1984: Penn Valley Common Read

Police can put cameras on utility poles and utility companies can’t be sued if that happens. Some Kansas lawmakers worry that expands police powers too much. The Beacon, 20 May 2025.

The Trump administration reportedly fired the head of the US copyright office over the weekend – within days of the dismissed official having published a report about how the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology could run afoul of fair use law. The Guardian, 12 May 2025

New York police have arrested dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters after they occupied part of the main library at Columbia University. BBC, 8 May 2025.

In Washington state, police arrested some 30 student activists overnight after they occupied the University of Washington’s engineering building to protest their school’s ties with weapons maker Boeing. Democracy Now!, 6 May 2025.

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, schools have become training grounds as state-ordered patriotic education seeks to mold soldiers for its future wars. Washington Post, 8 May 2025.

Opponents argue REAL ID creates a de facto national identification system, increasing vulnerability to data breaches and government surveillance. Privacy advocates express concerns about potential data sharing and tracking across states. USA Today, 3 May 2025.

The rapid development of China’s mass surveillance technology falls under the guise of enhanced public security. However, the surveillance serves as the primary measure to commit human rights abuses, particularly against Uyghur Muslims, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority community in Northwest China. University of Denver, 17 Nov 2024.

Police in the Xinjiang region of China rely on a master list of 50,000 multimedia files they deem “violent and terrorist” to flag Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim residents for interrogation, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch, 4 May 2023.

More than a million Muslims have been arbitrarily detained in China’s Xinjiang region. The reeducation camps are just one part of the government’s crackdown on Uyghurs. Council on Foreign Relations, 22 Sep 2022.

In Russia, teachers have been turned in by students or parents for antiwar speech, in some of the starkest examples of the government’s quest to identify and punish individuals who criticize the invasion. Washington Post, 10 April 2022.

China’s surveillance machine has grown with the aid of Chinese and international technology companies. But few have faced repercussions. The Guardian, 30 Sep 2021.

A letter sent by an industry group that includes the internet firms said companies are concerned that the planned rules to address doxing could put their staff at risk of criminal investigations or prosecutions related to what the firms' users post online. Doxing refers to the practice of putting people's personal information online so they can be harassed by others. Wall Street Journal, 5 Jul 2021.

Michael Pritchett's novella "Tania the Revolutionary" takes place in the 1970s, following a young woman newly-escaped from a cult and obsessed with news of Patty Hearst and the Manson Family murders. KCUR, 30 June 2020.

Xi Jinping is using artificial intelligence to enhance his government’s totalitarian control—and he’s exporting this technology to regimes around the globe. The Atlantic, Sep 2020.

It’s been estimated that China’s government has detained as many as a million members of the country’s Muslim population in so-called “re-education camps,” in part of a campaign that has alarmed human rights activists across the world. Drawing on 403 pages of leaked government documents, The New York Times published new details of how the ongoing crackdown took shape under Chinese President Xi Jinping and other leadership in the Communist Party of China, how government workers who resisted the plan were sidelined, and what officials were instructed to tell young people whose families had been detained. Frontline, 21 Nov 2019.

The vision of high-tech surveillance -- precise, all-seeing, infallible -- that China's leaders are investing billions of dollars in every year, making Xinjiang an incubator for increasingly intrusive policing systems that could spread across the country and beyond. It is also a vision that some of President Trump's aides have begun citing in a push for tougher action against Chinese companies in the intensifying trade war. New York Times, 22 May 2019.

George Orwell stayed in a remote Scottish farmhouse to write his new book, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It became one of the most significant novels of the 20th century. Here is the compelling story of Orwell's torturous stay on the island where the author, close to death and beset by creative demons, was engaged in a feverish race to finish the book. The Guardian, 9 May 2009.