Tag Archives: eavesdropping

When Surveillance Is Incompetent

When, in a post last week, I found parallels between the National Security Agency’s extensive data mining attempts and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, I neglected to mention (as this New Yorker essay does) that one has to be careful with books that have themselves become symbols. When this happens, they become like clichés, losing their […]

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U.K. Tabloid Voicemail Scandal as Film Noir

According to Jack Shafer of “Slate,” the U.K. tabloid phone hacking scandal has all the elements of a classic noir, especially “The Big Sleep” and “The Maltese Falcon.”

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