Category: the world

  • France and America

    France is a lovely country. Paris, a delightful city. The attacks last week were a disgusting expression of an empty ideology that hurts its practitioners and its victims both. The outpouring of support and solidarity that people around me have shown for France frankly caught me by surprise. It seems we’re past the old pettiness…

  • A Fig Leaf

    There is a major separation of powers issue with the current surveillance arrangement: The standard for permitting a query of the database of internal US phone calls is a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” of terrorist activity, Inglis says. Only 20 analysts within the NSA are empowered to approve targeting US-based phone conversations, he says. One of…

  • Decentralizing the Web… Again

    …cloud computing represents centralization of information and computing resources, which can be easily controlled by corporations and governments. [Jaeger, et al. Link] In the wake of Prismgate or the Snowden Affair or whatever we’re going to call this kerfuffle, I’ve been struck by how the current centralized nature of the World Wide Web has facilitated…