Tag: surveillance

The Pegasus Project: The NSO Group, Spyware and Human Rights

The Pegasus Project has shed more light on the attempt by various governments across the globe to challenge encryption as both principle and practice. They have done so by resorting to the amoral expertise provided by private enterprise.

Cybernetic Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics

China’s Social Credit System is a compelling manifestation of cybernetic capitalism—of how financial mechanisms interlock with other systems of social control, by combining mass surveillance, gamified corporate loyalty programs, and debt peonage.

The Limits of Control

Compelled towards impossible dreams of infinite growth within finite nature, the cybernetic capitalist system is decidedly expansionist and colonial...

On Walking Now

For Descartes thinking was all; to be human was to be a ‘thinking thing’ (res cogitans). Pierre Gassendi, writing in the 1640s, attempted to counter the exclusion of the body in his reply to Descartes’ Meditations. Gassendi’s proposition was stark: ambulo ergo sum (‘I walk therefore I am’).

Safe Space for Spying: What remains unsaid by the Signals Directorate

In government, neither side of politics has ordered an inquiry into the Iraq War, and the most obvious question is not asked in the NSC’s safe spaces: do Australia’s expeditionary military campaigns raise or lower the threat to domestic security? If you fear the answer, better not ask the question.

The Dismissal: The Beginning of the Era of Total Surveillance

The Kerr–Palace letters have turned attention back to the role of the Queen and British power in the sacking of the Whitlam government. But the dismissal was really the beginning of a new type of US power, linked to total surveillance, with Sir John Kerr as its willing accomplice.

Some (Un)intended Consequences

Without genuine oversight, openness and critique, this pandemic might change our social world in ways that are undesirable at best, and frightening at worst.

Expand and Centralise: Twenty Years of Google

The first of three articles in the twentieth anniversary year of Google: from garage project to global institution

Landscapes of Secret Power, by Richard Tanter

Pine Gap and Menwith Hill

Power Assymetries and Australian Hubris

7 Jan 2014

Indonesia, Australia and Edward Snowden By Richard Tanter

The State and Terror in the New Era

Jenny Hocking: Imprecision over the language of 'terrorism' and its application, leads to concerns that counter-terrorist security measures will be broadly targetted in ways that are neither appropriate nor efficient, ways that may impinge upon legitimate political agitation and dissent

Them’s Fighting Words

Douglas McQueen-Thomson: Language of War and War Through Language.