Outside Magazine
August 25, 2014
In the 1970s and 1980s, Texaco extracted more than a billion barrels of oil from the Ecuadorean rainforest but spilled an estimated 400,000. In 1993, locals filed a class action against the company. That case is ongoing—it’s a legal version ...
The Intercept
March 20, 2014
(This article was co-written with Ryan Gallagher.)
Across the world, people who work as system administrators keep computer networks in order – and this has turned them into unwitting targets of the National Security ...
The Intercept
March 7, 2014
What if the National Security Agency had its own advice columnist? What would the eavesdroppers ask about?
You don’t need to guess. An NSA official, writing under the pen name “Zelda,” has actually served at the agency as a Dear Abby for ...
The New York Times Magazine
August 18, 2013
This past January, Laura Poitras received a curious e-mail from an anonymous stranger requesting her public encryption key. For almost two years, Poitras had been working on a documentary about surveillance, and she occasionally ...
The Nation
June 18, 2013
Here’s a recipe for diluting the debate about our surveillance state: start talking about the foibles of the leakers and whistleblowers.
Consider the case of Edward Snowden, who worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency and ...
The New Yorker
April 9, 2013
Guess what? The war in Iraq had a bright side. It created the Arab Spring.
That is the theory that proponents of the invasion are peddling on the tenth anniversary of the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, on April 9, 2003. They ...
The New York Times
March 14, 2013
(The following story ran on the NYT’s At War blog)
With the invasion of Iraq just weeks away, Lt. Tim McLaughlin began a military ritual that dates back to Homer. He started a war diary. It was not a blog or e-mails sent from his waiting-to-invade ...
Crude World
2009
(Excerpted from “Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil” by Peter Maass)
The addictions of Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, are regularly
in full view. On his television show, Aló Presidente, Chávez sips espresso
from a ...
Sunday Times Magazine (London)
March 3, 2013
A few years ago, a former marine named Tim McLaughlin drove to New Hampshire in his red pickup to visit his parents’ farmhouse, which is where he stored his gear from Iraq, among which were his war diaries. ...
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 ...
