Author: Peter Maass

I was born and raised in Los Angeles. In 1983, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, I went to Brussels as a copy editor for The Wall Street Journal/Europe. I left the Journal in 1985 to write for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, covering NATO and the European Union. In 1987 I moved to Seoul, South Korea, where I wrote primarily for The Washington Post. After three years in Asia I moved to Budapest to cover Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I spent most of 1992 and 1993 covering the war in Bosnia for the Post.

Don’t Trust “Zero Dark Thirty”

The Atlantic
December 13, 2012

One of the most dramatic scenes in Zero Dark Thirty, the new film by Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, takes place in a conference room where the CIA team hunting Osama bin Laden is lambasted by its boss, played by Mark Strong. “There’s no working group coming ... (Read more)

Was Petraeus Borked?

Will the scandal surrounding David Petraeus, General John Allen, Paula Broadwell, Jill Kelley, and a shirtless F.B.I. agent turn into the same sort of eureka moment on privacy that Congress experienced when Judge Robert Bork’s video rentals were revealed during a bruising battle over his Supreme ... (Read more)

Was Petraeus Borked?

The New Yorker
November 14, 2012

In 1987, when Judge Robert Bork was enmeshed in a partisan struggle over his Supreme Court nomination, a reporter for an alternative weekly in Washington, D.C., got a tip that the judge was a patron of a local video store. Michael Dolan went to Potomac Video, in the ... (Read more)

McGill University

Montreal, Canada
A lecture on “Perpetrators and Participants: War Photographers of the Digital Age.” Part of a symposium organized by Media@McGill about war photography in the era of cellphone cameras and YouTube. At 1 pm on Nov. 2 at McCord Museum, 690 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, ... (Read more)

Chautauqua Institution

Chautauqua, NY
Lecture on oil, war and peace in the Hall of Philosophy at the Chautauqua Institution at 3:00 pm on August 18, 2012. For more information, please visit www.ciweb.org.

Does Cybercrime Really Cost $1 Trillion?

ProPublica
August 31, 2012
(This story was co-authored with Megha Rajagopalan)

Gen. Keith Alexander is the director of the National Security Agency and oversees U.S. Cyber Command, which means he leads the government’s effort to protect America from cyberattacks. Due to the secretive nature of his ... (Read more)

Cellphone? How Quaint. It’s a Tracker.

The device in your purse or jeans that you think is a cellphone — guess again. It is a tracking device that happens to make calls. We can love or hate these devices — or love and hate them — but let’s start calling them what they are so we can fully understand what they do. Read my ... (Read more)

That’s No Phone. That’s My Tracker.

The New York Times
July 15, 2012
(This article was co-authored with Megha Rajagopalan.)

The device in your purse or jeans that you think is a cellphone — guess again. It is a tracking device that happens to make calls. Let’s stop calling them phones. They are trackers.

Most doubts about the principal ... (Read more)

How a Lone Grad Student Scooped the Government and What It Means for Your Online Privacy

ProPublica
June 28, 2012

Jonathan Mayer had a hunch.

A gifted computer scientist, Mayer suspected that online advertisers might be getting around browser settings that are designed to block tracking devices known as cookies. If his instinct was right, advertisers were following people as they moved from ... (Read more)

‘The Toppling’ Wins Mirror Award

Nice news—my New Yorker story about the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad has won the John M. Higgins Award for Best In-Depth/Enterprise Reporting, given out as one of the Mirror Awards by the ... (Read more)