Teh Interwebs

slow fuse

“We don’t discuss intelligence matters,” Australia’s bewildered Prime Minister told the media again this morning, making him the only person left on earth not discussing intelligence matters. Finally, seven months after the fuse was lit, the scandal of the US National Security Agency surveillance state has…

spook #estimates

Senate Estimates committees are my favourite parliamentary obscurity, a thrice-yearly ritual of tense cross-examination and…

when asked anything

Couple of weeks ago I dipped a toe in the wilds of Reddit for the first time, hosting an Ask Me Anything for an hour and a half after Parliament had risen for the night

(The thread is here…

your taxes, mapped: the openeconomy project

Web-based financial data visualisation

the filter, reloaded

Another chapter has opened on the internet filtering debate in Australia. You might recall a scrappy and quite effective campaign that raged from 2007 to 2010 against a Government proposal to force ISPs to block the somewhat arbitrary ‘Refused Classification’ list in Australia. On the eve of…

with friends like these…

By now, anyone following the extraordinary twists in the WikiLeaks story will have heard the Government, from the Prime Minister on down, insisting that they have provided full consular assistance for Julian Assange, and don’t know anything about US plans to prosecute him.

closing the net

Midnight, December 31 2011. Fireworks lit up world capitals timezone by timezone. The cheerful familiarity of the Sydney Harbour…