If you’ve seen the documentary Citizenfour, about the NSA surveillance state and disclosures by Edward Snowden, then you know the work of Trevor Paglen. He served as a cinematographer for the film and was thanked in the credits. Until recently, the official website provided updates on where to see his artwork. Paglen, who is the […]
Hong Kong police took chainsaws and sledgehammers to barricades set up by pro-democracy demonstrators today. The New York Times reports that the barricades were largely symbolic, but the dismantling by authorities has prompted protesters to build stronger ones out of bamboo, trash cans, bus stop signs and other available materials. Reports say that crackdowns prompted […]
Getting in is no easy feat — through a hatch on a busy street, like Alice in Wonderland, scrambling along a ladder quickly enough to be swallowed up by the city unnoticed to end up in this abandoned subway station — a breathtaking, mystical space in Lower Manhattan. It’s what I imagine would have been a major pedestrian plaza […]
A study of Central Park’s soil has found 167,000 different microbial life forms. Such a wide variety of distinct soil communities is usually found among many, different geographical areas around the world, but they’re all here, in a 843-acre park. Central Park soils harbored nearly as many distinct soil microbial phylotypes and types of soil communities as we found in […]
In 2011, Alice Walton, daughter of Walmart co-founder Sam Walton, unveiled her ultimate vanity project: the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Exquisitely designed by architect Moshe Safdie, the world-class art institution reportedly cost over a billion dollars and sits on a 24-acre site that meticulously incorporates the woodsy, natural surroundings. It’s about a five […]
The city is attempting to make good on Mayor de Blasio’s “Vision Zero” plan to eliminate traffic deaths. According to data newly released by the NYPD, tickets for unsafe driving are up in 70 out of the city’s 75 precincts compared to last year. Some of the highest numbers come from the 109th precinct in Queens, where more […]
A hacktivist calling himself Phineas Fisher, has hacked into Gamma International, a UK-based spyware company that makes malware for governments, and leaked 40 GB of internal documents including the source code of their premier spy agency tool, FinSpy or FinFisher. The tools’ source has been released on BitTorrent, meaning now you too can be your […]
In a recent in-depth interview with the Guardian, former security contractor Edward Snowden has stated that documents completely irrelevant to the NSA’s work — like nude photos, discovered during routine surveillance — were regularly passed around the office. Though we’ve become somewhat jaded to ongoing revelations of the NSA’s abuses of power and personal violations, Snowden’s new comments […]
Software engineer and artist David Huerta has made a mixtape that is encrypted against NSA surveillance, for the express purpose of sending it to the NSA. This snarky subversion is inspired by the “cypherpunks” of the 90’s, whose open sourcing of encryption software allowed regular people access to government-level privacy enforcement. “I work outside the […]
A piece of code used by the NSA to label online “extremists” has been uncovered for the first time. The German public television network ARD reported that the popular encryption service Tor, which is based in Germany, was one of the entities that had become a target for the NSA’s labeling as part of their […]
