By: Sophie Butchers,
on 12/17/2015
As the analysis reaches deeper behind the recent Paris attacks, it has become clear that terrorism today is a widening series of global alliances often assisted and connected via cyber social media, and electronic propaganda.
The post Cyber terrorism and piracy appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Maryann Yin,
on 7/1/2015
Open Road Films has unleashed the first teaser for the Snowden biopic. Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as the infamous whistleblower Edward Snowden.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the script was based on two books: a nonfiction title called The Snowden Files by journalist Luke Harding and a novel called Time of the Octopus by lawyer Anatoly Kucherena (Snowden’s Russian attorney). This movie will hit theaters on December 25th. (via Deadline.com)
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By: Hannah Paget,
on 5/28/2015
In its recent report, Privacy and Security: A modern and transparent legal framework, the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee pondered on the scale of public concern about digital surveillance. A feature of the current controversy is its narrow chronology. The decades before 9/11 correspond to the medieval period and the centuries before the internet are lost in the mists of time. The legislation that controls the behaviour of the security agencies, particularly the Acts of 1989, 1994 and 2000, is generally seen as obsolete.
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By: Maryann Yin,
on 2/23/2015
Academy Award-winning actor Nicholas Cage has joined the cast for the Snowden film adaption. Cage will play “a former U.S. Intelligence Official.”
Two-time Golden Globe-nominated actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt will tackle the titular role of whistleblower Edward Snowden (pictured, via). Filmmaker Oliver Stone wrote a screenplay based on two books, Anatoly Kucherena’s Time of the Octopus and Luke Harding’s The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man.
Here’s more from Variety:”Snowden was charged in 2013 by the U.S. Department of Justice with two counts of violating the Espionage Act and theft of government property and his passport was revoked a week later by the U.S. Department of State. He was granted temporary asylum by Russia last year. Open Road Films will release the film in the U.S. on December 25.” To learn more about Snowden, check out his TED Talk.
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By: Julia Callaway,
on 7/2/2014
When Edward Snowden obtained documents as an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton and made them public, the information disclosed was covered by secrecy under US law. That obligation was part of his employment contract, and such disclosure constituted a crime.
He first disclosed this material to Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian in early June of 2013. On 14 June, the Department of Justice filed a complaint against Snowden, charging him with unauthorized disclosure of national defense information under the 1917 Espionage Act, unauthorized disclosure of classified communication intelligence, and theft of government property.
Snowden made these disclosures while in Hong Kong, and it is reported that the United States sought his extradition pursuant to the treaty it has with Hong Kong, which contains a provision for the exclusion of political offenses. This brings into question the nature of Snowden’s offence.
The Snowden case is inherently simple, and comes down to whether Snowden’s actions were politically motivated or based on social interest. There was no harm to human life, and there was no general social harm. On the contrary, it revealed abuses of secret practices that violate the constitutional right of privacy. Harm to the “national security” is not only subjective but it is also dependent upon who decides what is and what is not part of “national security.”
When it comes to extradition, both the nature of the crime and the motive of the requesting state are taken into account. If the crime for which the person is requested is of a political nature and there is no human or social harm, extradition may be denied on the grounds that it is a purely political offense. This theory is extended to what is called the “relative political offense exception,” when, as incidental to a “purely political offense exception” an unintended social harm results. For example, if someone exercises freedom of speech by speaking loudly in the middle of a square and is charged with disturbing the peace, flees the country, and is sought for extradition, that is a purely political offense exception. If, in the course of fleeing the park they accidentally knock over an aged person who is injured and the state charges him with assault and battery, which would be a relative political offense exception. But the fact that Snowden himself maintains that he did not make public any information that could put intelligence officers in harm’s way, or reveal sources to foreign rivals of the United States means that under extradition law, his case is purely political.
Almost all states allow for the purely political offense exception to apply. Those that do not, bypass the exception for political reasons. This explains why Snowden went to Russia, though the UK would have found it difficult to extradite him too. It helps to look back to the case of Julian Assange, who was sought by the United States when in the UK. When the UK could not extradite Assange because of the purely political offense exception doctrine, the United States had Sweden seek his extradition from the UK for what was a criminal investigation into a common crime (sexual assault). This is what led Assange to seek refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy.
The fact that the purely political offence exception doctrine arose with respect to the Snowden case, assuming it would be the subject of extradition proceedings, is curious to say the least. Would a government official of, say, the Comoros Islands be the subject of similar international attention for the disclosure of some secret skullduggery that the government had classified as top secret? The answer is of course no. What makes this case a cause célèbre is that it has to do with the United States, because it embarrasses the United States, and because it reveals that the government of the United States and at least one of its most important agencies (the NSA) has engaged in violations of the Constitution and laws on the protection of individual privacy. It has shown abuses of the powers by the executive branch to obtain information from private sector companies, which would not be otherwise obtainable without a proper court order. This of course is what makes the Snowden case so extraordinary since it is about a US citizen doing what he believed was right to better serve his country and whose very government was violating its constitution and laws.
M. Cherif Bassiouni is Emeritus Professor of Law at DePaul University where he taught from 1964-2012, where he was a founding member of the International Human Rights Law Institute (established in 1990), and served as President from 1990-2007, and then President Emeritus. He is also President, International Institute of Higher Studies in Criminal Sciences, Siracusa, Italy since 1989. He is the author of International Extradition: United States Law and Practice, Sixth Edition.
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Image: Screenshot of Edward Snowden by Laura Poitras/Praxis Films. CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The post For social good, for political interest: the case of Edward Snowden appeared first on OUPblog.
By: ChloeF,
on 6/20/2014
If a week is a long time in politics then goodness knows what seven years represents in geopolitical terms. The publication of the second edition of the VSI to Geopolitics was a welcome opportunity to update and reflect on what has changed since its initial publication in 2007. Five issues loomed large for me in terms of the second edition.
First, the onset of a global financial crisis and the geopolitics of austerity deserved greater recognition. While much of the conversation focused on the failings of neoliberal globalisation and the banking/financial services sector, the financial crisis was also geographical and geopolitical in nature. Geographically, the impact and scope of crisis and austerity remains resolutely uneven with some communities and localities more exposed to debt, liability, loss and dispossession. The retrenchment of government spending and investment hit those communities highly dependent on public sector employment for example. Geopolitically, the financial crisis brought to the fore the manner in which some countries were represented and understood as financially reckless, political weak and incapable of reforming their economies. The so-called PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain) within the European Union context might be one such example of this geopolitical profiling but another might be the manner in which Cyprus was depicted as a source of ‘hot money’ from Russia and China, which was disrupting the capacity of the Cypriot government to make ‘necessary’ fiscal and political reforms to its economy and society.
Second, the ongoing legacies of the War on Terror needed further exposition. The recent rise of Sunni Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has generated a plethora of commentary much of which insists that the contemporary crises in Iraq and Syria are related to the deeply controversial invasion of Iraq in 2003 by a US-led coalition and a US-led strategy designed to use the invasion of Iraq as a way of introducing democratic transformation in the Middle East and Central Asia. What we now appear to face is a situation where the US and Iran might find they are able to collaborate with one another in a mutual goal of preserving the territorial integrity of Iraq (and perhaps also Syria). All of this seems far removed from the situation in January 2002 when President George W Bush described Iran as part of an ‘axis of evil’ with Iraq and North Korea. As critics noted at the time, this opportunistic labelling did not reflect the complex geopolitical circumstances surrounding those three states. And the refrain ‘states like these’ in the 2002 State of the Union Address by President Bush suggested that there might be even more to add to the list.
Third, the Edward Snowden revelations have highlighted the second edition had to talk more explicitly about an ‘invisible geopolitics’ or one perhaps barely visible to those of us not well connected to the intelligence community. While few would have been surprised by the rise of a surveillance culture post 9-11 in the US and UK (for example), it took these revelations to bring home quite how involved the communications sector was in enabling these mass surveillance cultures. Had popular culture, including films such as Enemy of the State (1998), offered us a pre-warning of the kind of surveillance capabilities that might be brought to bare on domestic citizens? What might the implications be for citizens to express geopolitical dissent in a world where telephone conversations and electronic conversation might be capable of being recorded, analysed and actioned?
Fourth, a new chapter on objects is introduced for the express purpose of focussing attention on the materiality of geopolitics. In other words, stuff. Whether it be either the CCTV camera on the high street or the flag being waved at an official ceremony, geopolitics is made possible by our relationship to objects. In the midst of the 2014 World Cup, it is difficult to avoid the sight of various national flags fluttering from buildings and cars, and being waved vigorously by supporters. In the contexts of mega events such as the Olympics and World Cups, the flag is an essential accomplice to host governments eager to capitalise on such global media exposure while at the same demanding ever more investment in security projects designed to safe-guard participants, spectators and the interests of government sponsors. But the flag can also matter in more mundane ways as well; the flag that might hang from someone’s house barely noticed but a powerful marker of geopolitical possibilities which extend far beyond national identification.
Fifth, and finally, the second edition was a welcome opportunity to remind readers that geopolitics is always embodied. It is not abstract. It is not something merely preoccupied with the global. It is a subject matter that is resolutely everyday. Geopolitics is about the various ways the geographies of politics are made to matter and the manner in which the local, national, regional and global co-constitute one another. Feminist geographers have been at the vanguard of this realisation and demonstrating how bodies, sites, objects and practices are inter-linked to one another and capable of producing very real consequences for people, communities and environments. The border and associated border regimes provide a rich source of material; linking border control/policing ideologies to the mobility and vulnerability of bodies. Sites and environments matter as anyone who has attempted to cross the US-Mexican border or the Mediterranean in a ramshackle boat would testify. For many of those migrants the journey itself will be one they won’t survive.
publishes this month.Professor Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway University of London. Since publication of Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction, he has co-edited three books, Spaces of Security and Insecurity (2009), Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture (2010), and The Ashgate Handbook on Critical Geopolitics (2012). He has also written The Antarctic: A Very Short Introduction. The new edition of Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction
The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday, subscribe to Very Short Introductions articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS, and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.
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The post What has changed in geopolitics? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Dianna Dilworth,
on 5/19/2014
Bluewater Productions is working on a new comic book biography of Edward Snowden. Beyond: Edward Snowden, will explore Snowden's biography to try to understand what motivated him to reveal news of wide spread government surveillance by the NSA. Marvel Comics writer Valerie D'Orazio wrote the story and Dan Lauer did the artwork. "Working with Bluewater on this comic was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring such a fascinating public figure's story to life," stated D'Orazio. "Dan's art really added another dimension to this project and provided a look at a side of Edward Snowden the public has never really seen before. As a writer, I feel really lucky to have found a publisher who was willing to work with me so closely to turn my vision into a reality." The comic will be available in print and eBook versions on May 21st. You can preorder the comic for $3.99 at this link.
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