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Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias - Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress. His first book, with the working title Heads in the Sand: Iraq and the Strange Death of Liberal Internationalism, scheduled to be published next spring by John Wiley and co., deals with the Democratic Party's struggle to find a post-9/11 foreign policy, focusing primarily on the rise and (hopefully) fall of the liberal hawk movement.

Previously, he was a staff writer at The American Prospect and an Associate Editor at TPM Media, where he contributed to the group blogs Tapped and TPMCafe. His main blog, now at The Atlantic, has existed in various forms since the dark ages of the blogosphere in January 2002.

His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Slate, The New Republic, and The Washington Monthly, and he is a regular on BloggingHeads.tv and makes the occasional radio or television appearance.

Desperately out of touch with the American mainstream, Yglesias was born and raised in Manhattan and studied philosophy at Harvard where he was editor in chief of The Harvard Independent, a campus alternative weekly.

His latest writings can be found on the Matthew Yglesias blog.

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The Superphone

By Matthew Yglesias

Jul 21 2008, 5:23 PM ET Comment

It seems that one of Gordon Brown's aides was caught in a "honeytrap" and let a Chinese spy steal his Blackberry. Fair enough. But this doesn't have the ring of truth to it at all:

Experts say that even if the aide’s device did not contain anything top secret, it might enable a hostile intelligence service to hack into the Downing Street server, potentially gaining access to No 10’s e-mail traffic and text messages.


Can't the owner just report the phone stolen and have the service canceled? And why would a Blackberry let you do that anyway? This particular case aside, it seems to me more broadly that a certain set of people is taking advantage of low levels of tech literacy among certain elements of the western security services to make a lot of money by hyping up fake cybersecurity problems. It's true that Chinese encryption-breaking skills play an important role in Neuromancer but that doesn't make this a real problem.

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