[…] narratives are found wanting and counter-narratives (of varying plausibility) abound: from the suspicious deaths of government weapons experts, cryptographers and shadowy financiers to the covered-up connections between intelligence agencies and terror groups (see Curtis 2010). Criminologists should shrug off the stigma attached to theorizing that diverges from official accounts and carefully excavate the deep […]
[PDF file]: South of the border (occasional snippets from) Nick Must Spook joke department ‘UK spies will need artificial intelligence’ reads the headline to a Gordon Corera piece on BBC news online.1 Yes, the gags are pretty much writing themselves now. Deferred prosecution agreements – buying your way out of trouble ‘A deferred prosecution agreement, or […]
[PDF file]: […] a movie and fucked the writer. Would a script get you killed? Alford’s earlier book about Hollywood describes an entertainment industry in which the US military and intelligence are thoroughly integrated, a system in which a really radical script simply wouldn’t get made. So who would bother to kill the writer when a word […]
[…] narratives are found wanting and counter-narratives (of varying plausibility) abound: from the suspicious deaths of government weapons experts, cryptographers and shadowy financiers to the covered-up connections between intelligence agencies and terror groups (see Curtis 2010). Criminologists should shrug off the stigma attached to theorizing that diverges from official accounts and carefully excavate the deep […]
[PDF file]: […] or impacts upon democracy. It might, for example, examine all the state conspiracies which now exist within this society; and since the armed forces, police, security and intelligence services (and the big corporations) are almost entirely unaccountable, such research would be entirely apt. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the […]
[PDF file]: […] coup to seize power for himself. He ‘did little to hide his involvement in drug trafficking’ and, according to an interview with Col. Russell Thaden, the NATO intelligence chief, on one occasion he ‘blew his stack upon learning U.S. and British forces had jointly bombed a large drug lab in northern Afghanistan’. He calmed […]
[PDF file]: […] a third party buried in a book mixing fact with faction. But many of the witnesses in other versions of the story can be portrayed as unreliable: intelligence officers of one stripe or another, for example, or the anti-Castro Cubans, and assorted military and right-wing activists, all of whom have axes to grind. If […]
[PDF file]: […] disdain, as Hitler made clear in Mein Kampf: ‘We must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public. The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and […]
[PDF file]: […] should never have gone down. In the last few years, a considerable lobby has urged a 5 reboot of civilian nuclear, citing the extravagant requirements of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data centres as a justification for this. Such arguments should be resisted, as indeed should the unregulated private sector-led AI that is being offered. […]
