David Brin: The Half Life of Secrets

Surveillance: A Golden Age or Dark Days? My friend and info-perceptive wiseman Peter Swire, who helped to formulate the post-Snowden NSA reforms issued by the Obama Administration, has a series of articles and white papers of interest to anyone who is serious about the core topic of our era.

Berto Jongman: CIA’s Digital Innovation…

CIA goes live with new cyber directorate, massive internal reorganization The DDI’s formation implies that the CIA is increasingly bent on securing 21st century relevance on the overall American spying landscape, where other agencies — namely the cyber- and electronic-surveillance-focused National Security Agency (NSA) — have emerged as dominant shapers of U.S. intelligence policy.

Sepp Hasslberger: Liquid Democracy Rising…

Political decision-making by elected representatives is far removed from those who go to the election booth once every four or five years. Liquid democracy uses the internet to reduce the distance between citizens and decision makers… Liquid Democracy: The App That Turns Everyone into a Politician Liquid Democracy is one of the boldest contemporary innovations …

Berto Jongman: Pentagon Weapons Vulnerable to Open Internet Connections for Performance Monitoring

Pentagon’s Online Habits Render US Weapons Info Highly Vulnerable The Pentagon’s longstanding practice of connecting networks, equipment, and weapons to the open Internet has unintentionally created major vulnerabilities throughout the Defense Department. The strategy was supposed to facilitate the collection of performance data to help design new weapons and monitor equipment remotely, among other benefits. Instead, it has jeopardized …

Mongoose: Hillary Clinton’s Secret Spy Network….

What Was a Member of Clinton’s ‘Secret Spy Network’ Doing While Working for CBS News? In March, an investigation by ProPublica and Gawker revealed that a “secret spy network” that was not on the State Department payroll, run by longtime Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, was “funneling intelligence about the crisis in Libya directly to the …