My CCC talk in Ber­lin in Decem­ber 2007 about the role of Intel­li­gence agen­cies in society.

In the name of pro­tect­ing nation­al secur­ity, spy agen­cies are being giv­en sweep­ing new powers and resources. Their intel­li­gence has been politi­cised to build a case for the dis­astrous war in Iraq, they are fail­ing to stop ter­ror­ist attacks, and they con­tin­ue to col­lude in illeg­al acts of intern­ment and tor­ture, euphemist­ic­ally called “extraordin­ary rendi­tion”. Most west­ern demo­cra­cies have already giv­en so many new powers to the spies that we are effect­ively liv­ing in police states. As an informed com­munity, what can we do about this?

Here is the present­a­tion page on the CCC-2007-web­site. A video of the talk can be down­loaded from the talk-page or watched dir­ectly through Google-video. I was hon­oured to receive a stand­ing ova­tion at the end of my talk.  A write-up of the talk can be found here.  Enjoy!