www.idler.co.uk > Adam Curtis and Tom Hodgkinson
Adam Curtis: Social media is a scam
3 feb. 2021 - As Adam Curtis’s new series Can’t Get You out of My Head starts on BBC iPlayer, we publish excerpts from editor Tom Hodgkinson’s 2018 interview with the documentary maker.
 · advertising · anarchism · artificial-intelligence · big-tech · individualism · journalism · power · religion · science · spying

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
"North Korea" targets infosec researchers
26 jan. 2021 - One of the most fascinating revelations from the Snowden documents was the story of "fourth party collection," which is when the NSA hacks the spy agency of a friendly nation to suck up all the spy data it has amassed on its own people.
 · mass-surveillance · north-korea · spying

www.nybooks.com > José Manuel Prieto
The Battle Over the Cuban Five
24 sep. 2020 - On September 12, 1998, ten alleged Cuban spies from the group known as La Red Avispa (the Wasp Network) were arrested in South Florida by the FBI during an early-morning raid. They were charged with conspiracy to commit crimes against the United States, conspiracy to commit espionage, and acting as unregistered agents of a foreign government. Half of the accused cooperated with the district attorney’s office and received reduced sentences. The others—Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, and René González, who came to be known as the Cuban Five—denied the accusations. The saga of their imprisonment, trial, and release is the subject of North of Havana by Martin Garbus, the renowned civil rights attorney who joined the case in 2012, after the death of the Cuban Five’s lawyer, Garbus’s longtime friend Leonard Weinglass.
 · cuba · justice · special-period · spying · united-states

www.mattblaze.org > Matt Blaze
A Cryptologic Mystery
18 sep. 2020 - Did a broken random number generator in Cuba help expose a Russian espionage network?
 · cryptography · cuba · fbi · russia · spying · united-states

www.reuters.com > Raphael Satter
U.S. court: Mass surveillance program exposed by Snowden was illegal
3 sep. 2020 - Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans' telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful - and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.
 · mass-surveillance · nsa · snowden-disclosures · spying · united-states

www.theguardian.com > Luke Harding
'A chain of stupidity': the Skripal case and the decline of Russia's spy agencies
23 jun. 2020 - The unmasking of the Salisbury poisoning suspects by a new digital journalism outfit was an embarrassment for Putin – and evidence that Russian spies are not what they once were.
 · bellingcat · journalism · open-source-journalism · russia · spying