When you must rely on the NSA’s former director to defend privacy…

As Noah Shachtman reports here at The Daily Beast, the surveillance state is alive and well.

On Paul Kirby’s “What We Talked About At ISA: Political Speech in Fantastical Worlds”

This (“Political Speech in Fantastical Worlds”) is a refreshing post from Paul Kirby at The Disorder of Things on pop culture in IR, one that reaffirms why critical scholars interested in SF and pop culture always wish and need to go beyond the descriptive-analogical reasoning level (not that they necessarily need to be reminded) as has been recently witnessed in […]

ISA-Canada Program at CPSA 2015 (June 2-4)!

In a few months, ISA-Canada will hold its regional conference as part of the Canadian Political Science Association annual meeting at the University of Ottawa, my home university. Here (choose the ISA-Canada/IR section) is the program I have put forth as ISA-Canada Program Chair this year along with my co-chair from the CPSA Ellen Gutterman. We’ve worked […]

Food for thought on the future of war

Here is a welcome joint new initiative by Defense One and New America aimed at thinking about the future of war. Recognizing that [w]hether it has been fought with sticks and stones or improved explosive devices and drones, war has been a seemingly permanent and unchanging part of human history for the last several millennia. It remains […]

Hacking your cars!

Here is a new report by Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ed Markey on the possibilities of car hacking and which was featured in a recent 60 minutes report. It is also based on a DARPA study by Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek that aimed to help “to write custom software to monitor and interact with the ECUs [electronic control […]

Benjamin Muller on Mass Surveillance, Human Rights, and the State in the Digital Age

Going over recent takes on Snowden and surveillance, I just stumbled upon this great short piece at e-IR from friend and colleague Benjamin Muller, who offers up crucial insights on the connection of mass surveillance and human rights in light of the Snowden revelations: Drawing on what in light of these developments might be considered anachronistic […]

Matthew Bolton on Mines, IEDs and the Global Meta-Mine

Great piece just out in Political Geography from Matthew Bolton, which I found really fascinating. A great addition to the literature building on Derek Gregory’s work around “everywhere war”.  (The post is here from Bolton’s blog @political minefields).

Escaping Surveillance Realism

I stumbled this interesting small piece on surveillance after Snowden (reporting a LSE conference) by Lina Dencik at JOMEC (Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies). It asks us to reflect on a key question, whether we can ever escape a “state of Surveillance Realism,” as it seems “we can no longer imagine society without ubiquitous surveillance”. She […]

Susan Schuppli’s Deadly Algorithms, A Must-Read

This is a great piece from Susan Schuppli in Radical Philosophy on the code that kills – and the fallacious belief that data and automation will outdo human decision-making when it comes to killing efficiently: Guided by the Obama presidency’s conviction that the War on Terror can be won by ‘out-computing’ its enemies and pre-empting terrorists’ threats […]

My e-IR post on the US National Security State Entertainment

Here is my latest post at e-IR.

Cryptologic geographies

Originally posted on Open Geography:
In 2011, a 29-year-old grad student at the University of Münster in Germany made some coding alterations to OpenSSL, the secure sockets layer used on half a million websites around the world, including banks, financial institutions and even Silicon Valley companies such as Yahoo, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Unfortunately the code contained a…

Great post from “Mapping Security” blog on all things security and the sheer folly of it all!

This is a great post from James Alexander at a new blog, Mapping Security. The critique of today’s data-mining operations and the context of surveillance activities is spot on: this new logic of surveillance has become embedded in everyday life as a matter-of-fact part of our existence – normalised in our most mundane of interactions with […]

Language and Critical Security Studies in Canada

This is a shameless self-promotion, but I am happy to finally see these two articles – actually, the English and French version of the same “tale” – published in Critical Studies on Security. I am especially thankful to the editors for having been so on board with the project that they invited me to publish […]

# THE FUNAMBULIST PAPERS 46 /// Chamayou’s Manhunts: From Territory to Space? by Stuart Elden

Originally posted on The Funambulist:
Royal Air Force Nimrod XV230 named after the biblical character of Nimrod The forty-sixth Funambulist Papers comes from one of the most important current thinkers in political geography: Stuart Elden who is the author of five books, as well as the editor of seven others (see the photo) including the…

The US-Mexico Border: A Disaster of National Security

This is a good piece by Michelle Chen via Jacobin Magazine on the border zone insecurities, where the national security state reveals its ugly face. As she puts its: The concept of “national security” seems abstract in most of our political discussions, but there’s one place where the idea of the secure nation takes a […]