Josh Kilbourn: VIDEO from Hong Kong — Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind revelations of NSA surveillance — REACTIONS + New Details

Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations The 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA’s history explains his motives, his uncertain future and why he never intended on hiding in the shadows Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras in Hong Kong guardian.co.uk, Sunday 9 June 2013 • Q&A with …

Patrick Meier: Data Mining Wikipedia in Real Time for Disaster Response [or Any Current Event]

Data Mining Wikipedia in Real Time for Disaster Response My colleague Fernando Diaz has continued working on an interesting Wikipedia project since he first discussed the idea with me last year. Since Wikipedia is increasingly used to crowdsource live reports on breaking news such as sudden-onset humanitarian crisis and disasters, why not mine these pages for …

Allen Roland: Honoring Chalmers Johnson, Prophet of Truth + Empire Meta-RECAP

Prophet for a Dying Empire Every dying Empire has its truth telling prophet and America had its own with Chalmers Johnson. Johnson correctly compared the decay of the American empire, with its well over 600 overseas military bases, with the fall of the Roman Empire whereas the Senate becomes a wealthy corporate club and irrelevant …

Review (Guest): The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be

Moises Naim 4.0 out of 5 stars What kind of power, for whom, and for what?, May 31, 2013 By Tom Atlee (Eugene, OR USA) – See all my reviews Moises Naim’s new book THE END OF POWER should properly be called “The Decay of Power”. His thesis is that while it is becoming easier …

Patrick Meier: Crowdsourcing Syrian Crisis via Twitter API

Crowdsourcing Crisis Information from Syria: Twitter API vs Firehose Over 400 million tweets are posted every day. But accessing 100% of these tweets (say for disaster response purposes) requires access to Twitter’s “Firehose”. The latter, however, can be prohibitively expensive and also requires serious infrastructure to manage. This explains why many (all?) of us in the …

Patrick Meier: Google Blimps for Local Area Coverage and Disaster Response + Google Evil RECAP

Google Blimps for Disaster Response A blimp is a floating airship that does not have any internal supporting framework or keel. The airship is typically filled with helium and is navigated  using steerable fans. Google is apparently planning to launch a fleet of Blimps to extend Internet/wifi access across Africa and Asia. Some believe that “these …