Vanity Fair article about Edward Snowden

The latest issue of the magazine has a profile of the famous whistleblower that traces his life history and his evolution from a hesitant and tentative participant in online forums for computer enthusiasts to an assured, self-confident, sometimes cocky, and even abrasive personality. It is behind a paywall but one of the authors was interviewed at length on Fresh Air and it made for good listening and the interview and the transcript can be found here.
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How much was the NSA involved in Heartbleed?

Given all the revelations about the NSA and GCHQ spy agencies intercepting the communications of individuals all over the globe, the obvious question that arises is to what extent they were involved in the Heartbleed bug, the weakness in the OpenSSL protocol that enables third parties to extract 64K chunks of information at a time from targeted computers without the hosts being aware, a security problem so serious that it even caused the Canadian government to suspend electronic tax filing.
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Greenwald and Poitras dedicate their Polk awards to Snowden

Andrew Rice of New York magazine had an entertaining description of the Polk Awards last night where Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill, and Barton Gellman received the award for National Security Reporting for their work on the Snowden documents. Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian who supported the printing of the first major articles, also was present to pick up a well-deserved award for his paper.
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The growing mess in Ukraine

Once the US and western powers accepted that it was ok for the elected government of Ukraine to be overthrown by unrest (either spontaneous or secretly instigated by the US) caused ostensibly by what were essentially policy differences over whether the county should move closer to the west or Russia, things that are normally decided by elections, it seems that it has now become the norm in that country for people in various parts of it to take things into their own hands.
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They are not ‘bug splats’

The drone operators who remotely order the missiles that blow up people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and who knows where else the US is killing people refer to the victims of their airstrikes as ‘bug splats’, presumably because of the resemblance of the images they receive after the strike to what one sees on the wind shields of cars. This is part of the general dehumanizing that is adopted when you are killing people in cold blood from a distance.
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