan 128, 132–33, 152, 176 Copyright This revised and updated second edition first published by Verso 2013 First published by Verso 2012 © Paul Mason 2012, 2013 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN: 978-1-781-68245-6 (e-book) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Fournier by MJ Gavan, Truro, Cornwall Printed by ScandBook AB, Sweden

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Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict by Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, Jacob N. Shapiro, Vestal Mcintyre

basic income, call centre, centre right, classic study, clean water, confounding variable, crowdsourcing, data science, demand response, drone strike, experimental economics, failed state, George Akerlof, Google Earth, guns versus butter model, HESCO bastion, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, Internet of things, iterative process, land reform, mandatory minimum, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, natural language processing, operational security, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, statistical model, the scientific method, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, unemployed young men, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

In India, as we will discuss in more detail in chapter 8, Naxalite insurgents increased their attacks on civilians in many areas when the government began providing a basic income guarantee through a public works program. Gaurav Khanna and Laura Zimmermann, “Guns and Butter? Fighting Violence with the Promise of Development,” Journal of Development Economics 124, no. 1 (2017): 120–41. 13. Jonathan Miller, “Taliban Hunt Wikileaks Outed Afghan Informers,” Channel 4 News, 30 July 2010, http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/uk/taliban+hunt+wikileaks+outed+afghan+informers/3727667.html, accessed 23 May 2016. 14. David Galula, Pacification in Algeria, 1956–1958 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1963), reprinted in 2006: http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2006/RAND_MG478-1.pdf. 15.

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Rebels know that risk levers can be influenced, so they sometimes act not only to improve civilian attitudes toward them but also to raise civilians’ perception of the risk associated with informing. The Islamic State in Syria,9 Hamas in Gaza,10 al-Shabaab in Somalia,11 and other militant groups have publicly executed suspected informers as a warning to the civilian population to keep their mouths shut.12 In 2010 when the Wikileaks site released 92,000 U.S. military files, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid promised to punish informants: “We knew about the spies and people who collaborate with US forces. We will investigate through our own secret service whether the people mentioned are really spies working for the United States.

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., 255–56 Veith, George, 345n40 Veterans of Foreign Wars, 220 Vietnam War, 118–19, 177, 179–81, 214, 235, 344n31, 345n40, 356n15 violence: cellular coverage in relation to, 86–91, 96–108; civilian casualties in relation to insurgent, 200–202; development assistance awards influenced by level of existing, 122–23, 127–28; effect of aid and development assistance on, 115, 123–45, 148–49, 156–62, 167–77, 223–24, 224; effect of civilian casualties on, 23–24, 200–202, 208–11, 213–14, 219, 332n1; local variance in, 33–43; retaliatory, 84–85, 174, 244, 249–55 Walker, Tjip xv, xvi Walter, Barbara F., 375n46 water treatment projects, 110–13 Wedemeyer, Albert, 292 Weidmann, Nils B., 87, 89–91, 316 Werker, Eric, 275 Westmoreland, William, 119 wheat production, for food aid, 140–41 Wikileaks, 85 Williamson, Curtis L., III, 118 Winters, Matthew, 281 World Bank, 14, 129–30, 287, 298, 323 World Food Programme (WFP), 142, 143 World War II, 2–4, 8, 291 Wright, Austin, 211–12, 258 Yellen, Janet, 92 Yemen, ix, x, xiv Yugoslavia, xi Yugoslav Partisans, 8 Zain Iraq, 88–89 al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab, 88, 189–90 al-Zawahiri, Ayman, 190 Zimmermann, Laura, 253–54 Zürcher, Christoph, 132

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How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon by Rosa Brooks

airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, big-box store, clean water, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, different worldview, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, technological determinism, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, unemployed young men, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Or that you never scribbled your randomly generated eighteen-character computer password on a Post-it because you just could not seem to commit it to memory, no matter how hard you tried? If they’re being honest, most people with security clearances will start looking a little red in the face. I remember a particularly surreal period during my stint at the Defense Department. When the first WikiLeaks cables became public, every media outlet in the world began quoting from the leaked documents. At the Pentagon, however, we were all warned not to even read any of those stories quoting leaked documents, because classified documents remain classified even if they’re splashed all over the front page of the New York Times.58 Thus, anyone who read media quotes from any leaked classified documents above his or her clearance level was accessing unauthorized information.

…

It forced the frequent use of bizarre circumlocutions to avoid accidentally messing up: “If it is the case that classified information is contained in a Washington Post article, a fact I can neither confirm nor deny, that would be a security breach, and we certainly wish people would not read or discuss any such material that might or might not be genuine and might or might not be classified.” As I noted earlier, some classified material obviously should be kept secret. Even the most ardent WikiLeaks supporter might accept that launch codes for U.S. nuclear weapons don’t belong in the public domain, and the claim that we need to protect “intelligence sources and methods” isn’t a frivolous one. Some of the intelligence the United States collects comes from individuals who pass information at great personal risk.

…

Executive Order 12958, ”Classified National Security Information,” 60 Federal Register 19825, April 20, 1995, www.fas.org/sgp/clinton/eo12958.html. 57. Gotein and Shapiro, Reducing Overclassification Through Accountability; PIDB, “Transforming the Security Classification System.” 58. Eric Lipton, “Don’t Look, Don’t Read: Government Warns Its Workers Away from WikiLeaks Documents,” New York Times, December 4, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/world/05restrict.html. Chapter 6: Future Warfare 1. See “US Military Cybersecurity by the Numbers,” Nextgov, March 19, 2015, www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2015/03/us-military-cybersecurity-numbers/107637/; Federal News Radio, “DHS Defends FY 2016 Cyber Budget Before Senate Subcommittee,” April 15, 2015, http://federalnewsradio.com/budget/2015/04/dhs-defends-fy-2016-cyber-budget-before-senate-subcommittee/. 2.

pages: 565 words: 151,129

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Lam Thuy Vo, “Another Ridiculous Number from the Patent Wars,” NPR Planet Money, April 27, 2012, http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/04/27/151357127/another-ridiculous-number -from-the-patent-wars. 36. Angus Johnston, “Still More Questions about Why Wikileaks Hasn’t Trended on Twitter,” Student Activism, December 5, 2010, http://studentactivism.net/2010/12/05/wikileaks-twitter-3/. 37. Tarleton Gillespie, “Can an Algorithm Be Wrong? Twitter Trends, the Specter of Censorship, and Our Faith in the Algorithms around Us,” Social Media Collective, October 19, 2011, http://socialmediacollective.org/2011/10/19/can-an-algorithm-be-wrong/. 38.

…

Questions have been raised about whether the algorithms companies use to spot and rank trends might be programmed to reflect the biases of the management that oversees them, consciously or otherwise. Julian Assange’s supporters suspected that Twitter deliberately finagled the trending during the WikiLeaks scandal.36 Industry watchers are beginning to ask, how we can maintain “algorithm neutrality”? Tarleton Gillespie, a professor of communications at Cornell University, says that algorithm manipulation is not entirely out of the question, especially when the algorithms are created by commercial players who might see a pecuniary or ideological rationale for tampering with the data.

…

., 61 technological employment/unemployment, 7, 122, 266–269 telegraph(s), impact of, 22, 46, 50, 51, 71, 194 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 206–210 textile industry, 31, 39–40, 124–125, 212 thermodynamic efficiencies, 10–15, 70–73, 78, 91, 143–144, 186 the third Industrial Revolution. see Collaborative Commons The Third Industrial Revolution (Rifkin), 11 3D printing, 89–108 and automobiles, 98–99 and bioprinting body parts/organs, 246–247 and construction of buildings, 96–97 and customization, 91 democratizing the replicator, 93–99 differs from conventional manufacturing, 90–92 efficiency and productivity of, 90 and feedstock, 48, 89, 95–98, 101–102 and furniture, 96 and lunar buildings, 97 and a makers infrastructure, 99–104 marketing of, 91 and micro infofacturing, 89–92 and a neo-Gandhian world, 104–108 and the Solar-Sinter, 95–96 and Xerox, 95 ThredUP, 236, 258 Thrun, Sebastian, 114–115 Time, 253 time bank(s), 261 The Times of London, 44 Tie Society, 236 TIR Consulting Group, 15, 191 Torvalds, Linus, 175 Toyota, 54, 99, 230 “The Tragedy of the Commons” (Hardin), 155–158 transborder park(s), 183 Treaty to Share the Genetic Commons, 167–168 TrustCloud, 258 Twitter becoming an online monopoly, 204–205 and algorithm manipulation, 203 changes the concept of privacy, 76 as communication, 151, 234, 248, 302 exploiting the Commons for commercial ends, 199–200, 310 and freedom, 226 as a podium for activism, 189 referenced in news and entertainment reporting, 201–202 revenue and market share, 201 and the WikiLeaks scandal, 203 as tracking tool, 245 Two Treatises of Government (Locke), 60 Udacity, 115 unemployment and blue-collar workers,123–124 due to technological advancement, 7, 121–128 and repercussions of job loss, 132 and white-collar workers, 126 United Nations, 21, 213 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 274 Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), 285 Internet Governance Forum (IGF), 196 United States Centers for Disease Control, 245 Department of Defense, 96, 125, 142, 294–295 Department of Energy, 87, 295 Energy Information Administration (EIA), 87 Federal Trade Commission, 202, 291 Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 122, 219 income disparity in the, 277–278 Justice Department, 129 National Academy of Sciences, 293–294 National Center for Atmospheric Research, 288 Patents and Trademark Office (PTO), 165–166 postal service, 45–46, 113, 125–126, 163–164 transmission grid, vulnerability of, 293–296 Treasury, 259, 291 upcycling, 91, 236 UPS, uses Big Data, 11–12 urbanization, caused by printing/rail industry, 53 Urbee, 98–99 utilitarian value, Hume and Bentham’s theory of, 62–63 Utopia (More), 31 Vail, Theodore Newton, 49–50 vehicle(s). see automobile(s) Verizon, 51, 54, 148, 198 Vernadsky, Vladimir, 183 vertical integration/vertically integrated companies and centralized management of production and distribution, 46–47 and removal of costly middle men, 23, 46, 232 see also Collaborative Commons Vietor, Richard H.

pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

sh=86b6cf864407, accessed June 28, 2021; Amy Chozick, Nicholas Confessore, and Michael Barbaro, “Leaked Speech Excerpts Show a Hillary Clinton at Ease with Wall Street,” New York Times, October 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/politics/hillary-clinton-speeches-wikileaks.xhtml, accessed June 28, 2021; “Hillary Clinton’s Wall St Speeches Published by Wikileaks,” BBC News, October 8, 2016, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-us-2016-37595047, accessed June 28, 2021; Tamara Keith, “Wikileaks Claims to Release Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs Transcripts,” NPR.org, October 15, 2016, https://www.npr.org/2016/10/15/498085611/wikileaks-claims-to-release-hillary-clintons-goldman-sachs-transcripts?t=1625134407257, accessed June 28, 2021; Katie Forster, “Barack Obama: Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street Speeches Cast Her as an ‘Insider’ and Helped Her Lose to Donald Trump,” The Independent, November 18, 2016, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/barackobama-hillary-clinton-lost-insider-goldman-sachs-speeches-a7424476.html, accessed June 28, 2021. 70.On Clinton’s political views, see Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History (London: Headline, 2003); Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hard Choices (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014); Hillary Rodham Clinton and Tim Kaine, Stronger Together: A Blueprint for America's Future (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016); Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017); Karen Blumenthal, Hillary: A Biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign (New York: Broadway Books, 2017); Ivy Cargile, Denise Davis, Jennifer Merolla, and Rachel Vansickle-Ward, eds., The Hillary Effect: Perspectives on Clinton’s Legacy (New York: I.

pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

In 2002, the United States tacitly supported a coup attempt against the democratically elected government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela,1 and in 2004 helped topple Haiti’s progressive president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.2 In 2009, the elected leader of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, was deposed in a military coup that was countenanced by the US State Department.3 There have also been more overt interventions. The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was largely about securing access to oil and defence contracts, as well as preventing Iraq from selling oil in euros instead of dollars. As for the NATO air strikes on Libya in 2011, diplomatic cables released through WikiLeaks reveal that it had to do in part with France’s concerns about Libya’s attempts to create a Pan-African currency as an alternative to the French-controlled CFA franc. Assassinations are still in the playbook, too. Honduran indigenous activist Berta Cáceres was assassinated in 2016 by US-trained forces, to end her resistance to a dam across the Río Gualcarque.4 Third World debt is also re-emerging as a major concern.

…

Then there are the free-trade agreements. One of the reasons that free-trade agreements end up being so problematic is that they are negotiated in secret. Making the negotiations public, and subject to real democratic scrutiny, would go a long way towards making the final deals fairer. We shouldn’t have to rely on WikiLeaks to provide this information in a partial and ad hoc way. Having full access to the draft proposals would allow vulnerable groups and advocacy organisations in rich and poor countries alike to push back against clauses that are harmful to people and the environment. Indeed, ideally all existing agreements should be suspended and renegotiated under more transparent and democratic conditions.

…

, London Review of Books, 28(6), 2004, pp. 28–31. Interestingly, when Aristide’s successor ended up raising the minimum wage anyhow, to $0.61 per hour, US companies like Levi Strauss and Hanes got the State Department involved, which forced Haiti to reverse the decision. Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives, ‘WikiLeaks Haiti: let them live on $3 a day’, The Nation, 1 June 2011. That same year, the US State Department manipulated Haiti’s elections to swing in favour of their preferred candidate. Center for Economic and Policy Research, ‘Clinton emails reveal “behind the doors actions” of private sector and US embassy in Haiti elections’, 2015. 3 ‘In 2009, the elected leader …’ Zelaya had taken steps to impose environmental regulations on the mining industry, regulate trade and raise the minimum wage, all of which enraged the multinational companies operating there. 4 ‘Honduran indigenous activist Berta Caceres …’ Nina Lakhani, ‘Berta Caceres cour papers show murder suspects’ links to US-trained elite troops’, Guardian, 28 February 2017. 5 ‘As a result, external debt …’ Katie Allen, ‘World’s poorest countries rocked by commodity slump and strong dollar’, Guardian, 10 April 2016. 6 ‘Structural adjustment programmes are still …’ Fortunately conditionality has been relaxed a bit since the 2009 G20 Summit, which raised this as an issue.

Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Given that I’m sitting right in one of those very airport lounges as we speak, how about we pick up this conversation another time, in person?” * * * Admire him or not, almost everyone would agree that Edward Snowden is a thoughtful person, and he deliberated carefully over what to do with the enormous cache of top secret materials he had purloined from the U.S. government. Rather than publish them wholesale on the internet via WikiLeaks or another dump site, he chose to hand them over to a few select journalists for vetting. This arrangement created a safety check of sorts — a way to remove Snowden himself from the decision loop and publish only material that the journalists, their editors, and the experts they consulted concluded was in the public interest.

…

One of the oldest methods of Russian-style dezinformatsiya is the use of “kompromat,” which is defined as the public release of stolen data intended to embarrass or discredit adversaries — a technique to which most of the non-Russian world was introduced with the 2016 hack of the U.S. Democratic Party establishment and the leaking of stolen emails to WikiLeaks. Our own research has shown similar Russian hack-and-leak operations being used as a way to discredit local opposition figures, as when emails stolen from the journalist David Satter and the George Soros–founded philanthropy Open Society Foundations were acquired by hacking, doctored, and then strategically amplified by social media companies and patriotic state media to make it appear as if Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny was on the payroll of the CIA.

…

., 170 Warzel, Charlie, 74 Washington, George, 300, 316 WeChat, 86–87, 161, 163, 263 Weibo, 161 Weinstein, Harvey, 254 Wells, H. G., 132–134, 279 Wells Fargo, 170 WhatsApp, 300, 324 false information on, 82, 127, 131, 203, 300 targeted attacks on, 136, 143, 154, 205 Wheeler, Heather, 88 whistleblowers, 313–315. See also Snowden, Edward Whittaker-Howe, Sarah, 158 WikiLeaks, 122 Wikipedia, 108, 133, 264 Words with Friends, 63 World Health Organization (who), 81, 106, 325 World Trade Organization (wto), 216 World Wide Web, 10, 18. See also internet Wu, Timothy, 79, 296–297, 298–299, 304–305, 307 Xiao, Robert, 188 Xi Jinping, 86, 302 Yang, Catherine, 47 YouTube, 237 activism on, 138, 156–157 false information on, 2, 82, 84, 87, 139 YY (app), 86 Zeigarnik effect, 100 Ziblatt, Daniel, 196–197, 287 Zika virus, 87 Zoom, 4, 231–232 security/privacy concerns, 73, 195–196 zte Corp., 166 Zuboff, Shoshana, 14, 27, 48, 50–51, 52, 64, 78 Zuckerberg, Mark, 72, 93, 260–261, 266.

pages: 338 words: 104,815

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Practicing a task typically improves performance on a highly similar task but might not provide much, if any, improvement for real-world attention. 25. T. Abdollah and M. Biesecker, “Hackers Apparently Fooled Clinton Official with Bogus Email,” AP News, October 29, 2016. The original email can be found at WikiLeaks [https://web.archive.org/web/20220919052534/https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/34899]. 26. The use of “ph” rather than “f” might be an allusion to the repeated “ph” in an earlier form of hacking known as “phone phreaking”: “Phishing,” Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing]. 27. S. Cain, “Literary Mystery May Finally Be Solved as Man Arrested for Allegedly Stealing Unpublished Books,” Guardian, January 5, 2022 [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/06/literary-mystery-may-finally-be-solved-as-man-arrested-for-allegedly-stealing-unpublished-books]. 28.

…

We also might not recognize a fake address if we don’t read and process all the letters and punctuation marks carefully enough to notice anomalies. It’s not clear whether Podesta clicked on the link and gave the hackers his password, although the “It’s legit” response from the help desk might have led him to do so. Regardless of whether this phishing attempt succeeded in hooking Podesta, his emails were accessed and posted on WikiLeaks just weeks before the 2016 election. The leak, which most investigations linked to Russian state-sponsored hackers, redirected attention from Donald Trump’s travails to the controversies over Clinton’s email and her use of a private server, and it could have influenced the outcome of the election in critical states.

pages: 597 words: 172,130

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire by Neil Irwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency peg, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Google Earth, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, low cost airline, low interest rates, market bubble, market design, middle-income trap, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent control, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, WikiLeaks, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

The majority of the committee decided that they were comfortable with the language that appeared in the report. . . . It is factually correct, however, that at least one other member plus me were concerned that that language was too political, too much of a statement. That’s my personal opinion. A few days after that, another penny dropped. WikiLeaks, the publishing cooperative led by eccentric Australian Julian Assange and devoted to exposing the world’s secrets, began unveiling a trove of diplomatic cables that U.S. embassies around the world had sent to Washington, never meant for public consumption. Among them was Ambassador Susman’s write-up of his meeting with King from earlier in the year, showing the governor offering a ruthlessly critical assessment of the men who were now in power.

…

“This is a decisive moment”: Daniel Bentley, “Top Economists Call for Rapid Deficit Cut,” Independent (London), February 14, 2010. Five times in the winter and spring of 2010: Conaghan, Back from the Brink, 241. “King expressed great concern”: U.S. Embassy London, “Bank of England Governor: Concern about Recovery,” Cable 10LONDON364, http://wikileaks.org/cable/2010/02/10LONDON364.html. “was the spectre which loomed over our talks”: David Laws, 22 Days in May: The Birth of the Lib Dem–Conservative Coalition (London: Biteback Publishing, 2010), 109. “The most important thing now”: Bank of England, Quarterly Inflation Report Q&A, May 12, 2010, http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/inflationreport/conf120510.pdf.

…

Chancellor, welcome your commitment”: Mervyn King, Speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet for Bankers and Merchants of the City of London at the Mansion House, June 16, 2010, http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/speeches/2010/speech437.pdf. “thirst for power and influence”: David Blanchflower, “Mervyn King Must Go,” Guardian, December 1, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/01/mervyn-king-bank-of-england. “the issue of confidence simply doesn’t arise”: Jennifer Ryan and Thomas Penny, “Cameron Backs King as Wikileaks Cites BOE Chief’s Concern on Inexperience,” Bloomberg News, December 1, 2010. “I have never discussed with [Osborne]”: Bank of England 2011 Inflation Report, Transcript of Treasury Select Committee, March 1, 2011, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/cmtreasy/798/11030102.htm.

pages: 568 words: 164,014

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat by John P. Carlin, Garrett M. Graff

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Andy Carvin, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business climate, cloud computing, cotton gin, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, eat what you kill, Edward Snowden, fake news, false flag, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Hacker Ethic, information security, Internet of things, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, Wargames Reagan, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, zero-sum game

Russia, meanwhile, watched the Sony hack and learned the power of stolen information to influence public opinion and undermine confidence in an organization. And Russia saw how American society had been quick to blame and isolate the victim, Sony, rather than unite against the perpetrator. The Sony attack, as it turned out, represented the Rubicon: coupled with the experience of media and global reaction to WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden, North Korea knew that media organizations—some reputable, some not—would rush to cover the leaks, amplifying the thefts with little self-reflection. If North Korea simply sent a stolen spreadsheet of a company’s executive salaries to reporters, they’d publish it quickly. Particularly in the sped-up news cycles of the digital age, the media had decided that the “newsworthiness” of purloined internal secrets outweighed any ethical dilemmas raised by how that material was obtained.

…

All told, they found 71 victim organizations spread across 14 countries—from economic targets such as the Department of Energy research laboratory and defense contractors to US real estate and accounting firms, as well as targets clearly chosen for their political interest: a major US news organization’s Hong Kong bureau and the ASEAN Secretariat just before the organization’s annual summit in Singapore, the United Nations, the International Olympic Committee, and the World Anti-Doping Agency, as well as companies in South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, and other Chinese rivals in Asia.34 The public exposure of Shady Rat was another example for us of the odd bifurcation of cyber headlines. Even as hacktivist groups such as Anonymous and Lulzsec grabbed headlines that year with their attacks on HBGary—a company investigating WikiLeaks—and by hacking the website of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system’s police department after a controversial police shooting there, we continued to be most concerned about the foreign nation-states attacking our systems—threats that were much quieter, longer lasting, and deeply damaging to the core of our economy and national security.

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Regardless of its ties, though, the group was unabashedly pro-Assad: when the Atlantic posted a story about an activist tortured by the regime, the SEA asked its supporters to flood the magazine’s site with critics, explaining, “It is our duty to explain to them the truth of these peaceful protests.”10 One of their favorite tactics was to post, simply, that even as news reports documented the country’s descent into chaos and civil war, everything was absolutely fine: “I live in Syria, stop lying, nothing is happening in Syria.”11 The SEA’s efforts didn’t go unchallenged: by the summer and fall of 2011, they were engaging in regular skirmishes with the hacker collective Anonymous, which attacked and defaced regime websites. Anonymous had harassed each government in turn across the Arab Spring, at one point attempting to fax copies of embarrassing WikiLeaks documents into Egyptian schools so that students could spread the word in the streets.12 On August 7, 2011, Anonymous hacked the Syrian defense ministry, posting a message for the Syrian Army and people: “To the Syrian people: The world stands with you against the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad.

pages: 434 words: 117,327

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America by Cass R. Sunstein

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, anti-globalists, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Isaac Newton, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, microaggression, Nate Silver, Network effects, New Journalism, night-watchman state, nudge theory, obamacare, Paris climate accords, post-truth, Potemkin village, random walk, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

That is, what if a foreign intelligence agent leaks US government information that is motivated to harm the US government but that in fact results in virtuous, democracy-enhancing consequences? I explore these complications, which will become more pronounced in a world in which journalists receive secure anonymous leaks, in Jack Goldsmith, “Journalism in the Doxing Era: Is Wikileaks Different from the New York Times?” Lawfare, January 16, 2017, https://www.lawfareblog.com/journalism-doxing-era-wikileaks-different-new-york-times. 28. See Eric Lichtblau, Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008). 29. Jack Goldsmith, “Secrecy and Safety,” New Republic, August 12, 2008. 30. Goldsmith, Power and Constraint, supra note 17, 52–55. 31.

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See Tactics of Trump terrorist attack and state of emergency, 224, 225, 226, 227–28 use of homologies, 303–5 Trump supporters, 243–46, 264–66 authoritarianism and, 182–83, 189, 190, 191, 197n, 198, 199, 201, 205, 208, 212–13 Trust, loss in government, 22–23, 26–27 Turkey, 14–15, 107, 143, 150, 165, 234–35 Turkish coup d’état attempt of 2016, 150 Twenty-second Amendment, 138 Twenty-fifth Amendment, 421 Twitter, 137–38 availability chambers and, 252 Russian interference on, 86–90, 95–96 Trump’s use of, 4–5, 95 Tyrannophobia, 1–2 Ukraine, 92 Unconscious biases, 341–43, 348 “Unitary executive,” 70, 137 Universal suffrage, 288, 290, 300, 302, 402–4 Uno, Edison, 316–17 Vallandigham, Clement, 433 Value-added tax, 49 Venezuela, 140, 150 Veverka, Jindrich, 46 Vietnam War, 22, 303, 443–44 Voter turnout, 402, 403–4, 405–6, 416–17 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 160 War on Terror, 221–22, 399, 400 Warren, Earl, 160, 440 Washington, George, 81 Washington Post, 88, 277, 437 “Watch lists,” 109, 222, 227, 228–30 Watergate, 113–15 Watts, Duncan J., 461–62 “The Commonsense Presidency,” 329–64 Weber, Max, 341, 390 What-might-have-beens, ix–x White supremacism, 235, 245, 252, 261, 404–5 Wikileaks, 129n Wilders, Geert, 177 Wilhelm II of Germany, 277, 279 Wilson, Woodrow, 434–35 Wishful thinking, 269, 302, 303, 305–6 Woodward, Bob, 113–14 World War I, 139 civil liberties during, 434–38 World War II, ix, x, 66, 233, 314–15. See also Japanese-American internment civil liberties during, 438–41 Yates, Sally, 9, 124 Yoo, John, 225 About the Author CASS R.

pages: 394 words: 112,770

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Carl Icahn, centre right, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, impulse control, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, obamacare, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Secret intelligence was, the story suggested, being widely distributed across intelligence agencies so as to make it easier to leak, and at the same time to protect the leakers. This intelligence, it was rumored, consisted of spreadsheets kept by Susan Rice that listed the Trump team’s Russian contacts; borrowing a technique from WikiLeaks, the documents were secreted on a dozen servers in different places. Before this broad distribution, when the information was held tightly, it would have been easy to identify the small pool of leakers. But the Obama administration had significantly expanded that pool. So this was good news, right?

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Among the why-and-how theories of this imbecilic meeting: • The Russians, in organized or freelance fashion, were trying to entrap the Trump campaign into a compromising relationship. • The meeting was part of an already active cooperation on the part of the Trump campaign with the Russians to obtain and distribute damaging information about Hillary Clinton—and, indeed, within days of the Don Jr. meeting, WikiLeaks announced that it had obtained Clinton emails. Less than a month later, it started to release them. • The wide-eyed Trump campaign, largely still playacting at running for president—and with no thought whatsoever of actually winning the election—was open to any and all entreaties and offers, because it had nothing to lose.

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Supreme Court, 85–86, 251 University of Virginia, “Unite the Right” rally at, 293–94 unmasking, 96, 160 Vanity Fair, 74, 75, 199 Venezuela, 293 Vietnam War, 53, 264 Vogue, 35 Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, 201, 269 Walker, Scott, 33 Wall Street 2 (film), 270 Walsh, Katie, 10, 18, 52, 64, 110–17, 119–25, 144, 161, 163, 168, 171–72, 181–82, 187, 239, 303 Washington Post, 35, 37, 56, 78, 95–97, 105–6, 151–52, 155, 206, 211, 236, 237, 266 Washington Times, 129 Watergate scandal, 212–13, 278 Weekly Standard, 38 Weinstein, Harvey, 203 Weissmann, Andrew, 278 Welch, Jack, 88 West Bank, 6 White House communications director Dubke as, 208 Hicks as, 297, 307 Scaramuccci as, 273–74, 281–86 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, 198–99, 208 White House ethics office, 270 White House Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, 270–71 white supremacy, 127, 138, 293–96 Whitewater affair, 58, 97 WikiLeaks, 153, 254 Wintour, Anna, 35–36 Wirthlin, Richard, 201 Women Who Work (Ivanka Trump), 79 Woodward, Bob, 54, 116 World Bank, 257 World Wrestling Entertainment, 22 Wynn, Steve, 30 Xi Jinping, 193, 228, 258 Yaffa, Joshua, 154 Yahoo! News, 37 Yanukovych, Viktor, 101 Yates, Sally, 94–96, 98, 104, 214–16 Yemen, 6 Yiannopoulos, Milo, 128–28, 138 Zhukova, Dasha, 80 Zucker, Jeff, 92 ABOUT THE AUTHOR MICHAEL WOLFF has received numerous awards for his work, including two National Magazine Awards.

pages: 412 words: 115,048

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News by Eric Berkowitz

Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, high-speed rail, Index librorum prohibitorum, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, New Urbanism, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, undersea cable, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks

In 2014, Greenwald and others won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on a cache of confidential documents showing massive global cybersurveillance by the US, while Edward Snowden—the whistleblower who stole the materials and leaked them to Greenwald—was charged with espionage. Another publisher of stolen government documents, Julian Assange, is in serious legal jeopardy for publishing confidential US government materials on his WikiLeaks website in 2010. The materials were stolen by Chelsea Manning, an army intelligence analyst, who was given a lengthy sentence in a military prison for the theft. Should Assange be celebrated along with Greenwald as a journalist who brought important matters to the public, or is he a criminal along with Snowden and Manning?

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Roberts, “How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument,” American Political Science Review 111, no. 3 (2017): 484, https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/how_the_chinese_government_fabricates_social_media_posts_for_strategic_distraction_not_engaged_argument.pdf. 99. Wu, “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” 100. Zeynep Tufecki, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 231, 241. 101. Zeynep Tufecki, “Wikileaks Isn’t Whistleblowing,” New York Times, November 4, 2016, https://www.nytimes.corn/2016/11/05/opinion/what-were-missing-while-we-obsess-over-john-podestas-email.html. 102. Bobby Allyn, “Researchers: Nearly Half of Accounts Tweeting About Coronavirus Are Likely Bots,” NPR, May 20, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/20/859814085/researchers-nearly-half-of-accounts-tweeting-about-coronavirus-are-likely-bots; Thor Benson, “Trolls and Bots Are Flooding Social Media with Disinformation Encouraging States to End Quarantine,” Business Insider, April 20, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/trolls-bots-flooding-social-media-with-anti-quarantine-disinformation-2020-4. 103.

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See also Internet companies Weiland, Morgan, 250–51 Weill, Kurt, 186 Weimar Republic (Germany), 183–89, 253 Weller, George, 196 The Well of Loneliness (Hall), 192–93 West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 208 White, Harry, 145 white supremacy, 204, 208, 245, 247–48. See also hate speech; neo-Nazism Whiting, William, 114 Whitney, Charlotte, 182 Whitney v. California, 182 The Widow Jones (play), 163 WikiLeaks, 218 Wilde, Oscar, 161 Wilders, Geert, 247 Wilkes, John, 93–95 Wilson, Woodrow, 167, 175 Winkler, Adam, 249 witchcraft and witch trials, 87–88 Wolf, George, 154 The Wolf of Wall Street (book and film), 226 The Woman Rebel (Sanger), 162 women: censorship of, 21, 28; same-sex love and censorship, 160–62, 169, 192–93.

pages: 350 words: 115,802

Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy by Laurent Richard, Sandrine Rigaud

activist lawyer, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, corporate governance, COVID-19, David Vincenzetti, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, food desert, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mohammed Bouazizi, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, operational security, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero day

We were already in the middle of our third major investigation. I was still scanning the room as Sandrine talked, and I was having some doubts. We were a new organization, young in every way. The average age of our core reporting team was about twenty-five. This new investigation we were contemplating had the potential to blow up into a Wikileaks- or an Edward Snowden–sized revelation, much bigger and more sensitive than anything Forbidden Stories had ever tackled—with added layers of danger. NSO would fight us every step of the way. The company had enormous financial resources, as well as the protection of powerful military and intelligence officials in the Israeli government.

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Two weeks in Berlin and Donncha knew thirty different cybergeeks locked in battle against the rising tide of cybersurveillance. Donncha ended up back in Berlin after graduation, in the summer of 2015, a few weeks after the unveiling in Alexanderplatz of the life-size bronze statues of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning, the US whistleblower who had released hundreds of thousands of documents to Wikileaks, a number of them classified or sensitive, and a lot more of them simply embarrassing. Donncha was in Berlin for a Summer of Privacy internship at Tor, a nonprofit cybersecurity venture. “We believe everyone should be able to explore the internet with privacy,” read the Tor mission statement. “We advance human rights and defend your privacy online through free software and open networks.”

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Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Twitter Tzachi Uganda Ukraine Unit 8200 alumni of United Arab Emirates DarkMatter and Israel and NSO and United Kingdom United Nations Guiding Principles of Human Rights Security Council United States (see also specific states) aid to Mexico against drug cartels Azerbaijan and blacklisting of NSO by CIA Department of Defense Department of Homeland Security Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) FBI Israel and lack of action on Radi’s case Morocco and National Security Agency (NSA) presidential inauguration of 2021 State Department University of Michigan, Knight-Wallace Fellowship program University of Toronto, Citizen Lab peer review by prepublication reports to NSO Untersinger, Martin “US-Azerbaijan: Vision for the Future” conference Vanity Fair Varadarajan, Siddharth Venu, M. K. Veracruz, Mexico Videgaray, Luis Vincenzetti, David virtual private networks (VPNs) Wall Street Journal Washington, D.C. Washington Post Global Opinion columns Khashoggi and Radi and Western Sahara WhatsApp Wickr Wikileaks the Wire Wired World Bank, Control of Corruption report world leaders (see also specific leaders) Wyoming Yom Kippur War Yunus, Leyla Ziv, Amitai ABOUT THE AUTHORS LAURENT RICHARD is a Paris-based award-winning documentary filmmaker who was named the 2018 European Journalist of the Year at the Prix Europa in Berlin.

pages: 229 words: 67,869

So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

4chan, Adam Curtis, AltaVista, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Clive Stafford Smith, cognitive dissonance, Desert Island Discs, different worldview, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, gentrification, Google Hangouts, Hacker News, illegal immigration, Jon Ronson, Menlo Park, PageRank, Ralph Nader, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, urban planning, WikiLeaks

He’s spent his career representing anarchists and communists and squatter groups and Hamas, and now he was representing Mercedes. The crime she was accused of (and would later plead guilty to: she is awaiting sentencing as I write this) is that in November 2010 she and thirteen other 4chan users DDoSed PayPal as revenge for them refusing to accept donations to WikiLeaks. You could donate to the Ku Klux Klan via PayPal, but not to WikiLeaks. The FBI showed up at her Las Vegas apartment one morning at 6 a.m. ‘I answered the door and they said, “Mercedes, do you mind putting your pants on?” To be honest, being arrested is really fun. You get to troll the FBI, you get to wear fancy handcuffs, you get to pick the music in the car.

pages: 265 words: 69,310

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

If there is an archetype for Web 2.0, in the way that Linux is an archetype for open-source software, it is surely Wikipedia, the remarkable encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Wikipedia is so identified with web-based collaboration that its name has been incorporated into book titles (Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything) and related initiatives such as the leaked document site WikiLeaks. In Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, Wikipedia plays a prominent role as an exemplar of “commons-based peer production.” But Wikipedia turned out to be more the exception than the rule. While there are other not-for-profit large-scale collaborative platforms (OpenStreetMap, for example), no other non-commercial site has reached anything resembling Wikipedia’s influence.

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Lynne Supeene has been both a perceptive reader of this manuscript and a wonderful partner through life. Remaining shortcomings and errors are entirely my responsibility and persist despite the efforts of those listed above. Also Available from OR Books * * * CREDITOCRACY NOT WORKING WHEN GOOGLE MET WIKILEAKS Are you interested in reading more from one of the liveliest independent publishers working today? See our entire list at www.orbooks.com. Consider buying direct from OR, and take advantage of our special web-only discounts: it’s better for you, our authors—and us as well.

pages: 295 words: 66,912

Walled Culture: How Big Content Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Keep Creators Poor by Glyn Moody

Aaron Swartz, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, connected car, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, non-fungible token, Open Library, optical character recognition, p-value, peer-to-peer, place-making, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, rent-seeking, text mining, the market place, TikTok, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

With respect to its copyright provisions (it also covered issues such as counterfeiting and medicine patents), ACTA was an obvious attempt by the United States to continue pushing and expanding the Internet treaties, which were then about a decade old.”315 The general public had no access to these negotiations nor was it even made aware of ACTA’s existence until 2008, when a discussion paper was uploaded to WikiLeaks.316 The leak of a consolidated text of ACTA317 in March 2010 revealed that the European Union was proposing that ACTA should require criminal sanctions318 for inciting, aiding and abetting copyright infringements ‘on a commercial scale’. That included ‘significant wilful copyright or related rights infringements that have no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain’.

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abstract_id=2322516 297 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616163555/https://www.nextinpact.com/article/30433/109205-hadopi-82-millions-deuros-subventions-publiques-87000-euros-damendes 298 https://web.archive.org/web/20220615192453/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecoms_Package 299 https://web.archive.org/web/20220615192453/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecoms_Package 300 https://web.archive.org/web/20220507004149/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_William_La_Rue 301 https://web.archive.org/web/20220603094452/https://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/17session/A.HRC.17.27_en.pdf 302 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616163839/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act 303 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616163858/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_IP_Act 304 https://web.archive.org/web/20220615192636/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combating_Online_Infringement_and_Counterfeits_Act 305 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616163942/https://www.techdirt.com/ 306 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616164011/https://www.techdirt.com/2022/01/18/remembering-fight-against-sopa-10-years-later-what-it-means-today/ 307 https://web.archive.org/web/20220817064446/https:/www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/technology/public-outcry-over-antipiracy-bills-began-as-grass-roots-grumbling.html 308 https://web.archive.org/web/20220615193358/https://theconnector.substack.com/p/jan-18-2012-the-day-when-tech-changed 309 https://web.archive.org/web/20220615193427/https://www.fightforthefuture.org/ 310 https://web.archive.org/web/20220615193447/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_for_the_Future 311 https://web.archive.org/web/20220705092831/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Greer 312 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616172705/https://walledculture.org/interview-evan-greer-lia-holland-rethinking-copyright-fighting-creative-monopolies-and-more/ 313 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616172726/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement 314 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616172745/https://brocku.ca/social-sciences/political-science/people-in-the-department/blayne-haggart/ 315 https://web.archive.org/web/20220817064239/https:/books.google.be/books/about/Copyfight.html?id=2T-WAwAAQBAJ 316 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616172827/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks 317 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616172858/https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2010/03/23/0118-version-of-acta-consolidated-text-leaks/ 318 https://web.archive.org/web/20100322191648/http:/keionline.org/node/806 319 https://web.archive.org/web/20120120155721/http:/www.wcl.american.edu/pijip/go/acta-communique 320 https://web.archive.org/web/20120120155721/http:/www.wcl.american.edu/pijip/go/acta-communique 321 https://web.archive.org/web/20120425080452/http:/www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16735219 322 https://web.archive.org/web/20220705075900/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Tusk 323 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616172922/https://www.techdirt.com/2012/01/26/people-poland-come-out-to-protest-acta-large-numbers-polish-govt-calls-it-blackmail/ 324 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616173713/https://www.techdirt.com/2012/02/16/eu-member-bulgaria-halts-acta-minister-economy-offers-resignation/ 325 https://web.archive.org/web/20220704132341/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Martin_%28Scottish_politician%29 326 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616173734/https://www.techdirt.com/2012/04/12/eu-rapporteur-deals-major-blow-to-acta-recommends-rejection-european-parliament/ 327 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616173734/https://www.techdirt.com/2012/04/12/eu-rapporteur-deals-major-blow-to-acta-recommends-rejection-european-parliament/ 328 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616173819/https://www.techdirt.com/2012/06/21/fifth-eu-committee-recommends-rejection-acta-european-parliament/ 329 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616173849/https://www.techdirt.com/2012/07/04/european-parliament-declares-its-independence-european-commission-with-massive-rejection-acta-now-what/ 330 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618055249/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Schulz 331 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616173849/https://www.techdirt.com/2012/07/04/european-parliament-declares-its-independence-european-commission-with-massive-rejection-acta-now-what/ 332 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616083734/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act 333 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616083747/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_17_of_the_United_States_Code 334 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616083800/https://www.eff.org/about/staff/katharine-trendacosta 335 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616083815/https://walledculture.org/interview-katharine-trendacosta-the-us-dmca-upload-filters-sopa-pipa-fanfiction-platform-competition/ 336 https://web.archive.org/web/20220616083832/https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?

pages: 494 words: 121,217

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, augmented reality, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, Cody Wilson, commoditize, computerized markets, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, forensic accounting, Global Witness, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, index card, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, market design, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, ransomware, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, Social Justice Warrior, the market place, web application, WikiLeaks

I’d spent countless hours digging through the archives of the Cypherpunks Mailing List, a community of hundreds of programmers, cryptographers, anarchists, and trolls who, for nearly a decade, had shared their innovations, manifestos, and internal squabbles in a torrent of emails. Julian Assange was an active participant on the Cypherpunks Mailing List, where many of the ideas for WikiLeaks, with its anonymity protections for its sources, were born. The first developers of so-called proxy servers, which offered encrypted and anonymized internet connections—and which would evolve into virtual private networks, or VPNs, in common use today—were core cypherpunk contributors. The creators of the anonymity software Tor, too, were deeply influenced by the discussions they read in the list’s archives.

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A brilliant and coldly realist former Intel engineer who had retired young to a house in the Santa Cruz mountains, May had imagined a future where encryption tools supercharged a global black market for information. In a semi-satirical essay he posted to the Cypherpunks Mailing List, he proposed what he called BlackNet, a kind of monetized WikiLeaks where classified information and trade secrets could be anonymously sold for untraceable “CryptoCredits.” In his most famous essay, “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,” May summarized in 1988 the lawless future he both foresaw and, as a kind of absolutist libertarian, largely welcomed. “A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy,” May wrote forebodingly, imagining a “CryptoNet” of perfectly private communications and payments.

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Welcome to Video users (unnamed): Border Patrol agent in Texas, 265–8 database of, 275 former congressional staffer in D.C., 260–3 high school assistant principal in Georgia, 259–60, 263–4 HSI agent in Texas, 259, 269, 281–2, 308n mass arrests of, 275–8 Wieczner, Jen, 337 WikiLeaks, 28 Wilson, Cody, 97 WME. See Vinnik, Alexander Y Yerevan, 20–1 Yomiuri Shimbun, 104 Yum, Ilhwan, 85 Z Zcash (cryptocurrency): Cazes, Alexandre, and, 218 dark web markets and, 299 lack of popularity of, 310 as privacy coin, 298–9 shielded transactions of, 298–9 traceability of, 299–300 vulnerabilities of, 323 zero-knowledge proofs and, 298 See also Green, Matthew zero-knowledge proofs, 45–6, 298 Zetas drug cartel, 163 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z What’s next on your reading list?

pages: 275 words: 77,017

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers--And the Coming Cashless Society by David Wolman

addicted to oil, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, fiat currency, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, German hyperinflation, greed is good, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, P = NP, Peter Thiel, place-making, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steven Levy, the payments system, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

It sounds like something right out of Blade Runner. Yet evidence supporting Guest’s fear about controlled commerce isn’t confined to such oddities. In the winter of 2010 the New York Times echoed this prophecy in an editorial about the decision by MasterCard, VISA, PayPal, and others to stop processing payments for Wikileaks: “A handful of big banks could potentially bar any organization they disliked from the payments system, essentially cutting them off from the world economy.” I tell Guest that I recently met with electronics experts at Hitachi in Tokyo, who are developing biometric devices for seamless transactions.

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See Flu virus VISA Vodafone Von NotHaus, Bernard conviction of and Ron Paul trial/indictment of Wages Wall Street Journal Wampum Wang, Yang Warren, Elizabeth Wars. See also individual wars Washington, George Water consumption Watermarks Weber, Wesley Weimar Republic Weschler, Lawrence Western Union “What’s a Penny (or a Nickel) Really Worth?” Whistleblowers White, Chris White Plague, The (Herbert) Wikileaks Williams, Art Wired Won currency World Bank World economy World of Warcraft World War I World War II Wuffie Bank Yap (island) Yen currency YouTube Yuan currency Zazula, Tony Zimbabwe Zinc a One hypothesis about the Guidestones is that they were commissioned by a group of Rosicrucians, a mysterious cult-cum-religion with medieval roots and links to Protestantism.

Raw Data Is an Oxymoron by Lisa Gitelman

23andMe, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fixed income, folksonomy, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, index card, informal economy, information security, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Louis Daguerre, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, RFID, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, social graph, software studies, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, text mining, time value of money, trade route, Turing machine, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks

11 Leaking and whistle-blowing may have a certain glamour, but Stone’s journalism, like the Grimkés’ and Weld’s abolitionism, depended on something at once more subtle and more provocative of present concerns, not the opening of secrets but rather the painstaking extraction of already public information from the sources that have obscured it by dint of sheer proliferation. Don’t think of Wikileaks, think of the power of search itself. 91 92 Ellen Gruber Garvey Both Grimkés had previously used their own testimony about slavery extensively in speaking and writing. In 1837, Weld had published The Bible Against Slavery, initially in the Anti-Slavery Quarterly Magazine, and then as a ninety-eight-page pamphlet.

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., 48 Rheingold, Howard, 130 Rhetoric, 7–8, 12, 17, 36, 43 Rigor, 41–43 Robins, Kevin, 126 Rove, Karl, 42 Ruggles, David, 97 Schmidt, Arno, 116 Schmidt, Eric, 125 Science, 24 Science studies, 4–7 Search engine, 34, 107, 121 Secular acceleration, 7, 78, 81–82, 84, 85 Shaw, Peter, 21 Simmel, Georg, 116 Slip box (card index), 10, 103–116, 169 Smith, Adam, 65 Star, Susan Leigh, 9 Statistics, 15, 22, 29, 34, 69, 129 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 89–91, 96 University of Maryland, 155, 157 U.S. census, 2, 122, 124 U.S. Congress, 10, 42, 126, 128 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 159 Value, 61, 67, 69, 123, 127, 132, 133, 136, 153 Verizon, 128 Webster, Frank, 126 Weld, Angelina Grimké, 10, 89–99 Weld, Theodore, 89, 91–92, 98–99 White, Hayden, 3 White Noise, 121, 128 Wikileaks, 91 Williams, Raymond, 50–51 WorldCat, 35 Xenophon, 79 Yes Men, 135 Zimmermann, Johann Georg, 104 Color Plates Daniel Rosenberg, Ann Fabian, Thomas Augst, Jimena Canales, Lisa Lynch, Lisa Gitelman, Paul E. Ceruzzi, Lev Manovich, Jeremy Douglass, William Huber, and Vikas Mouli 1 Color Plates Chart of Biography (1765) The notion that human affairs may be studied through quantitative mechanisms was significantly advanced both in practice and theory during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

pages: 273 words: 76,786

Explore Everything by Bradley Garrett

airport security, Burning Man, call centre, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, failed state, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, Google Earth, Hacker Ethic, Jane Jacobs, Julian Assange, late capitalism, megacity, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, place-making, shareholder value, Stephen Fry, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, white flight, WikiLeaks

Once inside, we found that the magnetic reed switch alarm systems on the doors had been disabled prior to our arrival, a technique straight out of Ninjalicious’ book Access All Areas.81 We concluded that the PIRs must also have been disabled, based on the fact that the bunker was not teeming with angry police by this point. So it seemed we had free access to an entire bunker full of potentially sensitive documents, though in the end, we all joked about how unexciting most of it actually was. Just weeks after Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks fiasco, when he appeared in a London courtroom for disclosing government secrets, we had gained entry into a secure file-storage area and had unrestrained access to all the documents it contained. I imagined Assange would have been pleased to know this was happening; his ethos for transparency so closely aligned with ours.

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Brick, Subterranean Twin Cities (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 26 John Hollingshead, Underground London (London: Kessinger, 2009 [1862]); Charles Dickens, All the Year Round (London, 1861). 27 Whipplesnaith, The Night Climbers of Cambridge (Cambridge: Oleander Press, 2007 [1937]). 28 See Tom Whipple, ‘Confessions of a Night Climber’, Times, 2 November 2007. 29 Tom Wells, ‘Deck the Halls with, er, 150ft-high Santa Hats’, Sun, 4 December 2009. 30 Patrick Sawer, ‘Cambridge University’s 1958 Car on Roof Prank Secrets Revealed’, Telegraph, 28 June 2008. 31 Jon Lackman, ‘The New French Hacker-Artist Underground’, Wired, 20 January 2012. 32 Steven Jones, The Tribes of Burning Man: How an Experimental City in the Desert Is Shaping the New American Counterculture (San Francisco: CCC Publishing, 2011). 33 Geoff Manaugh, The Bldg Blog Book (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2009). 34 D. Wershler-Henry, ‘Urban Life: Usufruct in the City’, Globe and Mail (2005), quoted in Steven High and David W. Lewis, Corporate Wasteland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 42. 35 Ashley Fantz and Atika Shubert, ‘Wikileaks “Anonymous” Hackers: “We Will Fight” ’, CNN, 10 December 2010. 36 Lucy Osborne, ‘Urban Explorers Enter London’s Landmarks’, Evening Standard, 10 November 2011. 37 David Pinder, ‘Old Paris No More: Geographies of Spectacle and Anti-Spectacle’, Antipode 32: 4 (October 2000). 38 Quentin Stevens, The Ludic City: Exploring the Potetial of Public Spaces (London: Routledge, 2007). 39 Michael Scott, ‘Hacking the Material World’, Wired 1: 3 (July/August 1993). 40 E.

pages: 742 words: 137,937

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind

23andMe, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Atul Gawande, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Bill Joy: nanobots, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clapham omnibus, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, death of newspapers, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lump of labour, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, social web, speech recognition, spinning jenny, strong AI, supply-chain management, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telepresence, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, Two Sigma, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, world market for maybe five computers, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Set up in 2005, within six years it had overtaken the New York Times website in unique monthly visitors.206 ProPublica is an independent, not-for-profit online newsroom, financed by the charitable Sandler Foundation, which only conducts investigative journalism. Set up in 2007, it has won two Pulitzer Prizes and a Peabody award. Wikileaks is a not-for-profit organization, financed by donations, that provides an online platform to publish private, secret, and classified material. When it released 251,287 confidential US diplomatic cables on 28 November 2010, the New York Review of Books noted that it would have taken journalists ‘a couple of centuries to wheedle out this volume of information by traditional methods’.207 For many of these online platforms, success depends upon social media.

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From <http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/> (accessed 27 March 2015). 200 Nic Newman, ‘Mainstream media and the distribution of news in the age of social discovery’, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Sept. 2011 <https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk> (accessed 8 March 2015). 201 John Reynolds, ‘Three-fifth’s of Twitter’s UK users follow a newspaper or journalist’, Guardian, 4 Mar. 2014 <http://www.theguardian.com/> (accessed 8 March 2015). 202 ‘ABCs: National daily newspaper circulation September 2014’, Guardian, 10 Oct. 2014 <http://www.theguardian.com/> and <https://twitter.com> (accessed 8 March 2015). 203 David Carr, ‘Facebook Offers Life Raft, but Publishers Are Wary’, New York Times, 26 Oct. 2014 <http://www.nytimes.com> (accessed 8 March 2015). 204 Lizzie Widdicombe, ‘From Mars’, New Yorker, 23 Sept. 2013. 205 Scott E. Gant, We’re All Journalists Now (2007). 206 Roy Greenslade, ‘Huffington Post beats the New York Times to top news website chart’, Guardian, 10 June 2011 <http://www.theguardian.com/> (accessed 8 March 2015). 207 Christian Caryl, ‘Why Wikileaks Changes Everything’, New York Review of Books, 13 Jan. 2011. 208 The New York Times Innovation Report, retrieved from Jason Abbruzzese, ‘The Full New York Times Innovation Report’, Mashable, 16 May 2014 <http://mashable.com> (accessed 8 March 2015). 209 Derek Thompson, ‘The Facebook Effect on the News’, Atlantic, 12 Feb. 2014 <http://www.theatlantic.com> (27 March 2015). 210 <http://www.vox.com>, <https://www.themarshallproject.org>, <http://www.realclearpolitics.com>, <http://fivethirtyeight.com>. 211 <https://chartbeat.com>. 212 Kenneth Olmstead et al., ‘News Video on the Web’, Pew Research Center, 26 Mar. 2014 <http://www.journalism.org> (accessed 8 March 2014). 213 Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (1995), 152–4. 214 The New York Times Innovation Report, retrieved from Jason Abbruzzese, ‘The Full New York Times Innovation Report’, Mashable, 16 May 2014 <http://mashable.com> (accessed 8 March 2015). 215 Ravi Somaiya, ‘How Facebook is Changing the Way Its Users Consume Journalism’, 26 Oct. 2014 <http://www.nytimes.com> (accessed 8 March 2015). 216 <http://www.storyful.com> (accessed 8 March 2015). 217 <https://www.grammarly.com>, <https://www.evernote.com>. 218 Paul Colford, ‘A Leap Forward in Quarterly Earnings Stories’, The Definitive Source blog at Associated Press, 30 June 2014 <http://blog.ap.org/2014/06/30/a-leap-forward-in-quarterly-earnings-stories/> (accessed 8 March). 219 <http://www.forbes.com> See e.g.

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Carr, David, ‘Facebook Offers Life Raft, but Publishers Are Wary’, New York Times, 26 Oct. 2014 <http://www.nytimes.com> (accessed 8 March 2015). Carr, Nicholas, The Glass Cage (London: Bodley Head, 2015). Carr-Saunders, Alexander, and Paul Wilson, The Professions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933). Caryl, Christian, ‘Why Wikileaks Changes Everything’, New York Review of Books, 13 Jan. 2011. Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000). Cavin, Ralph, Paolo Lugli, and Victor Zhirnov, ‘Science and Engineering beyond Moore’s Law’, Proceedings of the IEEE, 100 (2012), 1720–49.

pages: 441 words: 136,954

That Used to Be Us by Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum

addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andy Kessler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, drop ship, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, full employment, Google Earth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Lean Startup, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, oil shock, PalmPilot, pension reform, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

These are now at risk, as a single, glaring, ominous statistic makes clear: In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the majority of American households made no economic gains at all. For the rest of the world, the stakes are just as high, perhaps even higher. Consider a list of some of the major events in world affairs at the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011. In November 2010, a website called WikiLeaks began releasing more than 250,000 classified diplomatic cables of the American government, some of them embarrassing to it and to the governments of other countries, cables that had apparently been supplied by a single low-ranking member of the American armed forces who had obtained access to them.

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The world is turbulent because it has multiple sources of turbulence: bullying governments, such as China’s; repressed and angry societies, such as those in the Arab world; the forces of nature, which are, as ever, powerful and unpredictable, as the devastation in Japan reminded us; and lone individuals, such as the source of the WikiLeaks cables, empowered—indeed super-empowered—by two of the defining trends of our era: globalization and the IT revolution. In this unstable world, the United States stands out as both a beacon and a supplier of stability. Americans sometimes underestimate the importance, and the value, of American power for other countries.

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.; high-speed train from New York to; public school system; snowy winters in; terrorist attack on, see September 11, 2001; transit system in Washington, George Washington magazine Washington Post Washington Wizards basketball team Watergate scandal Waterloo, Battle of Watts Bar Nuclear Plant Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill Weekly Standard Weingarten, Randi Welles, Orson Wellington, Duke of West Alabama Chamber of Commerce Whalen, Bill Whig Party Whitney, Meredith Whole New Mind, A (Pink) Wichita (Kansas) Wiki WikiLeaks Wikipedia Wilde, Oscar Williams, Tennessee Williams College Wilmington (Delaware) Wilson, Woodrow wind power Winklevoss, Cameron and Tyler Wired magazine Wisconsin Wisconsin, University of World Bank World Economic Forum (Tianjin, China; 2010) World Is Flat, The (Friedman) World Series World Trade Center, terrorist attack on, see September 11, 2001 World War I World War II; African American aviators in; economy during; scientific research during; veterans of World Wide Web WTOP radio station X Xi’an (China) Xu, Kevin Young Y Yale–New Haven Teachers Institute Yale University; Law School; School of Forestry and Environmental Studies Ye, Lynnelle Lin Yemen Yeung, Angela Yu-Yun Ying, Lori YouTube Z Zellweger, Renée Zhang Huamei Zhao, Alice Wei Zhou, Linda Zimbabwe Zuckerberg, Mark Zynga A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHORS Thomas L.

pages: 452 words: 134,502

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers, Josh Levy

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Aaron Swartz If you wanted to censor the Internet, if you wanted to come up with a way the government could shut down access to particular websites—this bill might just be the only way to do it. If you said it was about pornography, it’d probably get overturned by the courts—just like that adult bookstore case. But by claiming it was about copyright, it might just sneak through. And that was terrifying, because copyright was absolutely everywhere. If you wanted to shut down WikiLeaks, it’d be a bit of a stretch to claim you were doing it because they were distributing child pornography. But it wouldn’t be hard at all to claim they were violating copyright. Patrick Ruffini (Republican Party political strategist, cofounder of Engage) When I first read the bill that October, the notion that a bill like this could see the light of day was jaw-dropping.

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Which means that if you wanted to censor the Internet, if you wanted to come up with a way the government could shut down access to particular websites—this bill might just be the only way to do it. If you said it was about pornography, it’d probably get overturned by the courts—just like that adult bookstore case. But by claiming it was about copyright, it might just sneak through. And that was terrifying, because copyright was absolutely everywhere. If you wanted to shut down WikiLeaks, it’d be a bit of a stretch to claim you were doing it because they were distributing child pornography. But it wouldn’t be hard at all to claim they were violating copyright. Because everything is copyrighted. These words are copyrighted. And it’s so easy to accidentally copy something. So easy, in fact, that we found the leading Republican supporter of COICA, Orrin Hatch, had illegally copied a bunch of code into his own Senate website.

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OR Books PUBLISHING THE POLITICS OF THE INTERNET Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet JULIAN ASSANGE Tweets From Tahrir: Egypt’s Revolution as It Unfolded, in the Words of the People Who Made It NADIA IDLE AND ALEX NUNNS, EDITORS The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History CHASE MADAR Freeloading: How Our Insatiable Appetite for Free Content Starves Creativity CHRIS RUEN Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency MICAH L. SIFRY For more information, visit our website at www.orbooks.com

pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

* * * Among the close-knit cryptography community invited to review Nakamoto’s work were members of the Cypherpunk movement, a loose association of tech-minded activists who had first gained notoriety in the 1990s with their efforts to use cryptographic privacy tools to force radical political and cultural change. This effort bore some fruit: transparency crusader Julian Assange and his activist publishing organization, WikiLeaks, grew out of this movement. To the Cypherpunks, the idea of an anonymous digital cash system was nothing new. It had been one of their first big ideas, but no one had yet turned it into something viable. Several had attempted to build digital cash systems, one had even got tantalizingly close, but ultimately no system had reached any kind of critical mass, and the cause had fizzled out.

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One product they developed was the Cypherpunk version of an anonymous message remailer, which hid the identity of a person sending an e-mail and prevented the recipient from replying to it, all in the name of stopping governments or corporations from snooping on people’s daily communications. Other products had more subversive objectives—for example, May’s audacious BlackNet project, a precursor to WikiLeaks, which solicited secret information with the promise of encryption and payments in untraceable digital money. A few products were downright scary. Jim Bell, who like May was formerly employed by Intel, proposed an anonymous market for assassinations. The idea was that people could anonymously contribute to a bounty that they would pay to have a particular influential person killed, the assumption being that the market would put a greater price on the heads of those most egregiously abusing a position of authority.

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Gox and trust industries Turing Festival 20Mission Twitter Uber U-Haul Ulbricht, Ross Ultimate Frisbee unbanked people Unenumerated Unfair Trade, The (Casey) UnionPay Union Square Partners United Kingdom Utah utilities value: of bitcoins of coins of cryptocurrencies of dollar of gold intrinsic of money van der Laan, Wladimir Vaurum venture capitalists (VCs) Ver, Roger Verisign Verizon Vessenes, Peter VHS Virgin Group VirtEx Visa Vodafone Volabit Volcker, Paul Voltaire Voorhees, Erik voting Wall Street Wall Street Journal Walmart Washington State wealth bitcoin and Wealth of Nations, The (Smith) Web Designs WeChat Wedbush Securities Weill, Sanford Wei Dai Weimar Republic welfare state Wells Fargo Western Union Whelan, Jason Whelan, John WikiLeaks Wikipedia Willard, Rik William III, King Williams, Mark T. Wilson, Cody Wilson, Fred Winklevoss, Cameron and Tyler Wise, Josh Women’s Annex Wood, Gavin work World Bank Wright, Frank Lloyd Wuille, Pieter Xapo XIPH Foundation Xpert Financial XRP Y2K threat Yahoo Yang, Jerry Yap Y Combinator Yellen, Janet Yermack, David YouTube YTCracker Yunus, Muhammad ZeroBlock Zhang, Ng Zimbabwe Zimmerman, Phil Zobro, Jonathan Zoosk Zuckerberg, Mark Zug Also by Michael J.

pages: 297 words: 83,563

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts by Joshua Hammer

crowdsourcing, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, no-fly zone, pre–internet, trade route, unemployed young men, WikiLeaks

“As a quick response to the despicable French act”: “Al-Qaeda in North Africa ‘kills French hostage,’ ” BBC News, July 26, 2010. “The [government’s] attitude was, ‘it was best’ ”: Mantiply interview. “The level of inaction at the presidency”: Political Officer Aaron Sampson, “As Northern Crisis Deepens, Mali Drifts,” U.S. Embassy, Bamako, April 14, 2008, confidential diplomatic file released by Wikileaks. “I want to be near the Great Mosque”: Ansar interview. “I don’t think he was flipped there”: Yochi Dreazan, “The New Terrorist Training Ground,” The Atlantic, October 2013. “Are you sure you’re not heading down”: Ansar interview. “You are going where?”: Ansar interview. “Arabs with short beards, Tuaregs with turbans”: Charlotte Wiedemann, “From Holes in the Sand to a Digital Library,” trans.

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“Haidara is a man obsessed with the written word”: Peter Gwin, “The Telltale Scribes of Timbuktu,” National Geographic, January 2011. “impure as beads of sweat”: Ambassador Terence P. McCulley, “The ‘Frere Guide’ Qadhafi Causes a Stir in Mali,” U.S. Embassy, Bamako, April 17, 2006, confidential diplomatic file released by Wikileaks. “We knew that we had no chance”: Author interview with “Yusuf,” former Tuareg rebel, Timbuktu, February 15, 2014. “It’s an age favorable to war”: Jonathan Curiel, “ ‘Desert Blues’ Never Sounded So Good as it Does with Terakaft,” KQED Arts, October 8, 2012. “645 kilograms of Semtex plastic explosives”: “Nigeria Militants a growing threat across Africa: UN,” Reuters, January 26, 2012.

pages: 394 words: 85,734

The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Mason

active measures, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Easter island, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, planetary scale, post-oil, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, systematic trading, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

So it seems that the euro crisis is wholly unnecessary from an economic viewpoint, but that it serves the interests of maintaining within Europe the role that Germany developed for itself during the reign of the Global Minotaur. And now that the Minotaur is kaput, Europe is in crisis and Germany is in denial. The dragon soars, then plunges into angst On 4 December 2010, Wikileaks posted an official cable relating a conversation (some time around 28 March 2009) between US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. In it we read: ‘The Secretary also noted the challenges posed by China’s economic rise, asking, “How do you deal toughly with your banker?”’

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., 165; attitude towards Britain, 69; and bank regulation, 10; New Deal, 45, 58–9 Roosevelt, Theodore (‘Teddy’), 180 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), 6, 151, 156; takeover of ABN-Amro, 119–20 Rudd, Kevin, 212 Russia, financial crisis, 190 Saudi Arabia, oil prices, 98 Scandinavia, Gold Standard, 44 Scholes, Myron, 13 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 19 Schuman, Robert, 75 Schumpter, Joseph, 34 Second World War, 45, 55–6; aftermath, 87–8; effect on the US, 57–8 seeds, commodification of, 163 shares, in privatized companies, 137, 138 silver, prices, 96 simulated markets, 170 simulated prices, 170 Singapore, 91 single currencies, ICU, 60–1 slave trade, 28 SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises), 186 social welfare, 12 solidarity (asabiyyah), 33–4 South East Asia, 91; financial crisis, 190, 191–5, 213; industrialization, 86, 87 South Korea see Korea sovereign debt crisis, 205 Soviet Union: Africa, 79; disintegration, 201; Marshall Plan, 72–3; Marxism, 181, 182; relations with the US, 71 SPV (Special Purpose Vehicle), 174 see also EFSF stagflation, 97 stagnation, 37 Stalin, Joseph, 72–3 steel production, in Germany, 70 Strauss-Kahn, Dominique, 60, 254, 255 Summers, Larry, 230 strikes, 40 sub-prime mortgages, 2, 5, 6, 130–1, 147, 149, 151, 166 success, paradox of, 33–5, 53 Suez Canal trauma, 69 Suharto, President of Indonesia, 97 Summers, Larry, 3, 132, 170, 173, 180 see also Geithner–Summers Plan supply and demand, 11 surpluses: under capitalism, 31–2; currency unions, 61; under feudalism, 30; generation in the EU, 196; manufacturing, 30; origin of, 26–7; privatization of, 29; recycling mechanisms, 64–5, 109–10 Sweden, Crash of 2008, 155 Sweezy, Paul, 73 Switzerland: Crash of 2008, 155; UBS, 148–9, 151 systemic failure, Crash of 2008, 17–19 Taiwan, 191, 192 Tea Party (US), 162, 230, 231, 281 technology, and globalization, 28 Thailand, 91 Thatcher, Margaret, 117–18, 136–7 Third World: Crash of 2008, 162; debt crisis, 108, 219; interest rate rises, 108; mineral wealth, 106; production of goods for Walmart, 125 tiger economies, 87 see also South East Asia Tillman Act (1907), 180 time, and economic models, 139–40 Time Warner, 117 tin, prices, 96 toxic theory, 13–17, 115, 133–9, 139–42 trade: balance of, 61, 62, 64–5; deficits (US), 111, 243; global, 27, 90; surpluses, 158 trades unions, 124, 137, 202 transfer unions, New Deal, 65 Treasury Bills (US), 7 Treaty of Rome, 237 Treaty of Versailles, 237 Treaty of Westphalia, 237 trickle-down, 115, 135 trickle-up, 135 Truman Doctrine, 71, 71–2, 77 Truman, Harry, 73 tsunami, effects of, 194 UBS, 148–9, 151 Ukraine, and the Crash of 2008, 156 UN Security Council, 253 unemployment: Britain, 160; Global Plan, 96–7; rate of, 14; US, 152, 158, 164 United States see US Unocal, 106 US economy, twin deficits, 22–3, 25 US government, and South East Asia, 192 US Mortgage Bankers Association, 161 US Supreme Court, 180 US Treasury, 153–4, 156, 157, 159; aftermath of the Crash of 2008, 160; Geithner–Summers Plan, 171–2, 173; bonds, 227 US Treasury Bills, 109 US (United States): aftermath of the Crash of 2008, 161–2; assets owned by foreign state institutions, 216; attitude towards oil price rises, 97–8; China, 213–14; corporate bond purchases, 228; as a creditor nation, 57; domestic policies during the Global Plan, 82–5; economy at present, 184; economy praised, 113–14; effects of the Crash of 2008, 2, 183; foreign-owned assets, 225; Greek Civil War, 71; labour costs, 105; Plaza Accord, 188; profit rates, 106; proposed invasion of Afghanistan, 106–7; role in the ECSC, 75; South East Asia, 192 value, costing, 50–1 VAT, reduced, 156 Venezuela, oil prices, 97 Vietnamese War, 86, 91–2 vital spaces, 192, 195, 196 Volcker, Paul: 2009 address to Wall Street, 122; demand for dollars, 102; and gold convertibility, 94; interest rate rises, 99; replaced by Greenspan, 10; warning of the Crash of 2008, 144–5; on the world economy, 22, 100–1, 139 Volcker Rule, 180–1 Wachowski, Larry and Andy, 50 wage share, 34–5 wages: British workers, 137; Japanese workers, 185; productivity, 104; prophecy paradox, 48; US workers, 124, 161 Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (documentary, Greenwald), 125–6 Wall Street: Anglo-Celtic model, 12; Crash of 2008, 11–12, 152; current importance, 251; Geithner–Summers Plan, 178; global profits, 23; misplaced confidence in, 41; private money, 136; profiting from sub-prime mortgages, 131; takeovers and mergers, 115–17, 115, 118–19; toxic theory, 15 Wallace, Harry, 72–3 Walmart, 115, 123–7, 126; current importance, 251 War of the Currents, 39 Washington Mutual, 153 weapons of mass destruction, 27 West Germany: labour costs, 105; Plaza Accord, 188 Westinghouse, George, 39 White, Harry Dexter, 59, 70, 109 Wikileaks, 212 wool, as a global commodity, 28 working class: in Britain, 136; development of, 28 working conditions, at Walmart, 124–5 World Bank, 253; origins, 59; recession prediction, 149; and South East Asia, 192 World Trade Organization, 78, 215 written word, 27 yen, value against dollar, 96, 188, 193–4 Yom Kippur War, 96 zombie banks, 190–1

pages: 297 words: 84,009

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Those people who do not follow suit often may be considered “inferior,” the natural inference from a failure to disclose (imagine that a disclosure of criminal records and history of involvement with the law was at stake, and apply the same logic to those who would not disclose). Or the data may be hacked and published somewhere like WikiLeaks; bribe payments probably won’t keep this information a secret forever. In 1998, David Brin published a famous book called The Transparent Society. He noted that individuals were losing their privacy, but wondered whether this might be a good thing overall. He stressed that there would be an attendant decline in corruption, an openness about who we really are, and a strengthening of reputational and competitive checks as reasons to welcome this development, which indeed can be described as “greater transparency” and not just “loss of privacy.”

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Treasury Theranos Threadsy tolerance Transparent Society, The (Brin) Treasury bills See T-bills Trump, Donald big tech and crony capitalism employment and social media and supporters and conservative right See also Republican Party trust banks and CEOs and consumers and efficiency and government and management and market societies and nonprofits and privacy and public’s trust in corporations “trust game” venture capital and wealth and workers and trust-busting trusts truth-seeking Tupperware Twitter Trump and Uber “unicorn firms” UnitedHealth University of Chicago economics department See also Friedman, Milton up-front, capital U.S. Treasury See also T-bills venture capital American innovation and Verizon Vietnam War voice recording Volkswagen wages Walgreens Walmart Warren, Elizabeth Waze wealth management Wells Fargo WhatsApp whistleblowers Wi-Fi-enabled technology WikiLeaks Williamson, Oliver Wilson, David work altruism and economic oppression exploitation flow and human relationships and non-pay-related benefits potential burden of satisfaction of sexual harassment and stress and studies “work as a safe haven” effect work hours workplace freedom WolframAlpha World Bank World Trade Organization World Values Survey World War I World War II X-rays Yahoo YouTube Zak, Paul J.

pages: 314 words: 83,631

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum

air freight, cable laying ship, call centre, digital divide, Donald Davies, global village, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, inflight wifi, invisible hand, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, messenger bag, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, packet switching, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, undersea cable, urban planning, UUNET, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

A green pin meant an AMS-IX location, red showed private carrier-owned buildings, and blue indicated a data center that had fallen out of use. If I zoomed out to the scale of the country as a whole, the pins blanketed the screen, all leaning in the same direction, like windmills. It struck me as a startling example of the Netherlands’s transparency: here, pulled together in one place on the open web, was the same information that WikiLeaks had deemed sensitive enough to bother leaking. And yet nobody seemed to care. The map had been there for two years already, apparently unmolested. It also clarified a broader point that I’d been circling for months. It showed the Internet’s small-scale geography, with the data centers clustered into defined Internet neighborhoods, like the industrial parks surrounding Schiphol Airport, the “Zuidoost” just southeast of the city center, and the academic area known as Science Park Amsterdam.

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See also MAE-East undersea cables AC-1, 202–3, 216–17, 218 and connecting to unconnected places, 197–98 globalization and, 193, 197 as important to Internet, 9 as invisible, 194 latency of, 198–99 location of, 194 Main One, 218 maps of, 14, 16–17 Porthcurno and, 202–16 Portugal and, 191–92, 194, 217–26, 267 SAT-3, 191–92, 197 SEACOM, 192, 197 at 60 Hudson Street (New York City), 174 South Africa and, 191–93, 197 South Asia and, 196 of Tata Communications, 194–202, 218–26 WACS, 218–26 See also specific landing station or hub United Arab Emirates, 197 universities history of Internet and, 43–49, 51, 52, 53 See also specific institution University of California—Los Angeles (UCLA): history of Internet and, 36, 39–49, 51 University of California—Santa Barbara, 43 University College London, 50, 52 University of Karlsruhe, 137 University of Minnesota, 110 University of Pennsylvania, 52 University of Utah, 43 Up in the Air (Kirn), 38 UUNet, 56, 59, 60 Verizon, 19, 79, 86, 98, 102, 110, 121, 151, 152, 165, 166, 196 Vienna, Virginia: peering and, 128 Vietnam, 201 Virginia data storage in, 230 See also Ashburn, Virginia Voldemort Industries, 242, 243 Voorhees, Gmelin & Walker, 172 WACS (West Africa Cable System), 218–26 Washington, D.C. expansion of Internet and, 50 fiber optic connections to, 26 history of Internet and, 50 structure of Internet and, 27 Western Union, 172–73 Westesson, Par, 159–62, 189 Westnet, 53 White, E. B., 70 WikiLeaks, 149 Wired.com, 106 Witteman, Job, 131–33, 134, 135, 145, 150, 154–56, 157 World War II, 12, 39, 204–5 Worldcom, 84 Wu, Tim, 54 Xbox games, 233 XEROX, 52 Xlink, 138 Yahoo, 57, 79, 120, 235, 250 Yellowstone Regional Internet Exchange (YRIX), 111 Young, Nolan, 235–36, 237, 238, 241, 242, 244, 253 YouTube, 30, 79, 108, 119, 122, 200, 240 Zuckerberg, Mark, 70, 267 About the Author ANDREW BLUM writes about architecture, infrastructure, and technology for many publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, BloombergBusinessweek, Slate, and Popular Science.

pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

Certainly online eyes remain much less valuable than offline ones, with average advertising rates of the printed edition of a major newspaper being around ten times its online cost.36 The same is true of the value of offline versus online readers, with the Newspaper Association of America estimating that the average print reader is worth around $539 versus the $26 value of the online reader.37 And free certainly isn’t working as an economic model for online newspapers. Take, for example, the world’s third most frequently visited news website, the London Guardian. In spite of breaking the News of the World phone hacking scandal and the Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks stories, the Guardian has reported operating losses of more than £100 million since 2010, with a stunning £50 million lost just between 2012 and 2013.38 No wonder the Guardian is experimenting with a robot-generated print edition called #Open001, which replaces editors with algorithms to select relevant stories for publication.39 But robots can’t write the kind of high-quality journalism that distinguishes the Guardian from most of its rivals.

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Mielke amassed personal data with the same relentlessness that Google’s Street View car collected the emails, photos, and passwords of online German citizens between 2008 and 2010—a privacy breach that Johannes Caspar, the German regulator in charge of the investigation into Google’s behavior, described as “one of the biggest data-protection rules violations known.”8 But, as a violator of our online data, Google faces stiff competition from its rival Facebook. TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas suggests that Facebook’s “creepy data-grabbing ways,” such as the 2013 harvesting of the personal contact information of 6 million of its users, or that secret 2012 study to control the emotions of 689,000 of its users,9 make it the “Borg of the digital world.”10 WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who knows a thing or two about spying himself, even accuses Facebook of being the “greatest spying machine the world has ever seen.”11 So is Facebook really the greatest spying machine in world history—greater than either the Stasi, the CIA, or Google? Citing Google’s Street View car privacy violations, the German privacy regulator Johannes Caspar might doubt Assange’s assertion, as probably would privacy watchdogs in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy who collectively told Google in the summer of 2013 that the company would face legal sanctions unless it changed its 2012 policy of unifying personal data collected from all its different services.12 Others would also award this dubious honor to Google.

pages: 300 words: 87,374

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, anti-globalists, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, corporate governance, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, kremlinology, liberal world order, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, the market place, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

This gross asymmetry of understanding creates a strategic vulnerability. For instance, twenty-year-olds in Jeddah or Karachi can surf the internet and enroll in flight lessons in Oklahoma, but hardly any twenty-year-old from Oklahoma could learn what is on offer in Jeddah or Karachi, because they don’t speak the languages there. When WikiLeaks released the secret cables of the American State Department, it became a global news sensation and a major embarrassment for American diplomacy. In contrast, the Chinese diplomatic cables leaked a few years ago, although no doubt very interesting to professionals, could never become a worldwide human-interest story, nor a serious setback for Chinese foreign policy, because relatively few people read Chinese fluently, except for the Chinese themselves and a handful of experts abroad.

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., 18 Tarde, Gabriel, 7–8, 71 Tiananmen Square protests (1989), 188–90 Treaty of Trianon (1920), 68 Trump, Donald: and ‘America First,’ 157–63; anti-EU, 142; anti-immigration, 47; anti-liberalism of, 138–40; attitude toward the truth, 173–9; foreign policy, 180, 198; Inaugural Address, 150; lack of interest in the Cold War, 162; and the Mueller investigation, 182; and murder of Jamal Khashoggi, 184–5; Playboy interview, 160; popular appeal of, 169–70; rejection of American exceptionalism, 90, 143–8, 150; and truth telling, 179–85; view of America as ‘victim’ of its imitators, 16–17; and the wall, 153; and white nationalism, 139, 161, 183, 184; world-view of, 140–2 Twelve Angry Men (film, 1957), 115–16 Ukraine: ‘Orange Revolution’ (2004–2005), 93, 105, 109; Russian intervention in, 2, 110, 111, 126, 136 United Nations (UN), 37 United Russia Party, 102, 104 United States of America: and Amercian exceptionalism, 142–8, 165; ‘America First,’ 157–63; Birtherism movement, 177; and the Cold War, 151–2; confrontation with China, 195–7; and conspiracy theories, 134; de-industrialization, 167; demographic anxiety, 164; economic disparities in, 167–8; economic protectionism, 159; and economic rise of China, 16–18; effects of Americanization, 154–5; financial crisis (2008), 167; illiberal populism in, 46; immigration anxiety, 163–7, 170–1; interference in foreign elections, 126–7; invasion of Iraq, 149, 150, 151, 180, 183; loss of the moral high ground, 151–2; military aid to the Afghan mujahedeen, 89; monolinguism of, 153–4, 156–7; moon landing (1969), 187; and regime change, 198; Russian sanctions, 136; sense of victimization, 16–17, 139–42, 149, 162; War on Terror, 149, 151, 152; white nationalism, 164–5, 170–2 Vallet, Elisabeth, 2 Van Parijs, Phillipe, 153 Veblen, Thorsten, 8–9 ‘velvet revolutions’ (1989), 23–7, 45 Venezuela, 126 Vienna, Muslim siege of (1683), 46 Vietnam, 203 Vietnam War, 90 Visegrád Group, 34 Voloshin, Alexander, 156 Warsaw Pact, 90 Weizsäcker, Richard von, 82 Welles, Orson, The Lady from Shanghai, 80 Western hypocrisy, 125, 135 Western values, 52 Westernization, 9–11, 30–1, 42, 52–4, 57, 121–2 WikiLeaks, 155 Wilde, Oscar, 162 Williams, Bernard, 176, 177 Wilson, Andrew, 95 Wilson, Woodrow, 125, 145 Witkiewicz, Stanislaw, Insatiability, 25 Woodward, Bob, 155–6, 174, 180 Wright Laboratory, Ohio, 120 xenophobia, 5, 71, 74 Xi Jinping, 192, 193–4, 196–7, 199, 201–2, 203 Yakunin, Vladimir, 84 Yeats, William Butler, ‘The Second Coming,’ 3 Yeltsin, Boris, 79, 85, 87, 94, 98, 109, 126 Yugoslav wars, 59, 87 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, 102 Zucman, Gabriel, 134 Zyuganov, Gennady, 98, 102 THE LIGHT THAT FAILED Pegasus Books, Ltd.

pages: 265 words: 80,510

The Enablers: How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption - Endangering Our Democracy by Frank Vogl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, corporate governance, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Global Witness, Greensill Capital, income inequality, information security, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Londongrad, low interest rates, market clearing, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, profit maximization, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stock buybacks, too big to fail, WikiLeaks

US Department of Justice, press release, June 30, 2014, headline: “BNP Paribas Agrees to Plead Guilty and to Pay $8.9 Billion for Illegally Processing Financial Transactions for Countries Subject to U.S. Economic Sanctions.” 7. There has long been speculation about the scale of the wealth of former President Al-Bashir. According to one news report in the Guardian, December 2010, based on a report by Wikileaks, he had a fortune in excess of $9 billion: “Wealth of Sudan’s President: Wikileaks Cables.” 8. United Nations Resolution 1591. 9. Ibid. And see US Justice Department “Statement of Facts.” 10. The “2018 National Strategy for Combating Terrorist and Other Illicit Financing (Illicit Finance Strategy)” was prepared by the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI) of the Department of the Treasury (Treasury) in consultation with the many agencies, bureaus, and departments of the US federal government that also have roles in combating illicit finance. 11.

pages: 257 words: 80,698

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, Bellingcat, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Downton Abbey, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Global Witness, John Bercow, Julian Assange, light touch regulation, lockdown, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, surveillance capitalism, the High Line, WikiLeaks

Gazprom told the post-revolutionary government it would be renegotiating its gas supply contract, and when Ukraine refused to agree to its terms, cut it off. In the depths of winter the whole country suddenly realised quite how dependent it was on Russian goodwill. There’s a plaintive account in the State Department archive released by Wikileaks of a meeting between the US ambassador and Yushchenko’s prime minister. It describes the sudden urgency of the choice that had previously been postponed since 1991. ‘He was on the horns of a dilemma. If he went ahead with the deal with RUE, he and the Our Ukraine Party would be accused of corruption.

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‘There is no business connection between Mr Mogilevich and me. I have never had any direct business dealings with him, nor does he have any interests in any of my companies,’ Firtash wrote in a letter to the WSJ in 2007. According to an account of a meeting between Firtash and US officials a year later, and released by Wikileaks, ‘Firtash acknowledged that he needed, and received, permission from Mogilevich when he established various businesses, but he denied any close relationship with him.’ (After the cable was published, Firtash issued a statement denying he had ever acknowledged this, and suggested the claim was a ‘mistranslation or misunderstanding’.)

pages: 306 words: 82,909

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

It was a security alert, and included a link to what looked like a Google log-in page. Podesta entered his credentials on the page, which wasn’t Google at all. It was actually run by the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency. Once operatives on the other side of the screen had Podesta’s Gmail password, they grabbed at least 20,000 of his old emails—then sent them to WikiLeaks to publish. This was a social engineering hack. Social engineering is a common way to hack computer systems. Basically, it involves convincing someone with some specialized access to a system to use it in a way that they shouldn’t. Over twenty years ago, I wrote “Only amateurs attack machines; professionals target people.”

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Katzenbach, 164 spam, 46–47 spear phishing, 192 Spectre, 48 sponsored content, 194 spoofing, 81, 82 sports hacks, 41–44, 46, 103, 259n Summers, Larry, 97 sumptuary laws, 110 supply chain attacks, 145 Susskind, Jamie, 248 Suzuki, Daichi, 42 systems additional for hacking defense, 54, 60 biological, 19–20 defined, 17–18, 19 hierarchy and, 200 multiple levels of, 32 norms and, 66–67 resilience in, 152 rigidity of, 27 rules and, 18–19 thinking based on, 20 TaskRabbit, 124 Tata, Anthony, 160 tax code bugs in, 14–15 complexity of, 13–14 See also tax hacks Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (2017), 14, 15–16, 129, 146–47, 149 tax hacks architecture and, 109 creative hackers and, 22 cum-ex trading, 104–5 de minimis rule and, 249 defenses against, 15–16, 51, 61 jurisdictional rules and, 128–31 morality and, 263n wealth/power advantages and, 120 tax havens, 128–31 Tay (chatbot), 210 technological change, 251–52 telephone hacks, 26–27, 46 Terminator, 243 terrorism, 196 Tetzel, Johann, 72, 260n Theranos, 101 Thiel, Peter, 3, 4 threat modeling, 62–63, 64–65, 96 title-only bills, 154 “too big to fail” hack, 95–98 travel hacks, 179–80 trespass law, 135–36 tribal courts, 113 tribalism, 196–97 Troubled Asset Relief Program, 96 Trump, Donald banking hacks and, 77 cognitive hacks and, 182 destruction as result of hacking and, 173 legislative process hacks and, 147 norms and, 66–67 payday loans and, 126 social media and, 185 tax hacks and, 105 trust hacking, 27, 191–94, 218 TurboTax, 190 turducken, 110, 263n Turkle, Sherry, 218–19 Twenty-Fourth Amendment, 164 Twitter, 81 typos, 84–85 Uber, 99, 100, 101, 116, 123, 125, 264n unemployment insurance, 132–33 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (1994), 130 user interface design, 189–90 Vacancies Reform Act (1998), 160 variable rewards, 186 venture capital (VC), 99–101, 125 Violence Against Women Act (2013), 114 voice assistants, 217 Volcker Rule, 77 Volkswagen, 234 Voltaire, 172 voter eligibility hacks, 161–63 voter ID laws, 164–65 Voting Rights Act (1965), 164 vulnerabilities acceptance of, 16 AI ability to find, 229–30, 238–39 ATM hacks and, 31, 33, 34 bugs as, 14–15 hacking as parasitical and, 48, 49 hacking hierarchy and, 201 hacking life cycle and, 21 identifying, 56–57, 77–78, 237–38 legislative process hacks and, 147–48, 267n of AI systems, 4, 209–11, 226–27 real estate hacks and, 86 responsible disclosure, 89–90 secure systems design and, 59 zero-day, 90 See also patching Walker, Scott, 166–67 WannaCry, 50 Warner, Mark, 190 Watts, Duncan, 97 wealth/power access and, 22 administrative burdens and, 134 democratic growth and, 250 election hacks and, 168–71 hacking advantages of, 103–4, 119–22 hacking governance systems and, 248 hacking normalization and, 73, 104, 119, 120, 122 impact on vulnerability patches and, 24 market hacks and, 97 trust breakdown and, 251 West, Kanye, 170 Westphal, Paul, 41 WeWork, 100 WikiLeaks, 191 Wilson, Edward O., 251 Winston, Patrick, 206 Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, 134 work-to-rule, 115–16, 121 YouTube, 185, 236 Zelenskyy, Volodymyr, 193 zero-day vulnerabilities, 90 Zone of Death jurisdictional loophole, 112–13 Zuckerberg, Mark, 94 Zuckerman, Ethan, 183 ALSO BY BRUCE SCHNEIER We Have Root Click Here to Kill Everybody Data and Goliath Carry On Liars and Outliers Cryptography Engineering Schneier on Security Practical Cryptography Beyond Fear Secrets and Lies The Twofish Encryption Algorithm The Electronic Privacy Papers E-Mail Security Protect Your Macintosh Applied Cryptography Copyright © 2023 by Bruce Schneier All rights reserved First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W.

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Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

“Neuromorphic computing,” Intel Corporation, accessed May 3, 2020, www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/research/neuromorphic-computing.html. 2. Sara Castellanos, “Intel to release neuromorphic-computing system,” Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2020, www.wsj.com/articles/intel-to-release-neuromorphic-computing-system-11584540000. 3. Linda Hardesty, “WikiLeaks publishes the location of Amazon’s data centers,” SDXCentral, October 12, 2018, www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/wikileaks-publishes-the-location-of-amazons-data-centers/2018/10/. 4. “RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report from Flexera,” Flexera, 2019, resources.flexera.com/web/media/documents/rightscale-2019-state-of-the-cloud-report-from-flexera.pdf, p. 2. 5.

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Cancel Cable: How Internet Pirates Get Free Stuff by Chris Fehily

Firefox, patent troll, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, WikiLeaks

Chapter 14 – Books, Documents, and Fonts A sampling of books and documents that you can download: Academic textbooks and instructors’ solutions manuals Comic books and anime Computer source code Course notes and reports Dictionaries, thesauri, references, and usage books Fiction and nonfiction of many periods, genres, and languages Foreign-language instruction Knitting patterns Magazines Maps, atlases, and travel guides Musical scores and songbooks Programming, computer, and technical books Religious texts Screenplays and scripts Tests and test-preparation guides Training courses, tutorials, and seminars WikiLeaks archives PDF Files The most common format for books is Portable Document Format or PDF (.pdf). PDF is a fixed page-layout format, meaning that you can’t change a PDF file’s font, text size, page size, page numbers, margins, columns, gutters, or whitespace. PDF works best for highly formatted documents like magazines, brochures, and screenplays, or typographically complex works like technical manuals, design specifications, math books, academic texts, and music, architecture, and art books.

pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

It measures output in a particular country, even where the ultimate profits may accrue to owners in another jurisdiction. Nations can boost growth by misallocating investment, excessive borrowing, or misuse of natural resources. A significant part of China's recent rapid growth may have been an illusion. In a 2007 conversation disclosed by WikiLeaks, Chinese premier Li Keqiang told the US ambassador that GDP statistics were “for reference only.”2 Li preferred to focus on electricity consumption, the volume of rail cargo, and the amount of loans disbursed (promptly dubbed the Li Keqiang Index). Since 2008, China's headline growth of around 8 percent has been driven by investment funded by new bank lending, from state-controlled banks, averaging around 30–40 percent of GDP.

…

Julius West, The Cherry Orchard (1904) 1916. www.eldritchpress.org/ac/chorch.htm. 23 Russell Brand, “For Amy,” 24 July 2011. www.russellbrand.com/for-amy/. 4. The End of Growth 1 Arthur Miller, “The Year It Came Apart,” New York Magazine, vol. 8, no. 1 (30 December 1974—6 January 1975), p. 30. 2 See Reuters, “China's GDP Is ‘Man-made,’ Unreliable: Top Leader,” 6 December 2010. www.reuters.com/article/2010/12/06/us-china-economy-wikileaks-idUSTRE6B527D20101206. 3 Robert F. Kennedy, remarks at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, 18 March 1968. www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/RFK-Speeches/Remarks-of-Robert-F-Kennedy-at-the-University-of-Kansas-March-18-1968.aspx. 4 Henry C. Wallich, “Zero Growth,” Newsweek, 24 January 1972. 5 J.

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What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, business process, call centre, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, clean water, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, don't be evil, Dunbar number, fake news, fear of failure, Firefox, future of journalism, G4S, Golden age of television, Google Earth, Googley, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, old-boy network, PageRank, peer-to-peer lending, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Zipcar

A lot of attention is given to the mistakes or sabotage we see on Wikipedia, but what’s more impressive is watching the process of correcting and improving entries there, undertaken by people who get nothing out of it but the satisfaction of making things right. Snopes.com exists just to debunk urban legends. Wikileaks.org exists to give whistleblowers a place to share documentation of evildoings—and when a federal judge tried to shut it down in 2007, its community responded by replicating the site all over the web. Truth will out. Contrast the Rather affair with the case of Reuters after one of its photographers was accused of doctoring a photo of Beirut during Israeli bombardment of the city in 2006.

…

See venture capital vendor relationship management (VRM), 201–2 venture capital (VC), 189–95 Vershbow, Ben, 138 Virginia Tech University, 105 Virgin Money, 197 Virtual Law Partners, 223 Vise, David A., 114–15 VRM. See vendor relationship management Waghorn, Rick, 56 Wales, Jimmy, 60, 87 Wall Street Journal, 129 Wal-Mart, 54–55, 101 Washlet, 181 Wattenberg, Laura, 233 Weinberger, David, 3, 82, 96–97, 137, 149, 232 Westlaw, 224 widgets, 36–37 Wikia, 60 Wikileaks.org, 92–93 Wikinomics (Tapscott), 113, 151, 225 Wikipedia communities and, 50 growth of, 66 mistakes in, 92–93 open-source and, 60 speed of, 106 wikitorials, 86–87 Williams, Evan, 105–6 Williams, Raymond, 63 Wilson, Fred, 35, 176, 189–92, 225, 237 Wine.com, 158 WineLibrary.TV, 157 The Winner Stands Alone (Coelho), 142 Wired, 33 wireless access, 166 airlines and, 182–83 wireless spectrum, 166 The Wisdom of Crowds (Surowiecki), 88 The Witch of Portobello (Coelho), 142–43 WNYC, 128 Wojcicki, Anne, 205 Wolf, Maryanne, 235 World Economic Forum, 48, 113 Wyman, Bob, 211 Yahoo, 5, 36, 58 China and, 99–100 communities and, 50 Yang, Jerry, 36 Y Combinator, 193 youth, 191–94, 212 YouTube, 6, 20, 33, 37 Zappos, 161 Zara, 103–4 Zazzle, 180 Zell, Sam, 129 zero-based budgeting, 79–80 Zillow, 75, 80, 187 Zipcar, 176 Zopa, 196 Zuckerberg, Mark, 4, 48–53, 94–95 About the Author Jeff Jarvis is the proprietor of one of the Web’s most popular and respected blogs about the internet and media, Buzzmachine.com.

pages: 422 words: 89,770

Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate governance, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food desert, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Pearl River Delta, Plato's cave, post scarcity, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Josh Stieber spoke at the end of the event. Stieber was deployed with the army to Iraq from February 2007 to April 2008. He was in Bravo Company 2-16 Infantry, which was involved in the July 2007 Apache helicopter attack on Iraqi civilians depicted on a controversial video released in April 2010 by WikiLeaks, an organization that publishes anonymous submissions of and commentary on sensitive government and corporate documents. Stieber, who left the army as a conscientious objector, has issued a public apology to the Iraqi people. “This was not by any means the exception,” he said of the video, which showed helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning down civilians, including a Reuters photographer and children, in a Baghdad street:It is inevitable given the situation we were going through.

…

Conference of Catholic Bishops Van Agtmael, Peter Van Itallie, Jean-Claude Vietnam War and protest Violence Wall Street bailouts and Bell and communists manipulation and dishonesty on and Obama and World War I, Wallace, Graham Wallace, Henry Walling, William English Walzer, Michael War brutal and savage reality of and liberal class veterans See also Afghanistan war; Iraq war; Permanent war; World War I; World War II Warhol, Andy Warren, Earl Watergate Weather Underground Weavers Weber, Max Weisman, Fred Welfare Welles, Orson Wellstone, Paul West Bank White, Edward Douglas Whyte, William H. Wicker, Ireene Wieseltier, Leon WikiLeaks Wilson, Woodrow Winfrey, Oprah Wolin, Sheldon Women’s rights and equality Woods, Tiger Works Progress Administration (WPA) World War I, and conscription and crumbling of antiwar movement declaration of war end and aftermath of and end of liberal era and end of progressivism and industrial warfare and intellectuals and mass culture and mass propaganda and nationalism and repression of dissent World War II, Wright, Ann Wright, Ronald Yemen YouTube Yugoslavia Zuspann, Gary Zwally, Jay Nation Books New York www.nationbooks.org Copyright © 2010 by Chris Hedges Published by Nation Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group 116 East 16th Street, 8th Floor New York, NY 10003 Nation Books is a co-publishing venture of the Nation Institute and the Perseus Books Group All rights reserved.

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Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bretton Woods, corporate governance, feminist movement, Frank Gehry, ghettoisation, Howard Zinn, informal economy, land bank, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, RAND corporation, reserve currency, special economic zone, spectrum auction, stem cell, The Chicago School, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

Kabir, run by Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia, key figures in Team Anna, has received $400,000 from the Ford Foundation in the last three years.6 Among contributors to the India Against Corruption campaign there are Indian companies and foundations that own aluminum plants, build ports and Special Economic Zones (SEZs), run real estate businesses, and are closely connected to politicians who oversee financial empires that run into thousands of crores of rupees. Some of them are currently being investigated for corruption and other crimes. Why are they all so enthusiastic? Remember, the campaign for the Jan Lokpal Bill gathered steam around the same time as embarrassing revelations by Wikileaks and a series of scams, including the 2G spectrum scam, broke, in which major corporations, senior journalists, and government ministers and politicians from the Congress as well as the BJP seem to have colluded in various ways as hundreds of thousands of crores of rupees were being siphoned off from the public exchequer.

pages: 1,309 words: 300,991

Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations by Norman Davies

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, classic study, Corn Laws, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, labour mobility, land tenure, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Red Clydeside, Ronald Reagan, Skype, special economic zone, trade route, urban renewal, WikiLeaks

Helena Golani, ‘Two Decades of the Russian Federation’s Foreign Policy in the CIS: The Cases of Belarus and Ukraine’, Hebrew University, 2011: http://www.ef.huki.ac.il/publications/yakovlevgolani.pdf (2011). 11. ‘Eastern Partnership’, European Union External Action: http://eeas.europa.eu/eastern/index-en.htm (2011). 12. http://charter97.org/en/news/2011/5/22/38809/?1 (2011). 13. ‘Wikileaks, Belarus and Israel Shamir’, http://www.indexoncensorship.org/,,,wikileaks-belarus-and-israel-shamir (2011). 14. David Stern, ‘Europe’s Last Dictator Goes to the Polls’, BBC News online, 17 December 2010. 15. ‘As Belarus Votes, World Settles for Lukashenko as the Devil it Knows’, Radio Free Europe, 31 Jan. 2011. 16. Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World (London, 2011); see also Timothy Garton Ash, Guardian, 19 Jan. 2011. 17.

…

In an article entitled ‘Batka Stoops To Blackmail’, Russia Today lamented an incident in which Russia’s threat to cut off oil to Belarus had apparently been countered by a Belarusian threat to cut off electricity to Kaliningrad.12 Outside observers concluded that Russia was losing patience. Then, early in 2011, came the Wikileaks scandal. No less than 1,878 of the leaked cables related to Belarus; in a cluster dating back to 2005 American diplomats characterized Belarus as ‘the last outpost of tyranny’ and ‘a virtual mafioso state’.13 But Batka had little to fear. In the polls of 19 December, he had been officially declared to have received 79.7 per cent of the votes.14 Opposition candidates, who had been allowed to stand, were beaten up afterwards by the police.

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Y. 478 Ahern, Bertie 673, 676 Aidan, St 60 Ailamae 718 Aix-en-Provence 118, 217 Aix-les-Bains 415, 417 Alaborg 243 Åland Isles 617 Alans 17, 18, 31 Alaric I 16–17, 31 Alaric II 18, 24–5, 26, 30, 31 Alaric, Montagne d’ 27 Alauna 46, 47 Alba 66, 70–71, 72, 74, 75–6 Alban, St 46 Albania 197, 587, 597, 601, 617 Albert I of Belgium 600 Albert II of Monaco 637 Albert, prince 543–9, 551–9, 573, 637 timetable he prepared for himself, aged fourteen 547, 548 Albert the Bear 344 Albigensian Crusade 125, 179 Albon, counts of 118, 127 Albrecht Friedrich von Hohenzollern 355 Albrecht von Habsburg 478 Albrecht von Hohenzollern 341, 351, 352, 353–4 Alcañiz, fortress 184 Alcluith 39, 64 Alclut 69 Aleksandar, crown prince of Serbia 593, 601, 606, 612 Aleksandar I Obrenović 589–90 Alemanni 24 Alessandria 414 Alexander I, tsar 293, 334, 699 Alexander II, ‘Tsar Liberator’ 294, 297 Alexander VI, Roderic Llançol de Borja 215, 218 Alexander of Teck, 1st earl of Athlone 566, 569 Alexandria, Egypt 401, 435 museum 481 Alexandria, Vale of Leven 37 Alfons de Borja, Pope Callistus III 215 Alfonso I El Batallado 169, 170 Alfonso II of Aragon and I of Barcelona 171 Alfonso II of Naples 214 Alfonso V the Magnanimous, of Aragon 210, 211–12, 213–14 Alfonso VII of Castile 175 Alfonso of Aragon, Infante Alfonso 201–2 Alfonso of Aragon, son of Fernando I 209 Alfred, duke of Edinburgh and of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha 562, 563 Alfred, hereditary prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha 562 Alfred of Wessex, king 68 Alfred the Great 89 Alghero 202 Algierdas 252, 254 Alicante 189 Alice, countess of Athlone 566, 569 Aljaferia Castle 169, 184 Allenstein 342 Allobroges 414 Alt Clud, Kingdom of the Rock 42–83 5th century 49–52 6th century 52–57 7th century 57–62 8th to 9th centuries 62–72 10th century 72–5 11th century 75–7 12th century 77–80 Amadeo, ‘duke of Aosta’ 432–3 Amadeus VI, the Green Count 404 Amadeus VII, the Red Count 404 Amadeus VIII (Felix V) 406 Amalfings 18 Amalric 26 Amanieu de Sescars, il dieu d’amor 172 Ambaciensis (Amboise) 24 Amber Room (Bernsteinzimmer) 383, 386n Amfilohije, Archbishop 614 Amiens, Treaty of 507, 517 Anatolia 196, 319 Ancient Order of Hibernians 644 Ancillon, Charles 365 Andemantunnum (Langres) 95 Andorra 159–60 Andreas von Saxe-Coburg-Gotha 571 Andrew, St 66 Angevins, relations with Aragon 174, 192–3, 195, 197, 211 Angles 53, 56, 57–60, 62, 64 Anglo-Irish Bank 677 Anglo-Irish Treaty 655–7, 661–2, 737 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 66, 73–4 Anglo-Saxons 42, 44, 738 see also Angles Anna of Prussia 355 Annales Cambriae 52 Annecy 118, 407–8, 436 Anselm von Meisser 342–3 Ansip, Andrus 692 Ansky, Semyon 464–5 Antoinette-Marie of Württemberg 547 Antonine Wall 46, 48, 64 Aquitania/Aquitaine 17, 18–20, 24, 27, 30 Arago, François 154 Aragon, empire 161–227, 166, 178, 192, 735 and the Angevins 174, 192–3, 195, 197, 211 Aragonese language 171 and the Balearic Islands 185, 187–9, 197–200, 202–3, 226 and Castile 163, 165, 166, 169, 170–71, 175, 189, 204–5, 207–10, 211, 215–17, 217, 218–19, 220, 223 and the Catalans 166, 171, 174–5, 177, 189, 196, 199, 200, 202, 206–7, 210, 217–18, 222–7, 736 and the Church 169, 181–3, 184 coronation ceremonies 182–3 and Corsica 197, 201, 210 Crown of Aragon 176, 177, 180, 183–4, 190, 195, 206–7, 209–10, 217–18, 221–7, 736 General Privilege 191 and Gozo 196 and Greece 191, 196, 199 House of Ramiro 164–5, 165 and Jaime I 185–6, 187–9, 197 and the Jews 183–4 and Mallorca 187–8, 197–200, 202–3, 226 and Malta 191, 195–6 and Menorca 188–9, 199 and Montpellier 179–81, 184, 202–3 and Naples 184, 193, 197, 210–14, 211–13, 216–18 navy 205 origins of the kingdom 161–4, 165, 166 and Pedro IV 174, 202–7 Privilege of Union 203 and the Pyrenees 156–60 and the Reconquista 164, 166–9, 173, 181, 183, 184 and Rosselló 177–9, 200, 222 and Sardinia 197, 201–2, 206, 220 and Sicily 191–5, 197, 206, 212, 220 and Teruel 190–91 House of Trastámara 207, 208, 210, 216 Union of Liberties 191, 203 union with Barcelona 170–71, 174–6; see also Barcelona and Valencia 176, 189–90 Aragon, river 161 Aranjuez, Treaty of 509 Arborea 201, 206 Arcola, Battle of 501 Arelate (Arles) 20, 109 Argyll 37n, 53, 65, 66 Arianism 16, 20, 30, 93, 98–9 Ariège 157 Aristotle 729 Aristra, Inigo 155 Arius of Alexandria 16n Arles 104, 116, 119, 122 Arelate 20, 109 Kingdom of (Kingdom of the Two Burgundies) 115–19, 116 Armagnacs 131 Armenia 722 Armenian Church 463 Arnau de Grub, St 182 Arnaut Catalan 172 Arpitan 120 Arpitania 121 Art, son of Conn 47 Arthgal, king 69–70 Arthur, duke of Connaught 562 Arthur, king 54 Arthur, prince, of Connaught and Strathearn 562, 563 Arthurian legend 54–55, 56 Arvernis (Clermont) 20 Asad, Muhammad (Leopold Weiss) 478 Ascania, House of 344 Ascendancy, Protestant 650, 660, 667, 679 Asimov, Isaac 632–3 Aster, Operation 714 Asti 407 Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance (ATCA) 697 Ataulf, the ‘Noble Wolf’ 17–18 ATCA (Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance) 697 Athanasius of Brest, St 277 Athelstan 72, 73, 74 Athens 196 Atholl 65 Atlakvida 94 Attila (Atli) 94, 103 Auberge d’Aragon 220 Auerstadt 521 Augsberger, Franz 713 August II the Strong 283, 364 August III 283, 284 August Wilhelm of Prussia 568 Augustine of Hippo, St 730 Augustodunum (Autun) 95 Augustus Caesar 314 Aukštota 248 Aurausion (Orange) 125 Auschwitz 478, 479 Austerlitz 521 Austria/Austrians and France 451–2, 500–501, 505, 508–9, 516 and Galicia 289, 292, 295, 449–50, 451–3, 455–6, 470, 473–5, 474; see also Galicia Habsburgs see Habsburgs and Italy 425, 500–501 and Montenegro 597–9 and Napoleon I 500–501 and Poland 286 and Serbia 597–9 Vienna see Vienna/Viennese Austria-Hungary 470, 472 Carpatho-Ukraine see Carpatho-Ukraine collapse of Empire 599, 600, 733–4; Treaty of St Germain 625 Austrian Netherlands 141 Avenio (Avignon) 95 Avignon 104, 125, 128, 153, 205 Aouenion 95 Avitus, Eparchius 22 Avitus of Vienne 99 Azerbaijan 233, 722, 731 Azkenazy, Szymon 465 Babylon, Fall of 730 Bacciochi Levoy, Elisa Napoleone 534 Bacciochi Levoy, Maria-Anna (‘Elisa’) Bonaparte 500, 520–21, 523, 524, 527, 529 Bacciochi Levoy, Pasquale/Félix 520–21 Bağiş 313 Bagration, Operation 302 Bakiyev, Kurmanbek Saliyevich 235 Bakunin, Mikhail 730 Bałaban, Meir 465–6 Balearic islands 185, 187–9, 197–200, 202–3, 226 Balkans 214, 314, 383 Balkan Wars 594–5 Montenegro see Montenegro/Tsernagora Balmoral 83 Baltic Appeal (1979) 720 Baltic/Balts 240–42, 244, 245, 618, 702 ‘Baltic Chain’ 723 and the birth of the Grand Duchy of Litva 248–9 deportations under Soviet Great Terror 715 Estonia see Estonia inter-war Baltic States 707 Latvia see Latvia/Latvians Lithuania see Litva/Lithuania and the Mongol Horde 248, 251, 252, 260, 338 Prussia see Prussia/Borussia and the Prussians Soviet 1940 takeover of the Baltic States 301–2, 618, 710–12, 737 and the Teutonic Knights 248, 252, 253, 259 World War II 710 Baltic Tobacco Factory (BTF) 330 Baltiysk 334, 335 Bamburgh Castle 53, 56 Banach, Stefan 477–8 Bandera, Stepan 478 Baou, lords of (Les Baux) 119, 125 Bar, Montenegro 580 Barbarossa, Operation 301–2, 382, 479, 710 Barbarus, Johannes Vares 714, 717 Barbastro 166–7 Barcelona 160, 162, 170, 171, 173, 175, 183, 185–6, 200, 203, 222, 223, 224 Church Council of 181 Disputation of 184 House of 163n union with Aragon 170–71, 174–6 university 184 Usatges de Barcelona 174 Barretinas, Revolt of the 222 Bartians 338 Basle, Council of 215 Batory, Stefan 278–9 Batowski, Henryk 7 The Battle of Brunanburh 73 Battle of the Nations, Leipzig 529 Baussenque Wars 119 Baux, counts/lords of 119, 125 Bavarian Geographer (Geographus Bavarius) 337 Beatrice, princess 558 Beatrice I, countess of Burgundy 122 Béatrice de Provence 174 Beauharnais, Eugéne de 413, 521, 523, 535 Beauharnais, Joséphine de 501 Beaune 137 Beckwith, John 416 Bede 39, 42, 52, 53, 60, 64 Behan, Dominic 666 Beinnie Britt 47 Belarus/Byelorussia 231–9, 232, 249, 291, 301, 302, 303, 703; see also White Ruthenia Byelorussian National Republic (BNR) 233, 301, 738 Lukashenkism 233–5 and the Wikileaks scandal 235 Belfast 653–4 Belfast Agreement 673–5 Belgium 600, 710 Belgrade 590, 600, 602, 604, 605–6 Beli (Bili I) 61 Bellver Castle 199 Benaki Museum, Athens 320 Benedict XIII 209 Benso, Camillo, Count Cavour 417, 420–21, 423, 428, 429 Benveniste de Porta 183 Benvenuti, Pietro 527 Bera, count 171 Berber states 199 Berehaven 663 Berenguela of Barcelona 170–71, 175 Berenguer de Anglesola 182 Berenguer Ramón I El Corbat 163 Berenguer, House of 171, 175 Berlin 367, 370, 375, 379, 382 1918 revolution 599 Congress of 587–8 fall of the Berlin Wall 721, 723 Museum Island 390 Potsdam Conference 387–8 Prussian memory site 389–93 Berlusconi, Silvio 399, 437 Bernard, St 107–8 Bernard de Got 126 Berne 122 Bernhardi, Friedrich von 376–7 Bernicia (Berneich/Bryneich) 49, 53, 56, 60 Bernsteinzimmer (Amber Room) 383, 386n Berthold V, count 121–2 Bertrand, Henri Gatien 531, 533 Besalú 174, 175 Besanz/Besançon 141 Diet of Besanz 123 Vesontio 95, 118 Bevar Bornholmsk 87–8 Bianchi, M. 427 Bismarck, Otto Edward von 369, 376, 377 Black Death 128, 202, 204–5 Black, George Fraser 80 Blair, Tony 673, 680 Bloody Sunday 668 Saville Inquiry 677 Blücher, Gebhard Leberecht von 533 Blue Water, Battle of 252 Blumenthal, J.

pages: 386 words: 91,913

The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age by David S. Abraham

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbus A320, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, circular economy, Citizen Lab, clean tech, clean water, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairphone, geopolitical risk, gigafactory, glass ceiling, global supply chain, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, planned obsolescence, reshoring, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Energy Information Administration (EIA), “Saudi Arabia,” 2014, http://www.eia.gov/countries/country-data.cfm?fips=sa; James F. Carlin Jr., “Antimony” (Reston, VA: U.S. Department of the Interior, 2012); Thomas G. Goonan, “Lithium Use in Batteries, Circular 1371” (Reston, VA: U.S. Department of the Interior, 2014). 5. Wikileaks, “Cable Viewer,” February 18, 2009, https://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/02/09STATE15113.html. 6. CBMM, “Certifications,” 2014, http://www.cbmm.com/us/p/20/certifications.aspx. CBMM was the first mining company to receive ISO 14001, Environmental Management System Certification; Tadeu Carneiro, interview by David Abraham, Araxá, Brazil, May 14, 2013; Marta Vieira, “CBMM Investe R$ 1 Bilhão Para Fábrica Em Araxá,” August 13, 2013, accessed November 20, 2014, http://www.em.com.br/app/noticia/economia/2013/08/13/internas_economia,434415/cbmm-investe-r-1-bilhao-para-fabrica-em-araxa.shtml. 7.

pages: 323 words: 95,939

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

The next day, we learned how all this openness can be turned on its head, lending the explosive impact of jet liners and the population density of modern skyscrapers to a few guys armed with box cutters. That’s when the dream of a connected world revealed itself rather as the nightmare of a world vulnerable to network effects. Whether it’s a congressman losing his job over an errant Tweet, a State Department humiliated by the release of its cache of cables on WikiLeaks, or a corporation whose progressive consumers just learned their phones were assembled in Chinese sweatshops, connectedness has turned every glitch into a potentially mortal blow, every interactor into a potential slayer. It may seem glib to equate a terrorist attack with a public relations snafu, but from the perspective of the institutions now under seemingly perpetual assault, it is the same challenge: how can they better respond to the crises emerging seemingly from anywhere and everywhere, all the time?

…

This is why corporations functioning in this fashion gain more power over laborers who are competing rather than unionizing; it’s why real estate agents can jack up prices more easily in a market where “comps” are not available; and it’s why a larger government can push around developing nations more easily when its cables aren’t being posted on the Internet by WikiLeaks. Less networking and transparency keeps everyone acting more selfishly, individualistically, and predictably. In the controlled information landscape, these strategies worked pretty well for a long time. A closed, top-down broadcast media gave marketers and public relations specialists a nation of individuals with whom to communicate.

pages: 416 words: 100,130

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The big clash here is between the “need to know” mindset, which instinctively keeps information away from the public for its own protection, and a rising “right to know” expectation, where new power thinkers demand openness from institutions as a default. In the first case, experts and authority figures decide what filters information deserves; in the second the filters don’t exist. Across sectors, the old power world is absorbing a sustained attack on the hidden, with its dirty laundry increasingly exposed—by WikiLeaks and in the Paradise Papers, for example—and its daily performance monitored: the once-untouchable professor now must tolerate her teaching being rated online at any hour by neophyte students. In an age when it is ever harder to guard secrets and avoid scrutiny, some leaders and institutions are embracing radical transparency, if only as a preemptive strategy.

…

In a leaked document: Alyson Shontell, “A Leaked Internal Uber Presentation Shows What the Company Really Values in Its Employees,” Business Insider, November 19, 2014. “cooperative contexts proved”: Geoffrey James, “ ‘Collaboration’ Creates Mediocrity, Not Excellence, According to Science,” Inc., April 14, 2017. “I mean, politics is like sausage”: “HRC Paid Speeches,” WikiLeaks, January 25, 2016. “Noah has had both deep”: Noah Dyer for Governor, “Scandal and Controversy,” July 2017. www.noahdyer.com. “It really comes down”: “The Maker,” Vimeo video, posted by “Patrick Kehoe,” 4:43, January 18, 2016. www.vimeo.com. “GynePunks”: Doug Bierend, “Meet the GynePunks Pushing the Boundaries of DIY Gynecology,” Vice, August 21, 2015; Wattpad, July 2017. www.wattpad.com.

pages: 349 words: 98,868

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

This is why the specter of Russia and of private wealth haunt us, as we seek explanations for political upheavals and chaos: they offer the perfect base from which to wage informational war, being less constrained by public regulation. Reports of alliances between the Kremlin, billionaire owners of private companies (as opposed to shareholders of corporations), WikiLeaks, and firms, such as Cambridge Analytica, sometimes feel like conspiracy theories because—by definition and design—such entities are not subject to any expert or regulatory oversight. If the ideal of presenting facts in public in search of peaceful consensus has become a source of strategic vulnerability, then Western democracies are in serious trouble.

…

., Roger, 24, 25 Piketty, Thomas, 74 Pinker, Stephen, 207 plagues, 56, 67–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 95 pleasure principle, 70, 109, 110, 224 pneumonia, 37, 67 Podemos, 5, 202 Poland, 20, 34, 60 Polanyi, Michael, 163 political anatomy, 57 Political Arithmetick (Petty), 58, 59 political correctness, 20, 27, 145 Popper, Karl, 163, 171 populism xvii, 211–12, 214, 220, 225–6 and central banks, 33 and crowd-based politics, 12 and democracy, 202 and elites/experts, 26, 33, 50, 152, 197, 210, 215 and empathy, 118 and health, 99, 101–2, 224–5 and immediate action, 216 in Kansas (1880s), 220 and markets, 167 and private companies, 174 and promises, 221 and resentment, 145 and statistics, 90 and unemployment, 88 and war, 148, 212 Porter, Michael, 84 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 111–14, 117, 209 post-truth, 167, 224 Potsdam Conference (1945), 138 power vs. violence, 19, 219 predictive policing, 151 presidential election, US (2016), xiv and climate change, 214 and data, 190 and education, 85 and free trade, 79 and health, 92, 99 and immigration, 79, 145 and inequality, 76–7 and Internet, 190, 197, 199 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 and opinion polling, 65, 80 and promises, 221 and relative deprivation, 88 and Russia, 199 and statistics, 63 and Yellen, 33 prisoners of war, 43 promises, 25, 31, 39–42, 45–7, 51, 52, 217–18, 221–2 Propaganda (Bernays), 14–15 propaganda, 8, 14–16, 83, 124–5, 141, 142, 143 property rights, 158, 167 Protestantism, 34, 35, 45, 215 Prussia (1525–1947), 8, 127–30, 133–4, 135, 142 psychiatry, 107, 139 psychoanalysis, 107, 139 Psychology of Crowds, The (Le Bon), 9–12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25 psychosomatic, 103 public-spending cuts, 100–101 punishment, 90, 92–3, 94, 95, 108 Purdue, 105 Putin, Vladimir, 145, 183 al-Qaeda, 136 quality of life, 74, 104 quantitative easing, 31–2, 222 quants, 190 radical statistics, 74 RAND Corporation, 183 RBS, 29 Reagan, Ronald, 15, 77, 154, 160, 163, 166 real-time knowledge, xvi, 112, 131, 134, 153, 154, 165–70 Reason Foundation, 158 Red Vienna, 154, 155 Rees-Mogg, Jacob, 33, 61 refugee crisis (2015–), 60, 225 relative deprivation, 88 representative democracy, 7, 12, 14–15, 25–8, 61, 202 Republican Party, 77, 79, 85, 154, 160, 163, 166, 172 research and development (R&D), 133 Research Triangle, North Carolina, 84 resentment, 5, 226 of elites/experts, 32, 52, 61, 86, 88–9, 161, 186, 201 and nationalism/populism, 5, 144–6, 148, 197, 198 and pain, 94 Ridley, Matt, 209 right to remain silent, 44 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 160, 166 Robinson, Tommy, ix Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 52 Royal Exchange, 67 Royal Society, 48–52, 56, 68, 86, 133, 137, 186, 208, 218 Rumsfeld, Donald, 132 Russian Empire (1721–1917), 128, 133 Russian Federation (1991–) and artificial intelligence, 183 Gerasimov Doctrine, 43, 123, 125, 126 and information war, 196 life expectancy, 100, 115 and national humiliation, 145 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 and social media, 15, 18, 199 troll farms, 199 Russian Revolution (1917), 155 Russian SFSR (1917–91), 132, 133, 135–8, 155, 177, 180, 182–3 safe spaces, 22, 208 Sands, Robert “Bobby,” 43 Saxony, 90 scarlet fever, 67 Scarry, Elaine, 102–3 scenting, 135, 180 Schneier, Bruce, 185 Schumpeter, Joseph, 156–7, 162 Scientific Revolution, 48–52, 62, 66, 95, 204, 207, 218 scientist, coining of term, 133 SCL, 175 Scotland, 64, 85, 172 search engines, xvi Second World War, see World War II securitization of loans, 218 seismology, 135 self-employment, 82 self-esteem, 88–90, 175, 212 self-harm, 44, 114–15, 117, 146, 225 self-help, 107 self-interest, 26, 41, 44, 61, 114, 141, 146 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 sentiment analysis, xiii, 12–13, 140, 188 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 shell shock, 109–10 Shrecker, Ted, 226 Silicon Fen, Cambridgeshire, 84 Silicon Valley, California, xvi, 219 and data, 55, 151, 185–93, 199–201 and disruption, 149–51, 175, 226 and entrepreneurship, 149–51 and fascism, 203 and immortality, 149, 183–4, 224, 226 and monopolies, 174, 220 and singularity, 183–4 and telepathy, 176–8, 181, 185, 186, 221 and weaponization, 18, 219 singularity, 184 Siri, 187 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 slavery, 59, 224 smallpox, 67 smart cities, 190, 199 smartphone addiction, 112, 186–7 snowflakes, 22, 113 social indicators, 74 social justice warriors (SJWs), 131 social media and crowd psychology, 6 emotional artificial intelligence, 12–13, 140–41 and engagement, 7 filter bubbles, 66 and propaganda, 15, 18, 81, 124 and PTSD, 113 and sentiment analysis, 12 trolls, 18, 20–22, 27, 40, 123, 146, 148, 194–8, 199, 209 weaponization of, 18, 19, 22, 194–5 socialism, 8, 20, 154–6, 158, 160 calculation debate, 154–6, 158, 160 Socialism (Mises), 160 Society for Freedom in Science, 163 South Africa, 103 sovereignty, 34, 53 Soviet Russia (1917–91), 132, 133, 135–8, 177, 180, 182–3 Spain, 5, 34, 84, 128, 202 speed of knowledge, xvi, 112, 124, 131, 134, 136, 153, 154, 165–70 Spicer, Sean, 3, 5 spy planes, 136, 152 Stalin, Joseph, 138 Stanford University, 179 statactivism, 74 statistics, 62–91, 161, 186 status, 88–90 Stoermer, Eugene, 206 strong man leaders, 16 suicide, 100, 101, 115 suicide bombing, 44, 146 superbugs, 205 surveillance, 185–93, 219 Sweden, 34 Switzerland, 164 Sydenham, Thomas, 96 Syriza, 5 tacit knowledge, 162 talking cure, 107 taxation, 158 Tea Party, 32, 50, 61, 221 technocracy, 53–8, 59, 60, 61, 78, 87, 89, 90, 211 teenage girls, 113, 114 telepathy, 39, 176–9, 181, 185, 186 terrorism, 17–18, 151, 185 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 emergency powers, 42 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 suicide bombing, 44, 146 vehicle-ramming attacks, 17 war on terror, 131, 136, 196 Thames Valley, England, 85 Thatcher, Margaret, 154, 160, 163, 166 Thiel, Peter, 26, 149–51, 153, 156, 174, 190 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 34, 45, 53, 126 Tokyo, Japan, x torture, 92–3 total wars, 129, 142–3 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 34, 53 trends, xvi, 168 trigger warnings, 22, 113 trolls, 18, 20–22, 27, 40, 123, 146, 148, 194–8, 199, 209 Trump, Donald, xiv and Bannon, 21, 60–61 and climate change, 207 and education, 85 election campaign (2016), see under presidential election, US and free trade, 79 and health, 92, 99 and immigration, 145 inauguration (2017), 3–5, 6, 9, 10 and inequality, 76–7 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 and March for Science (2017), 23, 24, 210 and media, 27 and opinion polling, 65, 80 and Paris climate accord, 207 and promises, 221 and relative deprivation, 88 and statistics, 63 and Yellen, 33 Tsipras, Alexis, 5 Turing, Alan, 181, 183 Twitter and Corbyn’s rallies, 6 and JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x and Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x and Russia, 18 and sentiment analysis, 188 and trends, xvi and trolls, 194, 195 Uber, 49, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191, 192 UK Independence Party, 65, 92, 202 underemployment, 82 unemployment, 61, 62, 72, 78, 81–3, 87, 88, 203 United Kingdom austerity, 100 Bank of England, 32, 33, 64 Blitz (1940–41), 119, 143, 180 Brexit (2016–), see under Brexit Cameron government (2010–16), 33, 73, 100 Center for Policy Studies, 164 Civil Service, 33 climate-gate (2009), 195 Corbyn’s rallies, 5, 6 Dunkirk evacuation (1940), 119 education, 85 financial crisis (2007–9), 29–32, 100 first past the post, 13 general election (2015), 80, 81 general election (2017), 6, 65, 80, 81, 221 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 10 gross domestic product (GDP), 77, 79 immigration, 63, 65 Irish hunger strike (1981), 43 life expectancy, 100 National Audit Office (NAO), 29 National Health Service (NHS), 30, 93 Office for National Statistics, 63, 133 and opiates, 105 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 and pain, 102, 105 Palantir, 151 Potsdam Conference (1945), 138 quantitative easing, 31–2 Royal Society, 138 Scottish independence referendum (2014), 64 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 Society for Freedom in Science, 163 Thatcher government (1979–90), 154, 160, 163, 166 and torture, 92 Treasury, 61, 64 unemployment, 83 Unite for Europe march (2017), 23 World War II (1939–45), 114, 119, 138, 143, 180 see also England United Nations, 72, 222 United States Bayh–Dole Act (1980), 152 Black Lives Matter, 10, 225 BP oil spill (2010), 89 Bush Jr. administration (2001–9), 77, 136 Bush Sr administration (1989–93), 77 Bureau of Labor, 74 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 3, 136, 151, 199 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 Civil War (1861–5), 105, 142 and climate change, 207, 214 Clinton administration (1993–2001), 77 Cold War, see Cold War Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 176, 178 Defense Intelligence Agency, 177 drug abuse, 43, 100, 105, 115–16, 131, 172–3 education, 85 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 137 Federal Reserve, 33 Fifth Amendment (1789), 44 financial crisis (2007–9), 31–2, 82, 158 first past the post, 13 Government Accountability Office, 29 gross domestic product (GDP), 75–7, 82 health, 92, 99–100, 101, 103, 105, 107, 115–16, 158, 172–3 Heritage Foundation, 164, 214 Iraq War (2003–11), 74, 132 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 Kansas populists (1880s), 220 libertarianism, 15, 151, 154, 158, 164, 173 life expectancy, 100, 101 March For Our Lives (2018), 21 March for Science (2017), 23–5, 27, 28, 210 McCarthyism (1947–56), 137 Million-Man March (1995), 4 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 23, 175 National Defense Research Committee, 180 National Park Service, 4 National Security Agency (NSA), 152 Obama administration (2009–17), 3, 24, 76, 77, 79, 158 Occupy Wall Street (2011), 5, 10, 61 and opiates, 105, 172–3 and pain, 103, 105, 107, 172–3 Palantir, 151, 152, 175, 190 Paris climate accord (2015), 205, 207 Parkland attack (2018), 21 Patriot Act (2001), 137 Pentagon, 130, 132, 135, 136, 214, 216 presidential election (2016), see under presidential election, US psychiatry, 107, 111 quantitative easing, 31–2 Reagan administration (1981–9), 15, 77, 154, 160, 163, 166 Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” speech (2002), 132 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 Tea Party, 32, 50, 61, 221 and torture, 93 Trump administration (2017–), see under Trump, Donald unemployment, 83 Vietnam War (1955–75), 111, 130, 136, 138, 143, 205 World War I (1914–18), 137 World War II (1939–45), 137, 180 universal basic income, 221 universities, 151–2, 164, 169–70 University of Cambridge, 84, 151 University of Chicago, 160 University of East Anglia, 195 University of Oxford, 56, 151 University of Vienna, 160 University of Washington, 188 unknown knowns, 132, 133, 136, 138, 141, 192, 212 unknown unknowns, 132, 133, 138 “Use of Knowledge in Society, The” (Hayek), 161 V2 flying bomb, 137 vaccines, 23, 95 de Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre, Marquis de Vauban, 73 vehicle-ramming attacks, 17 Vesalius, Andreas, 96 Vienna, Austria, 153–5, 159 Vietnam War (1955–75), 111, 130, 136, 138, 143, 205 violence vs. power, 19, 219 viral marketing, 12 virtual reality, 183 virtue signaling, 194 voice recognition, 187 Vote Leave, 50, 93 Wainright, Joel, 214 Wales, 77, 90 Wall Street, New York, 33, 190 War College, Berlin, 128 “War Economy” (Neurath), 153–4 war on drugs, 43, 131 war on terror, 131, 136, 196 Watts, Jay, 115 weaponization, 18–20, 22, 26, 75, 118, 123, 194, 219, 223 weapons of mass destruction, 132 wearable technology, 173 weather control, 204 “What Is An Emotion?” (James), 140 whooping cough, 67 WikiLeaks, 196 William III & II, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, 55 World Bank, 78 World Economic Forum, 164 World War I (1914–18), 109–10, 130, 137, 143, 153, 159 World War II (1939–45), 114, 119, 132, 137, 138, 143, 147, 180, 222 Yellen, Janet, 33 Yiannopoulos, Milo, 22, 196 Yorkshire, England, 77 Zero to One (Thiel), 149 zero-sum games, 88, 89 Zuckerberg, Mark, 150, 156, 176–8, 181, 186, 188, 197–9 ALSO BY WILLIAM DAVIES The Limits of Neoliberalism The Happiness Industry Copyright © 2018 by William Davies First American Edition 2019 Originally published in Great Britain under the title Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World All rights reserved For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W.

pages: 372 words: 100,947

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks

The hackers also knew that the salacious details in the hacked emails were fodder for fringe websites and groups that would hype the Clinton-related material. The Russians doled out the emails strategically, for maximal impact. Just before the Democratic National Convention in July 2016, roughly twenty thousand emails from the DNC suddenly appeared on WikiLeaks. The emails showed DNC leaders playing favorites among the Democratic nominees for president. Most notably, DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz appeared to be pushing for Clinton over Bernie Sanders, the progressive senator from Vermont. The emails made front-page headlines, and Wasserman Schultz4 was forced to resign.

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Russia had been caught doping: Motez Bishara, “Russian Doping: ‘An Unprecedented Attack on the Integrity of Sport & the Olympic Games,” CNN website, July 18, 2016. 4. Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign: Jonathan Martin and Alan Rappeport, “Debbie Wasserman Schultz to Resign D.N.C. Post,” New York Times, July 24, 2016. 5. The Podesta emails, which highlighted mudslinging: Scott Detrow, “What’s in the Latest WikiLeaks Dump of Clinton Campaign Emails,” NPR, October 12, 2016. 6. Stamos was Yahoo’s information security officer: Arik Hesseldahl, “Yahoo to Name TrustyCon Founder Alex Stamos as Next Chief Information Security Officer,” Vox, February 28, 2014. 7. he discovered that the vulnerability: Joseph Menn, “Yahoo Scanned Customer Emails for U.S.

Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Air Force (1994–1997) and later received the air force’s “Exceptional Civilian Service Award.” See IEEE Computer Society biography of Feigenbaum, https://www.computer.org/web/awards/pioneer-edward-feigenbaum. 103. Springer, Military Robots and Drones. 104. For discussion of the use of drones by Israel, see Anshel Pfeffer, “WikiLeaks: IDF Uses Drones to Assassinate Gaza Militants,” Haaretz, September 2, 2011; Cora Currier and Henrik Moltke, “Spies in the Sky: Israeli Drone Feeds Hacked by British and American Intelligence,” Intercept, 2016. The Israeli Army used drones to fire tear gas at protestors and journalists in Gaza, as documented by various news agencies.

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Guardian, February 15, 2019. Perry, Ruth, and Lisa Greber. “Women and Computers: An Introduction.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16, no. 1 (1990): 74–101. Peterson, Grif, and Yarden Katz. “Elite Universities Are Selling Themselves—and Look Who’s Buying.” Guardian, March 30, 2018. Pfeffer, Anshel, “WikiLeaks: IDF Uses Drones to Assassinate Gaza Militants.” Haaretz, September 2, 2011. Philanthropy News Digest. “Berkeley Launches Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence.” September 5, 2016. Pickering, Andrew. The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

pages: 357 words: 99,456

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

4chan, affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, crack epidemic, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, green new deal, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, interest rate swap, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, microdosing, moral panic, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, Parents Music Resource Center, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Tipper Gore, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y2K

Four more CNN reporters (Gloria Borger, Eric Lichtblau, Jake Tapper and Brian Rokus) were bylined in a story that claimed Comey was expected to refute Trump’s claims he was told he wasn’t the target of an investigation. Comey blew that one up, too. In another CNN scoop gone awry, “Email pointed Trump campaign to WikiLeaks documents,” the network’s reporters were off by ten days in a “bombshell” that supposedly proved the Trump campaign had foreknowledge of Wikileaks dumps. “It’s, uh, perhaps not as significant as what we know now,” offered CNN’s Manu Raju in a painful on-air retraction. The worst stories were the ones never corrected. A particularly bad example is “After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced,” from the New York Times on February 18, 2018.

pages: 363 words: 98,496

Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy by Matthew Campbell, Kit Chellel

big-box store, coronavirus, COVID-19, drone strike, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, eurozone crisis, failed state, Filipino sailors, financial innovation, information security, lockdown, megacity, offshore financial centre, Skype, South China Sea, trade route, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Talbot Underwriting, Oct. 25, 2017. “Theo Blake” was the pseudonym used by the City of London Police to protect the identity of Dimitrios Plakakis. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT He apparently even had: Embassy Nairobi, “Somalia—Political Perspectives from Dubai,” WikiLeaks Cable: 08NAIROBI2619_a, dated Nov. 20, 2008, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08NAIROBI2619_a.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Rumored to be a veteran: Lucas Winter, “The Adaptive Transformation of Yemen’s Republican Guard,” Small Wars Journal, Mar. 7, 2017, https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/the-adaptive-transformation-of-yemen’s-republican-guard.

Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe by Noam Chomsky, Laray Polk

Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, energy security, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Kwajalein Atoll, language acquisition, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, nuclear ambiguity, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Recent news of the UK government’s plan to create a marine protection area has further inflamed the issue; a leaked diplomatic cable confirmed suspicions it was a move to deny Chagossians the right of return: “BIOT’s former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve.” WikiLeaks, s.v. “Cable 09LONDON1156, HMG Floats Proposal for Marine Reserve Covering,” May 2009. On GPS and Kwajalein Atoll, see Vltchek, note 1, chap. 3. 56 In 2009 the Pentagon sent an “urgent operational need” funding request to Congress to fast-track the development and testing of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a thirty-thousand-pound bunker-busting bomb designed to hit underground targets.

pages: 103 words: 32,131

Program Or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, citizen journalism, cloud computing, digital map, East Village, financial innovation, Firefox, Future Shock, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the printing press, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, mirror neurons, peer-to-peer, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, WikiLeaks

Many are dedicated to promoting this phenomenon. Technology sites sponsor contests to see who can reveal the inner workings of upcoming products before the manufacturers release them—much to the consternation of Silicon Valley CEOs and their marketing departments. Meanwhile, and much more significantly, sites like WikiLeaks and Memory Hole provide cover for activists with information they want to release to the public. Whether it’s damning transcripts from a corporation’s board meeting or the Afghan War policy documents of the Pentagon, the real facts now have a way to rise to the surface. We may hear what these institutions are saying to us, but now we also know what they actually did last summer. . .

pages: 437 words: 105,934

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The idea that Obama was born in Kenya (propagated by Donald Trump, among many others) is just one prominent example; another is that he is a Muslim. From 2009 to 2012, I had the honor of working in the Obama administration, and I was stunned to see the spread of false rumors about my own conduct and beliefs. (Some people said that I wanted to “steal people’s organs”; others said that I was behind Wikileaks.) What is especially interesting is that those who believe such rumors need not be irrational. They are simply reacting to what other people seem to believe. Most of these examples are innocuous, because no real harm is done, and because many cascades can be corrected. But as a disturbingly harmful illustration, consider widespread doubts in South Africa in the 1980s about the connection between HIV and AIDS.

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Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights and, 281n22; Stewart and, 22; Thomas and, 193 utopia, 23, 30, 52, 233, 253 vaccinations, 100–101, 110 V-chip, 219 Verizon, 219 Vine, 22, 64, 79, 83 violence: domestic, 41; echo chambers and, 24; fragmentation and, 57; freedom of speech and, 199, 206, 208; partyism and, 9–12; pessimism and, 16; republicanism and, 259; slavery and, 163; television and, 199, 224–25; terrorism and, 235, 237–38, 240, 245–46, 249–50 virtual reality, 13, 33, 71, 140, 243 Wall Street Journal, 18, 61, 123, 144, 152, 232 Washington Post, 152–53, 181–82 Watts, Duncan, 102–3, 113, 118 weapons of mass destruction (WMD), 94 Weekly Standard magazine, 230 Weibo, 139 welfare, 67, 133, 138, 159, 167 WhatsApp, 22–23, 219 Whole Foods Market, 131 Wikileaks, 109 Wikipedia, 22, 89 Wood, Gordon, 45 World Wide Web, 183 World Wildlife Fund, 231 WriteToThem, 107 Yahoo!, 118, 171 Yale Law School, 129 Yardi, Sarida, 81 Yasseri, Taha, 105–6, 108 Yates, Robert, 49 Yik Yak, 22 YouTube, 13, 22, 27, 60, 77, 82–83, 138, 245 Yurukoglu, Ali, 61

pages: 377 words: 110,427

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz by Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Legislative Exchange Council, Benjamin Mako Hill, bitcoin, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, deliberate practice, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, failed state, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, full employment, functional programming, Hacker News, Howard Zinn, index card, invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Gruber, Lean Startup, low interest rates, More Guns, Less Crime, peer-to-peer, post scarcity, power law, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, semantic web, single-payer health, SpamAssassin, SPARQL, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, unbiased observer, wage slave, Washington Consensus, web application, WikiLeaks, working poor, zero-sum game

If it was about pornography, it probably would get overturned by courts, just like the adult bookstore case. But if you claimed it was about copyright, it might just sneak through. And that was especially terrifying, because, as you know, because copyright is everywhere. If you want to shut down WikiLeaks, it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that you’re doing it because they have too much pornography, but it’s not hard at all to claim that WikiLeaks is violating copyright, because everything is copyrighted. This speech, you know, the thing I’m giving right now, these words are copyrighted. And it’s so easy to accidentally copy something, so easy, in fact, that the leading Republican supporter of COICA, Orrin Hatch, had illegally copied a bunch of code into his own Senate website.

pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

It enabled them first of all to produce and consume knowledge independently of the channels formed in the era of industrial capitalism. That’s why we noticed the disruptions first in the news industry, in music and the sudden loss of the state’s monopoly over political propaganda and ideology. Next, it began to undermine traditional concepts of property and privacy. Wikileaks and the controversy over the mass surveillance data collected by the NSA are just the latest phase of a war over who can own and store information. But the biggest impact of all is only now being understood. The ‘network effect’ was first theorized by Bell Telephone boss Theodore Vail 100 years ago.

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Google is not postcapitalist – but as long as it keeps Android Open Source it is being forced to act in a way that prefigures non-capitalist forms of ownership and exchange, even if, as the EU is investigating, they use this position to carve out dominance. The birth of free software and the pursuit of collaborative software projects in the 1980s were just the opening shots of a war that is still raging, and whose battlefront is fluid. The Open Source movement also gave impetus to a movement for freedom of information, to Wikipedia, Wikileaks and a branch of the legal profession dedicated to writing contracts that could defend openness and shareability. It was within this milieu, in the late 1990s, that the first systematic thinking took place about a question obvious to Drucker, but not to Romer: could an economy based on information networks create a new mode of production beyond capitalism?

pages: 349 words: 109,304

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton

bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, crack epidemic, Edward Snowden, fake news, gentrification, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, Ross Ulbricht, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the market place, trade route, Travis Kalanick, white picket fence, WikiLeaks

One of the most important LulzSec targets that the FBI planned to arrest was also allegedly the most dangerous member of the group. His name was Jeremy Hammond, and he was a political activist and computer hacker who had been arrested more than half a dozen times for protests against both Nazis and Republicans, for breaking into private servers around the world, and for releasing information to WikiLeaks. Fast-forward to the night of the LulzSec takedown. The plan was as follows: Tarbell would go to Ireland to oversee the arrest of one of the LulzSec team’s youngest hackers, a spritely nineteen-year-old. An FBI team in Chicago would be stationed, ready to pounce on Hammond. Senior agents in New York would watch live video feeds of the other arrests.

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Next Ross got to work securing other vulnerable areas of his life, including his own laptop. First and foremost, he made sure his Samsung 700Z was properly encrypted. He had talked to VJ about this before, days after they read the news about someone being arrested for leaking information to WikiLeaks. The news reports about the bust noted that the man had used exactly the same password to log in to his computer and for his encryption software and that the FBI cracked it in no time at all. “What a macaroon,” VJ had written. “Weak,” Ross agreed. “If he had a good password, they’d have nothing,” VJ said, referring to the “Feebs,” the nickname they used for the FBI.

The Targeter: My Life in the CIA, Hunting Terrorists and Challenging the White House by Nada Bakos

Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, fear of failure, feminist movement, meta-analysis, operational security, performance metric, place-making, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, WikiLeaks, work culture

Some government organizations, including the Pentagon and the State Department, use a separate database to hold and share classified information. The Agency has for years felt that SIPRNet, the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, has unacceptable vulnerabilities and has instead used its own network for distributing classified material among CIA branches and personnel. The value of that separation was underscored by the WikiLeaks fiasco in 2010, when Private First Class Chelsea Manning illegally pulled 250,000 State Department cables—but not CIA documents—off the network and shared them with media outlets. Having government teams working off different computer networks was a factor in intelligence-sharing failures prior to the 9/11 attacks—and still, a few years later, the sheer clumsiness of the CIA workaround inhibited necessary communication between my team and SOF in Iraq.

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It is not a secret now: Matthew Rosenberg, “Michael Flynn Is Harsh Judge of C.I.A.’s Role,” New York Times, December 12, 2016. 12. ten times that: McChrystal, My Share of the Task. 13. his teams needed to be more agile: Ibid. 14. and has instead used its own network… classified material: Bruce Berkowitz, “Failing to Keep Up with the Information Revolution,” Studies in Intelligence 47, no. 1 (June 27, 2008), https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol47no1/article07.html. 15. illegally pulled 250,000 State Department cables… off the network: Paul Lewis, “Bradley Manning Given 35-Year Prison Term for Passing Files to WikiLeaks,” The Guardian, August 21, 2013. 16. raiding the right homes only around 50 percent of the time: Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little, Brown, 2011). 17. “left to clean up the mess”: Ibid. 18. “former regime elements”: David C.

pages: 113 words: 37,885

Why Wall Street Matters by William D. Cohan

Alan Greenspan, Apple II, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, bonus culture, break the buck, buttonwood tree, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, financial repression, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Potemkin village, quantitative easing, secular stagnation, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tontine, too big to fail, WikiLeaks

His consistent prescription has been the somewhat vague idea of creating “more demand for the product of business.” (During the presidential campaign, Trump promised that his economic policies, including tax cuts, a $1 trillion infrastructure program, and less regulation, would result in annual GDP growth of 4 percent. Easier said than done.) In an October 2013 speech at Goldman Sachs—made public by a WikiLeaks hack into her campaign manager’s e-mail account—Hillary Clinton seemed to share Summers’s concerns about the dangers of the wrong kind of regulation in the banking sector. Of course, she didn’t think what she said to Goldman Sachs would become public, even though she was paid $225,000 to answer questions for thirty minutes.

pages: 122 words: 38,022

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, capitalist realism, citizen journalism, crony capitalism, death of newspapers, DIY culture, Donald Trump, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, mass immigration, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, Overton Window, post-industrial society, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

Chapter One The leaderless digital counter-revolution It is worth thinking back now to the early 2010s, when cyberutopianism had its biggest resurgence since the 90s, before the dot-com bubble burst. This time it emerged in response to a series of political events around the world from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement to new politicized hacker movements. Anonymous, Wikileaks and public-square mass protests in Spain and across the Middle East were getting huge coverage in the news, causing a flurry of opinion and analysis pieces about their profound significance. All of these events were being attributed to the rise of social media and characterized as a new leaderless form of digital revolution.

pages: 364 words: 112,681

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, failed state, financial engineering, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Global Witness, high net worth, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, income inequality, joint-stock company, land bank, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, medical malpractice, Navinder Sarao, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Sloane Ranger, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

Under the stage name Googoosha, she sang in auto-tuned English or Russian over mediocre pop beats, including in a duet with previously-great French actor Gerard Depardieu, who often hires out what’s left of his credibility to rich people from the ex-USSR. Reports from inside Uzbekistan described how she made her money by stealing successful businesses that caught her eye. ‘Most Uzbeks see Karimova as a greedy, power hungry individual,’ wrote American ambassador Jon Purnell in a 2005 cable later released by WikiLeaks. ‘She remains the single most hated person in the country. (Comment: We have no polling data to support that statement, but we stand by it.)’ Uzbekistan is not a place where journalists or investigators are able to work freely (or if they do, not for long), so most of the allegations against Karimova remained anecdotal until a series of prosecutions of foreign telecoms companies revealed the profits she had been making out of her government connections.

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They have both owned property in highly desirable parts of central London, as well as a café and a restaurant. Meanwhile, their father has been head of Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Emergency Situations (MES, which wags called the Ministry of Everything Significant) since 2006. In a US embassy cable revealed by WikiLeaks, an American diplomat told his superiors in Washington that Heydarov Sr had earned a vast fortune by exploiting his powers (Kamaladdin Heydarov has denied the allegations). ‘Only one name – Kamaladdin – is regularly whispered as the most powerful man in Azerbaijan,’ the cable said. ‘Heydarov expanded Customs income by systematising bribery within the organisation, in effect creating an extensive pyramid scheme.’

pages: 359 words: 113,847

Siege: Trump Under Fire by Michael Wolff

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Potemkin village, Quicken Loans, Saturday Night Live, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

It certainly would be an odd kind of justice, Bannon thought, if the case against the president came down to Stone, Julian Assange, and Jerome Corsi—crazies, conspiracists, bullshit artists, and fringe players all. Corsi, a right-wing gadfly who had recently become a figure in the investigation, connecting Stone to WikiLeaks and Assange, had once spearheaded the rumors that Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart, who died in 2012 from a heart attack, had been assassinated—and that Bannon, in cahoots with the CIA, was involved. (A raging Bannon had confronted Corsi: “I will shit down your neck if you don’t stop this.

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Vanity Fair Veterans Affairs Department Vietnam, Kim summit in Vietnam War View, The (TV show) Virginia, midterms of 2018 and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz Waco standoff Wag the Dog (film) Wahlberg, Mark Wall Wall Street Journal Walter Reed National Military Medical Center War on Terror Warren, Elizabeth Washington, Michigan, rally Washington Post Watergate scandal Waters, Maxine Weinstein, Harvey Weisselberg, Allen Weissmann, Andrew Wexton, Jennifer Whitaker, Matthew White House Correspondents’ Dinner White House staff “Anonymous” op-ed and communications team DOJ and midterms and Mueller and Whitestone, Erik Whitewater investigations WikiLeaks Wiles, Susie Wilson, Woodrow Winfrey, Oprah witness tampering WME company Wolf, Michelle Woman’s Day Woodward, Bob working class World Bank World War I commemoration World War II Wray, Christopher Wu Xiaohui Xi Jinping Young, Cy Zelinsky, Aaron ALSO BY MICHAEL WOLFF Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys Who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet Where We Stand White Kids About the Author Michael Wolff is the author of Fire and Fury, the number one bestseller that for the first time told the inside story of the Trump White House.

pages: 397 words: 110,222

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. The Rise of Surveillance Tech by Cyrus Farivar

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, call centre, citizen journalism, cloud computing, computer age, connected car, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, information security, John Markoff, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lock screen, Lyft, national security letter, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech worker, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, you are the product, Zimmermann PGP

King has been at the forefront of trying to understand where, when, and how stingrays are being used. He’s repeatedly gone to law enforcement and military technology industry conventions around the world (which are normally closed to outsiders), and has come away with documents showing the rapid and unchecked growth of these types of technologies. In December 2011, Privacy International, WikiLeaks, and several media organizations worldwide partnered to publish The Spy Files. King added that he’s taken photographs of stingrays “that are not much bigger than a BlackBerry.” In 2013, Ars Technica reported on possible stingrays being deployed in the Moscow Metro system, and worse still, a body-worn stingray vest.

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There was even something called an Airborne Kit, allowing stingrays to be mounted on aircraft. The tenacious privacy researcher even teamed up with others (including Eric King) to try to submit an amicus brief detailing their research into stingrays and other new information about surveillance in technology in United States v. Rigmaiden—published in the December 2011 Spy Files on WikiLeaks—but the request was denied by the judge. (These friend of the court filings, written by outside parties, which can either be accepted or denied by the judge, are often meant to help provide more context in rapidly evolving areas of the law.) As 2012 rolled in, Soghoian and Rigmaiden worked in parallel.

The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier by Ian Urbina

9 dash line, Airbnb, British Empire, clean water, Costa Concordia, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Filipino sailors, forensic accounting, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global value chain, Global Witness, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, Jones Act, Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Maui Hawaii, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, standardized shipping container, statistical arbitrage, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

In the 1970s, a German businessman named Alexander Gottfried Achenbach hired a team of Dutch mercenaries to stage a coup at Sealand, resulting in a hostage crisis and a tense diplomatic row between Germany and England. In the early 1980s, during the Falklands War, a group of Argentinians tried to buy the platform for a training camp. More recently, WikiLeaks explored moving its servers there, and Sealand appeared in the Panama Papers as a haven for organized crime. A cartoon that ran on October 23, 1968, in the London-based newspaper The Sun offers some context on Sealand’s status as a nascent postcolonial breakaway nation with a reference to Rhodesia, which had declared independence from Britain in an attempt to preserve white minority rule.

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It turned away clients tied to spam, child porn, and corporate cyber sabotage. “We have our limits,” Michael said. (I refrained from asking him the question on my mind, which was why pyramid schemes were okay if spam was not.) He added that in 2010 he had declined a request from representatives of WikiLeaks for a Sealand passport and safe haven for the group’s founder, Julian Assange. “They were releasing more than made me comfortable,” he added. The idea of moving online services offshore was not new. Science-fiction writers had dreamed of data havens for years. Perhaps the most famous was in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, published in 1999, in which the sultan of Kinakuta, a fictional, small, oil-rich island between the Philippines and Borneo, invites the novel’s protagonists to convert an island into a communications hub free from copyright law and other restrictions.

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See James Cusick, “Shots Fired in Sealand’s Defence of a Small Freedom,” Independent, Feb. 24, 1990. The British government soon brought firearms: Grimmelmann, “Sealand, HavenCo, and the Rule of Law.” Recently declassified U.K. documents: Dan Bell, “Darkest Hour for ‘Smallest State,’ ” BBC, Dec. 30, 2008. More recently, WikiLeaks explored: Katrin Langhans, “Newer Sealand,” Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Panama Papers, April 25, 2016. They were often called seasteads: My full bibliography on seasteading is as follows: Jerome Fitzgerald, Sea-Steading: A Life of Hope and Freedom on the Last Viable Frontier (New York: iUniverse, 2006); “Homesteading the Ocean,” Spectrum, May 1, 2008; Oliver Burkeman, “Fantasy Islands,” Guardian, July 18, 2008; Patri Friedman and Wayne Gramlich, “Seasteading: A Practical Guide to Homesteading the High Seas,” Gramlich.net, 2009; Declan McCullagh, “The Next Frontier: ‘Seasteading’ the Oceans,” CNET News, Feb. 2, 2009; Alex Pell, “Welcome Aboard a Brand New Country,” Sunday Times, March 15, 2009; Brian Doherty, “20,000 Nations Above the Sea,” Reason, July 2009; Eamonn Fingleton, “The Great Escape,” Prospect, March 25, 2010; Brad Taylor, “Governing Seasteads: An Outline of the Options,” Seasteading Institute, Nov. 9, 2010; “Cities on the Ocean,” Economist, Dec. 3, 2011; Jessica Bruder, “A Start-Up Incubator That Floats,” New York Times, Dec. 14, 2011; Michael Posner, “Floating City Conceived as High-Tech Incubator,” Globe and Mail, Feb. 24, 2012; Josh Harkinson, “My Sunset Cruise with the Clever, Nutty, Techno-libertarian Seasteading Gurus,” Mother Jones, June 7, 2012; Stephen McGinty, “The Real Nowhere Men,” Scotsman, Sept. 8, 2012; Michelle Price, “Is the Sea the Next Frontier for High-Frequency Trading?

pages: 706 words: 202,591

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

“But effectively there was no policy and the Policy team did not want to be seen as getting involved in the election. They absolutely did not want it.” By the time Facebook made the decision, the DCLeaks page was irrelevant anyway. The GRU did not need a Facebook page to distribute the leaks because WikiLeaks, the distributor of secret information that had inspired its name, had posted selected stolen emails, and the American press feasted on them, just as the Russians hoped they would. * * * • • • THE REAL TAKEAWAY of Trending Topics was the degree to which misinformation and cynically wrangled outrage dominated the News Feed.

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., 445 RockYou, 159–60, 164–65 Roosendaal, Arnold, 205 Rose, Dan, 172, 179, 184–85, 293, 306 Rosen, Guy, 315–16, 448, 452, 455, 477, 480 Rosenberg, Jonathan, 200 Rosenstein, Justin, 180, 182, 202, 203, 206, 473 Rosensweig, Dan, 134, 193 Ross, Blake, 217, 245, 276 Rothschild, Jeff, 105, 124, 143, 243 Royal Bank of Canada, 176 Russian interference in US presidential election and ad purchases, 372–76, 377, 378–79 briefing board of directors on, 379–80 and congressional hearings, 377, 378, 395–96 and DCLeaks, 336, 344–45 DNC emails stolen, 334, 336–37, 344, 353 engagement with FB users, 334 and evasion of FB’s detection, 375 first signals of, 333, 334, 335 and free expression on FB, 376 going public on, 377, 378, 379 and inflammatory messages embedded in graphics, 455–56 and Instagram, 374, 489 and intent to sow conflict, 383, 398, 421–22 and Project P team, 365–66, 367, 369 proof of, 375 and propaganda, 364, 365 spear-phishing attacks, 334, 336 and Stamos’s report, 364–67 and troll farms, 373–76, 395 and voter suppression, 374 white supremacism fueled by, 469 and WikiLeaks, 345 Zuckerberg’s perspectives on, 526 Rust, John, 400, 401, 415–16 Sandberg, Sheryl and author’s research, 15 background of, 190–92 and business plan of Facebook, 198, 199–200 and Cambridge Analytica, 419, 425–26 and Congressional Black Caucus, 469–70 congressional testimony of, 468–69 criticisms of, 356 and culture of FB, 237–38, 243 and data collected by FB, 207 division of labor with Zuckerberg, 194, 255, 355 on fake news disseminated on FB, 346, 359 and FB’s attempts to impugn competitors, 466 and “FOSS” term (friends of Sheryl Sandberg), 200, 339 and free speech, 470–71 frustrations of, 470–71 and FTC investigations, 479 and goals for the future, 469 at Google, 192–93 and husband’s death, 355, 357, 469, 470 and initial public offering, 287–88, 290, 298 and Lean In movement, 467–68 loyalty to Zuckerberg, 473 management style of, 196–97, 200, 356–57 meetings with Zuckerberg, 193–94 and Palihapitiya’s criticism of FB, 474 and Palihapitiya’s growth proposals, 213, 214 and Pincus, 167 and presidential election of 2016, 9, 355, 357 recruiting efforts of, 200–201 recruitment of, 193–94 and Ressa’s warnings, 435 role of, in FB, 194–95 and Russian election interference, 378, 380 and security team, 335–36 and Stamos’s security report, 364, 366–67 and Stamos takedown, 380 and WhatsApp, 504 work style of, 191–92 Sanghvi, Ruchi, 105, 124, 127, 139, 140, 142 satellite launch failure, 5, 6–7, 8, 232, 233 Saverin, Eduardo and advertising sales, 178 background of, 66–67 co-founder role of, 70 and incorporation of FB, 85 and Parker, 82, 98 partnership with Zuckerberg, 66–67 portrayed in The Social Network, 99 stake in FB, 96, 98, 99 terminated from FB, 98–99, 177 and Zuckerberg’s profile in Crimson, 77 Schmidt, Eric, 192, 196 Schmidt, Sophie, 423 Schrage, Elliot and anti-Semitism charges, 466 briefing board of directors, 379 and DCLeaks page, 344 departure of, 479 and Kaplan, 344 and Myanmar situation, 436 and “Napalm Girl” image, 458 and policy making, 357 and Ressa’s warnings, 435 role of, in FB, 200 and Sandberg, 357 Schroepfer, Mike, 282, 454, 471 Schultz, Alex, 217, 219–20, 224, 234, 435, 455, 511 Scissors, Lauren, 408 SCL, 410–15, 417, 419, 421–24 Scrabble app, 162 search engine optimization (SEO), 219–20 search engines, visibility of users’ details to, 264 security measures of Facebook additional staff hired for, 476 and Election War Room (2018), 485 and encryption, 500–501, 513–14 Growth team’s oversight of, 477 Stamos’s leadership of, 335–36 Selby, Brad, 161, 169–70 Semel, Terry, 133, 134, 135 Senate Judiciary hearing, 395–96 server space for Facebook, 66, 67, 97–98, 100, 105, 115 sexual politics on Facebook, 249 shadow/dark profiles, 129–30, 205, 222–23 sharing dynamics of Facebook users, 171, 401, 405 Shavell, Rob, 205 Silver, Ellen, 440 Simo, Fidji, 390, 439, 510 Sittig, Aaron and Book Reviews app, 155 and Like button, 203 and News Feed feature, 130, 140 and Photos feature, 114–15 recruitment of, 90–92 and recruitment of computer science engineers, 106–7 and redesign of FB, 113 on Wirehog project, 92 sixdegrees, 19–22, 80, 87, 522 Six Degrees to Harry Lewis, 61–62 Six4Three lawsuit, 465 “61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization, A” study, 337–38 Slashdot, 40–41 Slee, Mark, 217, 259–60, 261 Slide, 152, 159–61, 164 slogans used at Facebook, 241–43 smartphone, Facebook, 284–87 Smith, Ben, 390 Snapchat, 307–9, 316–17, 496–99 Snowden, Edward, 501 social advertising, 180–81, 183, 185 social graph, 156–57.

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s attempt to acquire FB, 136 thisisyourdigitallife app, 408 Threat Intelligence team of Facebook, 333–34, 336, 364, 366, 372 Tillery, Kris, 34–35, 60 Time’s Person of the Year, Zuckerberg as, 8 Tinder, 175, 445 Tokuda, Lance, 159–60 Translate Facebook app, 227–30 Trending Topics feature, 341–42, 345, 346 troll farms, 373, 395 Trump, Donald anti-Muslim posts of, 340, 457 elected president of United States, 9, 360, 494 and fake news disseminated on FB, 10 on marriage of Chan and Zuckerberg, 293 Ressa’s comment on election win of, 348 and Russian election interference, 366, 378, 379 Twitter account of, 340 Trump presidential campaign, 2016 anti-Hillary ads run by, 353 and Cambridge Analytica, 399, 420, 421, 427 effort put into FB, 351–52, 354 targeted ads of, 351–53 voter suppression by, 353 trust and Beacon, 187 and changes in default privacy settings, 265, 267 and Dating feature, 464–65 FB’s efforts to restore, 484 following Cambridge Analytica crisis, 464–65 and growth of Facebook, 235 importance of, to FB’s success, 121 and users’ distrust of apps, 170 truth, Facebook’s reluctance to arbitrate, 337, 346, 357, 361 Twitter, 257–64, 299, 304–5, 307, 395, 439, 445 Universal Facebook of Greenspan, 58–59, 60 US Congress, 377, 378, 427–28, 468–69, 474, 515, 516, 519–20 US Department of Justice, 515, 516 user data availability of, to public, 402, 404 and Cambridge Analytica, 399, 411–13, 414–19, 420–21, 422, 423–26 and data breach of Facebook, 467 data brokers’ selling of, 269–70 and deactivated accounts, 274 and Facebook Connect, 169–71, 173, 268 friends-of-friends data, 223, 268–69, 409, 412–13, 415, 416 and FTC investigation and sanctions, 273–74, 478–79 and Graph API V1 (“the Friend API”), 171–72, 175–76, 271, 409, 412 and Instant Personalization, 270–72, 409, 424 and Like button on external websites, 204–7 and mobile analytics of Onavo, 315–16, 323 and Onavo Protect, 316–17 and Open Graph, 171–72, 176, 267–70, 409, 424, 430 and personally identifying information (PII), 474, 476 policies for use of, 410 predicting users’ traits with, 402–4, 416 safeguards for, 153 and User ID leak, 268–69, 270 user-generated content, 22, 86, 112, 221 User IDs, leak of, 268–69, 270 users and anonymity on Friendster, 66 content created by, 64 and “Dark Profiles” (people not on FB), 129–30, 205, 222–23 and data collected via Platform, 169–70, 173–74 and elections on governance of FB, 265 engagement of, 202, 385 fake accounts/users, 376–77, 455 growing numbers of, 275, 297 (see also growth of Facebook) integration of FB into lives of, 89 “Likes” pursued by, 205 limited audience of, 67 and Mini-Feed feature, 130–31 older generations of, 122 and Open Registration, 119–23, 133–34, 215 and opt-in requirement, 64 phone numbers of, 318, 502–3 and privacy setting defaults, 263–67 purchases by, shared on FB (Beacon), 182–83, 186–89, 206, 212 reactions to News Feed, 140–43 real names of, 42, 63, 66, 81, 147, 249 resistance to redesigns, 138–39 retention of, 220–21, 224–25 Russians’ engagement with, 334 safety of, 250–52 and usage patterns, 89, 90 and user testing, 122 and Workplace Networks, 121, 133 vacation days at Facebook, 85 values of Facebook, 111, 239–41, 289, 459 Van Natta, Owen and buyout offers, 131–32, 134–35, 210, 211 demotion of, 211 management style of, 196 and Microsoft meeting, 184 and News Feed feature, 141 role of, in FB, 116, 194 “Verified Apps” program, 274 Vernal, Mike, 169, 170, 176, 280–81 video content in News Feed of FB, 390–91 violence incited on Facebook, 11, 234, 435–39, 473, 526 virality, 159, 262–63, 388, 391, 405 virtual private network (VPN) of Onavo, 316 virtual reality (VR), 325–30, 491–96 voting button and study, 237, 337–38, 406 Wall feature of Facebook, 111–12, 160, 227–28 Warner, Mark, 372, 395 Warren, Elizabeth, 516 Washington Post, FB’s funding agreement with, 100–104 Web 2.0, 12, 86 Wehner, David, 476, 484 Weinreich, Andrew, 19, 20–21, 66, 87, 522–23 Welsh, Matt, 60, 104 WhatsApp, 499–507 advertising on, 477 and antitrust charges, 515, 516 and congressional hearings, 520 FB’s acquisition of, 322–25 origins of, 317–22 popularity of, 12 used to incite violence, 11, 437–38, 473 WikiLeaks, 345 Williams, Evan, 258–59, 299 Williams, Maxine, 469, 470 Willner, Charlotte, 252 Willner, Dave, 250, 252, 253–54, 447, 457 Winklevoss, Cameron, 56–57, 64, 72–76 Winklevoss, Tyler, 56, 64, 72–76 Wirehog project, 92–95 Words with Friends app, 162 Workplace Networks, 121, 133 work spaces of Facebook author’s access to headquarters, 15 bonuses for staff living nearby, 109 consolidation of, in Palo Alto, 194 and culture of FB, 105, 254–55 Los Altos house, 96–97, 100 and non-disclosure agreements, 74 Palo Alto headquarters on California Ave., 238, 254, 368–69 Palo Alto house on La Jennifer (Casa Facebook), 76–77, 82–84, 90–91, 95 Palo Alto office on Emerson Street, 100, 105 Palo Alto office on University, 109 whiteboards in, 118, 369 Wu, Tim, 515 Wylie, Christopher, 410–15, 420, 422–25 Xobni, 174 Yahoo!

pages: 179 words: 43,441

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioﬀ, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Micro-powers are now capable of constraining macro-powers such as national governments. The digital age undermined many of the barriers that used to protect public authority, rendering governments much less efficient or effective as the governed, or the public, became better informed and increasingly demanding in their expectations. The WikiLeaks saga – in which a tiny non-state entity confronted a mammoth state – illustrates the asymmetry of the new power paradigm and the erosion of trust that often comes with it. It would take a book dedicated to the subject alone to explore all the multifaceted impacts of the fourth industrial revolution on governments, but the key point is this: Technology will increasingly enable citizens, providing a new way to voice their opinions, coordinate their efforts and possibly circumvent government supervision.

pages: 151 words: 39,757

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

4chan, Abraham Maslow, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, context collapse, corporate governance, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, Network effects, peak TV, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, theory of mind, WikiLeaks, you are the product, zero-sum game

A credible researcher in the employ of Facebook who highlights instances of positivity in social media is Moira Burke: http://www.thoughtcrumbs.com/. 15. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563216302941 16. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-05/sdsu-caa050415.php 17. http://annenberg.usc.edu/news/around-usc-annenberg/family-time-decreasing-internet-use 18. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/23/stress-anxiety-fuel-mental-health-crisis-girls-young-women 19. http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2017/10/16/1708518114.full.pdf 20. http://www.smh.com.au/technology/smartphone-apps/fuelling-a-mental-health-crisis-instagram-worst-social-network-for-young-peoples-mental-health-20170520-gw9fvq.html 21. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nsa-breach-shadow-brokers-michael-morell/ 22. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/mar/07/wikileaks-publishes-biggest-ever-leak-of-secret-cia-documents-hacking-surveillance 23. You could add Trump’s tax returns to this rarefied list. 24. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/24/us/politics/facebook-ads-politics.html 25. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2475265 26. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-visa/trump-administration-approves-tougher-visa-vetting-including-social-media-checks-idUSKBN18R3F8 27. https://www.forbes.com/sites/adp/2016/10/24/how-to-legally-use-social-media-to-recruit/#1fd4ebce29f4 28. https://www.tuition.io/2014/04/social-media-shocker-twitter-facebook-can-cost-scholarship-admissions-offer/ 29. https://www.edmunds.com/auto-insurance/car-insurance-companies-use-facebook-for-claims-investigations.html 30. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/11/aclu-geofeedia-facebook-twitter-instagram-black-lives-matter 31. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/10/03/god-view-uber-allegedly-stalked-users-for-party-goers-viewing-pleasure/ 32. http://fortune.com/2016/04/27/zuckerberg-facebook-control/ 33. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/sep/21/does-quitting-social-media-make-you-happier-yes-say-young-people-doing-it ARGUMENT EIGHT: SOCIAL MEDIA DOESN’T WANT YOU TO HAVE ECONOMIC DIGNITY 1.

pages: 480 words: 123,979

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

The likely result would be that the next best way to drive cranky traffic would come to the fore, but the overall result would be similar. As an example of a next-best source of crankiness, consider how Russian intelligence services have been identified by U.S. intelligence as meddlers in the U.S. election. The method was not just to shitpost, but to “weaponize” WikiLeaks to selectively distribute information that harmed only one candidate. Suppose the tech companies implement ethical filters to block malicious selective leaking. Next up might be the subconscious generation of paranoia toward someone or something, in order to lock in attention. If the companies implement filters to prevent that, there will always be some other method-in-waiting.

…

Watts, Alan Watts Towers wealth concentration weightlessness weight loss Welles, Orson Wessel, David What Technology Wants (Kelly) white hats White Sands Missile Range Whole Earth Catalog Whole Earth Review Who Owns the Future (Lanier) Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us (Joy) Wiener, Norbert Wii WikiLeaks Wilde, Oscar Wild West Wilson, Andy Windows Wired Wizard of the Upper Amazon, The (Lamb) Wolfram, Stephen women dating and gaming and tech world and Won, Andrea Stevenson “world,” vs. “reality” world games world music World War II World Wide Web (WWW) Xanadu digital network Xbox Xerox PARC Xiao, Jianxiong You Are Not a Gadget (Lanier) YouTube Zachary, George Zhang, Zhengyou Zimmerman, Tom zither Zombie Apocalypse Zuckerberg, Mark Also by Jaron Lanier Who Owns the Future?

pages: 427 words: 127,496

Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service by Michael Bar-Zohar, Nissim Mishal

airport security, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, Dr. Strangelove, false flag, illegal immigration, Stuxnet, traveling salesman, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

is based on, among other sources: “Their Man in Cairo,” Ronen Bergman, Yedioth Ahronoth, 6.5.2005 (H) “Code Name Hatuel,” Ronen Bergman, Yedioth Ahronoth, 7.9.2007 (H) Chapter 16: Saddam’s Supergun is based on, among other sources: “Cut off His Head, Mossad Version,” Ronen Bergman, Yedioth Ahronot, 8.6. 2007 (H) Chapter 17: Fiasco in Amman is based among others on: “Less Luck Than Brain,” Ronen Bergman, Yedioth Ahronoth, 7.7.2006 (H) Chapter 18: From North Korea with Love is based on, among other sources: “Asad’s Nuclear Plan,” Ronen Bergman, Yedioth Ahronoth, 4.4.2008 (H) “The Nuclear General Killed on Shore,” Ronen Bergman, Yedioth Ahronoth, 4.8.2008 “Wikileaks: The Attack on Syria,” Ronen Bergman, Berlin, Yedioth Ahronoth, 24.12.2010 (H) Chapter 20: The Cameras Were Rolling is based on, among other sources: “Turn off the Plasma,” Ronen Bergman, Yedioth Ahronoth, 31.12.2010 (H) “The Anatomy of Mossad’s Dubai Operation,” Ronen Bergman, Christopher Schult, Alexander Smoltczyk, Holger Stark and Bernard Zand, Spiegel Online, 17.1.2011 Chapter 21: From the Land of the Queen of Sheba is based on, among other sources: “The Price: 4000 Killed,” Ronen Bergman, Yedioth Ahronoth, 3.7.1998 (H) CHAPTER 1: KING OF SHADOWS MEIR DAGAN “Meir Dagan, the Mastermind Behind Mossad’s Secret War,” Uzi Mahanaimi, Sunday Times, February 21, 2010 “The Powerful, Shadowy Mossad Chief Meir Dagan Is a Streetfighter,” London Times, February 18, 2010 “Mossad Chief Meir Dagan Is a ‘Streetfighter,’” Nation (Pakistan), February 18, 2010 “Vegetarian, Painter … Spy Chief,” Uzi Mahanaimi, Sunday Times, February 21, 2010 “Mossad—The World’s Most Efficient Killing Machine,” Gordon Thomas, Rense. com, September 12, 2002 “Abu Jabel Gets the Mossad,” Yigal Sarna, Yedioth Ahronoth, September 13, 2002 (H) Mike Eldar, Sayeret Shaked Association, The Heritage, synopsis of the book Unit 424, the story of Sayeret (Commando) Shaked, published by Shaked Association (H) “Dagan Who?”

…

Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown, 2010) THE DEATH OF GENERAL SULEIMAN “Syrian General’s Killing Severs Hezbollah Links,” Nicholas Blandford and James Hider, TimesOnline.com, August 6, 2008 “General Muhammad Suleiman Buried in Syria,” cafesyria.com/yrianews/2706.aspx, August 10, 2008 “Mystery Shrouds Assassination of Syria’s Top Security Adviser,” Manal Lutfi and Nazer Majli, Asharq El-Awsat, August 5, 2008 “Slain Syrian Aide Supplied Missiles to Hezbollah,” Uzi Mahanaymi, Sunday Times, August 10, 2008 “Meir Dagan: The Mastermind Behind Mossad’s Secret War,” Uzi Mahanaymi, Sunday Times, February 21, 2010 “The Mystery Behind a Syrian Murder,” Nicholas Blanford, Time, August 7, 2008 “There Was Total Silence,” Lilit Wanger, Yedioth Ahronoth, June 7, 2010 (H) “Commendation of the Long Arm,” Yossi Yehoshua, Yedioth Ahronoth, June 22, 2010 (H) (Sunday Times: The Naval Commando Liquidated Muhammad Suleiman Two Years Ago) “The End of the Secret Adviser of the Syrian President,” Jacky Huggi, Maariv, August 4, 2008 (H) “The Hezbollah Member Who Was Liquidated Was Nicknamed in Israel ‘the Syrian Mughniyeh,’” Barak Rabin, Yoav Stern, Haaretz, August 4, 2008 (H) “Death of the North Korean Builder and Security Officer of the Syrian Reactor,” Debka Internet site, August 9, 2008 (H) “Wikileaks: Syria Believes Israel Killed Top Assad Aide,” Lahav Harkov, Jerusalem Post, December 24, 2010 “Former CIA Director: The Secrecy Around the Attack on the Syrian Reactor Is Unjustified,” Amir Oren, Haaretz, July 9, 2010 (H) CHAPTER 19: LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON “Profile: Imad Mughniyeh,” Ian Black, Guardian, February 13, 2008 “US Official: World ‘Better Place’ with Death of Hezbollah Figure,” Associated Press, February 13, 2008 “Mossad Most Wanted: A Deadly Vengeance (Imad Mughniyeh),” Gordon Thomas, Independent, February 23, 2010 “Commentary: A Clear Message to Nasrallah and the Hezbollah,” Amir Oren, Haaretz, February 13, 2010 (H) Hezbollah’s report about the liquidation of Mughniyeh, Debka file, February 28, 2008 (H) “From Argentina to Saudi Arabia, Everybody Was Looking for Mughniyeh,” Yedioth Ahronoth, February 13, 2008 (H) “Syria: The Liquidation of Mughniyeh Is a Terrorist Act,” Yoav Stern, Yossi Melman, Haaretz, 13.2.200 (H) “The Terror Attacks that Put Mughniyeh on the Map,” Yossi Melman, Haaretz, February 13, 2008 (H) “The Retaliation for the Killing of Mughniyeh Is a Question of Time,” Roy Nachmias, Yedioth Ahronoth, June 30, 2008 (H) “Commentary: He Was Higher on the Wanted List Than Nassrallah,” Yossi Melman, Haaretz, February 13, 2008 (H) “Iran—The Killing of Mughniyeh Is an Example of the Israeli Terror,” Dudi Cohen, Roy Nachmias, Yedioth Ahronoth, February 13, 2008 (H) CHAPTER 20: THE CAMERAS WERE ROLLING “Assassins Had Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Sight as Soon as He Got to Dubai,” Hugh Tomlinson, Times (UK), February 17, 2010 “Mahmoud al-Mabhouh Was Sedated Before Being Suffocated, Dubai Police Say,” Times (UK), March 1, 2010 “Report from the Sunday Times: PM Authorized Mabhouh Killing,” YNET, February 21, 2010 “Inquiry Grows in Dubai Assassinations,” Robert F.

pages: 482 words: 121,173

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

The DCU was born out of our anti-counterfeiting work in the 1990s but evolved into a digital SWAT team to work with law enforcement when we saw new forms of criminal activity begin to proliferate on the internet.2 Ten days earlier, on the Friday before the 2016 Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks had released emails stolen by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee, or DNC. It became a major news story throughout the week of the convention. As the week progressed, our threat intelligence center, MSTIC, identified a new and separate hacking attempt by Strontium—our name for a Russian hacking group also known as Fancy Bear and APT28.

…

., 56, 84, 85, 98, 174, 176 Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, 323n9 elections and, 83 Intelligence Committee, 95 Judiciary Committee, 26 September 11 terrorist attacks, 8–9, 71, 72 Shadow Brokers, 63–64 Shaw, Frank, 215, 218, 306 Sheinwald, Nigel, 110 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 152 Shields, Mike, 279–80 Shum, Harry, 207–8, 252 Siebel, Edwin, 309n2 Siemens AG, 111, 122, 294 singularity (AI superintelligence), 197, 199, 328n12 Skillful initiative, 325n18 Skype, 2 Slate, 101, 199 smartphones, cell phones, 34–35, 94, 158, 159, 200, 241, 270 Snapp, Mary, 180 Snowden, Edward, 4–5, 8, 9, 13–14, 17–19, 25, 41, 263 social media, 89–107, 212 disinformation campaigns and, 90, 94–98, 102–4 illegal content on, 99, 103 NewsGuard and, 104 privacy and, 145 regulation of, 98, 100–104, 144 Russia and, 95–98, 103 terrorists and, 99, 100, 125–26 violent material on, 102 Socolow, Michael, 318nn27–28 Socrates, 259 software: creative aspects of software development, 140–41 Hippocratic oath for coders, 207–8 open-source, 264, 276–78, 283 resource allocations and trade-offs in development, 15 role of software architects for GDPR, 140–41 Software Freedom Law Center, 314n8 Sony Pictures, 63 Sotomayor, Sonia, 33–34 South Korea, 81, 124, 316n2 Soviet Union, 40, 90, 91 in Cold War, 12, 40, 107, 116–18 KGB in, 92 Spain, 63 Spalter, Jonathan, 323n9 spear-phishing, 79, 83 speech recognition, 194–95, 197, 201 Spielberg, Steven, 211–12 Stahlkopf, Dev, 125, 293 Stamos, Alex, 97 Standard Oil, 148, 310n6 Stasi (State Security Service), 39–41, 44 Stern School of Business, 333n16 Stored Communications Act, 23 Strontium (Fancy Bear; APT28), 78–81, 84–85 student activism, 217–18 Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), 323n9 Supreme Court, 7, 33–35, 52–56, 58, 228, 299, 311n15, 314n10 Surace-Smith, Kathy, 50, 308 surveillance, 1–19, 45, 131, 289–90, 292, 300 commercial, 145; see also privacy facial recognition and, 227–28 FISC and, 12 Fourth Amendment and, 34 GPS, 33–34, 228 PRISM and, 1–4, 8, 9, 310–11n4 Reform Government Surveillance coalition, 16–17 see also privacy Swift, Taylor, 256 Switchboard data set, 197 Symantec, 120 T Tallinn, Estonia, 89–90, 92 Tallinn Manual 2.0, 128, 320n19 taxes, 146, 182–83, 290 Tay, 255–56 Taylor, Anne, 287–88, 334–35n1 TechFest, 170–71 tech intensity, 289 technology(ies), 129–30, 184, 221, 247 cultural values and, 244–45 Einstein on, 129, 209–10, 289 government and, 109–30 international collaboration on, 300 managing, 287–304 market barriers to, 257 network effects and, 270 regulation of, see regulation time needed for adoption of, 240–41 technology companies: banks compared with, 11 blitzscaling and, 292 cultural change and, 292 cybersecurity and, 294–95 employees’ role at, 217 entrepreneurs in, 335n9 government and, 11, 19, 23, 76, 85–86 interns and young employees at, 218 leaders in, 293, 295 as nation, 119 principles in, 293–94 PRISM and, 1–4, 8, 9 regulation of, 11 talent gap and, 169–90; see also education; immigration White House meetings with leaders of, 16–19, 111–12 women and racial minorities at, 184–85 Technology Education and Literacy in Schools (TEALS), 178–79 Techonomy, 192 techplomacy, 127 TechSpark, 233, 331n8 telegraph, 192 telephones, 161, 192, 289, 299 cell, 34–35, 94, 158, 159, 200, 241, 270 landline, 94, 159 television, 159, 299 white spaces, 159–60, 162, 163, 167 Tencent, 256 Terminator movie franchise, 202 terrorism, 9, 12, 25, 26, 99, 100, 102, 203, 222 Christchurch mosque shootings, 99–100, 102, 125–26 facial recognition and, 330n21 in Paris, 26–28 Pearl kidnapping, 21–22 September 11 attacks, 8–9, 71, 72 social media and, 99, 100, 125–26 Thompson, John, 221, 252 Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, 143–44, 146 Tiku, Nitasha, 225 TitleTownTech, 331n8 Tomahawk missiles, 66–67 Toronto, 316n2 Total, 122 trademark law, 80 transparency, 30, 32, 35 artificial intelligence and, 200–201, 207 transportation, 185–86 Trudeau, Justin, 142–43 Trump, Donald, 58, 73–75, 82, 83, 115, 144, 157, 172–74, 180, 214, 263, 279–82, 284 meeting at Trump Tower with tech executives, 172–73, 176 technology strategy for 2016 presidential campaign, 279–82 Trump, Ivanka, 180 Trunnell, Matthew, 272–73, 275, 276, 278, 282, 284–85 Turing, Alan, 328n12 Twitter, 90, 95, 104, 125 Christchurch mosque terrorist shootings and, 99, 126 2001: A Space Odyssey, 328n12 U Uganda Wildlife Authority, 288 UHF, 159 Ukraine, 69–72, 90, 317n2 unemployment, 152, 156 unions, 216 United Kingdom, 14, 42, 53, 69, 75, 95, 103, 265, 284 Brexit and, 131–32, 139, 238 cyberattack in, 63 war between France and, 105 in War of 1812, 46, 313n5 United Nations (UN), 72, 129, 160 United States Trade Representative, 257 University of Washington, 178, 182, 208, 273, 286, 297, 325n11 V Vabamu Museum of Occupations and Freedom, 90–92 Vail, Theodore, 161 Vatican, 208–10 Verizon, 2–3 VHF, 159 vision, computer, 194–95, 197, 201 Voice of America, 107 voting, see elections W Walker, Kent, 12–13 Wall Street Journal, 21, 104 Wang, Kevin, 178 WannaCry, 63–69, 71–74, 122, 294, 300, 301 war, 204–5, 302, 329n29 cyberwar, cyberweapons, 69, 118, 130, 205–6, 289 see also military weapons Ward, Patrick, 61–62 WarGames, 116–17 Warner, Mark, 98, 99, 103, 105 War of 1812, 46, 313n5 Warren, Samuel, 330n24 Washington, George, 105, 106, 319n36 Washington Post, 4, 13–15, 298 Washington State Opportunity Scholarship program, 181–82, 325n20 WeChat, 256 Wicker, Roger, 323n9 Wikileaks, 78 Wilkes, John, 5–6, 23 Willard InterContinental Washington, 160–61 Wilson, Woodrow, 100 Windows, xx, 12, 29, 63–65, 203, 212, 253, 270 Wired, 225 wireless technologies, 159, 167, 296 broadband, 151–67, 289, 296, 322n6, 323n9 TV white space, 159–60, 162, 163, 167 Wiretap Act, 47 Word, 50, 264 workforce, see jobs Workforce Education Investment Act, 182–84 World Bank, 325n18 World Economic Forum at Davos, 191–93, 202 World Trade Organization, 257 World War I, 123 World War II, 28, 40, 61, 62, 77, 88, 90, 95, 117, 122, 123, 166, 172, 209, 317n2 writ of habeas corpus, 10 X Xamarin, 277 Xbox, 72, 100, 126, 140, 160 XiaoIce, 255, 256 Xi Jinping, 249–52, 268 Y Yahoo!

pages: 677 words: 121,255

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

Debs, anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and Pentagon Papers revealer Daniel Ellsberg. But, in fact, the Act is still used today as a cudgel against such whistleblowers as diplomatic cable leaker Chelsea Manning and National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, still on the lam in Moscow for his Wikileaks revelations about spying (and other questionable activities) on both American citizens and foreign actors (including German Chancellor Angela Merkel) by the United States government. Tellingly, as mission creep set in and “clear and present danger” expanded to include speech unrelated to military operations or combating foreign enemies, Holmes dissented in other cases, reverting to a position of absolute protection for nearly all speech short of that intended to cause criminal harm, concluding that the “marketplace of ideas” of open discussion, debate, and disputation was the best test of their verisimilitude.

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Science and Religion in Modern Society, 86 The Mind of the Market (Shermer), 61, 203, 284 The Moral Arc (Shermer), 26, 72, 78, 136, 140, 155, 185, 221, 229, 236, 240, 264 The Onion, 34 The Science of Good and Evil (Shermer), 34, 87, 264 The Transcendental Temptation (Kurtz), 269–275 Theistic Evolutionists, 51 Theology and Science, 221, 236 Thermodynamics Second Law of, 109, 237–238, 309–310 Thomas, Keith, 223 thought crime, 38 thought police, 71 Tooby, John, 238 top-down government fatal conceit of, 215–217 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 139 Totalitarian Liberalism (Totalitarian Left), 75 Treaty of Rome, 249–250 Treesh, Frederick, 35 tribalism, 243–246 trigger warnings, 66–67 Trump, Donald, 33 truth scientific search for, 26–27 Thomas Jefferson on, 27 Tupey, Marian, 130 UFO cults cognitive dissonance effects, 95–96 United States increasing political division, 136–139 political system, 26 views of the founding fathers, 26 United States Constitution First Amendment, 23, 53, 71 Second Amendment, 71, 171 Thirteenth Amendment, 2, 83 Fourteenth Amendment, 83 Eighteenth Amendment, 227 Nineteenth Amendment, 227 Twenty-first Amendment, 227 universe arguments for divine providence, 110–111 auto-ex-nihilo theory, 124–125 Big Bang, 121 boom-and-bust cycles, 121 brane universes, 123 creation by God ex nihilo (out of nothing), 115–117 Darwinian universes, 122 explanations for, 120–125 explanations for nothing, 113–120 grand unified theory, 121 inconstant constants, 120 M-theory, 124–125 many-worlds multiverse, 122–123 multiple creations cosmology, 122 natural vs supernatural explanations of something, 117–119 nothing is unstable, something is stable, 119–120 quantum foam universe creations, 124 question of why it exists at all, 111 sense of awe out of nothing, 125–126 string universes, 123 views on its purpose and meaning, 103–108 why it takes the form it does, 111–113 universities avoidance of controversial or sensitive subjects, 25 disinvitation of controversial speakers, 25 University of California, Berkeley reactions to controversial speakers, 21 Unjust World Theory, 255–256 Urban, Hugh, 93 Valla, Lorenzo, 224–225 van Wolde, Ellen, 115 Veenhoven, Ruut, 211 veil of ignorance (Rawls), 240 Venker, Suzanne, 71 venture capitalists success rates for business start-ups, 263 victimhood culture, 73 viewpoint diversity lack of tolerance on college campuses, 75–76 ways to increase in colleges, 76–78 viewpoint of eternity (Spinoza), 240 Vinge, Joan, 153 virtue signaling, 75 Voltaire, 270, 280 von Däniken, Erich, 315 von Mises, Ludwig, 90 Waco siege, 29, 178 Wall Street Journal, 71 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 45 Wasserman, Steve, 277 Waterman, Robert, 264 Webb, John, 120 Weber, Mark, 78 Weber, Max, 302 Webster, Daniel, 2 Weinstein, Bret, 303 Weiss, Bari, 177 Wells, Jonathan, 55 whistleblowers, 2 white supremacism, 30–31 Why Darwin Matters (Shermer), 44, 56, 282 Why People Believe Weird Things (Shermer), 24, 44, 87, 134 Wikileaks, 2 Willink, Jocko, 308 Wilson, Doug, 281 Wilson, Edward O., 289 witch theory of causality, 223 witch trials and executions, 221–223impact of the scientific and philosophical revolution, 223 Witt, Ulrich, 198 Wolfman, Scott, 161 Wolpe, David, Rabbi, 104 Wright, Lawrence, 93 Wright, Robert, 239–240 xenophobia, 244 Yiannopoulos, Milo, 13 Young-Earth Creationists, 51 YouTube censorship issue, 33–34 Zubrin, Robert, 153–154

pages: 413 words: 120,506

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi

Bernie Sanders, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Kickstarter, mass immigration, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

The late Ambassador Dean graciously provided me with documents that cover the entire period of his ambassadorship in Beirut, from late 1978 until 1981. Those concerning the PLO are mainly from 1979. There are also at least a half dozen classified cables dealing with the contacts undertaken by Parker and Dean with one of these intermediaries, my cousin Walid Khalidi, in Wikileaks: see, e.g., https://search.wikileaks.org/?s=1&q=khalidi&sort=0. 62. Ambassador Dean provided copies of these documents to the Institute for Palestine Studies, where they are available for consultation by researchers. 63. “Telegram from Secretary of State Vance’s Delegation to Certain Diplomatic Posts,” October 1, 1977, FRUS, 1977–80, Arab-Israeli Dispute, vol. 8, 634–36. 64.

pages: 519 words: 136,708

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

gloats one US Apache weapons operator after two cars drive into the helicopter’s line of cannon fire and their passengers scatter to be gunned down in turn. ‘Oooh, my bitch is fucking done, dude!’ screams another. ‘Dude, look at it! We fucked those people all to shit down there!’49 Advert for a US Bell Super Cobra attack helicopter. Although there are many examples, the 2010 release via WikiLeaks of the so-called ‘Collateral Murder’ video – captured in 2007 – exposes these logics with the most brutal clarity. This captured the digital video sensed by the helicopter, and beamed direct to the pilot and gunner’s helmet-sights, of an US Apache helicopter as it gunned down two Reuters journalists and ten colleagues in Baghdad.

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., 248 Washko, Travis, 267 Wazir, Sadaullah, 76 Weimar, 179–80 Weisman, Leslie Kames, 154 Weizman, Eyal, 1–2, 72–3, 75n27, 294, 295 Wells, H. G., 138, 220 Wenchai, 233 Wesley, John, 323–4 West Bank, 295 West Virginia, 289 West Wits, 385 What Is to Be Done about Law and Order (Andyouno), 107n26 Wheeler, Tony, ixn1 White, Allon, 325 WikiLeaks, 113 Williams, Robbie, 315 Williams, Seville, 352–3 Will There Be a Plane in Every Garage?, 95–6 Wood, Anthony, 239, 241 Woolworth Building, 134, 158 World Cup, xiii, 124, 126, 270 World Health Organization (WHO), 252–3, 256 World Trade Center, 60n24, 143, 155–6, 156–7n22, 168–70, 172–3, 211, 241, 293, 310–2, 311 World War II, 57, 62, 65, 66n40, 222, 273, 304, 340, 355, 357 Wyly, Elvin, 193 Yamasaki, Minoru, 155, 172–3 Yeang, Ken, 238n51 Yemen, 73 Yongsan, 240–1 York, England, 284 Young, Liam, 375–6 Yousef, Ramzi, 170 Zambia, 381n44 Zapatistas, 21 Zimbabwe, 46 Zinn, Howard, 62–3 Zionist colonisers, 294 Zionist Israel, 295 Zokwana, Senzeni, 386 Zoran Island, 301 Zurita, Raúl, 50

pages: 588 words: 131,025

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

Cure “I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded.” —EDWARD SNOWDEN1 “Today’s Web-enabled gadgets should come with a digital Miranda warning: Anything you say or do online, from a status update to a selfie, can and will be used as evidence against you on the Internet.” —NICK BILTON, New York Times2 In a world of Julian Assange’s Wikileaks and Edward Snowden’s exposé of the National Security Agency, we are progressing toward zero tolerance of governmental non-transparency.1,3 At the same time, massive Internet security breaches are occurring or being discovered, from retailers like Target to the Heartbleed bug. Just as everything is getting digitized, making it eminently portable and accessible, we’re betwixt and between.

…

Vallee, David, 65 van de Werf, Ysbrand, 53 Variants of unknown significance (VUS), genomic, 85–86, 205 Veatch, Robert, 18, 29–30 Verghese, Abraham, 279 Veterans Affairs, Department of, 129, 136 Virtual Doctor Project, 270–271 Virtual health assistants (VHAs), 164–165 Virtual office visits, 165–172 Voice recognition software, 131 Voigt, John, 56–57 VSee, 270–271 Walgreens, 68, 106–107, 162–163, 224, 292 Walker, Jan, 131 Wall Street Journal, 22, 69 Warner, David, 127 Waste in health care expenditures, 142–147 Wearable book, 54 White coat lecture, 175–176 Whole genome sequencing, 86 Wikileaks, 219 Wikilife Foundation, 200 Wilsey, Grace, 9–10, 10(fig.) Wireshark network analysis tool, 221 Wisdom of the body, 280 The Wisdom of the Body (Cannon), 280–281 Wojcicki, Anne, 63, 69–72 Wolfram, Stephen, 82, 221 Wolpert, Ann, 210 World Bank, 257 World Health Organization (WHO), 257, 270 Worstall, Tim, 151 Xpert, 266 X-rays, 113 Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (Seife), 71–72

pages: 501 words: 134,867

A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice by Tony Weis, Joshua Kahn Russell

addicted to oil, Bakken shale, bilateral investment treaty, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, decarbonisation, Deep Water Horizon, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, failed state, gentrification, global village, green new deal, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, liberal capitalism, LNG terminal, market fundamentalism, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, profit maximization, public intellectual, race to the bottom, smart grid, special economic zone, WikiLeaks, working poor

By dramatically increasing Canada’s global warming pollution, tar sands mining and drilling makes the problem worse, and exposes millions of Africans to more devastating drought and famine today and in the years to come.”4 In Norway, the tar sands became an election issue in 2009 during political debates because of widespread public opposition to the fact that Norway’s state-owned energy company, Statoil, has significant investments in Alberta. Jim Prentice, Canada’s minister of the environment at the time, visited Norway around this election period and was struck by the extent of public hostility towards Statoil’s investment in the tar sands. According to a diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks, Prentice later told US ambassador David Jacobsen that the experience “heightened his awareness of the negative consequences to Canada’s historically ‘green’ standing on the world stage.”5 Prentice also told the US ambassador in Ottawa that the Conservatives were “too slow” in responding to the dirty oil label and “failed to grasp the magnitude of the situation.”

…

See also Keystone XL pipeline “transit justice,” 307 Trans Mountain pipeline, 11, 91, 95 transnational corporations (TNCs), 23, 27, 114, 272; in United States, 30 Transport Workers Union (TWU), 220 treaties, 256, 258, 260–61 Treaty 6: 119, 123, 125, 268 Treaty 8: 114, 125, 268 treaty rights, 75, 81, 122–23, 271, 274, 277 treaty violations, 139–40, 260 tribal sovereignty, 243 Trinidad and Tobago, “extreme” tar sands extraction in, 103–4 Trumka, Richard, 218, 223–24, 225 Tutu, Archbishop Desmond, 56 Tyee, The, 60 UK Tar Sands Network (UKTSN), 207–16, 292 unemployment, 125, 233, 303, 305 Unifor, 79 Unist’ot’en people, 16, 158–59, 260, 293 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 29 United Church of Christ: Fauntroy report, 67; Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, 67 United Kingdom: Canada House protest, 208–9; Canadian embassy in, 57; grassroots activism opposing tar sands in, 55; oil imports from, 31; opposition to tar sands in, 207–16; unbuilt wind farms in, 269 United Mine Workers of America (UMW), 218 United Nations, 42, 114, 248, 267; Convention on Biological Diversity, 121; Copenhagen ministerial negotiations (2009), 167–68, 171, 209, 310–12; Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 12, 122, 251, 257, 268; Green Jobs report, 302; Human Rights Committee, 114; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 114; Working Towards a Balanced and Inclusive Green Economy, 300–301 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), 302, 353n10; Towards a Green Economy, 300 United States, 6, 42, 78; as “addicted to oil,” 181; Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, 200; Bureau of Land Management, 315; Canadian lobbying of tar sands in, 59–63; Canadian oil as part of solution to energy security in, 30; civil rights movement, 75, 251; Clean Air Act, 283; climate movement in, 167–69, 243, 311; climate policy in, 244–45, 318; domestic gas prices in, 233; Endangered Species Act, 283; Energy Information Administration, 47; energy market, 24; ENGOs in, 310; Environmental Defense Fund, 283; Environmental Protection Agency (EP A), 198, 203; fight over Keystone XL in, 78, 166–80; forced migration to, 89; guest worker programs in, 85; Indian Energy Title V campaign, 242–43; labour movement and climate change in, 217–25; military industrial complex, 336n8; National Energy Policy Development Group, 30; National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, 202; National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), 198–99; Natural Resources Defense Council, 175, 221, 230, 242, 283; as net exporter of refined petroleum, 314; Oil Protection Act, 199; Oil Sands Advocacy Strategy, 59; oil shale exploration and experimentation in, 100; Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), 190, 198–99, 205; refining capacity of West Coast of, 95; tribal comtar munities in, 230–31, 243, 246; unemployment in, 233 uranium, 125, 241, 315–16 Urbaniak, Darek, 59 US Public Interest Research Group, 244 Utah, 315, 325n46 Utica shale formation, 283 Valero Energy Corporation, 210, 234 Velshi, Alykhan, 50–51 Venezuela, 6, 33; Bolivarian Revolution, 101–2; “extreme” tar sands extraction in, 101–2 Vermont, 315 Victims of Chemical Valley, 144 violence: against Indigenous women, 255; against land, 96, 252, 255; increases in rates of, 255; symbolic vs. real, 44; systemic, 263 volatile organic compounds, emissions of, 32 Walpole Island Native reserve (Bkejwanong First Nation), 145, 241 “war in the woods,” 70–71 “war of position,” 39 Warren County (North Carolina), 66–67 water: diversion of, 9, 129; pollution, 9, 51, 114, 116, 119–20, 128, 136, 181, 196, 255, 268, 315; use of in extraction, 9, 32, 33, 100, 230, 281 Wawanosh, Joshua, 139 Waxman, Henry, 60, 62 Waxman-Markey climate legislation, 224 wealth accumulation, vs. environmental and social protection, 38 wealth polarization, 73 web-based resources, list of, 19 “Week of Action to Stop Tar Sands Profiteers,” 189 West, Ben, 164 Western Mining Action Network, 168 West Virginia, 314 wetland, destruction of, 9 Wet’suwet’en Nation, 157, 260, 293; C’ihlts’ehkhyu (Big Frog Clan), 158 white supremacy, 96, 265 Whitley, David, 192 Wikileaks, 56 Wildfire Project, 322n3 wildlife, declines in and threats to, 116, 120–21, 254, 295, 300 wind-powered generation, 314 Winnsboro Tree Blockade, 186–88 Wisconsin: Clean Energy Jobs Act, 61–62 women: grassroots, 192, 277; Indigenous, 193, 209, 213, 242, 246, 251–52, 255, 261–63 Wong, Kent, 97 Wood Buffalo National Park, 130 Woodward, Ron, 130 workers’ rights, 303, 306 World Bank, 90, 303 World Trade Organization, 311 Worldwatch Institute, 353n10 World Wildlife Fund, 270 xenophobia, 92–93 Yearwood Jr., Rev.

pages: 458 words: 132,912

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

It soon would become an extension of the so-called Resistance and a defender of the administrative state—in a way well beyond both the center-left news networks and the strictly news division at center-right Fox News. Its new mission was stunning in the wide variety of its expression. Reporters Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb in December 2017, for example, falsely asserted that Donald Trump Jr. had advanced access to the hacked WikiLeaks documents belonging to the Democratic National Committee in general and to the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign advisor John Podesta in particular. But Trump Jr. did not. Such a false charge may have spawned all sorts of subsidiary rumors that the younger Trump was on the verge of becoming indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller.64 Why did CNN’s own “unnamed source”—namely, lawyer Lanny Davis—later deny he had ever given CNN information that Donald Trump had advance warning of a meeting between Russian interests and Donald Trump Jr. concerning purported “collusion” during the 2016 campaign?

…

Mount Rushmore speech: Michael D’Antonio, “Trump’s Powerful Message of Rage,” CNN, July 5, 2020, www.cnn.com/2020/07/04/opinions/trump-mount-rushmore-speech-monuments-rhetoric-dantonio; cf. Rich Lowry, “Patriotism Is Becoming ‘White Supremacy,’” National Review, July 6, 2020, www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/president-trump-mount-rushmore-speech-distorted-by-media. 64. Raju: Oliver Darcy, “CNN Corrects Story on Email to Trumps About Wikileaks,” CNN, December 8, 2017, https://money.cnn.com/2017/12/08/media/cnn-correction-email-story. 65. Davis: Allan Smith, “Lanny Davis’s Walk-Back of His Bombshell Claim to CNN Is More Complicated Than It Looks. And Experts Say It Causes Michael Cohen Some New Problems,” Business Insider, August 28, 2018, www.businessinsider.com/lanny-davis-cnn-claim-hurt-michael-cohen-2018-8. 66.

pages: 689 words: 134,457

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Martin Elling, a senior partner and a leader of the firm’s pharmaceutical practice, donated the most—nearly $1 million to Democrats from 2015 to 2020. He also solicited money for candidates and used his connections with party leaders to give donors favorable accommodations at the 2016 national convention in Philadelphia, according to emails released by WikiLeaks. The second-biggest donor was Vivian Riefberg, a senior partner who retired from McKinsey in 2020 after directing the public-sector practice and co-leading its health-care unit in the United States. She gave $346,450, mostly to Democrats. Riefberg oversaw McKinsey’s contracts with federal agencies that regulate the firm’s commercial clients.

…

., office, 26, 30–31 Washington Mutual bankruptcy, 188 Washington Nationals, 219 Washington Post, 63, 216, 253–54 Washington State, 72 water, 165, 206, 269 Waterman, Bob, 179 Waxman, Henry, 42 Weiss, Alexander, 232–34, 238, 240 Wen Jiabao, 97 West Point, 155 Wharton School, 83, 87–88, 212, 230 Whitney Museum, 116 “Why We Need Bolder Action to Combat the Opioid Epidemic” (Latkovic), 143–44 WikiLeaks, 65 wildfires, 151, 168 William Hill, 210 Wilson, Thomas, 198 Wilson, Tom, 114 wind power, 151, 158 Winickoff, Jonathan, 123 Winners Take all (Giridharadas), 26 Wirth, Mike, 164 Woetzel, Jonathan, 96 Women’s March (2017), 78 Wood, Eric, 234 Woodcock, Janet, 68 Working Nights (newsletter), 10 World Economic Forum (Davos), 149, 150, 262 World Health Organization (WHO), 118–19, 128 World Series, 216–17, 219 World Trade Center, 118 World Trade Organization (WTO), 96 World War II, 32, 258, 260 Wriston, Walter, 171, 175–76 X Xactimate computer program, 194 Xi Jinping, 26, 100–101 Xinjiang Province, 100, 104–6 Y Yale University, 25, 51, 165 Yanukovych, Viktor, 257 Yee, Lareina, 150 Yemen, 245–46 YouTube, 252–53 Yunnan Province, 108 Z Zelensky, Volodymyr, 279 zero tolerance policy, 83 zhongyang qiye, 92, 98, 108 Zondo, Raymond, 237, 239–41 Zucker, Brandon, 13 Zuckerberg, Mark, 149 Zuma, Jacob, 226–28 Zweig, Phillip, 176 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z What’s next on your reading list?

pages: 439 words: 131,081

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

They claimed that the police investigation of Anthony Weiner, a former Democratic congressman caught sexting a fifteen-year-old girl, had discovered evidence that Weiner, along with his wife, Huma Abedin, and his wife’s boss, Hillary Clinton, were all involved in a child sex ring. As evidence, they cited the emails of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager, which Russian hackers had stolen and published through WikiLeaks. A Washington DC pizza place that Podesta had mentioned in his emails, Comet Ping Pong, was, the conspiracists insisted, the headquarters of a vast, elite conspiracy to ritualistically cannibalize children. “Half or more of the people I have met online believe in it fully,” Adam, the longtime 4channer, told me.

…

But it was on 4chan’s politics board, the internet’s petri dish for pathogenic conspiracies, that he’d watched its genesis. Conspiracy belief is highly associated with “anomie,” the feeling of being disconnected from society. The userbase of 4chan defined itself around anomie—mutual rejection of the off-line world, resentful certainty that the system was rigged against them. And they idolized WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange, an anarchist hacker whose politics, like 4chan’s, had drifted alt right. So when Assange published Podesta’s emails in October, a month before the election, they saw it not as a Russian-backed operation, but as the start of a thrilling campaign to expose the hated elite. Pursuing the 4chan pastime of crowdsourced dives, users scoured the tens of thousands of pages for revelations.

pages: 1,242 words: 317,903

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby

airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equity premium, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, short selling, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, trade liberalization, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

Henry Kissinger, memorandum, August 15, 1975, National Security Adviser, Kissinger-Scowcroft West Wing Office Files, box 16, Iran (5), Secret, Nodis, Cherokee, Gerald R. Ford Library. 53. Charles Robinson to Henry Kissinger, memorandum, August 17, 1975, WikiLeaks, https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1975STATE195265_b3.html. 54. Charles Robinson to Henry Kissinger, memorandum, August 30, 1975, WikiLeaks, https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1975STATE207021_b.html. 55. Charles Robinson to Henry Kissinger, memorandum, September 8, 1975, in Monica L. Belmonte, Iran; Iraq, 1973–1976, 27:430–32. 56. Henry Kissinger, interview by the author, September 5, 2012. 57.

pages: 184 words: 53,625

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

There are thousands of organizations—some of them focused on journalism, some of them government-based, some of them new creatures indigenous to the Web—that create information that can be freely recombined into neighborhood blog posts or Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalism. ProPublica journalists today can get the idea for an investigation from a document on WikiLeaks, get background information from Wikipedia, or download government statistics or transcripts from data.gov or the Sunlight Foundation. They can even get funding directly from Kickstarter. Once again, the power of the system comes not just from the individual peer networks, but from the way the different networks layer on top of one another.

pages: 188 words: 9,226

Collaborative Futures by Mike Linksvayer, Michael Mandiberg, Mushon Zer-Aviv

4chan, AGPL, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative economy, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Debian, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, informal economy, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lolcat, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, Network effects, optical character recognition, packet switching, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, stealth mode startup, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

They are not friends, and they are not family. It is that anonymous. Anyone can use Tor to do things other people wouldn't approve, like downloading porn or a acking other people's computers. Or things that governments would not approve of, like posting dissident information, the most notorious case being a very active chap called Wikileaks. It doesn't have to be heroic; maybe you just want to browse the most milquetoast sites on the Internet with complete privacy. By using Tor, you join a bunch of strangers in declaring everybody has the right to complete privacy and collaborate anonymously to grant yourself and others that constitutional right. 74 21.

pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

Structural change makes the world complicated; systems change makes it complex. International relations among states are complicated, while today’s global network civilization is complex. Financial feedback loops destabilize markets, and corporations can be more influential than countries, while ISIS, Occupy Wall Street, and WikiLeaks are all quantum in nature: everywhere and nowhere, constantly metastasizing, capable of sudden phase shifts. If planet Earth had a Facebook account, its status should read “It’s Complex.” Connectivity is the main cause of this complexity. Globalization is almost always written about in terms of how it operates within the existing order rather than how it creates a new one.

…

The intersection of demographic and technological flows creates new opportunities for Facebook groups and other cloud communities to emerge more rapidly, globally, and in greater number, generating flash mobs of allegiance that force us to evolve our political concepts beyond states. Social networks provide the tools for people to shape their welfare by motivating members, financing activities, and sparking political action. The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, argues that the Internet enables connected groups to anneal into empowered collectives that can act on their principles. The taxonomy of influential actors is thus expanding to include terrorist networks, hacker units, and religious fundamentalist groups who define themselves by what they do rather than where they are.

pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

“Pragmatic judgments often trump ideological ones,” Coleman writes, “leading to situations where, say, an anti-capitalist anarchist might work in partnership with a liberal social democrat without friction or sectarian infighting.” The afternoon of the hackathon, I run into Steve Phillips; he’s arrived with a group of volunteers, coders who’ve all begun helping build the Pursuance system. In the afternoon he climbs onstage in the Archive’s auditorium in a WikiLeaks T-shirt to show off what they’ve built. There’s the beginnings of the full software, where activists can set up to-do lists, set tasks, delegate jobs. As he tells the crowd, there are a ton of forums where people can talk, but few tools to help them get things done, he explains; Pursuance aims to help fix that.

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Today’s big cybercrime groups themselves may not be directly run by national governments or their spy agencies, but they often appear to be at least working in communication with them. When the Russian hacking group Fancy Bear penetrated the Democratic National Committee—via the ever-popular trick of phishing, getting John Podesta to click on a bad link—the trove of DNC email soon appeared in Russian intelligence circles, and thence on WikiLeaks and other sites online. Meanwhile, Chinese state-sponsored hackers are busily penetrating US firms and government agencies: The Department of Defense blocks 36 million phishing attempts each day. And in every authoritarian country, government-sponsored hackers busily wage attacks on civil society advocates and pro-freedom groups—installing spyware on dissidents, the better to bust them.

pages: 660 words: 141,595

Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking by Foster Provost, Tom Fawcett

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, iterative process, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, new economy, p-value, pattern recognition, placebo effect, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, Teledyne, text mining, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

Taking a sample of the Facebook population, if we define our target variable as the binary variable IQ>130, about 14% of the sample is positive (has IQ>130). So let’s examine the Likes that give the highest evidence lifts…[56] Table 9-1. Some Facebook page “Likes” and corresponding lifts. Like Lift Like Lift Lord Of The Rings 1.69 Wikileaks 1.59 One Manga 1.57 Beethoven 1.52 Science 1.49 NPR 1.48 Psychology 1.46 Spirited Away 1.45 The Big Bang Theory 1.43 Running 1.41 Paulo Coelho 1.41 Roger Federer 1.40 The Daily Show 1.40 Star Trek 1.39 Lost 1.39 Philosophy 1.38 Lie to Me 1.37 The Onion 1.37 How I Met Your Mother 1.35 The Colbert Report 1.35 Doctor Who 1.34 Star Trek 1.32 Howl’s Moving Castle 1.31 Sheldon Cooper 1.30 Tron 1.28 Fight Club 1.26 Angry Birds 1.25 Inception 1.25 The Godfather 1.23 Weeds 1.22 So, recalling Equation 9-4 above, and the independence assumptions made, we can calculate the probability that someone has very high intelligence based on the things they Like.

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What Data Cant Do (Brooks), What Data Can’t Do: Humans in the Loop, Revisited whiskey example clustering and, Example: Whiskey Analytics Revisited–Hierarchical Clustering for nearest-neighbors, Example: Whiskey Analytics–Example: Whiskey Analytics supervised learning to generate cluster descriptions, * Using Supervised Learning to Generate Cluster Descriptions–* Using Supervised Learning to Generate Cluster Descriptions Whiz-bang example, Example Data Mining Proposal–Flaws in the Big Red Proposal Wikileaks, Example: Evidence Lifts from Facebook “Likes” wireless fraud example, What Data Can’t Do: Humans in the Loop, Revisited Wisconsin Breast Cancer Dataset, Example: Logistic Regression versus Tree Induction words lengths of, Why Text Is Difficult modifiers of, Results sequences of, N-gram Sequences workforce constraint, Profit Curves worksheets, Models, Induction, and Prediction worsening models, * Example: Why Is Overfitting Bad?

pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

It appears likely that Baran’s supervisors deprioritized his work because it did not have weight of the top-secret imprimatur: if so, it is bitter comment on how interagency collaboration often bloomed in secrecy, not open, cultures, since Baran deliberately chose to publish his research publicly in the hopes his designs would reach the Soviets and ensure mutual competitiveness. (Perhaps the limits of contemporary open-source politics—such as the radical transparency of WikiLeaks and the private cipher that is Julian Assange—follow the limits of Cold War mutual intelligibility.) AT&T, the near analogue to a state network monopoly at the time, also rejected Baran’s proposal to develop digital networks, fearing digital networks would bring them into competition against their own services.32 And so Baran’s research languished until an Englishman named Donald Davies, with the support of the UK post office, independently developed network innovations similar to Baran.33 Only then, in 1966, under the pressure of an outside organization to which the national government felt compelled to respond (an ally nation backed by another hefty state media monopoly), did Baran’s superiors feel pressured to revisit and reclaim his team’s network research for ARPA under J.

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., 160–162, 163f, 164, 174 and Germany, 168–169, 171–173 IBM family, 164–167 Web service providers, 318 Weizenbaum, Joseph, 15–16 Wells, Nate, 238 West (Western) corporate content, 331 democratic practices, 366 Enlightenment, 364 enterprise culture, 300 industrial, 88 internet, 94 language, 180 networks, 77 non-West, notions of, 96, 110 non-Western critiques of, 338–339 non-Western technology, 104–105, 107 non-Western typing technology, 342–345, 353–354, 356 non-Western workers, 99, 102, 104–105 postindustrial, 32, 152 society, 39 technology, 109, 120 telecom companies, 103 typing technology, 219–221, 225, 227, 338, 381 WhatsApp, 329, 331–333 Wheeler, David A., 274, 291–292 White collar, 23, 43, 105, 150, 170, 174, 288–289 Whitespace, 279, 281, 284 White supremacy, 18–19, 139, 289–290, 344 Whose Knowledge?, 91 Wiener, Norbert, 73 WikiLeaks, 83 Wikimedia Foundation, 91, 111 Wikipedia, 233 Word processing, 221–227, 337, 350, 354 designed for English, 213–216 Workforce, 18, 45, 65, 104, 140, 260 all-male, 148 diversify, 253, 261, 265, 383 IBM, 160, 171, 173, 175 lean, 53, 56 software, 255 women, 17, 143, 145, 261 World War I (First World War), 184, 219, 373, 378 World War II (Second World War), 21, 93, 152, 166, 367, 378 Allies, 17, 139–140 Britain and, 137–138, 140, 143 Germany, 170–171 World Wide Web, 14, 18, 109, 188, 232, 317, 330 World Wide Web Foundation, 331 W32/Induc-A, 290 Wyatt Earp Syndrome, 262 Wyden, Ron, 61 x86, 275 Xerox, 82, 175 Yahoo, 17, 257 Yes We Code, 255 YouTube, 54–55, 179, 313, 319, 331 Y2K, 104 Zambia, 330 Zuckerberg, Mark, 11–12, 14, 16–17, 59–60, 264 universal internet access, 329–331 Zymergen, 261, 263

pages: 506 words: 151,753

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze by Laura Shin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Airbnb, altcoin, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, cloud computing, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, DevOps, digital nomad, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial independence, Firefox, general-purpose programming language, gravity well, hacker house, Hacker News, holacracy, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Internet of things, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, litecoin, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, off-the-grid, performance metric, Potemkin village, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social distancing, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks

Headlines read, “Winklevoss twin predicts multitrillion-dollar value for bitcoin,” “Analyst who predicted bitcoin’s rise now sees it hitting $300,000–$400,000,” and “Trader who called bitcoin rally says cryptocurrency will surge above $100,000 in 2018.”28 News about Bitcoin and Ethereum proliferated: about teens who’d become millionaires off Bitcoin, ETH traders who turned $8,500 into $7.5 million in six months with leveraged crypto trades, and WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange thanking the US government, because the site was now enjoying 50,000 percent returns since it had been forced to use Bitcoin after being blocked by credit cards and PayPal.29 Now that Bitcoin had gone “to the moon,” a company named Moonlambos made it possible for anyone wanting to buy a Lamborghini to do so with BTC or ETH.30 It also planned an ILO—initial Lambo offering.31 On December 13, PineappleFund, an anonymous early Bitcoiner, posted on Reddit, announcing that he or she had “far more money than I can ever spend” and so was going to give away 5,057 Bitcoins—$86 million—to what he or she had christened The Pineapple Fund.32 (A software engineer who, by email, helped “Pine” distribute the money got a strong sense, from Pine’s mannerisms and use of emojis, that Pine was a woman and, from Pine’s references to things like Hacker News, perhaps an engineer familiar with Silicon Valley.)

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Michelle Castillo, “This High School Dropout Who Invested in Bitcoin at $12 Is Now a Millionaire at 18,” CNBC, June 20, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/20/bitcoin-millionaire-erik-finman-says-going-to-college-isnt-worth-it.html; Laura Shin, “Return of the Day Traders,” Forbes, July 10, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2017/07/10/return-of-the-day-traders; Defend Assange Campaign (@DefendAssange), “My deepest thanks to the US government, Senator McCain and Senator Lieberman for pushing Visa, MasterCard, Payal, AmEx, Mooneybookers, et al, into erecting an illegal banking blockade against @WikiLeaks starting in 2010. It caused us to invest in Bitcoin—with > 50000% return,” Twitter, October 14, 2017, https://twitter.com/DefendAssange/status/919247873648283653?s=20. 30. Chris O’Brien, “Moonlambos Sells Lamborghinis for Bitcoin to Help Gilded Cryptocurrency Generation Spend Its Windfall,” VentureBeat, December 15, 2017, https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/15/moonlambos-sells-lamborghinis-for-bitcoin-to-help-the-gilded-cryptocurrency-generation-spend-its-windfall. 31.

pages: 944 words: 243,883

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, decarbonisation, disinformation, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, kremlinology, market fundamentalism, McMansion, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart meter, statistical model, Steve Jobs, two and twenty, WikiLeaks

The narrative also benefited from the release of about eight hundred pages of documents—mainly State Department cables—that were provided to me in response to Freedom of Information Act requests concerning ExxonMobil’s recent activities in Indonesia, Russia, Equatorial Guinea, Chad, and elsewhere in West Africa. The full release of Wikileaks’ collection of State Department cables from 2003 to early 2010 provided additional valuable insights and details, particularly about ExxonMobil’s activity in Chad, Nigeria, and Venezuela. Wikileaks cables—as opposed to those released in response to my F.O.I.A. requests—are indicated below by (W). Court records and trial and deposition transcripts from Exxon Valdez litigation in Alaska; the Jacksonville, Maryland, gasoline spill case Jeff Alban et al. v.

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N’djamena to Washington, January 31, 2006 (W). 17. N’djamena to Washington, February 6, 2006 (W). 18. N’djamena to Washington, January 9, 2006. This and other cables, as indicated, were released to the author under a Freedom of Information Act request. Some of these cables were written around the same time as cables released by Wikileaks, but are not in that online collection. 19. N’djamena to Washington, July 12, 2006. 20. Robert Zoellick telephoned Wolfowitz: Secretary of State to N’djamena, January 19, 2006. The document provides a redacted account of a meeting among Zoellick, other State Department officials, Chad’s foreign minister Ahmad, Allam-mi, and other Chadian officials, January 10, 2006.

pages: 196 words: 58,886

Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe

British Empire, disinformation, facts on the ground, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Jeremy Corbyn, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, Suez canal 1869, WikiLeaks

“Palestine Papers: UK’s MI6 ‘tried to weaken Hamas,’” BBC News, January 25, 2011, at bbc.co.uk. 14.Ian Black, “Palestine Papers Reveal MI6 Drew up Plan for Crackdown on Hamas,” Guardian, January 25, 2011. 15.A taste of his views can be found in Yuval Steinitz, “How Palestinian Hate Prevents Peace,” New York Times, October 15, 2013. 16.Reshet Bet, Israel Broadcast, April 18, 2004. 17.Benny Morris, Channel One, April 18, 2004, and see Joel Beinin, “No More Tears: Benny Morris and the Road Back from Liberal Zionism,” MERIP, 230 (Spring 2004). 18.Pappe, “Revisiting 1967.” 19.Ari Shavit, “PM Aide: Gaza Plan Aims to Freeze the Peace Process,” Haaretz, October 6, 2004. 20.Haaretz, April 17, 2004. 21.Pappe, “Revisiting 1967.” 22.For an excellent analysis written on the day itself, see Ali Abunimah, “Why All the Fuss About the Bush–Sharon Meeting,” Electronic Intifada, April 14, 2014. 23.Quoted in Yediot Ahronoth, April 22, 2014. 24.See “Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” on the ICJ website, icj-cij.org. 25.At first, in March 2004, Beilin was against the disengagement, but from July 2004 he openly supported it (Channel One interview, July 4, 2004). 26.See the fatalities statistics on B’Tselem’s website, btselem.org. 27.Leslie Susser, “The Rise and Fall of the Kadima Party,” Jerusalem Post, August 8, 2012. 28.John Dugard, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of the Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied by Israel since 1967, UN Commission on Human Rights, Geneva, March 3, 2005. 29.See the analysis by Roni Sofer in Ma’ariv, September 27, 2005. 30.Anne Penketh, “US and Arab States Clash at the UN Security Council,” Independent, March 3, 2008. 31.David Morrison, “The Israel-Hamas Ceasefire,” Sadaka, 2nd edition, March 2010, at web.archive.org. 32.“WikiLeaks: Israel Aimed to Keep Gaza Economy on the Brink of Collapse,” Reuters, January 5, 2011. 33.Morrison, “The Israel-Hamas Ceasefire.” 34.See the B’Tselem report “Fatalities during Operation Cast Lead,” at btselem. org. 35.“Gaza Could Become Uninhabitable in Less Than Five Years Due to Ongoing ‘De-development’,” UN News Centre, September 1, 2015, at un.org. 10 The Two-States Solution Is the Only Way Forward 1.Daniel Clinton, “Jeremy Corbyn Appears to Compare Supporters of Israel with ISIS at Release of Anti-Semitism Report,” Jerusalem Post, June 30, 2016. 2.On the dictionary see Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe, On Palestine, London: Penguin, 2016.

pages: 215 words: 59,188

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down by Tom Standage

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, blood diamond, business logic, corporate governance, CRISPR, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, failed state, financial independence, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, Julian Assange, life extension, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mega-rich, megacity, Minecraft, mobile money, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, post-truth, price mechanism, private spaceflight, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, ransomware, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South China Sea, speech recognition, stem cell, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, zoonotic diseases

Whether or not people get married is their own business. But the finding does offer some comfort to those who worry that declining marriage rates are purely the product of worsening economic prospects for men. Clearly, some other factor is at play. What explains Europe’s low birth rates? Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks and apparently an amateur demographer, is worried about Europe’s declining birth rate. In a tweet posted in 2017 he posited that “Capitalism + atheism + feminism = sterility = migration”, and noted that the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Italy were all childless. Never mind that Mr Assange needs a dictionary.

pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

Bernanke, “Acquisition of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America,” Congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, June 25, 2009. BofA did not in the event activate the ring-fence loss protection agreement. Kuttner, Presidency in Peril, 144–146. 115. D. Dayen, “The Most Important WikiLeaks Revelation Isn’t About Hillary Clinton,” New Republic, October 14, 2016. J. Podesta, “Fw: Huffpost: The Obama Test: Personnel Is Policy,” WikiLeaks, Podesta Emails, October 25, 2008. 116. C. Rampell, “Christina D. Romer,” New York Times, November 25, 2008. 117. For a devastating report, see M. Taibbi, “Obama’s Big Sellout: The President Has Packed His Economic Team with Wall Street Insiders,” Common Dreams, December 13, 2009.

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Weighing the issue, her campaign managers decided that Clinton’s words were not, in fact, fit for public consumption. She would look too friendly to the banks.11 We know this because starting in July, as she closed in on winning the nomination, internal memos from the Clinton campaign began to be dumped en masse in WikiLeaks folders. Who, in fact, compromised the security of the Democratic Party machine was to become a matter of complex technical and legal dispute.12 But at the time the conviction rapidly took hold that it was down to hackers with ties to Russia.13 Was the mounting confrontation with Putin, which had reached a new pitch in intensity over Ukraine and Syria, blowing back on the United States, and on Clinton in particular?

pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

And then, whoops, forty-eight hours later he admitted he was mistaken—as Fox also finally did about its “regrettable errors on air regarding the Muslim population in Europe” in 2014. In 2017, for a week, Fox News promoted the conspiracy theory that Democrats had rubbed out a party functionary for leaking material to WikiLeaks. Fox finally retracted that story too. Yet compared to the Breitbart News Network and Infowars, and leaving Sean Hannity aside, Fox News is fair, balanced, and reality-based. Once again, the residents of Fantasyland get graded on a curve. There are different degrees of egregious. Until recently most of us were unaware of the new global cottage industry that knowingly concocts and publishes false news stories, each optimized to be clicked, shared, and viralized.

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At the end of 2016, BuzzFeed analyzed the year’s political stories—the twenty most viral articles from publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, and the twenty most viral published by false-news peddlers. During the last three months of the presidential campaign, the top fictional articles—“Pope Francis Endorses Donald Trump,” “Wikileaks Confirms Hillary Sold Weapons to ISIS”—were much more widely shared and commented on than the top genuine ones. The direct democracy of Internet search algorithms is a stark example of Gresham’s law, the bad driving out—or at least overrunning—the good. — DURING THE FIRST fifteen years of the twenty-first century, the GOP turned into the Fantasy Party, with a beleaguered reality-based wing.

pages: 579 words: 164,339

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

American Anthropologist, vol. 109, no. 2 (June 2007): 350–62. doi: 10.1525/AA.2007.109.2.350. Lavanga, Claudio. “Berlusconi Tells Businessman to Bring Girls, But Not Tall Ones, Wiretaps Reveal.” NBC News, September 17, 2011. Ludwig, Mike. “New WikiLeaks Cables Show US Diplomats Promote Genetically Engineered Crops Worldwide.” Truthout, August 25, 2011. http://www.truth-out.org/new-wikileaks-cables-show-us-diplomats-promote-genetically-engineered-crops-worldwide/1314303978. _______.“US to Vatican: Genetically Modified Food Is a ‘Moral Imperative.’ ” Truthout, December 29, 2010. Meldolesi, Anna. “Vatican Panel Backs GMOs.”

pages: 649 words: 172,080

Hunting in the Shadows: The Pursuit of Al Qa'ida Since 9/11: The Pursuit of Al Qa'ida Since 9/11 by Seth G. Jones

airport security, battle of ideas, defense in depth, drone strike, Google Earth, index card, it's over 9,000, Khyber Pass, medical residency, Murray Gell-Mann, operational security, RAND corporation, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, WikiLeaks

Most of these concerns had a familiar ring for those involved in the 1990s debates about targeting bin Laden. Yet the longer the administration waited to secure more intelligence, the greater the risk that bin Laden might leave, the more likely that he would realize he was being watched, and the higher the probability that U.S. planning efforts would leak. Almost exactly a year before, WikiLeaks had begun releasing classified material on the Internet. In October 2010 it had released the “Iraq War Logs” and that April it had begun releasing files related to Guantánamo. On Saturday, April 30, the president said he wanted to talk to Vice Admiral McRaven. In a twelve-minute phone call, according to an aide who took notes of their conversation, the president told McRaven that he supported the mission.

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.: planned terrorist attacks in, 344 sniper attacks in, 314 waterboarding, 96–97 water reservoirs, 134 Watson, Dale, 63 Waziristan, Pakistan, 315 weapons of mass destruction, 148, 149, 152 “We’re at War” (CIA memo), 79 Westergaard, Kurt, 382, 389 West Yorkshire, England, 189 West Yorkshire Police, 191 White House, 321 WikiLeaks, 423 Winfrey, Oprah, 368 Wissam Abd al-Ibrahim al-Hardan al-Aethawi, 239-4–9-41 Wolfowitz, Paul, 66 Wollongong, University of, 350 Woolwich Crown Court, 21-2–1-22 World Bank, 144 World Financial Center, 403 World Trade Center, 1993 attack on, 8, 113, 183, 274 see also September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks Yafi’i, Abu-Ali al-, 76 Yahoo!

pages: 569 words: 165,510

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

During the campaign, members of Trump’s inner circle, including his son Donald Jr. and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had met with politically connected Russians who promised potentially damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Trump himself had openly welcomed the hack and release of Clinton’s and the DNC’s emails. Trump’s longtime associate Roger Stone had also bragged of contacts with Wikileaks, the internet platform that posted the emails. These actions in themselves stoked plenty of suspicion and public outrage. In May 2017, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein authorized an official probe into possible links between the Kremlin and Trump’s campaign ahead of the election. He appointed a special prosecutor, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Robert Mueller, to oversee the inquiry, and also to figure out the full extent of Russia’s efforts to interfere.

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went after trade unions’ efforts: Margaret Poydock, “President Trump has attacked workers’ safety, rights, and wages since Day One,” Economic Policy Institute, September 17, 2020, https://www.epi.org/blog/president-trump-has-attacked-workers-safety-wages-and-rights-since-day-one/. 79,646 votes: Philip Bump, “Donald Trump will be president thanks to 80,000 people in three states,” Washington Post, December 1, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/donald-trump-will-be-president-thanks-to-80000-people-in-three-states/. contacts with Wikileaks: David Shimer, Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference (New York: Knopf, 2020); Catherine Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020); Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman, “Roger Stone’s Dirty Tricks Put Him Where He’s Always Wanted to Be: Center Stage,” New York Times, January 25, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/us/politics/who-is-roger-stone.html; Get Me Roger Stone, directed by Dylan Bank, Daniel DiMauro, and Morgan Pehme, aired April 23, 2017, on Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/title/80114666.

pages: 237 words: 67,154

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

FURTHER RESOURCES LAUNCH EVENT “Platform Cooperativism: The Internet, Ownership, Democracy,” The New School (November 2015), video archive: http://platformcoop.net/2015/video READINGS Trebor Scholz, “Platform Cooperativism vs. the Sharing Economy,” Medium (December 5, 2014), https://tinyurl.com/oj8rna2 Nathan Schneider, “Owning Is the New Sharing,” Shareable (December 21, 2014), http://shareable.net/blog/owning-is-the-new-sharing Janelle Orsi, Frank Pasquale, Nathan Schneider, Pia Mancini, Trebor Scholz, “5 Ways to Take Back Tech,” The Nation (May 27, 2015), http://thenation.com/article/5-ways-take-back-tech Trebor Scholz, Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, New York Office, 2016, with additional translations in Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, and Chinese), http://platformcoop.net/about/primer Trebor Scholz, Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers are Disrupting the Digital Economy (Polity, 2016) WEBSITES Platform Cooperativism portal, http://platformcoop.net Platform Cooperativism Consortium, http://platformcoop.newschool.edu The Internet of Ownership, http://internetofownership.net Shareable, http://shareable.net Sustainable Economies Law Center, http://theselc.org OR Books PUBLISHING THE POLITICS OF THE INTERNET What’s Yours is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy TOM SLEE Black Ops Advertising: Native Ads, Content Marketing, and the Covert World of the Digital Sell MARA EINSTEIN Splinternet: How Geopolitics and Commerce are Fragmenting the World Wide Web SCOTT MALCOLMSON Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Start-Up Culture ELISSA SHEVINSKY, EDITOR When Google Met WikiLeaks JULIAN ASSANGE The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet) MICAH L. SIFRY Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet JULIAN ASSANGE WITH JACOB APPELBAUM, ANDY MüLLER-MAGUHN, AND JéRéMIE ZIMMERMANN Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet DAVID MOON, PATRICK RUFFINI, AND DAVID SEGAL, EDITORS For more information, visit our website at www.orbooks.com

pages: 247 words: 71,698

Avogadro Corp by William Hertling

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, invisible hand, messenger bag, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, off-the-grid, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, standardized shipping container, tech worker, technological singularity, Turing test, web application, WikiLeaks

Instead of a few dozen or less Internet connections that could be shut down by a centralized government, the Mesh network within any given country has thousands of nodes that span national borders. When governments tried to enforce wi-fi dead zones around their borders, Avogadro responded by incorporating satellite modems in the Mesh boxes, so that any box, anywhere on Earth, can access Avogadro satellites when all else fails. Between Mesh boxes and Wikileaks, it's impossible for governments to restrict the flow of information. Transparency rules the day." "Exactly. Thank you, Leon, you can sit down. Class, let's talk about transparency and government." Leon slumped back to his desk. * * * "Nice going, dorkbot," James called after class. "What happened to not sticking out?"

Bulletproof Problem Solving by Charles Conn, Robert McLean

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset allocation, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Swan, blockchain, book value, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deep learning, Donald Trump, driverless car, drop ship, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fail fast, fake news, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Hyperloop, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, iterative process, loss aversion, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, nudge unit, Occam's razor, pattern recognition, pets.com, prediction markets, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart contracts, stem cell, sunk-cost fallacy, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, WikiLeaks

If a model has significant errors—and we have seen examples of 10% or more errors in data sets—it inherently embeds all the biases of that data into its predictive efforts. 14 Kaggle website. 15 Philip E. Tetlock and Don Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (Crown Publishing, 2015). 16 Tetlock and Gardner, Superforecasting. 17 CSIRO briefing to US government, December 5, 2006, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07CANBERRA1721_a.html. 18 Private communication with Mehrdad Baghai. 19 PriceWaterhouse Coopers, Patent Litigation Study: A Change in Patentee Fortunes, 2015. 20 Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically (W.W. Norton, 1991). 21 GameSet Map, February 19, 2013.

pages: 234 words: 63,844

Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal That Undid Him, and All the Justice That Money Can Buy: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein by James Patterson, John Connolly, Tim Malloy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, corporate raider, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Murray Gell-Mann, Ponzi scheme, Stephen Hawking, WikiLeaks

“Once again,” she said afterward, “my errors have compounded and rebounded and also impacted on the man I admire most in the world: the Duke.” Prince Andrew had had his troubles already—with shady real estate deals, sticky romances, highly embarrassing document dumps (courtesy of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks), and questionable ties to Tunisian oligarchs, corrupt presidents of former Soviet republics, and Mu’ammar Gadhafi, among other entanglements, many of which were explored in a Vanity Fair article headlined THE TROUBLE WITH ANDREW. “The duke has a record of being loyal to his friends,” a “royal source” told Vanity Fair’s Edward Klein.

pages: 666 words: 181,495

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

See his “Boycott Microsoft Bing,” The New York Times, November 20, 2009. 306 Li Changchun James Glanz and John Markoff, “Vast Hacking by a China Fearful of the Web,” The New York Times, December 4, 2010. The Times article reported Li as the official whose name was excised in a May 9, 2009, U.S. State Department cable from the Beijing embassy to the secretary of state. This was one of several cables released to certain press sources by WikiLeaks that had relevance to Google’s activities in China, with information that confirmed, and in a few cases added to, my reporting on the difficulties between Google and the Chinese government. 308 Apparently someone had hacked into Google Google has been circumspect on the details of the attack, but Adkins shared an overview at the June 15, 2010, Forum of Incident Response Security Teams (FIRST) Conference in Miami.

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Brin also addressed the issue at the TED 2010 conference. 311 The next day Drummond wrote David Drummond, “A New Approach to China,” Official Google Blog, January 12, 2010. 313 “We are certainly benefiting” Baidu Inc. Q1 2010 Earnings Call Transcript, www.seekingalpha.com, April 30, 2010. 313 someone familiar with the report Glanz and Markoff, “Vast Hacking.” The New York Times source was elaborating on a report whose existence was revealed by one of the State Department cables exposed by Wikileaks. Part Seven: Google.gov 315 “the main building” Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown, 2006), p. 139. 315 “The image was mesmerizing” Ibid., pp. 140–41. 317 “Bush would not” Peter Norvig, “Hiring a President,” www.norvig.com, June 2004. 319 Google employees Information about corporate contributions from www.opensecrets.org. 320 He saw his mission Dan Siroker, “How We Used Data to Win the Presidential Election—Dan Siroker at Google,” presentation at Google.

Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies

Helena Golani, ‘Two Decades of the Russian Federation’s Foreign Policy in the CIS: The Cases of Belarus and Ukraine’, Hebrew University, 2011: http://www.ef.huki.ac.il/publications/yakovlev%20golani.pdf (2011). 11. ‘Eastern Partnership’, European Union External Action: http://eeas.europa.eu/eastern/index-en.htm (2011). 12. http://charter97.org/en/news/2011/5/22/38809/?1 (2011). 13. ‘Wikileaks, Belarus and Israel Shamir’, http://www.indexoncensorship.org/,,,wikileaks-belarus-and-israel-shamir (2011). 14. David Stern, ‘Europe’s Last Dictator Goes to the Polls’, BBC News online, 17 December 2010. 15. ‘As Belarus Votes, World Settles for Lukashenko as the Devil it Knows’, Radio Free Europe, 31 Jan. 2011. 16. Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World (London, 2011); see also Timothy Garton Ash, Guardian, 19 Jan. 2011. 17.

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pages: 238 words: 73,121

Does Capitalism Have a Future? by Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, Craig Calhoun, Stephen Hoye, Audible Studios

affirmative action, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, company town, creative destruction, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global village, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, loose coupling, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, too big to fail, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

Collusion between states and corporations, organized crime on various scales, the political power of warlords and cartels that hold no political office, and the economic power of semiautonomous parts of states including militaries all reveal a more complicated world—and one threatening to capitalism as we know it. So do cybersecurity challenges from Wikileaks to hacking, malware, spear-phishing, and other tactics deployed sometimes with state backing and sometimes by freelancers, sometimes against states and sometimes against corporations. This is part of the transformation of capitalism, not all without historical precedent, but with an unclear future.

pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

“There was a time when science advanced by locking small teams of researchers up in their labs until they produced some minor breakthrough,” says Randy Rettberg, the former MIT scientist who helped start iGEM. “Science won’t work that way in the future, and synthetic biology doesn’t operate that way now.15 Having emerged in the era of open-source software and Wikileaks, synthetic biology is becoming an exercise in radical collaboration between students, professors, and a legion of citizen scientists who call themselves biohackers. Emergence has made its way into the lab. As far as disciplines go, synthetic biology is still in its infancy, but it has the potential to impact humanity in ways we can scarcely imagine.

pages: 276 words: 71,950

Antisemitism: Here and Now by Deborah E. Lipstadt

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Cass Sunstein, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fixed income, ghettoisation, Jeremy Corbyn, microaggression, Oklahoma City bombing, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

He then added that there were “very fine people” marching with the white supremacist protesters.17 A few days later, while events at Charlottesville were still in the headlines, Trump retweeted a message from Jack Posobiec, a Trump supporter known for spreading malicious conspiracy theories about Democratic political figures, including the utterly false and reprehensible claims that high-ranking officials in the Democratic Party were trafficking in children and that Seth Rich, a twenty-seven-year-old employee of the Democratic National Committee and the victim of an unsolved murder on July 10, 2016, was in some way responsible for the leaked DNC emails that were published by WikiLeaks a few weeks later. The tweet asked why there was so much attention being paid to Charlottesville when that same weekend there had been shootings in Chicago and “there was no national media outrage.” Once again, the question must be asked: Why was Trump following and giving a much-desired retweet to a man who in the aftermath of Charlottesville had already described it as “massive propaganda” and argued that the mainstream media was “fanning the flames of this violence”?

pages: 352 words: 80,030

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World by Peter Frankopan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, cashless society, clean water, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, global supply chain, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, land reform, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, purchasing power parity, ransomware, Rubik’s Cube, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, trade route, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Nye, ‘Xi Jinping’s Marco Polo Strategy’, Project Syndicate, 12 June 2017; Sarah McGregor, ‘China Boosts Its US Treasuries Holdings by Most in Six Months’, Bloomberg, 18 April 2018. 109James Kynge, ‘How the Silk Road plans will be financed’, Financial Times, 9 May 2016. 110Testimony by Jonathan Hillman, Statement Before the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission, 25 January 2018. 111Quoted by Mark Magnier and Chun Han Wang, ‘China’s Silk Road Initiative Sows European Discomfort’, Wall Street Journal, 15 May 2017. 112US Department of State, ‘Remarks – Secretary of State Rex Tillerson On US–Africa Relations: A New Framework’, 6 March 2018. 113Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the Republic of Zimbabwe, ‘All-weather Friendship between China and Zimbabwe Beats the Slander’, 26 May 2016. 114For Mugabe’s fortune, see Wikileaks, ‘Assets of President Mugabe and Senior Goz and ruling party leaders’, 29 August 2001. For Grace Mugabe’s Ph.D., News24, ‘Grace Mugabe’s PhD the greatest academic fraud in history: academics’, 3 February 2018. For China’s role, Simon Tisdall, ‘Zimbabwe: was Mugabe’s fall as a result of China flexing its muscle?’

pages: 260 words: 76,223

Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It. by Mitch Joel

3D printing, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, behavioural economics, call centre, clockwatching, cloud computing, content marketing, digital nomad, do what you love, Firefox, future of work, gamification, ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, place-making, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, vertical integration, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

While complaining and petitioning might change certain aspects of a business, it will never sway companies from making money or growing their data sets. THERE ARE NO “COPIES.” Thinking about your content (words, pictures, and videos) in terms of someone else having a “copy” is a mistake as well. This is the same mistake that many traditional organizations made when looking at WikiLeaks. There are no copies. The picture you have on your camera that you then post to Facebook is not a copy in both locations. There is a second original version that now exists in another place. The same can be said of everything digital—from your text messages and emails to your tweets. You can’t have privacy online using the same definitions we used in a pre-digital world.

pages: 257 words: 77,612

The Rebel and the Kingdom: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime by Bradley Hope

Airbnb, battle of ideas, bitcoin, blockchain, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital map, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, operational security, Potemkin village, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

The younger of her two sons is Kim Jong-un, who later succeeded his father. The elder son, Kim Jong-chol, made a poor candidate, because he was more interested in video games than politics and was thought to be “too effeminate” to be a leader by his father, Kim Jong-il, according to a once-secret U.S. government cable later released by WikiLeaks. Effectively exiled, Kim Jong-nam set up in Macau, the former Portuguese colony that had turned into China’s gambling hub, bringing along his wife and children, including his son Kim Han-sol. His life was largely a mystery in those years, but it later emerged he liaised with intelligence agencies in the United States and China both and lived a well-financed lifestyle.

pages: 700 words: 201,953

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

As Maurer points out, “We may need a better vocabulary for fees, rents, taxes, tribute—not everything, as the Islamic bankers remind us, is usury” (Maurer 2011: 11). 51 Payment service providers wield significant power in other ways, too, as exemplified by the involvement of Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union in the WikiLeaks case. CONCLUSION I turned the corner; the dark octagonal window indicated from a distance that the shop was closed. In Calle Belgrano, I took a cab. Sleepless, obsessed, almost joyful, I reflected on how nothing is less material than money, inasmuch as any coin whatsoever (a twenty-centavo piece, let us say) is, strictly speaking, a repertory of possible futures.

…

See also First World War; Second World War; Vietnam War; violence war against terror, 43 Warburton, Peter, 199 Warren, Josiah, 342 Warwick, University of, 73n30 waste, 12–13, 151; and the gift, 186; and money, 175, 184, 204; versus utility, 164 Wave and Pay, 377 Weber, Florence, 292 Weber, Max, 109, 247, 276n, 292, 302, 317; on capitalism and religion, 143, 155, 175; on charisma, 247; on Knapp, 103; on money and the modern state, 217; on prices, 109n25; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 156, 175; on taxation, 217 Weimar inflation, 131n57, 142, 224, 387 welfare. See social welfare Wendt, Alexander, 220 Wergild, 24, 302 Western Union, 380n Westphalia. See Peace of Westphalia Westphalian system, 216–27, 238 Where’s George?, 226 Wherry, Frederick, 164n Whuffie, 214, 316, 381 WikiLeaks, 380n Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 390 workers, 59, 72, 73, 74, 75–76, 77, 81, 242, 244, 345, 352; and cooperatives, 84; and consumers, 81, 86, 356; in Proudhon, 353–54; in the public sector, 77, 88, 126. See also migrant workers; workers’ associations; workers’ movement workers’ associations, 323–24 workers’ movement, 81n World Bank, 241 world money, 70, 298 World Trade Center (WTC), 197–98 World Trade Organization (WTO), 99, 239, 241 Wray, Randall, 103, 300, 359–60, 374; on the Eurozone, 107n, 255; and Ingham, 110–11; on Knapp, 104, 359; and neochartalism, 106–8 Wriston, Walter, 392, 393 writing, 36, 37, 41n, 42, 297; versus speech, 180–81.

pages: 251 words: 80,243

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev

Bretton Woods, corporate governance, corporate raider, Julian Assange, mega-rich, megaproject, new economy, Occupy movement, Silicon Valley, WikiLeaks

And when the President will go on to annex Crimea and launch his new war with the West, RT will be in the vanguard, fabricating startling fictions about fascists taking over Ukraine. But the first-time viewer would not necessarily register these stories, for such obvious pro-Kremlin messaging is only one part of RT’s output. Its popularity stems from coverage of what it calls “other,” or “unreported,” news. Julian Assange, head of WikiLeaks, had a talk show on RT. American academics who fight the American World Order, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, antiglobalists, and the European Far Right are given generous space. Nigel Farage, leader of the nonparliamentary anti-immigration UKIP party, is a frequent guest; Far Left supporter of Saddam Hussein George Galloway hosts a program about Western media bias.

pages: 264 words: 79,589

Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground by Kevin Poulsen

Apple II, Brian Krebs, Burning Man, corporate governance, dumpster diving, Exxon Valdez, fake news, gentrification, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, index card, Kickstarter, McMansion, Mercator projection, offshore financial centre, packet switching, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, traffic fines, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zipcar

He’s broken numerous national stories, including the FBI’s use of spyware in criminal and national security investigations; a hacker’s penetration of a Secret Service agent’s confidential files; and the secret arrest of an Army intelligence officer accused of leaking documents to whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks. In 2009 he was inducted into MIN’s Digital Hall of Fame for online journalism and in 2010 was voted one of the “Top Cyber Security Journalists” by his peers.

Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors by Matt Parker

8-hour work day, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, British Empire, Brownian motion, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, fake news, Flash crash, forensic accounting, game design, High speed trading, Julian Assange, millennium bug, Minecraft, Neil Armstrong, null island, obamacare, off-by-one error, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, publication bias, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, selection bias, SQL injection, subprime mortgage crisis, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Therac-25, value at risk, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Through the walls can be heard muffled cries of ‘Tell them to use a real database LIKE AN ADULT.’ The end of the spreadsheet Another limitation of spreadsheets as databases is that they eventually run out. Much like computers having trouble keeping track of time in a 32-digit binary number, Excel has difficulty keeping track of how many rows are in a spreadsheet. In 2010 WikiLeaks presented the Guardian and The New York Times with 92,000 leaked field reports from the war in Afghanistan. Julian Assange delivered them in person to the Guardian offices in London. The journalists quickly confirmed that they seemed to be real but, to their surprise, the reports ended abruptly in April 2009, when they should have gone through to the end of that year.

pages: 302 words: 84,881

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo

Airbnb, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, gig economy, industrial robot, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, post-industrial society, precariat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, software studies, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, WikiLeaks

According to this vision, government information should be freely accessible to the public, allowing individuals to closely monitor the action of officials. The demand for transparency is one that is extant in digital culture, as seen most spectacularly by leaking websites releasing confidential information of public interest such as Wikileaks. In its declaration of principles, the Pirate Party has strongly sided with the demand for ‘transparency from those in power’.128 Similarly, the Five Star Movement has often advocated that the state needs to open all its proceedings to the scrutiny of citizens and in this spirit it has often live-streamed political meetings, countering its openness to public oversight with the secrecy of more traditional parties.

pages: 304 words: 80,965

What They Do With Your Money: How the Financial System Fails Us, and How to Fix It by Stephen Davis, Jon Lukomnik, David Pitt-Watson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Admiral Zheng, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, compensation consultant, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Northern Rock, passive investing, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payment for order flow, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, post-work, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, WikiLeaks

Executives could be confident of their ability to control proprietary information and to manage aggrieved employees without triggering broader problems for the firm. Social media have upended those assumptions. Today, any lone consumer tapping on a tablet in an Internet café, any citizen with one share of stock, or any disgruntled worker with WikiLeaks in mind has the potential to sway a Wall Street behemoth’s fortunes. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media can turbocharge investor, consumer, or community activism because cyberspace is an unprecedented force multiplier. Social media can be a low-cost, high-impact tool for assertive campaigns in the capital market, and it radically drives down their cost.

pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Here are some of the paper’s initiatives: In 2007, the Guardian offered a free blogging platform for thought leaders and created online forums and discussion groups [Community and Crowd]. Developers offered an open API to the paper’s website so they could leverage content on the site [Algorithms]. Investigative reporting for the millions of WikiLeaks cables fully crowdsourced [Community & Crowd]. The Guardian has institutionalized the crowdsourcing of investigative reporting and has successfully used that approach on several occasions, including after obtaining public documents from Sarah Palin’s tenure as governor of Alaska. Similarly, in 2009, when the UK government bowed to public pressure and released two million pages of parliamentary expense reports, the Guardian asked its readership to find any newsworthy needles in that vast haystack of words.

pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

We got the fun, he admitted. But the other stuff, privacy and reliability, he argued, hasn’t been delivered. Privacy, in particular, remains a hugely important issue for Kahle. It was Edward Snowden, Kahle reminded me, who revealed that the British security apparatus was monitoring everyone who accessed the WikiLeaks site and then turning the names of American visitors over to the National Security Agency (NSA). “That’s frickin’ frightening,” Kahle, who was with Cerf and Berners-Lee a founding inductee into the Internet Hall of Fame, warns about this unaccountable online surveillance. “It shouldn’t be a security decision every time you click on a link.”

pages: 286 words: 86,480

Meantime: The Brilliant 'Unputdownable Crime Novel' From Frankie Boyle by Frankie Boyle

Big Tech, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, printed gun, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, technoutopianism, Turing test, WikiLeaks

It was all a bit of a pose if I’m honest, setting myself up for a political career. I thought it’d be Labour, but by the time I got into the game they were obviously a waning force up here. Anyway, some daft bastard took me at face value and sent me a huge data dump of classified shit. What I would call extremely fucking classified shit. Thought I was going to do a Wikileaks, publish it to the world.’ ‘You didn’t publish it?’ ‘No, I didn’t fancy going on a country walk and later being discovered to have kicked myself to death. I threw myself on the mercy of our brave security services.’ He shook his head. ‘You know how they say data is out there forever? It really isn’t.

pages: 363 words: 92,422

A Fine Mess by T. R. Reid

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, game design, Gini coefficient, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial robot, land value tax, loss aversion, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Tesla Model S, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

Over a period of weeks, John Doe funneled batch after batch of the firm’s confidential documents—contracts, letters, e-mails, and tens of thousands of incorporation papers—to the German newspaper. Quickly, it became clear to Obermayer and his team that this trove of data was too big for any one newspaper to handle. By sheer number of pages, it was the biggest leak in history—the papers constituted about ten times as many documents as the notorious WikiLeaks revelations. There were so many clients and so many clandestine deals, and there was so much money secreted in anonymous bank accounts in so many countries, that the investigative reporters in Munich were quickly overwhelmed. Finally, they took a step that would be difficult for any scoop-hungry journalist: they decided to share the Panama Papers with other reporters around the world (they did not, of course, show the documents to any of their German competitors).

pages: 304 words: 93,494

Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton

4chan, Airbus A320, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, friendly fire, index card, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, messenger bag, PalmPilot, pets.com, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technology bubble, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks

Such a stance would become the conviction of Twitter over the years. And it would be the DNA that made it a different kind of company in Silicon Valley. Twitter, with Amac at its legal helm, would eventually fight a court order to extract Occupy Wall Street protesters’ tweets during protests. It would stand up to the Justice Department in a witch hunt for WikiLeaks supporters online. And in stark contrast to Facebook, Twitter would eventually allow newcomers to opt out of being tracked through the service. Facebook had a completely different approach to free speech and tracking, often infringing people’s privacy and sometimes removing content that violated its strict terms of service.

pages: 276 words: 93,430

Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body by Sara Pascoe

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, meta-analysis, presumed consent, rolodex, selection bias, Stephen Fry, TED Talk, WikiLeaks

What keeps surprising me is how relaxed some people seem about men using women’s bodies. Like there’s something ‘natural’ or understandable about it. I’ll give you an example. In 2010, a warrant was issued by Swedish police for the arrest of Julian Assange. The case gained a lot of publicity because of Assange’s pre-existing notoriety as the co-founder of the WikiLeaks website. He was accused of rape by one woman and of molestation by another. In both cases the alleged assault took place AFTER consensual sex. In the first account, a woman who willingly had sex with Assange one night, at her apartment, awoke the next morning to find that he was having penetrative intercourse with her against her will.

pages: 326 words: 91,559

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

“It’s taking advantage of a historic opportunity to do something innovative and transformative in Ecuador.” He saw a chance to set the conditions for a commonwealth. FLOK bore the style and contradictions of Ecuador’s brand at the time. The president, Rafael Correa, sometimes spoke in favor of open-source software; WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had been living in Ecuador’s London embassy since 2012. Even while exploiting rain-forest oil resources and silencing dissenters, Correa’s administration called for changing the country’s “productive matrix” from reliance on finite resources in the ground to the infinite possibilities of unfettered information.

pages: 305 words: 93,091

The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data by Kevin Mitnick, Mikko Hypponen, Robert Vamosi

4chan, big-box store, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, connected car, crowdsourcing, data science, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Earth, incognito mode, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, Tesla Model S, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

It was the kind of e-mail that Sophie received all the time, and as a professional courtesy she didn’t think twice about accepting it from a colleague. A couple of weeks later she received an e-mail that appeared to be from an anonymous whistle-blower organization that was about to release sensitive documents. As a reporter who had covered groups such as Anonymous and WikiLeaks, she had received e-mails like this before, and she was curious about the request. The file attachment looked like a standard file, so she clicked to open it. Immediately she realized something was wrong. Windows Defender, the security program that comes with every copy of Windows, started issuing warnings on her desktop.

pages: 340 words: 90,674

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

Chris Buckley and Didi Kirsten Tatlow, “Cultural Revolution Shaped Xi Jinping, from Schoolboy to Survivor,” New York Times, September 24, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/25/world/asia/xi-jinping-china-cultural-revolution.html. 9. US Embassy Beijing, “Portrait of Vice President Xi Jinping,” cable, November 16, 2009, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09BEIJING3128_a.html. 10. Evan Osnos, “Born Red,” New Yorker, April 6, 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/born-red. 11. James Palmer, “China’s Overrated Technocrats,” Foreign Policy, July 4, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/04/chinas-overrated-technocrats-stem-engineering-xi-jinping/. 12.

pages: 339 words: 99,674

Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War by James Risen

air freight, airport security, banking crisis, clean water, drone strike, Edward Snowden, greed is good, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, large denomination, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, Stuxnet, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, WikiLeaks

Yet despite its track record, Dyncorp was given contracts to provide police training in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Afghanistan, Dyncorp was caught up in another scandal when its contractors reportedly paid for young “dancing boys” to entertain Afghan policemen, an incident that was described in a State Department cable released by WikiLeaks. But fortunately for Dyncorp, these allegations of misdeeds by its personnel were overshadowed by Blackwater. After Blackwater’s guards were involved in a 2007 shooting incident in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in which at least seventeen Iraqi civilians were killed, pressure mounted in Washington for the government to dump Blackwater and give its business to other firms.

pages: 363 words: 101,082

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

-trained investment banker turned mining minister, and the billionaire Israeli diamond dealer, Beny Steinmetz. A bit player is the International Finance Corporation, the project-financing arm of the World Bank, which has a 5 percent stake in Rio Tinto’s Simandou joint venture. Adding to the general air of derring-do, The Times of London reported in 2011 that U.S. diplomatic cables obtained by Wikileaks apparently show a rival of Rio Tinto paid a $7 million bribe to officials in Guinea to sideline the company’s front-runner position. Guinea, which declared its independence from France in 1958, clearly is no place for the faint-hearted in business, despite its wealth of mineral resources such as bauxite and iron ore.

pages: 332 words: 100,601

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations by Nandan Nilekani

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, call centre, carbon credits, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, digital rights, driverless car, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, fail fast, financial exclusion, gamification, Google Hangouts, illegal immigration, informal economy, information security, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, law of one price, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, more computing power than Apollo, Negawatt, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, price mechanism, price stability, rent-seeking, RFID, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software is eating the world, source of truth, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

While government funding has been a key component of technological innovation, some of the resulting discoveries have ended up posing an unexpected challenge to government itself. For example, the era of the internet has helped to make public the kind of information traditionally restricted to the government domain, and the blurring of the boundary between governments and their citizens have led to conflict on both sides of the divide—the brouhaha around WikiLeaks is an excellent example, even though not all the information leaked was particularly sensitive or revelatory. When applications start to use this information for general use, new regulatory issues arise. A particularly interesting case is that of Google Maps, a breakthrough when it was first introduced.

pages: 379 words: 99,340

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Ayatollah Khomeini, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Burning Man, business cycle, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, David Graeber, death of newspapers, disinformation, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, job-hopping, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skype, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, too big to fail, traveling salesman, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional

The public is on the move. The age, recall, is stuck at midnight. I don’t do prophecy, so call it speculation: but I feel certain that, to the extent government stands aloof from the global information sphere, to that exact degree the information sphere, in the form of Tea Party-like revolts and Wikileaks-style revelations, will burst back, uninvited and destructive, into the precincts of power. *** The reason to push information out to the public isn’t primarily so it can participate in making law or policy. The public’s engagement with laws or policies has always been determined by its interest in an affair, and that, in turn, has been limited by the fractured nature of the public.

pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

We’ll have the technology to cure diseases and perhaps even extend life itself, we’ll have machines that mimic or surpass humans in intelligence, we’ll have self-driving cars, we’ll land the first humans on Mars and we’ll finally have the technology to live sustainably on the planet with abundant energy and creativity. Shifts of these magnitudes often bring incredible opportunities, jarring sociological adjustment and, on many occasions, even violence. The Internet, social media and smartphones brought us email, selfies, hashtags and YouTube, but they also brought us the Arab Spring, ISIS propaganda, Wikileaks, NSA’s PRISM programme and the global Occupy movement. Social media gave us Facebook and Twitter and arguably propelled Barak Obama to the presidency in 2008, but it has also allowed some of the most hateful and racist vilification in recent history to find a home. It has created cyberbullying that has left numerous victims in its wake and has exposed intimate details of both famous personalities and secret government agencies.

pages: 416 words: 106,582

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The chatter of Twitter eclipses fixed-form and hierarchical communication. The news flow we remember from our childhoods, a single voice of authority on one of three channels, is replaced by something hyperevolving, chaotic, and less easily defined. Even the formal histories of a nation may be rewritten by the likes of Wikileaks and its yet unlaunched children. Facts are more fluid than in the days of our grandfathers. In our networked mind, the very act of observation—reporting or tweeting or amplifying some piece of experience—changes the story. The trajectory of information, the velocity of this knowledge on the network, changes the very nature of what is remembered, who remembers it, and for how long it remains part of our shared archive.

pages: 350 words: 109,379

How to Run a Government: So That Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don't Go Crazy by Michael Barber

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-fragile, Atul Gawande, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Checklist Manifesto, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, deep learning, deliberate practice, facts on the ground, failed state, fear of failure, full employment, G4S, illegal immigration, invisible hand, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, North Sea oil, obamacare, performance metric, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, school choice, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

Judge Damon Keith’s observation that ‘democracies die behind closed doors’2 looks increasingly prescient. RULE 55 BIG DATA AND TRANSPARENCY ARE COMING (prepare to make the most of them) PRIVACY As the data explosion occurs there will be growing concern about privacy, especially when extensive data about individuals comes into the possession of governments. In the era of Wikileaks and lost flash drives, many people simply don’t trust governments (or corporations) with their data. The problem is that the data explosion is happening so fast that there isn’t time to write the rules of the game before the game changes. Paradoxically, governments will have to strengthen transparency and privacy at the same time.

pages: 367 words: 109,122

Revolution 2:0: A Memoir and Call to Action by Wael Ghonim

British Empire, citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, digital divide, financial independence, Khan Academy, Mohammed Bouazizi, Skype, WikiLeaks

The NDP “won” more than 95 percent of Parliament’s seats. Everyone joked about it. Yet I felt helpless. The regime was a hopeless case, and there seemed to be no way forward. I tried to use humor to relieve my stress. I remember writing many jokes about the rigged elections and one of them becoming a “top tweet”: “Wikileaks would like to apologize for being unable to cover the Egyptian parliamentary elections of 2010, as its servers will not be able to withstand the number of forged documents expected to be revealed tomorrow.” We published a file that included all the photographs and video clips of the NDP’s repressive and unabashed rigging.

pages: 372 words: 107,587

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, green transition, happiness index / gross national happiness, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, naked short selling, Naomi Klein, Negawatt, new economy, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private military company, quantitative easing, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, short selling, special drawing rights, systems thinking, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, tulip mania, WikiLeaks, working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

In the US, again whether Republicans or Democrats are in power, this could mean increased surveillance, controls over the Internet, tightening laws governing freedom of expression, and sharp reductions in guarantees of civil rights and liberties — most likely in the name of protection from terrorism and in response to worsening natural disasters. Wikileaks aside, secrecy will be rampant — with the biggest secret of all being that leaders have no viable long-term strategy to stop the economy’s slide.3 With support services (in the U.S: Social Security, Medicare, public schools, the food stamp program) stretched beyond their limits, we could see more public resentment against immigrants, especially in border states.

pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Rana Foroohar, “It Is Time for a Truly Free Market,” Financial Times, March 31, 2019. Chapter 12: 2016: The Year It All Changed 1. Sean J. Miller, “Digital Ad Spending Tops Estimates,” Campaign and Elections, January 4, 2017. 2. Status Memo from Teddy Goff to Clinton Campaign Officials can be accessed here: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/fileid/12403/3324. 3. Kreiss and McGregor, “Technology Firms Shape Political Communication.” 4. Ibid., 415. 5. Evan Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?” The New Yorker, September 17, 2018. 6. Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg, “Inside the Trump Bunker, With 12 Days to Go,” Bloomberg, October 27, 2016. 7.

pages: 407 words: 108,030

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon tax, Climategate, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crisis actor, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, fake news, false flag, green new deal, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Shellenberger, obamacare, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, selection bias, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steven Levy, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks

Kate Yoder, “Russian Trolls Shared Some Truly Terrible Climate Change Memes,” Grist, May 1, 2018, https://grist.org/article/russian-trolls-shared-some-truly-terrible-climate-change-memes/; Craig Timberg and Tony Romm, “These Provocative Images Show Russian Trolls Sought to Inflame Debate over Climate Change, Fracking and Dakota Pipeline,” Washington Post, March 1, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/03/01/congress-russians-trolls-sought-to-inflame-u-s-debate-on-climate-change-fracking-and-dakota-pipeline/; Rebecca Leber and A.J. Vicens, “7 Years Before Russia Hacked the Election, Someone Did the Same Thing to Climate Scientists,” Mother Jones, January/February 2018, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/12/climategate-wikileaks-russia-trump-hacking/. 26. Carolyn Y. Johnson, “Russian Trolls and Twitter Bots Exploit Vaccine Controversy,” Washington Post, August 23, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/08/23/russian-trolls-twitter-bots-exploit-vaccine-controversy/; Jessica Glenza, “Russian Trolls ‘Spreading Discord’ over Vaccine Safety Online,” Guardian, August 23, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/aug/23/russian-trolls-spread-vaccine-misinformation-on-twitter. 27.

pages: 388 words: 111,099

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

The Kremlin operation during the 2016 US presidential election often seemed geared less towards changing how people voted and more at influencing who voted – and who didn’t. Russia spent only a fraction of the amount that the official campaigns did on paid-for advertising on Facebook and Google, but its organic content, amplified by bots, often spread quickly. The Kremlin passed emails about Hillary Clinton to Wikileaks, allegedly hacked from her campaign chairman John Podesta’s account. These emails were used to powerful effect, feeding into established narratives about Clinton as untrustworthy and duplicitous. Trolls pushed out an almost endless stream of pro-Trump and anti-Clinton messages, flooding social media with what looked like grassroots support for the Republican candidate.

pages: 1,042 words: 273,092

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

access to a mobile phone, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, yield management, Yom Kippur War

For some recent figures, see Afghanistan Opium Price Monitoring: Monthly Report (Ministry of Counter Narcotics, Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, Kabul, and United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Kabul, March 2010). 6‘Lifestyles of the Kazakhstani leadership’, US diplomatic cable, EO 12958, 17 April 2008, WikiLeaks. 7Guardian, 20 April 2015 8‘President Ilham Aliyev – Michael (Corleone) on the Outside, Sonny on the Inside’, US diplomatic cable, 18 September 2009, WikiLeaks EO 12958; for Aliyev’s property holding in Dubai, Washington Post, 5 March 2010. 9Quoted in ‘HIV created by West to enfeeble third world, claims Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’, Daily Telegraph, 18 January 2012. 10Hillary Clinton, ‘Remarks at the New Silk Road Ministerial Meeting’, New York, 22 September 2011, US State Department. 11J.

pages: 397 words: 112,034

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversification, energy security, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, global village, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, payday loans, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precautionary principle, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yield curve

The response from the Bush administration was “We do not make deals with evil.” A significant portion of the Iranian government seems committed to increasing the private-sector share of the economy. Yet the current geopolitical situation, the country’s near-perpetual state of crisis, and international sanctions help keep Iran locked in a state-centric economic mode. The Wikileaks documents that were revealed in November 2010 indicated that there may have been a serious infiltration of the Iranian nuclear programs by Israeli intelligence agencies, and that US plans to reengage Iran diplomatically were not supported unanimously within US policymaking circles. They also showed that Iran’s Arab neighbors have a very hostile view of the country’s government and are not likely to be significant investors in Iran’s near-term economic development projects.

pages: 379 words: 114,807

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth by Fred Pearce

activist lawyer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Cape to Cairo, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, corporate raider, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, Garrett Hardin, Global Witness, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, out of africa, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, smart cities, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

Hood said he had been “chased off” his property, which was also home to ten giraffes, sixty antelopes, thirty buffaloes, five lions, and two cheetahs. Paul Mangwana, former minister of empowerment, was said to have taken the Wanezi block ranch, while local senator and former governor Josiah Hungwe took Mwenezi ranch. WikiLeaks later published U.S. diplomatic cables repeating many of the assertions. Early in 2011, the German government lodged a complaint alleging that one of its citizens had his land stolen. Willy Pabst was the owner of the Sango ranch on the Save Valley Conservancy. Berlin claimed that Maluleke had “made it quite clear that he wanted a partnership without paying for it.”

pages: 467 words: 116,094

I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That by Ben Goldacre

Aaron Swartz, call centre, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Desert Island Discs, Dr. Strangelove, drug harm reduction, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Firefox, Flynn Effect, Helicobacter pylori, jimmy wales, John Snow's cholera map, Loebner Prize, meta-analysis, moral panic, nocebo, placebo effect, publication bias, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), seminal paper, Simon Singh, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Fry, sugar pill, the scientific method, Turing test, two and twenty, WikiLeaks

Drug addiction affects 100,000 people in Britain directly, and many more indirectly; it is responsible for an enormous drain on health-care resources, a large proportion of acquisitive crime, and the fastest-growing group of HIV infection. That we should apparently neglect our obligations in such an important field is astonishing. LIBEL NMT Is Suing Dr Peter Wilmshurst. So How Trustworthy Is This Company? Let’s Look at Its Website . . . Guardian, 11 December 2010 You will hopefully remember – from the era before WikiLeaks – that US medical-device company NMT is suing NHS cardiologist Peter Wilmshurst over his comments about the conduct and results of the MIST trial, which sadly for NMT found no evidence that their device prevents migraine. The MIST trial was funded by NMT, and Wilmshurst was lead investigator until problems arose.

pages: 538 words: 121,670

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, carbon tax, carried interest, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, invisible hand, jimmy wales, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Pareto efficiency, place-making, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The “sole and express purpose” of that conference was to promise amendments to the Articles of Confederation to “render the federal constitution adequate to the exigencies of Government & the preservation of the Union.”4 Amendments. Not a new Constitution. But quickly the organizers of that convention convinced those present (and not every state even deigned to send a delegate) to meet in secret. (No WikiLeaks to fear.) The windows were shut. And for almost three months the Framers banged away at a document that we continue to revere today. They took to this exceptional path because they recognized that sometimes an institution becomes too sick to fix itself. Not that the institution is necessarily blind to its own sickness.

pages: 424 words: 119,679

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Addressing a rally in Colorado a few days before the election, Trump told voters they were living through “the lowest point in the history of our country.” In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, there was a scramble to attach culpability to the pollsters, the pundits, the Russians, the FBI, WikiLeaks, sexism, and Hillary Clinton’s egregious campaign. What mattered is that when Trump told voters things were awful, they believed him. Trump hardly was alone in being all negative all the time. In the same year, Bernie Sanders came out of left field and nearly upset heavily favored insider Hillary Clinton for the nomination of the Democratic Party via a campaign that relentlessly described contemporary America as foundering on the rocks.

pages: 400 words: 121,378

Red Platoon: A True Story of American Valor by Clinton Romesha

Berlin Wall, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Kickstarter, Skype, WikiLeaks

< BlackKnight_TOC > >>> We need something. >>> Trucks are pinned. RPGs are being taken every time we try something. Mortars can’t do shit. We are taking indirect fire. >>> We took another casualty!!! When the classified transcripts of these communications were eventually dumped onto the Internet by WikiLeaks, the New York Times would describe them as a “frightening record” that depicted a group of young American soldiers “isolated and overwhelmed on enemy turf.” I suppose that’s more or less true. What mattered at the time, however, was that the sense of desperation that is so clearly evident in those text messages was about to set off a chain of dominoes, the first of which was already toppling in my direction

pages: 377 words: 121,996

Live and Let Spy: BRIXMIS - the Last Cold War Mission by Steve Gibson

Adam Curtis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, corporate social responsibility, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, John Nash: game theory, libertarian paternalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, unbiased observer, WikiLeaks

This cultural ‘gatekeeper’ to the passage of information is still being circumvented by ‘water-cooler conversation’; informal rather than formal methods of communication. The system has become so nonsensical that the US Congressional Research Service is forbidden to use any of the recently released WikiLeaks documents because they were once classified. Yet, they can all be freely and openly retrieved from the Internet. How can their analysis be optimal if some of the more useful and relevant information available to them in plain sight is denied them by their ‘own side’? Third – coping with a changing context.

pages: 1,071 words: 295,220

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman

Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, card file, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, operational security, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

not even the experienced Hayden anticipated the bombshell Ibid. Hayden leaned over to Vice President Dick Cheney Hayden, Playing to the Edge, 256. “this reactor was not intended for peaceful purposes” Secretary of State Rice, “Syria’s Clandestine Nuclear Program,” April 25, 2008 (taken from the Wikileaks archive, as given to the author by Julian Assange, March 4, 2011). he wanted U.S. forces to destroy the reactor Interview with “Oscar,” April 2014. The Assad family…reminded him of the Corleone family Interview with Hayden, July 20, 2016. “Assad could not stand another embarrassment” That retreat was forced on Assad by the international community, led by the United States and France, for his involvement in the assassination of Rafik Hariri.

…

Haqirya, Israel: Ministry of Defense, 1991. Ronen, David. The Years of Shabak. Haqirya, Israel: Ministry of Defense, 1989. Ronen, Yehudit. Sudan in a Civil War: Between Africanism, Arabism and Islam. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1995. Rosenbach, Marcel, and Holger Stark. WikiLeaks: Enemy of the State. Or Yehuda, Israel: Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir, 2011. Ross, Michael. The Volunteer: A Canadian’s Secret Life in the Mossad. Tel Aviv: Miskal, 2007. Rubin, Barry, and Judith Colp-Rubin. Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography. Tel Aviv: Miskal, 2006. Rubinstein, Danny.

pages: 556 words: 141,069

The Profiteers by Sally Denton

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, clean water, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, G4S, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, nuclear winter, power law, profit motive, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, William Langewiesche

Project on Government Oversight (POGO). “Federal Contracting and Iraq Reconstruction.” March 11, 2004. Public Citizen, with Dahr Jamail. “Bechtel’s Dry Run: Iraqis Suffer Water Crisis.” A Special Report by Public Citizen’s Water for All Campaign. April 2004. www.wateractivist.org. Public Library of U.S. Diplomacy. www.wikileaks.com. Remnick, David. “War Without End?” New Yorker, April 21, 2003. Riccio, Jim. “Incompetence, Wheeling & Dealing: The Real Bechtel.” Multinational Monitor 10, no. 10 (October 1989). Rich, Spencer. “Senate Kills Measure on Enriched Uranium.” Washington Post, October 1, 1976. Richardson, John H.

pages: 444 words: 130,646

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

These sites had a high degree of versimilitude to actual news sites, sometimes including fake tabs for “weather” or “traffic.” For example, millions saw false stories, shared hundreds of thousands of times, claiming that the Pope had endorsed Donald Trump (when, in fact, they disagreed vociferously about refugee policies, and the Pope does not endorse presidential candidates) or that Wikileaks documents showed that Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, had sold weapons to ISIS.10 These sites’ operators could use Facebook’s advanced targeting capabilities to find willing audiences, hoping some of those readers would share the story with their own network. If a story hit a nerve, it could be seen by millions of people, some of whom would click on the link, making money for the creators of the site through ads displayed on the site.

pages: 493 words: 136,235

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves by Matthew Sweet

Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, computer age, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, game design, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

“model for social fascist society”: “The Swedish Way: Rockefeller’s Northern Paradise,” New Solidarity International Press Service, June 29, 1974. They also implied that Israel had lied: Ibid. Henry Kissinger ordered them banned from the White House: Cable, U.S. Department of State to U.S. Embassy Rome, March 4, 1975, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1975STATE048175_b.html. “Fascist pressure exerted by the CIA”: Cable, U.S. Embassy Bonn to U.S. Embassy London, Paris, Stockholm, et al., February 11, 1976. Cliff Gaddy was named as Stockholm bureau chief: Cliff’s first credit as Stockholm bureau chief appears in Executive Intelligence Review, September 26, 1978.

pages: 483 words: 134,377

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by William Easterly

air freight, Andrei Shleifer, battle of ideas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, germ theory of disease, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, M-Pesa, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, oil shock, place-making, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional

We know this.” “It is clear that our money is being moved into political brainwashing.” A World Bank staff member in Addis Ababa wondered “Which state are we building and how? It could be that we are building the capacity of the state to control and repress.”6 A 2009 secret US cable uncovered by Wikileaks also said that the official donors to Meles were “keenly aware that foreign assistance . . . is vulnerable to politicization.”7 Publicly, however, a spokesman for the group of leading official donors said that, in their own research, they had not found “any evidence of systematic or widespread distortion.”8 The embarrassment of the HRW report in October 2010 induced these aid agencies to promise a field study to investigate the charges.

pages: 520 words: 129,887

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce

Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Bernie Madoff, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

id=7662471. 45 David Sandalow, “Statement of David Sandalow, Assistant Secretary of Energy for Policy and International Affairs, Before the Committee on Environment and Public Works, United States Senate,” August 6, 2009, http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=e2ec9004-e94d-41d6-81c6-a3f8c9bd9975. 46 Paul W. Parfomak, “Carbon Control in the US Electricity Sector: Key Implementation Uncertainties,” Congressional Research Service, December 23, 2008, https://secure.wikileaks.org/leak/crs/R40103.pdf, 15. 47 U.S. Department of Energy, “Secretary Chu Announces $2.4 Billion in Funding for Carbon Capture and Storage Projects,” May 15, 2009, http://www.energy.gov/news2009/7405.htm. 48 Andres Cala, “Europe Bets $1.4B on Carbon Capture,” Energy Tribune, May 29, 2009, http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?

pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

., “Social Media, News and Political Information During the US Election: Was Polarizing Content Concentrated in Swing States?,” arXiv:1802.03573 (2018). 12 of 16 swing states were above the average: While Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Maine were the swing states below the national average concentration of polarizing political content from Russian, WikiLeaks, and junk news sources, Colorado, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Nevada, Missouri, and Arizona were all above it. States were classified as swing states in November 2016 by the National Constitution Center. effectively decided the election: Ed Kilgore, “The Final, Final, Final Results for the Presidential Popular Vote Are In,” New York, December 20, 2016.

pages: 642 words: 141,888

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 11: See It Now looking into the camera: A. M. Sperber, Murrow: His Life and Times (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), 355–6. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT a prominent Egyptian activist: Another version of this event emerged in WikiLeaks cables, which claimed that the activist, Wael Abbas, after failing to contact Google, reached out to the U.S. embassy to resolve the issue. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Unbeknownst to his company: Wael Ghonim, Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People Is Greater Than the People in Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).

Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

“no identifiable leader” “For Iran, No Clear Alternative to the Shah,” NYT, November 6, 1978. The failure to grasp the emergence of revolutionary Islamism is a theme I take from Caryl’s Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century. On November 22 “Secretary Blumenthal’s Meeting with Shah of Iran,” November 22, 1978, Wikileaks Canonical ID 1978KUWAIT06258_d and 1978STATE295264_d, Wikileaks.org. “on a vacation” Translations of the Shah’s statement differ. See AP, January 17, 1979. hushed awe Washington Post Service, January 17, 1979; “Teary-Eyed Shah Flies Out of Iran and Millions Take to Streets in Joy,” CT, January 17, 1979. “God is Great” Toronto Globe and Mail, January 17, 1979.

…

Brewster Kahle is an American hero for providing a platform for crowdsourced historian preservation through his nonprofit Internet Archive, where, for example, one kind soul uploaded transcripts of all the ABC News broadcasts from 1979 to 1980. Julian Assange remains a controversial figure, but the State Department documents uploaded to Wikileaks.org documenting the fall of the Shah of Iran were indispensable to me. I also cherish Gerhard Peters and John Woolly for building the Presidency Project (Presidency.UCSB.Edu), where just about every public utterance by Jimmy Carter quoted here can be found. Amy Salit of WGYY graciously rescued an ancient Terry Gross interview from the Fresh Air archives for me.

pages: 554 words: 149,489

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Yet crowds performed better. What did it all mean? One view is that crowds will displace traditional modes of production. By now crowd-reliant models are routine in digital worlds, where they generate opinion (on Twitter and Facebook), create videos (YouTube), evaluate internal projects (Google), expose secrets (WikiLeaks), raise funds (Kickstarter and GoFundMe), and uncover relevant information. This last application was particularly relevant to The Guardian a few years ago, when its newsroom relied on readers to filter hundreds of thousands of documents on British MPs’ expense claims and identify misconduct. In this light, it’s hard not to think that crowds represent a powerful model and promising future for content creation, deployed in more and more places and inevitably improving in quality.

pages: 537 words: 149,628

Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War by P. W. Singer, August Cole

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, air gap, augmented reality, British Empire, digital map, energy security, Firefox, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Google Glasses, IFF: identification friend or foe, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, new economy, old-boy network, operational security, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, stealth mode startup, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Defense Intelligence Agency, accessed August 19, 2014, http://www.dia.mil/About.aspx. 38 A compact HK G48: “G36C — Das ultrakurze Sturmgewehr,” Heckler and Koch, accessed August 17, 2014, http://www.heckler-koch.com/de/produkte/militaer/sturmgewehre/g36/g36c/produktbeschreibung.html; fictional version. 38 using covert radio signals: Geoffrey Ingersoll, “The NSA Has Secretly Developed the ‘Bigfoot’ of Computer Hacks,” BusinessInsider.com, January 15, 2014, accessed August 19, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-has-the-bigfoot-of-computer-hacks-2014-1. 39 SIPRNet classified network: Sharon Weinberger, “What Is SIPRNet?,” Popular Mechanics, December 1, 2010, accessed August 19, 2014, http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how-to/computer-security/what-is-siprnet-and-wikileaks-4085507. 39 air-gapped: Peter W. Singer and Allan Friedman, Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 39 three faintly glowing metallic smart-rings: Darren Quick, “Ring Puts the Finger on Gesture Control,” Gizmag, March 4, 2014, accessed August 19, 2014, http://www.gizmag.com/logbar-smart-ring-bluetooth/31080/. 39 nicknamed the Eastern MIT: “Shanghai Jiao Tong University,” Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2012–2013, accessed August 19, 2014, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2012-13/world-ranking/institution/shanghai-jiao-tong-university. 39 Hainan Island incident: “Interview with Lt.

pages: 517 words: 155,209

Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation by Michael Chabon

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, clean water, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, land tenure, mental accounting, microdosing, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, off grid, off-the-grid, Right to Buy, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

Issa holds youth meetings and teaches lessons here at the center, at least when he’s permitted to. Issa’s unwavering commitment to nonviolent resistance drives Israeli military officials crazy, and for years they have waged a campaign against him and his community center. In a conversation with US officials that was revealed by WikiLeaks, Amos Gilad, the director of the Political-Military Affairs Bureau at Israel’s Defense Ministry, said, “We don’t do Gandhi very well.” Shooting a person in a suicide vest, a person with a gun, even a child with a knife, is easily justified as self-defense. But a man whose weapon are his words, who can convince a young person to put down her gun or her blade and resist with tools learned from the example of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and, yes indeed, from Gandhi—what do you do with him?

Data Wrangling With Python: Tips and Tools to Make Your Life Easier by Jacqueline Kazil

Amazon Web Services, bash_history, business logic, cloud computing, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, database schema, Debian, en.wikipedia.org, Fairphone, Firefox, Global Witness, Google Chrome, Hacker News, job automation, machine readable, Nate Silver, natural language processing, pull request, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, social web, statistical model, web application, WikiLeaks

If your topic is something the govern‐ ment might not collect (data on religious details, drug use, community-based support networks, etc.) or if the government in question is an unreliable source or lacks an open data portal, you might be able to find the data via an NGO or open data organi‐ zation. We’ve listed some here, but there are many more fighting for open exchange and access to data: • United Nations Open Data • United Nations Development Program Data • Open Knowledge Foundation • World Bank Data • WikiLeaks • International Aid and Transparency Datasets • DataHub • Population Reference Bureau Education and University Data Universities and graduate departments around the world are constantly researching and releasing datasets, covering everything from advances in biological science to the interrelatedness of native cultures with neighboring ecological habitats.

pages: 475 words: 155,554

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge by Faisal Islam

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, British Empire, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, energy security, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, ghettoisation, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Chicago School, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two tier labour market, unorthodox policies, uranium enrichment, urban planning, value at risk, WikiLeaks, working-age population, zero-sum game

In March 2008 Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, had outlined to the US ambassador in London and the visiting US Treasury deputy secretary, Robert Kimmitt, a plan for global recapitalisation of the over-leveraged banking sector by a small group of countries. The account of that meeting, in secret US embassy cables published by Wikileaks, indirectly quotes the governor as telling his American guests: ‘It is hard to look at the big four UK banks [i.e. RBS, Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds TSB] and not think they need more capital.’ The big banks and also the smaller ones all attempted to raise more capital from shareholders in the following months, with varying degrees of desperation, failure and the odd success.

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

The r/pizzagate subreddit was only two weeks old, but it was extremely fast-growing in terms of subscriber numbers. It had launched on November 7, the day before the U.S. presidential election, and some of its roots can be traced in part to a highly organized effort among subscribers of The_Donald to comb through and disseminate information from the Wikileaks files of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Upon its launch r/pizzagate was dedicated to discussing the bizarre theory that attempted to link the Clinton Foundation to a pedophilia ring based in the basement of a pizza joint that had no basement. The whole concept, from its inception, was identified by the more reputable media as a conspiracy theory—and a wild one at that.

pages: 535 words: 149,752

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, airport security, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, desegregation, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Magic , global pandemic, global supply chain, haute couture, imposter syndrome, index fund, Internet Archive, inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Chapter 10: Deals Brand-conscious consumers: Ian Johnson, “China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million into Cities,” New York Times, June 15, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/world/asia/chinas-great-uprooting-moving-250-million-into-cities.html; Rui Zhu, “Understanding Chinese Consumers,” Harvard Business Review, November 14, 2013, https://hbr.org/2013/11/understanding-chinese-consumers. The effort required navigating: WikiLeaks, “Cablegate: Apple Iphone Facing Licensing Issues in China,” Scoop Independent News, June 12, 2009, https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WL0906/S00516/cablegate-apple-iphone-facing-licensing-issues-in-china.htm?from-mobile=bottom-link-01. He was especially close: Zheng Jun, “Interview with Cook: Hope That the Mainland Will Become the First Batch of New Apple Products to Be Launched,” Sina Technology (translated) January 10, 2013; John Underwood, “Living the Good Life,” Gulf Coast Media, July 13, 2018, https://www.gulfcoastnewstoday.com/stories/living-the-good-life,64626.

pages: 592 words: 161,798

The Future of War by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Markoff, long peace, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, open economy, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, systematic bias, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, Valery Gerasimov, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, zero day

Korb and Stephen Biddle, ‘Violence by the Numbers in Iraq: Sound Data or Shaky Statistics?’ Council on Foreign Relations, 25 Sept. 2007. 30. Figures available at the Iraq Body Count website, http://www.iraqbody-count.org/database/. When official American figures reached the public domain as a result of the release of classified documents by wikileaks, they were not too far from those of the Iraq Body Count, which raised its assessment by 12,000. The US numbers were 109,032 deaths between January 2004 and December 2009, of which 66,081 were civilians, 15,196 Iraqi forces, 23,984 insurgents, and 3,771 friendly. See David Leigh, ‘Iraq War Logs Reveal 15,000 Previously Unlisted Civilian Deaths’, Guardian, 22 Oct. 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/22/true-civilian-body-count-iraq 31.

pages: 586 words: 160,321

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, Jean-Pierre Landau

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, diversification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Irish property bubble, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, short selling, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special drawing rights, tail risk, the payments system, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yield curve

Taylor, “The Lesson Greece’s Lenders Forgot,” Wall Street Journal, July 9, 2015. http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lesson-greeces-lenders-forgot-1436482117. 43. IMF Press Release 16/31, January 29, 2016. Last accessed January 31, 2016, from http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pr/2016/pr1631.htm. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Liz Alderman, “After WikiLeaks Revelation, Greece Asks I.M.F. to Clarify Bailout Plan,” New York Times, April 3, 2016, 4. CHAPTER 15 1. European Central Bank, “Verbatim of the Remarks Made by Mario Draghi,” speech at the Global Investment Conference in London, July 26, 2012. Last accessed January 4, 2016, from http://www.ecb.int/press/key/date/2012/html/sp120726.en.html. 2.

pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

And as recently as 2003, Deng’s handpicked and equally pragmatic successors were openly criticizing provincial leaders for overstating local growth numbers in an attempt to advance their careers. That is, of course, how technocracy is supposed to work—objectively. Increasingly, though, China’s government has twisted that ideal, manipulating numbers to fit a political mission. In a cable revealed in 2010 by WikiLeaks, Chinese premier Li Keqiang was quoted acknowledging that official GDP numbers are “man made,” and saying that he looks to more reliable numbers—on bank loans, rail cargo, and electricity consumption—to get a fix on the actual growth rate. Independent economists then started tracking these numbers as the “LKQ Index,” which has shown in recent years that actual growth is falling well below the official target.

pages: 407

Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy by Rory Cormac

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, false flag, illegal immigration, land reform, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, precautionary principle, private military company, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/02/18, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/02/18, SPi Bibliography Archives and primary source databases consulted (and their abbreviations used in text) BFI British Film Institute BOD Bodleian Library, University of Oxford BSI Bloody Sunday Inquiry CAD Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham CCC Churchill College Archives, University of Cambridge CHIL The Iraq Inquiry, chaired by Sir John Chilcot CREST CIA Records Search Tool DDEL President Eisenhower Library and Archives DDRS Declassified Documents Reference System DNSA Digital National Security Archive FAOHP Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project FOI Freedom of Information Act FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States HTL President Truman Library and Archives JFK President Kennedy Library and Archives LBJ President Johnson Library and Archi LCHMA King’s College London Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives NARA National Archives and Records Administration, United States NSA National Security Archive, George Washington University NYPL New York Public Library PAL Palestine Papers, leaked to Al Jazeera PDP Pierson Dixon Papers SBI Inquests into the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales and Emad El-Din Mohamed Abdel Moneim Fayed (Mr Dodi Al Fayed). Led by Justice Scott-Baker Inquiry TNA The National Archives, UK USDDO US Declassified Documents Online WIKI Wikileaks YUL Yale University Library OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/02/18, SPi 360 bi bliogr a ph y Government Documents and Reports Lord Justice Bingham, Inquiry into the Supervision of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (London: HMSO, 1992). Lord Butler et al., Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction (London: The Stationery Office, 2004).

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

,’” Daily Mail, August 12, 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2722878/Bizarre-Twitter-outburst-ISIS-fighters-reveal-love-late-Robin-Williams-blockbuster-hit-Jumanji.html. 169 “People feel like”: “Longform Podcast #254: Maggie Haberman,” Longform, July 26, 2017, https://longform.org/posts/longform-podcast-254-maggie-haberman. 169 team of eleven staffers: Kyle Cheney, “The Staff Army Behind a Clinton Tweet,” Politico Live Blog, Politico, October 15, 2016, https://www.politico.com/live-blog-updates/2016/10/john-podesta-hillary-clinton-emails-wikileaks-000011. 169 “MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL”: Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump), “My use of social media is not Presidential—it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again!,” Twitter, July 1, 2017, 3:41 P.M., https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/881281755017355264. 169 La Meute: Julia Carrie Wong, “How Facebook Groups Bring People Closer Together—Neo-Nazis Included,” The Guardian, July 31, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/31/extremists-neo-nazis-facebook-groups-social-media-islam. 169 “bring the world”: Josh Constine, “Facebook Changes Mission Statement to ‘Bring the World Closer Together,’” TechCrunch, June 22, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/22/bring-the-world-closer-together/. 170 ballooned 600 percent: J.

pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Civilian deaths, in sizable numbers, used to be universally considered a necessary and inevitable, if perhaps unfortunate, by-product of war. That we are entering an era when these assumptions no longer apply is good news indeed.183 Goldstein’s assessment was confirmed in 2011 when Science magazine reported data from WikiLeaks documents and from a previously classified civilian casualty database of the American-led military coalition. The documents revealed that around 5,300 civilians had been killed in Afghanistan from 2004 through 2010, the majority (around 80 percent) by Taliban insurgents rather than coalition forces.

…

G. West, Rebecca Western society: declines in violence compared with societies hostility to accomplishments humanistic movements in non-Western societies see also modernity western U.S. Westphalia, Peace of White, Matthew Who, The Wiesel, Elie Wiessner, Polly WikiLeaks Wilde, Oscar Wilkinson, Deanna Willard, Dan Willer, Robb Williamson, Laila Willkie, Wendell Wilson, James Q. Wilson, Margo Wilson, Woodrow Wimer, Christopher Winfrey, Oprah Wirth, Christian witchcraft Witness (film) Wollstonecraft, Mary Wolpert, Daniel women: and abortion Amazons in American West antiwar views of attitudes toward competition for and domestic violence feminism feminization genital mutilation of in harems and Islam as leaders male control of as pacifying force peace activists postpartum depression as property rape of, see rape rights of self-defense for “Take Back the Night,” torture of violence against violence by violence over; see also sexual jealousy World Bank world government World Health Organization (WHO) World War I and antiwar views and influenza pandemic as literary war and nationalism onset of poison gas in and World War II World War II causes of destructiveness of and ethnic cleansing London Blitz in and Pearl Harbor and poison gas Wotman, Sara Wouters, Cas Wrangham, Richard Wright, Quincy Wright, Robert Xhosa people Yamaguchi, Tsutomu Yanomamö people Yates, Andrea Yemen Young, Liane Young, Maxwell Younger, Stephen young men: African American aggression of in American West in bachelor cults and code of honor and crime in criminal gangs and dominance and drug culture homicides by in prison socialization of terrorists tribal elders defied by Yugoslavia Zacher, Mark Zambia Zebrowitz, Leslie Zelizer, Viviana zero-sum games Zimbardo, Philip Zimring, Franklin Zipf, G.

pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

“Couldn’t Obama just let the Mafia send them to us?” he asked. “Don’t worry, we won’t use them against Israel.” Some diplomats saw all of this coming. On January 21, 2014, I wrote a column in The New York Times quoting a November 8, 2008, cable from the U.S. Embassy in Damascus to the State Department that had been unearthed by WikiLeaks. This was in the middle of the Syrian drought. The embassy was telling the State Department that Syria’s U.N. food and agriculture representative, Abdullah bin Yehia, was seeking drought assistance from the U.N. and wanted the United States to contribute. Here are a few key passages: The U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs launched an appeal on September 29 requesting roughly $20.23 million to assist an estimated one million people impacted by what the U.N. describes as the country’s worst drought in four decades … Yehia proposes to use money from the appeal to provide seed and technical assistance to 15,000 small-holding farmers in northeast Syria in an effort to preserve the social and economic fabric of this rural, agricultural community.

pages: 603 words: 182,826

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, electricity market, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, light touch regulation, market clearing, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, ultimatum game, wage slave, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor

This priority dictated the choice of Xi Jinping as General Secretary in succession to Hu Jintao. The son of one of the party’s founders, Xi earned his spurs supervising the government of Shanghai, the least Communist, most independent-minded megacity in China. In a 2009 cable from the U.S. embassy in Beijing published by Wikileaks, Xi was described as “repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialization of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveau riche, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect.” His chief means of political management, other than by exercising the imperial power of the party, was through Beijing’s control of finance—despite the sums raised from the sale of land, city and provincial governments must rely on central government subsidies for almost a third of their revenue.

pages: 733 words: 179,391

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Hedge funds and proprietary trading desks are as opaque as the law will allow, even to their own investors. But the average financial institution also needs to limit disclosure of its business processes, methods, and data, if only to protect the privacy of its clients—how would you like it if your monthly bank statement appeared on WikiLeaks? As a result, government policy has had to tread carefully on the financial industry’s disclosure requirements. How can financial institutions provide the information that adaptive regulation requires without feeling threatened? One solution is to make the interactions between financial institutions and regulators secret.

pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Online communication was promised to unleash the wisdom of the crowds, as different perspectives communicated and competed freely, enabling the truth to triumph. The internet was supposed to make democracies stronger and put dictatorships on the defensive as it revealed information on corruption, repression, and abuses. Wikis, such as the now infamous WikiLeaks, were viewed as steps toward democratizing journalism. Social media would do all the above and better by facilitating open political discourse and coordination among citizens. Early evidence seemed to bear this out. On January 17, 2001, text messages were used to coordinate protests in the Philippines against its Congress, which had decided to disregard critical evidence against President Joseph Estrada in his impeachment trial.

pages: 498 words: 184,761

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland by Ali Winston, Darwin Bondgraham

affirmative action, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ferguson, Missouri, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden Gate Park, mass incarceration, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Port of Oakland, power law, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra

Olsen was relatively new to activism, having taken part in the state capitol occupation in his native Wisconsin the previous year when labor unions tried to save workers’ collective bargaining rights. He hooked up with Iraq Veterans Against the War in Northern California and took part in Anonymous-led protests in support of WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning.44 When the Occupy San Francisco encampment appeared, Olsen joined and became a fixture outside the Federal Reserve, sleeping overnight and returning to his apartment only to shower. “It was easier than commuting in from Daly City,” Olsen recalled ten years later. At Fourteenth and Broadway, Olsen spotted a familiar face: navy veteran Joshua Shephard, another IVAW and Veterans for Peace activist.

Sweden Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, G4S, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, urban planning, walkable city, white picket fence, WikiLeaks

Under his guidance, the UN resolves the 1956 Suez Crisis. 1974 ABBA triumphs in the Eurovision Song Contest in England, kick-starting a hugely successful pop career. 1994 The ferry Estonia sinks during a storm on the Baltic Sea, killing 852 passengers, including 551 Swedes. 1995 Reluctantly, Sweden joins the European Union. 2001 Parliament votes 260 to 48 against abolition of the monarchy, even though the monarch ceased to have any political power in 1974. 2009 Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden, marries Daniel Westling, her personal trainer; she is the first Swedish royal to marry a commoner. 2011 Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, due for extradition to Sweden on sexual-assault charges, takes refuge in the Ecuador embassy in London. (Sweden drops the inquiry in 2017.) 2014 Umea is named a European Capital of Culture, with the spotlight falling on northern Sweden and Sami art and culture. 2017 Five people are killed and several injured when an Uzbek asylum-seeker with ties to ISIS hijacks a truck and drives it into a crowd outside a Stockholm department store.

The Rough Guide to Sweden (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

carbon footprint, centre right, congestion charging, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, large denomination, Peace of Westphalia, place-making, sensible shoes, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, urban planning, WikiLeaks

Some economists argue it is this enforced shaking up of the business environment from outside, rather than any direct government measures, that is responsible for Sweden’s improved economic fortunes since 1998 – although unemployment remains stubbornly above government targets. Since 2010, Sweden has found itself at the centre of the scandal surrounding Julian Assange – founder of the media website, Wikileaks – who was wanted for questioning by Swedish police over sexual assault charges. A court ruling in 2011 cleared the way for his extradition to Sweden, but since 2012 Assange has sought asylum inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. In October 2016 he was set to be interviewed by an Ecuadorian prosecutor in the presence of Swedish officials.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Laura Smith, “In the early 1980s, white supremacist groups were early adopters (and masters) of the internet,” Medium, October 11, 2017, https://timeline.com/white-supremacist-early-internet-5e91676eb847, archived at https://perma.cc/8UKG-UB8H; Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018). One early and leading participant in the Cypherpunk movement was Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who made it the subject of a book-length treatise, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet (New York: OR Books, 2016). 26. Peter H. Lewis, “Despite a New Plan for Cooling it Off, Cybersex Stays Hot,” The New York Times, March 26, 1995, 1. 27. President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management, A Quest for Excellence: Final Report to the President (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, June 1986); William J.

pages: 767 words: 208,933

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Obama’s unprecedented use of drones to assassinate suspected terrorists on his ‘kill lists’ – in Yemen, Somalia or Pakistan, where America was not at war, and without judicial oversight even when the targets were its own citizens – ‘do not undermine the rules of war’, though more could be done to ‘adapt’ a ‘potent new weapon’ to the constitution.123 When the US Army private then named Bradley Manning leaked hundreds of thousands of secret government documents related partly to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010, exposing war crimes committed by US mercenaries, the Economist insisted that both he and the ‘digital Jacobins’ at Wikileaks to whom Manning confided this cache be punished. Julian Assange should be extradited, though in the meantime the paper found ‘some consolation’ that his revelations actually offered ‘a largely flattering picture of America’s diplomats: conscientious, cool-headed, well-informed, and on occasion eloquent’.124 Three years later Edward Snowden, a private analyst for the National Security Agency, exposed the staggering extent of its illegal surveillance of US citizens and foreigners, including such staunch allies of the US as German chancellor Angela Merkel.

pages: 864 words: 222,565

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

“edifice complex”: Robert Whymant, “A Conjugal Dictatorship Rules in the Philippines,” Gazette (Montreal), May 10, 1976, 9. Reprint from the London Sunday Times. “Within one of the great dictatorships”: RBF, CP, 138. “not pursued”: Ibid. “an only barely audible”: Diplomatic cable from US embassy in Manila, October 28, 1976, archived at https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1976MANILA16743_b.html (accessed January 2021). “geodesic communities”: Samuel Lanahan, “Dome Communities for Southeast Asia” report, B343-F4. “definite fear”: Tom Vinetz, interviewed by author, August 5, 2020. “This is not to say”: Ibid. “memorably delightful”: RBF to Imelda Marcos, April 3, 1977, B343-F4.

pages: 809 words: 237,921

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kula ring, labor-force participation, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, openstreetmap, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, the market place, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

For a survey of business economists on the accuracy of China’s GDP statistics, see https://www.wsj.com/articles/wsj-survey-chinas-growth-statements-make-u-s-economists-skeptical-1441980001. On Li Keqiang’s statement on unreliability of Chinese GDP statistics, see https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-wikileaks/chinas-gdp-is-man-made-unreliable-top-leader-idUSTRE6B527D20101206. CHAPTER 3. WILL TO POWER There is a vast scholarly literature about the life of Muhammad and Islam. Our treatment of his life follows Watt (1953, 1956), published together in an abridged version in Watt (1961). There are many very good treatments of this period of history, for example Hourani (2010), Lapidus (2014), and Kennedy (2015).