Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Face to Face With More Electronic Privacy Concerns

June 17, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
surveillance-face

Whether or not your electronic life is your own to share or not fuels debate over the propriety of U.S. government trolling of phone and Internet sources. But the face you present to the world—literally, your face—generates new questions about privacy as various local government-created databases are surveyed with facial-recognition software. That’s the takeaway message of a piece in today’s Washington Post, which reviews the legal and legislative terrain of law enforcement using all those driver’s license photos to track down (for now, at any rate) bad guys. With a whiff of ... Read More

Peace Protest Kabuki Now Booked for the High Court’s Stage

June 6, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
SpaceX_Falcon_verticle_on_the_launch_pad

Last October I talked about the kabuki of the Vandenberg peace protesters, who routinely demonstrate right outside of the California missile base’s front gate, are just as routinely arrested, and then not quite as often are released without facing trial or have their charges dismissed. It’s an intriguing constitutional ritual, combining concerns about free speech, domestic tranquility, and providing for common defense with just a tinge of farce. Only a tinge, because the protesters are deadly serious, and so is the work of the base, which when it test fires Minuteman missiles is ... Read More

Keeping a Human Finger on the Killer Robot’s Trigger

May 30, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
drone-human-killer

We told you about the loving robots and existential-threat robots, and now it looks like the United Nations is triangulating between those poles as it urges humankind to be careful about developing autonomous warrior robots. The concern is driven less by a future Terminator, and more about the present explosive growth of drone warfare, which wedges open the door to increasingly automated killing. Christof Heyns, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, has urged the world’s militaries to pause in producing such “lethal autonomous robotics” ... Read More

Human Rights Watch’s Take on Obama’s Drone Speech Is Worth Reading

May 24, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
drone-uav

Yesterday's presidential address on the set of security policies collectively called the War on Terror contained lots of clear statements—and yet no one seems to agree on what, if anything, they meant. Among the more detailed responses this morning was this statement from Human Rights Watch. The organization's investigators have on several occasions won access to the Guantanamo prison, and the group has one of the more consistent track records on researching the legal issues surrounding unmanned vehicles, the so-called "drone war." In its summary, the group flags a fine, but ... Read More

Should We Retire the Word ‘Sweatshop’?

May 6, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
sweatshop-bangladesh

The casualty count topped 600 in Bangladesh this morning, more than a week after a textile manufacturing complex collapsed outside Dhaka. After an initial spate of weirdly detached debate, some concrete thinking on the challenges of preventing such tragedies has started to bubble. Take this morning's Baltimore Sun: Last year, a fire in one Bangladeshi factory that killed 112 people prompted the Walt Disney Co., the world's largest licenser of branded merchandise manufactured abroad, to pull out of the country entirely in order to avoid negative publicity associated with its inhumane labor ... Read More

Here Is Pussy Riot Member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s Parole Hearing Speech. She Was Denied.

April 30, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
pussy-riot

Four days ago, a court in the impossibly-named Russian region of Mordovia—recently famous for wooing French actor/tax fugitive Gerard Depardieu—refused parole for Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, better-known as one of three members of Russian punk protest outfit Pussy Riot. Tolokonnikova received a two-year sentence for her participation in a protest in Moscow's main Orthodox church last year. (We spoke at the time to a Russia expert, who gave us some context around the Pussy Riot phenomenon. Read the interview here.) Apparently Tolokonnikova had drafted a statement before the court, but was ... Read More

America’s Sea-Born Terrorism Challenge: the Panga Boat

April 1, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK)

Officials with the Department of Homeland Security were roundly eviscerated on Capitol Hill last week, blistered for their surprising failure—“stunning” was the word often used—to devise a reliable metric to gauge the status of border security. Both sides in the battle for immigration reform insist an improved measurement is critical to the passage of any legislative package. High-ranking officials with Homeland Security had no answer; worse yet—at least according to the members of Congress giving them the third degree—they said none was likely in the near future. No one at the ... Read More

Expect Gay Marriages in the Courthouse, Not the Statehouse

March 29, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Parisians protest against the legislature's "marriage and adoption for all" draft law in January. The girl's placard reads, "I know where I come from; I wonder where we're going." (PHOTO: ANDREY MALGIN/SHUTTERSTOCK)

Ah, liberal France, with its 35-hour work weeks, powerful unions, and ... massive anti-marriage equality rallies. With the Gallic legislature likely to legalize gay marriage next month, at least 300,000 marched in opposition. Even so, civil rights legislation guaranteeing marriage and adoption rights for same-sex couples has already passed the country's lower house, and is nearly certain to gain full approval in France. The march—which ended with police deploying tear gas—was a useful reminder that European social politics are not as simple as they can seem from across the ... Read More

How (Not) to Smuggle a Dinosaur

January 23, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
The skeletal head of a Tyrannosaurus bataar, or Tarbosaurus (PHOTO: WIKIMEDIA)

When we imagine a smuggler, most of us think of illegal drugs, of precious stones and valuable artifacts, or even those occasional head-scratchers when someone is caught at customs with exotic pets hidden inside their pant legs. This story, also recounted at-length in the latest issue of the The New Yorker, makes them all look like amateurs. In December, Eric Prokopi went on trial in New York City for smuggling the skeleton of a 70-million-year-old Mongolian Tyrannosaurus bataar (or Tarbosaurus, as it is also known). Prosecutors contended that he took the bones from the Gobi desert, then ... Read More

How True is Zero Dark Thirty? A Former Operative Weighs In

January 16, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
ZERO-articleLarge

When Pacific Standard called me to ask if I would write about Zero Dark Thirty, I still had not decided whether I wanted to see it. I was leaning toward no. People who work in intelligence don't generally see movies about it. You can enjoy them only once you've been out of the game for a while, and then only if you don’t take it too seriously. I watch Homeland. It’s fun, because it’s a fantasy. Zero Dark Thirty occupied an odd space. It’s not ridiculous enough to allow complete suspension of disbelief. I get that Hollywood needs to sell tickets, but it’s not accurate enough to ... Read More