naturalfeature:island of cyprus

A New Age of Warfare: How #Internet Mercenaries Do Battle for Authoritarian Governments - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/us/politics/government-hackers-nso-darkmatter.html

The proliferation of companies trying to replicate NSO’s success and compete in what Moody’s estimates is a $12 billion market for so-called lawful intercept spyware has set off a fierce competition to hire American, Israeli and Russian veterans of the world’s most sophisticated intelligence agencies — and for the companies to poach talent from one another.

In late 2017, NSO executives grew concerned about a spate of resignations. Private detectives hired to investigate soon found themselves on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, tailing a group of former NSO employees — all veterans of Israel’s Intelligence Unit 8200 — going back and forth to work at a research facility.

The building was owned by a company affiliated with DarkMatter, an Emirati firm that had quietly hired the Israelis to develop technologies for the U.A.E. to conduct cyberoperations against perceived enemies at home and abroad.

#surveillance

Unfinished Modernity - Books & ideas

▻http://www.booksandideas.net/Unfinished-Modernity.html

signalé par mail par @isskein et ça m’a l’air fort bien.

http://www.booksandideas.net/IMG/arton3356.jpg?1459494735 http://www.booksandideas.net/local/adapt-img/640/20x/IMG/jpg/buffer_zone_nicosie_cote_grec_suspended.jpg?1447063940

Scattered all over the world are abandoned places, promises of modernity that history, economics or politics have shattered. The Suspended Spaces collective has undertaken to project the gaze of contemporary artists onto these ghostly spaces.

Created in 2007 and based in Paris, Suspended Spaces is a collective that brings together academics, artists and theoreticians around fragile and vulnerable spaces that have been abandoned by modernity. This collective is an organic structure, which calls on international academics and artists from different fields in accordance with the places it is travelling to.

The initial project started on the island of Cyprus, with the discovery of the town of Famagusta, whose Greek-Cypriot inhabitants were forcibly evacuated in 1974, as Turkey was taking control of the North of the island. Varosha, a huge modern district of Famagusta that used to be a touristic sea resort, has been guarded for 40 years by the Turkish army, and now appears in an empty and ghostly form to the gazes of those who manage to get close to it.

Landscapes of the Green Line of Cyprus: Healing the Rift.

▻http://www.nakedpunch.com/articles/73

by Dr. Anna Grichting

The UN controlled Green Line occupies approximately 3% of the land mass of the island of Cyprus. Frozen in a military status quo for the past 35 years, this strip of land swallows up abandoned rural villages, agricultural lands that lie fallow, and stone buildings that crumble in the historic city of Nicosia. On the up side, this landscape has escaped the construction boom on both sides of the Green Line, meadows have recovered from the contamination with pesticides and artificial fertilizers, hillside forests have been preserved, and wildlife has been allowed to flourish. Similar to other military buffer zones worldwide, the most salient example being the Korean Demilitarized Zone, the Green Line has, due to its isolation, become really “green”, that is, it has become a haven for biodiversity. The year 2010 being the International Year of Biodiversity - as designated by the United Nations - as well as the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the Republic of Cyprus, leads us to reflect on how this UN controlled Buffer Zone, could be transformed from a military dividing line into a new landscape of cultural and biological diversity[1], and this through a process that brings together the communities on both sides in a common project for an ecologically and socially sustainable future.

#frontières #murs #chypre