“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to gets his pants on.” –Winston Churchill On October 4th, the House Judiciary Committee introduced a bill that would extend the controversial Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is set to expire at the end of December, for […]
Proposals to pardon Edward Snowden before the end of the Obama administration have revived the debate over his actions and their consequences.
Our five favorite longreads and blog posts from the past week.
In the first few months after Snowden’s leaks first exploded onto headlines, the public, and the media, struggled to fathom how private individuals figured into this story, and how close the U.S. had come to that “Orwellian state” Edward Snowden warned us of. If Google Trends are any indication, the story reached a peak in […]
On the heels of Obama’s signal intelligence speech and just a day before the president’s State of the Union address, yet another Snowden document dump has come to the fore, this time detailing data collection activities from leaky mobile apps, such as Angry Birds. Mobile networks have proven to be a rich resource for the […]
At the end of each year I tried to reflect on the most important events that took place in Europe (see my comments for 2011 and 2012). Aside from the political look down in DC, tensions in South-East Asia, instabilities in the Middle East and North Africa, among many other stories, seven stories caught my attention […]
The snowball effect of the Snowden revelations is finally picking up. Between the revelations of the National Security Agency eavesdropping on Merkel’s cellphone and massive collection of European citizens’ emails and phone calls (as demonstrated by the illustration below), Europeans are furious and have been asking questions to a reluctant Obama administration. US Secretary of […]
The best long form reads and blog posts for the week of October 25. 2013.
Recent news from the information provided by Edward Snowden has placed the United States out of favour with Brazil when it was revealed that the U.S. has been spying on Brazil. Along with the U.S. allegation, Canada was also brought into the debate when it was alleged that Canadian intelligence agents have been sourcing private […]
On Thursday, Aug. 1, 2013, Russia granted temporary asylum to Edward Snowden, permitting him to leave the transit zone of Sheremetyevo Airport for the first time in nearly six weeks. The Obama administration immediately expressed its disappointment with the Russian decision, and some members of Congress have called for retaliatory measures against Russia. While President […]
As Edward Snowden slipped into Moscow this afternoon, asylum documents in hand, he joined another recently freed man: Alexey Navalny. Russia now has two famous cyber-whistleblowers on its hands, and hasn’t yet figured out what to do with either. One thing is for sure, Putin’s planned meeting Obama on the sidelines of the G20 summit […]
Weekly updates on the best long form reads and blog posts from ForeignPolicyBlogs.com’s editorial team.
Bradley Manning’s consequence for sending classified information to Wikileaks over incidents in Iraq where American soldiers killed 24 innocent Iraqis were reaffirmed today. Manning’s possible life sentence was maintained as charges of “aiding the enemy” were upheld. Manning sent videos to Wikileaks showing gun camera footage of American gunship pilots with permission of their commanders […]
What is Russia playing at by harboring America’s most wanted whistleblower Edward Snowden in a Moscow airport? A brief recap: Over the weekend, Snowden arrived in Moscow from Hong Kong en route to a third country, probably Ecuador (which is already housing Julian Assange in its London embassy). On Sunday, journalists received a number of […]
“The Lives of Others,” a film documenting the workings of a surveillance state run by the Stasi, the secret domestic spymasters who kept the Soviet lid on in East Germany from the end of World War II until the wall came down, paints a grim picture of what happens when a government begins to […]