Three of the articles I saw today seem to fit together rather well. One, about unpublished manuscripts by Franz Kafka, is by Mark Tran, writing for the Guardian. I’m being particularly careful to identify authors, lest anyone think that the other stories are from the Kafka archives.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post leads with an investigation of Top Secret America by Dana Priest and William Arkin. I was relieved to find that it’s not behind the same login wall as a lot of WashPost content.
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work…
Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year – a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
Last comes a Kafkaesque story by Curt Hopkins at RWW. Blogetry, a WordPress platform, has been closed down by its host, BurstNET, “at the request of an unidentified law enforcement agency.” We know that about 70,000 blogs have been shut down. We don’t know:
- How many of these blogs did a bad thing.
- What bad thing was done.
- Which agency issued the shutdown request.
Happy Kafka Day. Maybe we can celebrate it again tomorrow.
Agree with you there mate. The more technology advances and empowers the individual the more, Kafka like things become…POWER…