Bob Garfield

The NSA has defended its controversial surveillance program by arguing that it just collects metadata, and therefore doesn't violate the privacy of individual Americans. But computer scientists at Stanford Security Lab have conducted their own simulation of the NSA's program, and found the metadata to be inherently revealing. Bob speaks with Jonathan Mayer, one of the researchers on the project, about how much can be learned just from the numbers.

What happened in Kiev was a Nazi coup, says the Russian Foreign Ministry, and it’s high time they liberate the Crimeans from the Ukrainian fascists. Why are the Russian people buying this story?

Trigger warnings on the internet have been around for years as a way to prepare for potentially disturbing subjects. Recently a group of students at the University of California, Santa Barbara passed a resolution imploring administrators to include mandatory trigger warnings in potentially offensive syllabi.  Bob speaks to journalist Jenny Jarvie, about the spread of the trigger warning.

From terrorism to catastrophic structural failure to alien tractor beams, theories on the vanishing jetliner have come fast and furious. And one after another, they have themselves disappeared into nothingness. Bob reflects on how a story that lacks not only the “why,” but also the “what,” gets covered in the news.

Somewhere at the edge of our heliosphere, billions of miles from Earth, the Voyager 1 spacecraft carries the sounds of a few musicians from our planet into the interstellar void. It also carries a legacy of extraterrestrial copyright law. Bob talks with The New Yorker's music critic Alex Ross about the nature of intergalactic intellectual property.

With more than 240 million active users engaged in activities ranging from abetting revolutions to reporting tornadoes, Twitter’s cultural impact can’t be denied. But can we use it to chart how we actually communicate, not just with our own cohorts, but the world outside? Bob talks to Pew Research Center's Lee Rainie about mapping the informational ecosystem of Twitter.

Abby Martin, an anchor for the Kremlin-funded news channel Russia Today, launched herself into the headlines this week by sternly denouncing Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine. On her show Breaking The Set, she said: “Just because I work here, for RT, doesn't mean I don't have editorial independence and I can't stress enough how strongly I am against any state intervention in sovereign nations' affairs. What Russia did is wrong.” Given that RT is widely regarded as a 24-hour propaganda machine engineered to polish Russia’s image abroad, Martin shocked many with her outburst. Bob talks with Martin about why she wasn't afraid to speak out. 

The Serbian government has established a commission to investigate unsolved murders of journalists. Remarkably, the commission includes both police and journalists. Bob talks with Politika editor Ljiljana Smajlović about what the commission has already accomplished and her hopes for what it might achieve in the future. 

Bob goes to Hollywood to track down the future of television and locates it....in his laptop. A special report on streaming video.

Despite the seizure of their office and most of their files and equipment by masked gunmen, the journalists at the Crimean Center for Investigative Journalism were prepared: over the weekend they had backed up their entire web history through the Archive-It service from the Internet Archive. David E. Kaplan, executive director of the Global Investigative Journalism Network and one of the coordinators of the effort, tells Bob just how they managed to pull it off. You can check out what they've saved here and here.

Back in September, OTM producer Sarah Abdurrahman, her family, and her friends were detained for hours by US Customs and Border Protection on their way home from Canada. Everyone being held was a US citizen, and no one received an explanation. Sarah tells the story of their detainment, and her difficulty getting any answers from one of the least transparent agencies in the country.

A recent investigation from The Arizona Republic found that since 2005, at least 42 people have been killed by US Customs and Border Protection agents. But getting information about those incidents is no easy task. Bob speaks with Bob Ortega, one of the reporters behind the investigation, about the difficulty in getting answers on use of force at the border.

"Jane Doe" is a 54-year old US citizen who was crossing into the US at the Juarez/El Paso border when agents took her aside for secondary screening. The screening ended up being 6 hours of invasive cavity searches—which yielded nothing and left her traumatized. Bob speaks with Laura Schauer Ives, an ACLU attorney for Jane Doe about what happened at the border that day.

Before an agreement was brokered Friday, the standoff in Kiev between Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s government and the loose coalition of anti-government forces was bloody and telegenic. Bob examines what those gripping images tell us, and what they don't. 

All across the country, communities are fighting to build their own broadband internet networks as an alternative to the services offered by big cable companies. However, these efforts have often been thwarted by legislation lobbied for by, you guessed it, the cable companies. Bob talks with James Baller, president of the Baller Herbst Law group, who has long been leading the legal charge on behalf of municipalities.

Cake - Fashion Nugget

A rash of state laws considered or passed in 2013 seek to rein in drone surveillance. They offer a patchwork of restrictions that seem to reflect the particular culture, or business interests, of individual states. Bob talks with Margot Kaminski, executive director of the Information Society Project and a lecturer at Yale Law School, who has surveyed the legal landscape and noticed a trend.

Historical understanding doesn’t always move ahead. Sometimes it slips backwards. Case in point: In 2012, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of official US involvement in Vietnam, the Pentagon quietly launched VietnamWar50th.com. Bob talks to historian Nick Turse, the author of Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, who noticed that the website’s version of the war seems stuck in the past, reasserting misinformation long since debunked by journalists, historians, and the government’s own Pentagon papers.

In the past OTM has covered sock-puppetry -- the act of assuming another persona online to praise or defend the work of your real self. We’ve seen it done by art critics, comic book artists, and politicians. Well, now it's an orthodox rabbi. Bob speaks with Steven I. Weiss, an anchor and managing editor at The Jewish Channel, about the rabbi and his online persona.