Here are some links to well-written (or spoken), interesting or challenging pieces about privacy, secrecy, and surveillance.
Last updated 8 November 2013
I'll inconsistently update this as I come across (or am sent) others.
Danielle Allen - "The NSA unravels a civil rights-era win" - Washington Post, 30/8/2013
James Ball - "Protecting journalist sources: Lessons in communicating securely" - Journalism, 26/7/2013
James Bamford - "They Know Much More Than You Think" - New York Review of Books, 17/7/2013
Yochai Benkler - "A Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate" [PDF] - Harvard Civil Liberties Law Review, August 2011
David Burnham - "The silent power of the NSA" - New York Times, 27/3/1983
David Carr - "War on Leaks Is Pitting Journalist vs. Journalist" - New York Times, 25/8/2013
Jelani Cobb - "Obama, surveillance, and the legacy of the march on Washington" - New Yorker, 22/8/2013
Ken Cukier
- "Searched at UK Border for Net Porn" - NTK, 11/8/1988
- "Watched by the Web: Surveillance Is Reborn"- New York Times review by Michiko Kakutani of Cukier and Mayer-Schönberger's book about big data, 10/6/2013
Janey Daley - "It's Left-wing prats who are defending our freedoms - the visit by national security agents to smash up computers at the Guardian newspaper is shocking, like something out of East Germany in the 1970s" - Daily Telegraph,24/8/2013
Amy Davidson - "When journalists are called traitors"</> - New Yorker, 11/10/2013
Keith Devlin - "Will this (mathematics) be of any use?" - Devlin's Angle, 1/8/2013
Cory Doctorow - "Sterling's "The Ecuadorian Library" vs civil liberties groups" - BoingBoing, 5/8/2013 (see link below to Sterling's piece)
Barry Eisler - "David Miranda and the Preclusion of Privacy" - The Heart of the Matter, 22/8/2013
Conor Friedersdorf - "The Surveillance Speech: A Low Point in Barack Obama's Presidency" - The Atlantic, 12/8/2013
John Gapper - "Do not blindly trust official guardians of our security" - Financial Times, 21/8/2013 (login maybe required, but free to view)
Jennifer Granick (and Christopher Sprigman) - "NSA, DEA, IRS Lie About Fact That Americans Are Routinely Spied On By Our Government: Time For A Special Prosecutor" - Forbes, 14/8/2013
Simon Jenkins - "So the innocent have nothing to fear? After David Miranda we now know where this leads" - The Guardian, 20/8/2013
Pamela Jones - "Forced Exposure" (the last Groklaw article) - 20/8/2013
Poul-Henning Kamp - "More Encryption Is Not the Solution" - Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 1/7/2013
John Kiriakou - Obama's abuse of the Espionage Act is modern-day McCarthyism - The Guardian, 6/8/2013
Neelie Kroes - "On the consequences of living in an age of total information" - European Commission, 18/7/2013
John Lanchester - "The Snowden files: why the British public should be worried about GCHQ" - Guardian, 3/10/2013
Peter Ludlow - "The Banality of Systemic Evil" - New York Times, 15/9/2013
Peter Maass - "How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets" - New York Times, 13/8/2013
Eben Moglen - "Westward the Course of Empire" - the first of four talks by Eben Moglen at Columbia Law School, 9/10/2013
John Naughton
- "Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is" - Observer, 28/7/2013
- "Democracy as a 'game'" - Memex 1.1, 21/8/2013
- "Mission-creep and the NSA" - Memex 1.1, 9/9/2013
- "After Edward Snowden's revelations, why trust US cloud providers? The NSA's activities are a massive blow for US computer businesses" - Observer, 15/9/2013
Nicole Perlroth and Scott Shane - "Lavabit Founder Waged Privacy Fight as F.B.I. Pursued Snowden" - New York Times, 2/10/2013. See also this 2 minute 9/10/2013 NYT interview with Lavabit's founder Ladar Levison.
Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark - "Codename 'Apalachee': How America Spies on Europe and the UN" - Spiegel Online International, 26/8/2013
Bill Robinson - "Capacity of the NSA's Utah Data Centre" - Lux ex Umbra, 29/8/2013
Jay Rosen - "Conspiracy to commit journalism" - Press Think, 20/8/2013
Rebecca Rosen - "What Does It Really Matter If Companies Are Tracking Us Online?" - The Atlantic, 16/8/2013
Alan Rusbridger - "David Miranda, schedule 7 and the danger that all reporters now face" - Guardian, 19/8/2013
Dominic Rushe - "Lavabit founder: 'My own tax dollars are being used to spy on me'" - Guardian, 22/8/2013
Bruce Schneier
- "The value of privacy" - Schneier on Security, 19/5/2006
- "NSA secrets kill our trust" - CNN, 31/7/2013
- "Technology companies have to fight for their users, or they'll eventually lose them" - The Atlantic, 12/8/2013
- "The Real, Terrifying Reason Why British Authorities Detained David Miranda" - The Atlantic, 22/8/2013
- "Our newfound fear of risk" - Schneier on Security, 3/9/2013
Charles Seife - "An Open Letter to My Former NSA Colleagues - Mathematicians, why are you not speaking out?" - Slate, 22/8/2013
Jack Shafer - "From Tom Paine to Glenn Greenwald, we need partisan journalism" - Reuters, 16/7/2013
David Soar - "How to Get Ahead at the NSA" - London Review of Books, 24/10/2013
Chris Soghoian - "How NSA's cyber sabotage puts us all at risk" - American Civil Liberties Union, 13/9/2013
Bruce Sterling - "The Ecuadorian Library or, The Blast Shack After Three Years" - Geek Empire, 3/8/2013 (see link above to Doctorow's piece)
Andrew Sullivan - "Cameron Proves Greenwald Right" - The Dish, 18/8/2013
Bill Thompson - "The final brick in the wall of the security state?" - Billblog, 20/8/2013
Craig Timberg and Barton Gellman - "NSA paying U.S. companies for access to communications networks" - Washington Post, 30/8/2013
Jennifer Valentino-Devries and Siobhan Gorman - "What You Need to Know on New Details of NSA Spying" - Wall Street Journal, 20/8/2013
Adam Wagner - "David Miranda – remember his name" - UK Human Rights Blog, 20/8/2013
Alex Wilhelm - " Smashed Hard Drives, Shuttered Email Services, And The Slow Leak Of Free Speech" - TechCrunch, 20/8/2013
Chris Williams - "Four ways the Guardian could have protected Snowden – by the NSA" - The Register, 22/8/2013
John Kampfner, Helen Margetts, John Naughton, and Malcolm Rifkind, discussion at the Frontline Club, chaired by Mark Urban - 10/7/2013
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