The End of Hypocrisy with Martha Finnemore

The U.S. government seems outraged that people are leaking classified materials about its less attractive behavior. It certainly acts that way: three years ago, after Chelsea Manning, an army private then known as Bradley Manning, turned over hundreds of thousands of classified cables to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, U.S. authorities imprisoned the soldier under conditions that the UN special rapporteur on torture deemed cruel and inhumane. The Senate’s top Republican, Mitch McConnell, appearing on Meet the Press shortly thereafter, called WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, “a high-tech terrorist.”

More recently, following the disclosures about U.S. spying programs

Access the full article here.

Other Writing:

Essay

Ireland’s Cold War

The end of the Cold War didn’t have obvious consequences for everyday life in Ireland. The great battle with communism seemed irrelevant to a country that had only gently been brushed by the forces of industrialized capitalism and affected a threadbare neutrality in international politics. Farming was the thing, even if it had gradually become ...
Read Article
Essay

“Democracy’s Dilemma” with responses from Riana Pfefferkorn, Joseph Nye, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Allison Berke, Jason Healey, Astra Taylor and danah boyd, and a reply to the responses by Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier. with Bruce Schneier

The Internet was going to set us all free. At least, that is what U.S. policy makers, pundits, and scholars believed in the 2000s. The Internet would undermine authoritarian rulers by reducing the government’s stranglehold on debate, helping oppressed people realize how much they all hated their government, and simply making it easier and cheaper ...
Read Article