The G4S debacle in London is a wake-up call on outsourcing security

By Greg Barton, Monash University

Stuff happens. When organising something as big as the Olympic Games some things are bound to go wrong.

Sometimes the failures are simply funny. Just one day after its public unveiling in Trafalgar Square, the official 500 day Countdown Clock stopped counting down. It was a real-egg-on-face moment for LOCOG but harmless black comedy for everyone else.

Why is Telstra Next G serving your data to Netsweeper in America?

By Mark Gregory, RMIT University

Telstra representatives have this week admitted to collecting data for a new internet filtering product and sending this data to the USA office of Netsweeper Inc.

Netsweeper Inc, based near Toronto, Canada, provides web content filtering and web threat management solutions. Web threat management solutions are designed to reduce email and web based threats such as phishing, viruses, malware and include the capability to do content filtering.

The Shock Doctrine and Disaster Capitalism

It’s All a Grand Capitalist Conspiracy

When Milton Friedman died in 2006, the acclaim for his work was nearly universal. Even his ideological opponents, like Paul Krugman and Lawrence Summers, treated this Nobel Prize-winning economist — who taught for decades at the University of Chicago — with respect.

Naomi Klein will have none of it. In her new book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” she essentially accuses Friedman of being the godfather of a Mafia-like gang, the Chicago Boys, who have exploited the public disorientation associated with catastrophes and political crises to impose an unwanted free-market ideology on much of the world.

Lessons in Secular Criticism, Thinking Out Loud 2012

“Secular criticism” is a term invented by Edward Said to combat the desire of much of modern thinking to reach for the transcendental, the very space philosophy wrested away from religion in the name of modernity. Stathis Gourgouris reinvokes the term “secular criticism” as a compass for addressing the necessity to reconceptualise the political space against religious tendencies of all kinds. Gourgouris will focus specifically on those parameters needed for societies to create new forms of collective reflection, interrogation, and action, which alter not only the current terrain of dominant politics but the very self-conceptualisation of what it means to be human. The most important dimension of the secular imagination is not the battle against religion per se, but the creation of radical conditions of social autonomy. Gourgouris will address these issues with the following series of lectures.                            

Tight Security Measures for March 25th Parade

Tight Security Measures for March 25th Parade