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Keywords: Security

  • ENVIRONMENT

    Bitcoin has a massive energy problem

    • Greg Foyster
    • 19 January 2018
    1 Comment

    The digital currency Bitcoin consumes more electricity per year than New Zealand. Yes, the entire country. Escalating energy intensity is actually a security feature of the currency. With the related carbon dioxide emissions from this escalating electricity consumption, Bitcoin is a formula for climate change catastrophe.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Rights are a luxury in the age of national security

    • Justin Glyn
    • 06 October 2017
    7 Comments

    In this time of austerity I am pleased and proud that Our Glorious Leader has decided to curtail the luxuries which we had formerly enjoyed ... for our own good, of course. I refer, of course, to our rapidly diminishing pool of civil liberties.

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  • PODCAST

    Andrew Zammit on sensible ways to think about terrorism

    • Podcast
    • 15 August 2017

    Is there a way to think about terrorism without politics? Do counter-terrorism responses make us safer? What are sensible ways to sift through news reports about acts of terror? Andrew Zammit takes us through these and other questions. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and has worked on terrorism-related research projects at Monash University and Victoria University.

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  • RELIGION

    The cruelty at Manus Island

    • Ann Deslandes
    • 09 August 2017
    4 Comments

    As I write, staff of the Australian immigration authority and their security contractors are working hard to close the detention centre on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, where Australia has held over 900 refugees for the last four years.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    A terrifying new arms race

    • Todor Shindarov
    • 07 August 2017
    4 Comments

    Today’s highly technological era amazes us with possibilities for human growth and innovation, but in our amazement we often forget to tackle various pitfalls. Arguably, the biggest risk is the emerging military technology, about which there are many unanswered questions. We are faced with many uncertainties: security risks due to loss of competitiveness, potential control over advanced weapons by terrorists and, most importantly, reduced comprehension by the wider society—let alone any participation in the decision making process, as the frenzied pace of technological development increases.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Take care not to co-opt soldiers' and civilians' deaths

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 21 April 2017
    4 Comments

    At Anzac Day it is common to set the deaths of soldiers into the context of a larger cause; as shaping a template of national identity. This year we celebrate it in a sea of citizen deaths from terrorism and military actions. Such killings are also often set within a broader context such as democracy, national security, or the Western way of life. Deeper reflection suggests that to attribute meaning and value to people through their relationship to a cause does not enhance but diminishes their humanity.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Striking Syria and the vagueness of humanitarian intervention

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 10 April 2017
    5 Comments

    Absent a Security Council resolution, the US had operated independently, adopting a policing and punitive stance against the Assad regime. 'This action,' House Speaker Paul Ryan insisted, 'was appropriate and just.' If humanitarian intervention is supposedly engineered to punish a regime in breach of obligations to protect the civilian population, it starts looking, all too often, like an act of regime change. At what point is the distinction on such matters as proportion or necessity even credible?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Marr withers 'White Queen' Pauline

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 05 April 2017
    16 Comments

    Hanson doesn't pretend to be religious. Her anti-Islam agenda isn't inspired by some rightwing evangelical passion like Danny Nalliah's nor by a conservative moralistic Catholicism like Cory Bernardi's. But she clearly can feel the pulse of many in the electorate who worry about terrorism and national security. Hanson's politics really only work when there is a 'them' for 'us' to worry about. But where does she get this idea that Islam is not a religion but an ideology?

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Manning mercy belies double standard on whistleblowers

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 19 January 2017
    5 Comments

    Manning became the victim of an institutional drive to target whistleblowers, with the centrepiece of the prosecution focusing on computer crimes and the Espionage Act. Despite the eventual commutation of her 35 year sentence, the severity of that sentence demonstrated the gulf between the cosy, public relations air of an administration keen to project certain achievements and its stomping on those keen to disclose inappropriate and illegal conduct in the security and intelligence services.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Oliver Stone's love letter to hero Edward Snowden

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 28 September 2016
    1 Comment

    Snowden's disclosures regarding the data-mining activities of the US government sparked a worldwide debate about security versus privacy that rages to this day. If his status as either a villain or a hero - a traitor, or the ultimate patriot - remains a matter of debate in some circles, you won't die wondering in which camp Oliver Stone sits. In Snowden the famously didactic filmmaker posits an utterly sympathetic portrait within the structure of a lithe and gripping political thriller.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Young man burned by Australia's detention hell

    • Lisa Stewart
    • 26 September 2016
    21 Comments

    In the early hours of Wednesday morning, 21 September 2016, a young asylum seeker was forcibly removed from the Maribyrnong Immigration Detention Centre. With barely time to scramble his possessions together, he was taken away, placed on a plane and, along with four others, transferred to the high security detention facility on Christmas Island. Why? Because he's done something wrong? Because he's a criminal? No. Just because that's the way we now do things here.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The world we choose to live in

    • Jim McDermott
    • 24 August 2016
    5 Comments

    Maybe standing there we weren't afraid about the fight that was happening across the street, but the fraying at the edges that it represents, the insecurity that the gospel both of Trump and against Trump seems to be creating in our society. It echoes the insecurity we hear in the Brexit vote, and the treatment of both ethnic British citizens and immigrants that followed. Likewise, the resurrection of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party. None of it sounds good and where is it all going?

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