Gail Albert Halaban’s new series Italian Views — with an accompanying monograph from Aperture (2019) — extends the photographer’s ongoing project to the cities of Venice, Rome, Naples, Palermo, Florence, Lucca, and Milan, collaborating with pairs of neighbors in these cities to create visual short stories that the viewer is invited to write for him/herself. Halaban’s series is a collection of images taken through and into windows in New York City, a project that earned her international recognition in 2012.

The drive to destroy the private sphere of consciousness inextricably links Moore's law and Singularity with advances in surveillance, data mining and the systematic destruction of personal privacy. Singularity and privacy will not coexist, although the technology that propels us toward the Singularity needs privacy and its destruction to study human intelligence more acutely. As private consciousness becomes more available for examination and translation, Singularity becomes more realistic. 

Who is mined, who is profiled, and who suffers at the hands of an extensive regime of corporate and government surveillance raises issues of social and racial justice. PRISM, the National Security Agency’s clandestine electronic surveillance program, builds on a history of similar efforts whose impacts have affected racial and ethnic minorities in disproportionate ways. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counter Intelligence Program (“COINTELPRO”), established in 1956, represents one of the forbearers of PRISM. 

Despite Bloomberg Businnessweek's accusation that the Chinese army is spying on Americans, the report that led to the charges has serious flaws. These raise troubling questions about a repetition of  the "China spy syndrome." Beginning with The New York Times January 30 disclosure of Chinese hacking, every publication of note or of little note has since run one or more stories on cyber attacks emanating from China.