Much of the pre-release debate about “Zero Dark Thirty” has focused on whether it portrays torture as effective, in the sense of prying information out of al Qaeda suspects. Yes, the movie conveys that view, and I think it’s inaccurate. Many experts, including key senators who oversaw ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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.
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
