• News & article

  Modern world leaders are just walking cliches

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 30/07/2019

  » One of the most striking things about Boris Johnson, who became UK prime minister, is how precisely he fits the stereotype of the eccentric upper-class Brit. With his elevation, Britain joins several major nations led by people who embody their national stereotypes and not the best of them at that. However, it could be argued that it's leaders defying such cliches who take their countries forward.

• News & article

  Secretive Russian billionaire vents to US conservatives

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 13/03/2018

  » It's not every day that a Russian billionaire submits a op-ed piece to the Daily Caller, the conservative US website. When the billionaire in question is as media-shy as Oleg Deripaska, something extraordinary is going on. As the unfortunate recipient of an oversized role in the "Trump-Russia" scandal, he has had enough and is not quite sure how to defend himself.

• News & article

  The year of the woeful world leaders

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 28/12/2018

  » The dictionaries have decided on their 2018 words of the year. Oxford picked "toxic". Merriam-Webster went for "justice". Collins chose "single-use". However, I'd zero in on "misgovernment". Surely, 2018 saw a number of countries misruled by the worst crop of world leaders in recent memory.

• News & article

  What's scary about Facebook's new troll findings

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 03/08/2018

  » Facebook's widely publicised discovery of a possible influence operation through "inauthentic" accounts warrants some scrutiny -- and some reflection about the difference between a genuine political debate on social networks versus its simulated version.

• News & article

  Cambridge Analytica's business simply isn't data

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 23/03/2018

  » As the Cambridge Analytica scandal unfolds, the Western world is meeting a little-known part of its political industry, the one that has operated in developing nations since at least the 1990s. CA's methods as revealed by Britain's Channel 4 News, whose reporter posed as a potential Sri Lankan client, may be a bit extreme -- but for the most part, the consultancy has been one of many firms that have brought Western-style electioneering to lawless environments in which it has been blatantly abused.

• News & article

  Facebook's new mission looks well nigh impossible

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 17/01/2018

  » If Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg is sincere in a recent post about gradually taking the media element out of "social media", he's striking a powerful blow for tech self-regulation, as well as preparing to pay a heavy price for the evolution of his vision. But getting the genie back into the bottle may be too difficult even for Mr Zuckerberg, and, in any case, his creation's problems go far beyond his proposed fix.

• News & article

  Stock market is a lot like bitcoin now

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 08/02/2018

  » Just as President Donald Trump had nothing to do with the stock market's rise, despite the almost 60 boastful tweets he has posted about it since being elected, he has nothing to do with the recent stock crash. Instead, praise the machines -- and blame them, too.

• News & article

  Until it gets hacked, e-government sounds just great

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 23/11/2017

  » A group of Czech security researchers earlier this year discovered a way to steal identities from electronic ID cards used in a number of countries, known in the cryptography industry as a ROCA vulnerability. So far, the vulnerability has caused problems in Estonia -- the country with perhaps the most comprehensive e-identification and e-government system in the world -- and in Spain. Former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a tireless promoter of his country's e-democracy, has said that other countries and institutions have the same problem, too; they're just not talking openly about it. He's very likely right.

• News & article

  The biggest problem of the West is dwindling trust

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 06/01/2017

  » Many Americans gasp when they see Donald Trump mockingly put the word "intelligence" in quotes when referring to the US intelligence community; it seems heretical to challenge the wisdom and expertise of institutions charged with safeguarding their security and freedoms. As a Russian, I just shrug: I have never believed a word coming from my country's intelligence services. This cultural gap is shrinking, though. Western societies are turning into low-trust ones, after the post-Communist, Eastern European model.

• News & article

  Anti-Trump protests are detrimental

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 17/11/2016

  » The footage of the anti-Donald Trump marches and the belligerent tweets criticising the US president-elect fill me with ambivalence. On the one hand, Mr Trump's victory hardly makes me happy; then again, as someone who has seen, and taken part in, both successful and failed mass protests, I believe the liberal cause would be better served if the demonstrators stayed home.

1 2 Next Last