News & Commentary

Hollywood's annual awards season culminates with the Academy Awards, a night honoring the best films and performances of the year. This year, all five directors nominated for the Best Director award are men. Last year, all the nominees were men. In fact, a woman hasn't been nominated for Best Director since 2010, the year that Kathryn Bigelow took home the honor for directing The Hurt Locker. Bigelow is the only woman to have ever won the award, and she is one of only four women who has ever been nominated for it in the Academy Awards' 86 year history.

I recently came across an interesting passage by George Orwell. It made me think about Big Data.

We live in freedom by necessity. We must reshape our world. We must love one another, or die.

--Vijay Prashad, The World We Want is the World We Need, Riverside Church

These piece ran originally at The Guardian.

Political speech regulation remains an incredibly complex and contentious issue in our government, and there is plenty of legitimate concern about the recent influx of big, outside money in modern campaigns.

Old-man winter spared the nation's capital the crippling blow it dealt to the Northeast last week, which turned out to be a very good thing for NSA critics. That meant that the House Judiciary Committee's hearing on surveillance reform went on as planned, and it was a doozy for Obama administration witness, Deputy Attorney General James Cole.

True or false: private probation companies are engaged in a court-sanctioned extortion racket.

The Washington Post ran a story Thursday on a technology that I've been very concerned about for a while: persistent aerial surveillance. Specifically, it profiled a company, Persistent Surveillance Solutions, that has been deploying this panoptic video technology over American cities, as well as in Mexico.

Yesterday, we filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI asking for details about a surveillance tool we know too little about, called a port reader. According to news reports, port readers copy entire emails and instant messages as they move through networks, in real time. They then delete the contents of the messages, leaving only the "metadata" — the sender, recipient, and time of a message, and maybe even the location from which it was sent — behind for the government. According to the same reports, the FBI is taking steps to install port readers on the networks of major U.S. phone and Internet companies, going so far as to make threats of contempt of court to providers that don't cooperate.