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The CIA and Charlie Wilson’s War – The CIA and Hollywood 06 - Sibel Edmonds is our final guest as we dissect this shambolic re-telling of the Soviet-Afghan War. Much of this conversation is devoted to what the film leaves out, such as Charlie Wilson being a CIA asset, the origins of Operation Cyclone being older and much more important than one drunk congressman and his ultra-right wing Christian friend and of course the likes of Jalaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Osama Bin Laden who are completely absent from the movie. This was a no-holds-barred critique of this quite shameful piece of CIA propaganda, and all the more fun because of that.
The CIA and Hollywood – The Bridge with Kira featuring Pearse and Tom - Pearse Redmond and I joined Kira Young once again to discuss our new podcast series The CIA and Hollywood. We discussed our reasons for creating the show as well as where we will be taking it in second season. Later we get into some of the cultural memes that the CIA is currently introducing into popular culture, with a particular emphasis on female characters in TV.
The CIA and The Social Network – The CIA and Hollywood 05 - Thomas Sheridan joins us to talk about the 2010 film The Social Network, which tells the story of the origins of facebook. We discuss the class struggle portrayed in the story, the mechanism by which the film could have been influenced by the CIA, the archetypes in the finely-produced melodrama that plays out, the CIA's silicon valley network which is conspicuous by its absence from the narrative, and the meaning of the movie's dark and brooding tone. We also get into some unusual areas, including the mystery of the sub sandwich.
Why we left youtube – Tom Secker on Trans Resistor Radio - Old friend Aaron Franz invited me back onto Trans Resistor Radio to talk about why we have left youtube. We chatted about our various reasons for giving up on youtube as a platform for distributing our material, but also got into some very curious areas about the ethics of youtube, the psychological impact it has on its users, the sorts of mentalities and behaviours it encourages. Both Aaron and myself have released youtube farewell videos recently, which are quite different in style but equally fun to watch.
The CIA and Enemy of the State – The CIA and Hollywood 04 - Good friend Adam joins us to discuss the 1998 action thriller Enemy of the State, and its unprecedented 'revelation' of surveillance technology. We talk about how the film has a rogue's gallery of technical advisers - including Chase Brandon and Marty Keiser - and how this led to one of the most spectacular depictions of the NSA and the spy state in general. Following from this we analysed the likely purpose in the CIA masking themselves as the NSA in the film, and how this has scuppered the progress of any serious dialogue about mass surveillance.
