The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) are joined by Terry Anderson of the Cartoonist Rights Network International to discuss the state of political cartooning in the United States and around the world during a time of political transition and the ongoing seismic disruption in the print media ecosystem that supported the profession throughout the previous century.
From my new essay, exclusively on ANewDomain.net, about Zuckerberg’s call to Obama asking him to ramp down NSA spying:
“The Internet is our shared space,” Zuckerberg wrote. “It helps us connect. It spreads opportunity. This is why I’ve been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the U.S. government. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government.”
Given that Facebook worked with the NSA to create “the tech equivalent of a safety deposit box that only the NSA and the corresponding tech company can access… (the equivalent of) … a locked briefcase full of intel left in a digital garbage can with the NSA swinging in to pick it up at a prescribed time,” Zuckerberg’s confusion is — what else? — confusing.
It’s as if he is shocked — shocked! — to find that crazy dystopian data-vacuuming of everything about everyone all the time is going on at his own company. Yet he engineered it, in part.
But here’s the part of Zuck’s doth-protest-buckets post I found especially intriguing. He writes:
So it’s up to us — all of us — to build the Internet we want. Together, we can build a space that is greater and a more important part of the world than anything we have today, but is also safe and secure.”
Can we? Can we really?
My feelings about Bush’s politics are well-documented. As a political cartoonist, however, a subject like that only comes along once in a lifetime.
