Posted: February 29th, 2012 | Author: Maha Rafi Atal | Filed under: Journalism | Tags: Anonymous, hacking, journo ethics, law, Wikileaks | 2 Comments »
On Sunday night, Wikileaks began releasing its latest cache of documents, this time a set of 5 million emails from Stratfor, the self-described ‘global intelligence’ company. The emails are the result of several Anonymous hacking attacks on Stratfor in December. Anonymous turned the emails over to Wikileaks, who subsequently shared them with 25 partners – a combination of news outlets and activist organizations.
My reaction was one of deep discomfort. These emails are the product of outright theft by Anonymous, and in publishing them, Wikileaks and its partners are taking ownership of stolen goods.
This comes as News International is under investigation for hacking the phones of celebrities, royals, and a murdered teenage girl. How can journalists justify accepting a cache of stolen emails, while calling for the heads of peers who did the same with voicemails? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: February 10th, 2012 | Author: Maha Rafi Atal | Filed under: Economics, Foreign Policy | Tags: Arab Spring, austerity, education, employment, Occupy, Occupy Wall Street, Paul Mason, revolution, students, unemployment, Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere, youth | No Comments »
Paul Mason, the Economics Editor of the BBC’s Newsnight program, has a new book out. In it, he argues that the myriad forms of protest we’ve seen over the last year – the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, student protests, protests against austerity budgets in Europe, are linked, part of a global revolution. Over at my Forbes blog, I’ve got a long review of the book.
The links are, according to Mason:
1. “the near collapse of free-market capitalism,†and in particular the opportunities it presents to the young;
2. rapid demographic growth creating a “youth bulge,†where young people come to represent a growing percentage of a country’s overall population, compounding and amplifying the impact of point 1;
3. growth in educational attainment, which Mason uses to argue that the young people sans opportunity are those who played by the rules and feel their economic loss more acutely as a result. He calls them “graduates with no futureâ€;
4. “an upswing in technical innovation, a surge in desire for individual freedom and a change in human consciousness about what freedom means.†Technology and individualism, Mason says, allow protests to assume a networked structure than can overpower traditional hierarchies.
I’ve been skeptical of this argument since it first appeared on Mason’s blog a year ago.
The three core problems Mason identifies – youth unemployment, the youth demographic bulge, and the diminishing returns on education- are real ones. But in Mason’s account, they are depicted as three components of the same, global problem. That’s simply not accurate.
To learn exactly what’s wrong with Mason’s economic assumptions, and how a more rigorous look at the economic data undermines his argument, read the whole thing.