In this interview, Miriam Greenberg, author of Branding New York: How a City in Crisis was Sold to the World, makes sense of the origins of New York’s vast inequalities and what the prospects are for changing them.
Confronted with recent revelations concerning the shape and scope of NSA surveillance, liberal commentators have frequently expressed dismay and forwarded objections that the monitoring of ordinary citizens is a wasteful and dangerous distraction from the hunt for real terrorists. As this selection from the new collection Life During Wartime makes clear, such protestations really miss the point, as they misunderstand both the strategy of wholesale surveillance and the ends it serves.
A new government surveillance and intelligence program is being developed by the US National Security Agency in which academics utilize US government-collected online data to predict future events, such as political protests, pandemics, and economic crises—with a focus on Latin America.
Emerging from the airport baggage claim late the following afternoon he crossed to the taxi stand for a lift into town. It would be only minutes to the Hilton and a comfortable room with a commanding view of the waterfront and Lake Champlain. But then he heard his last name being called and noticed a wiry-haired kid holding a cardboard sign with the word “Wolf” on it.
Big Bro is watching you. Inside your mobile phone and hidden behind your web browser are little known software products marketed by contractors to the government that can follow you around anywhere. No longer the wide-eyed fantasies of conspiracy theorists, these technologies are routinely installed in all of our data devices by companies that sell them to Washington for a profit.
How a brilliant Vermont mathematician became an early target of government harassment.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019