Author Archive

There will be an exciting debate on the threat of cyberwar! A panel of four distinguished guests (including Harvard professor John Zittrain, founder the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society) will square off against each other in favor of and against the motion: “The Threat of Cyberwar Has Been Grossly Exaggerated.” The debate...
Read more »

James Fallows has a highly relevant article about China’s new “cyber warrior” culture and leanings towards asymmetric warfare in this month’s Atlantic. After that, be sure to check out Fallows’s blog entry on the same subject rounding up reactions to the imagery of a “digital Pearl Harbor” and whether or not that really is a...
Read more »

Last month I complained, far too prematurely, that in the wake of revelations about Chinese cyberattacks against Google services, international rhetoric was largely ignoring the insidious underlying signals about the dangers of Chinese cybermilitary prowess. Since then, of course, news outlets have seen a deluge of commentary about the next “digital war,” enhanced by...
Read more »

By now, the very public news of Google’s threat to end operations in China following the discovery of some very troubling cyberattacks has been well circulated, picked apart, lauded, and analyzed. Free speech advocates who have lambasted the company in the past for ever agreeing to abide by the Chinese government’s policy of information...
Read more »

Not two days ago, I read this passage in Wired for War, P.W. Singer’s absorbing and excellently researched book on the robotics revolution in warfare: Through most of 2005 and 2006, the Department of Homeland Security flew a Predator drone over the U.S.-Mexico border. The robot border-cop helped arrest 2,309 people and seize seven tons...
Read more »

Every couple of months, a news organization does a special feature on the threat of cyber warfare — armies of hackers, both from private groups and trained military personnel, digging into top secret files of foreign governments with just a few swift keystrokes. Most recently, 60 Minutes featured an analysis of the threat of...
Read more »

On Friday, three bloggers and activists in Cuba were detained and beaten by the Cuban authorities. Yoani Sanchez, Claudia Cadelo, and Omar Luís Pardo Laz were dragged into a car, violently beaten, and left in the street. Global Voices Online translates Sánchez’s own harrowing account of the incident: We were left aching, lying in a...
Read more »

One of the more nail-biting voter decisions to come out of this past Tuesday’s elections here in the United States was the repeal of a law allowing same-sex marriages in the state of Maine. The 53% or so who voted to strike down the law made Maine the 31st state in the U.S. to...
Read more »

Global Voices Online, a website that translates blog entries from around the world, recently launched Threatened Voices, an advocacy website that aims to build a global database of bloggers who have been killed or threatened for their work. The website has a great interactive map; a timeline of reports; profiles of bloggers who have...
Read more »

President Obama announced today that he would lift the 22-year-old ban restricting HIV-positive people from entering the United States. This is great news for an old, fear-motivated piece of legislation that’s been in effect for far too long.
Read more »