Reading Time: 8minutesThe moment that my international flight landed in Shanghai, China, I tried out a new VPN service on my cell phone. I’d heard about the app while studying abroad; the company promised it could bypass China’s “Great Firewall” to access YouTube, Netflix, and other government-blocked sites with lightning speed.
Reading Time: 15minutesNew State Department rules, effective since May of this year, require applicants for visas to enter the United States to disclose all of their social media accounts, including those that use a pseudonym.
For decades undercover British intelligence officers have infiltrated almost every notable political movement in the UK. In this episode I talk to Kit Klarenberg, an investigative journalist who has written extensively about this topic.
Reading Time: 16minutesAre the agencies and tools intended to combat international terrorism being used more broadly against US citizens?Ultra-liberal Berkeley, California, has been the scene of provocative demonstrations staged by right-wing groups in recent years that have sparked clashes with anti-fascist groups.And the Berkeley police secretly filmed the protests, using high-tech surveillance cameras equ
Despite its enormous popularity there are many problems with Breaking Bad - the utterly racist depiction of Mexicans, the glorifying of a sociopathic protagonist and that incredibly boring and pointless fifth season come to mind. But what has never been discussed before is how the show functions as propaganda for the Dr
Superman is one of the world’s most recognisable cultural icons. A symbol of human idealism, he has been subject to a range of political and philosophical agendas over the last 80 years.
The Superman reboot Man of Steel launched the (now abandoned) DC Extended Universe, and put a much darker tinge on the Superman franchise than any previous incarnation, especially the Christopher Reeve classics. Man of Steel benefited from large-scale support from the military, but hidden until now are the d
Osama Bin Laden’s death is the perfect postmodern event, in that most of the reports detailing how, where and when he died contradict all the other reports.
In late 2009 the FBI got wind of the fact that Martin Scorcese was developing The Wolf of Wall Street, about stock fraudster turned federal cooperator Jordan Belfort. So the Bureau's Michael Kortan wrote to Scorcese to offer their help and supp
The 1968 spy and counterspy classic Ice Station Zebra was inspired by a real life event during the CIA/Air Force Corona spy satellite program. In April 1959 the satellite Discoverer 2 became the first to send a recovery capsule containing satellite surv
Public Enemies is a 2009 historical drama/thriller film that tells the story of the Bureau of Investigation’s manhunt for Public Enemy Number One John Dillinger. In this episode I examine the film, the politics of crime and the romanticising of criminals.
Anwar al Awlaki rose to notoriety in the 2000s as a leading internet jihadist whose lectures and videos were very popular among the emerging Islamist movement.
In this penultimate review episode I look at how the education system is a poor place to learn anything, how standardised testing is a form of child abuse, the fundamental problems of electoral politics, and expand on why an intelligence-based approach to societal problems is always better than a military-based ap
In part 3 of this subcriber-only review series I look at season three of The Wire. In this season the Barksdale storyline comes to a climax, while the city hall politics are added into the ever-expanding world of the show.
Sam Greenlee is perhaps most famous for writing the novel The Spook Who Sat By the Door, which was adapted into a film in the 1970s. Greenlee believed that the CIA and FBI suppressed the film because it portrayed them in such a bad light, and promoted b