Photographer Trevor Paglen produced a series of images of US spy headquarters so bloggers like us can finally have some new images to top our posts about NSA leaks. The photos appear in newly-launched digital mag The Intercept, the first of a number of digital publications which will be launched by the Omidyar/Greenwald/etc venture First Look Media — and they attempt to answer the question, "What does a surveillance state look like?"

Artist/geographer Trevor Paglen of UC Berkeley physically and conceptually "maps" hotspots of clandestine military activity in the western United States. The San Francisco Bay Guardian's AC Thompson joined Paglen for a jaunt to Area 51:

I met Paglen about 10 years ago when we were both hanging out at East Bay punk gigs.

[Matt Potolsky's new book, The National Security Sublime, is a tour through the look-and-feel of mass surveillance, as practiced by the most unlikely of aesthetes: big data authoritarian snoops and the grifter military contractors who wax fat on them. This is a subject dear to my heart. — Read the rest

James "New Aesthetic" Bridle (previously) is several kinds of provocateur and artist (who can forget his autonomous vehicle trap, to say nothing of his groundbreaking research on the violent Youtube Kids spammers who came to dominate the platform with hour+ long cartoons depicting cartoon characters barfing and murdering all over each other?).

The End of Trust (previously) is a special issue of McSweeney's, produced in collaboration with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on the themes of technology, privacy and surveillance: it's in stores today, and free to download under a Creative Commons license.

The End of Trust will be McSweeney's issue 54, the first-ever all-nonfiction issue of McSweeney's, with more than 30 contributions on "surveillance in the digital age."

For 25 years, my friend Kal Spelletich of Seemen and Survival Research Labs has lived and worked in a San Francisco warehouse studio where he's built myriad robots, fire machines, and sculptures, hosted music, art, and political action events, and provided support for more than 100 other artists, activists, and fringe characters. — Read the rest

Johannes Grenzfurthner writes, "My cinematic tour de farce through nerd culture comes to the West Coast. Upcoming Bay Area and L.A. premieres!"

Trevor Paglen and Jacob Appelbaum collaborate to create beautiful, acrylic-encased computers that are also Tor nodes, anonymizing data that passes through them, and install the in art galleries all over the world, so that patrons can communicate and browse anonymously, while learning about anonymity and Tor.

Reporters and press freedom advocates from around the world have signed on to support Netzpolitik and condemn the German government's outrageous investigation.

Wink is a site that's dedicated to the unique and glorious qualities of the print book. Similarly, The Thing The Book celebrates all aspects of this amazing medium that revolutionized the world. Created by John Herschend and Will Rogan, the Bay Area artists behind one of my favorite subscription-based art projects, The Thing Quarterly, The Thing The Book gathers together over 30 well-known writers, artists, photographers, and thinkers, and asks them to riff on some traditional element of the book: cover, bookplate, table of contents, footnotes, endnotes, index, endpapers, etc. — Read the rest

"As politicians drape themselves in the flag of free speech and freedom of the press in response to the tragic murder of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists," writes Freedom of the Press Foundation's Trevor Timm at the Guardian, "they've also quickly moved to stifle the same rights they claim to love. — Read the rest

Government surveillance and secrecy "are undermining press freedom, the public’s right to information, and the right to counsel, all human rights essential to a healthy democracy," reports HRW and the ACLU.

San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is presenting a fascinating art exhibition titled Dissident Futures, showcasing artists exploring the unknown of tomorrow. The contributors include quite a few provocative artists we've previously featured on Boing Boing including Trevor Paglen, Paul Laffoley, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and many others. — Read the rest

Boing Boing: Ingenuity's second day will be a mind-bending theatrical experience of presentations, performances, oddities, and wonder taking place at a opulent former Masonic Lodge. We are thrilled to announce our line-up for this experience we've come to think of as vaudeville for Happy Mutants.

"By exposing NSA programs like PRISM and Boundless Informant, Edward Snowden has revealed that we are not moving toward a surveillance state: we live in the heart of one," photographer and artist Trevor Paglen writes in Creative Time Reports. He took the incredible photo of the NSA facility in this article, and has also filmed the black sites in Afghanistan and tracked rendition planes. — Read the rest

My earlier post about Trevor Paglen mentioned that one of his tours is the San Diego home of the Sea Shadow. BB reader John Worthington responded with a link to several interesting photographs of the Sea Shadow taken after it was declassified a decade ago. — Read the rest