Media & communications - openDemocracy (Page 117)

All I can say is that you are uninteresting! An exchange with General Michael Hayden, Director of the NSA from 1999-2005

On the first anniversary of Ed Snowden’s revelations, this interview contributes to what we intend will become a growing, in depth exploration of the significance of surveillance for the future of humanity across the globe.

By Anthony Barnett and Michael Hayden

/ 4 Jun 2014

Global Preventive Security and its unbearable lightness

One now plays a part in one’s own protection. The institutions can help one to strengthen one’s preparedness. One must not blame them if they fail despite the promise of a maximum-security programme.

By Didier Bigo

/ 3 Jun 2014

Belonging in Northern Ireland: portraits of the individual migrant

A new art project is challenging Belfast’s reputation as the ‘race hate capital of the UK’, revealing an important gap between the presentation of migrants as a political category and their own experience and identities, says Sonia Banaszczyk.

By Sonia Banaszczyk

/ 2 Jun 2014

The Cloud rains on all parades

A parking ticket leads our Sunday Comics author to wonder how much of our lives have migrated Up There

By Jim Gabour

/ 1 Jun 2014

Syria, storytelling, and all things between: a meta-commentary on ‘the Prisoner Series’

Al-Akhbar English (AAE) is the English branch of a prominent Lebanese newspaper, Al-Akhbar. During the second week of February 2014, Al-Akhbar English published a six-part special series called, “Syrian Prisoners: In Their Own Voices.” This is the story of that series.

By Yazan al-Saadi

/ 30 May 2014

Modi's extraordinary use of mobile technology

Narendra Modi with his Bharatiya Janata Party has used technology in an Indian election campaign at an unprecedented level, campaigning digitally in nine languages and changing the election process forever.

By Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey

/ 30 May 2014

Content creation in the age of the mobile internet

The tradeoff between the capacity to upload and the possibility to download goes to the heart of the battle between active creation and passive consumption. Today it is clear that the digital divide will be about whether access translates into sophisticated usage.

By Andy Yee

/ 30 May 2014

“Spain is Different”: Podemos and 15-M

Podemos has presented itself as a party of "decent ordinary people”, who understand the needs of ordinary citizens and are open to taking their lead from them through the participatory process (as opposed to positioning themselves as the intellectual vanguard).

By Cristina Flesher Fominaya

/ 29 May 2014

The habits of the heart: substantive democracy after the European elections

Despite the dramatic spread of democratic procedures in recent decades, there is a profound and growing deficit in substantive democracy everywhere. ‘They call it democracy but it isn’t’ was one of the slogans of the Spanish indignados.

By Mary Kaldor

/ 27 May 2014

(Pa)trolling the RuNet

In Russia the information war isn’t just being waged on television and in print. Well-funded Kremlin-linked organisations are waging a battle for hearts and minds in cyberspace.

By Alexandra Garmazhapova

/ 22 May 2014

The limits of radical publishing

Publishing house Lawrence & Wishart’s demand that the Marxists Internet Archive remove its digitised copy of the Marx-Engels Collected Works exposes all the contradictions of ‘radical publishing’ in the internet era

By En Liang Khong

/ 22 May 2014

Mass surveillance and institutional racism: two sides of the Swedish coin

Last year, it was revealed that the Swedish state indexed all Roma living in Sweden and made its secret services actively cooperate with GCHQ and the NSA. Why has nobody drawn a connection between these two facets of mass surveillance?

By Ola Svenonius and Ellen Edlundh

/ 20 May 2014