NYT 2016 Best Book Picks

Thanks: New York Times Book Review

1. The Association of Small Bombs, Karan Mahajan, fiction. Review here.
2. The North Water, Ian McGuire, fiction. Review here.
3. The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead, fiction. Review here.
4. The Vegetarian, Han Kang, fiction. Review here.
5. War and Turpentine, Stefan Hertmans, fiction. Review here.
6. At the Existentialist Cafe, Sarah Bakewell, nonfiction. Review here.
7. Dark Money: The Hidden History of Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Jane Mayer, nonfiction. Review here.
8. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond, nonfiction. Review here.
9. In the Darkroom, Susan Faludi, nonfiction. Review here.
10. The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, Hisham Matar, nonfiction. Review here

25 Literary Classics

1. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
2. The Invisible Man
3. Common Sense
4. Paradise Lost
5. Daisy Miller
6. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
7. A Tale of Two Cities
8. The Red Badge of Courage
9. Heart of Darkness
10. Up From Slavery
11. On Liberty
12. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
13. The Jungle
14. Anthem
15. The Republic
16. Great Expectations
17. The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
18. Pride and Prejudice
19. The Call of the Wild
20. Leaves of Grass
21. Moby Dick
22. The Last of the Mohicans
23. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade)
24. The Scarlet Letter
25. Wuthering Heights

14 Heroes & 14 Villains

Source: Blog | Access

Heroes

1. David Kaye, Special Rapporteur to the United Nations Human Rights Council on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression
2. U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, introduced and was a crucial advocate for the USA FREEDOM Act of 2015.
3. Malkia Amal Cyril, executive director of the Center for Media Justice and co-founder of the Media Action Grassroots Network, Malkia Amal Cyril’s work
4. MPs David Davis and Tom Watson
5. Maricarmen Sequera is the director of TEDIC, a Paraguayan digital rights organization
6. Journalists Scahill and Begley revealed that American and British spies hacked into the internal computer network of the world’s largest producer of SIM cards and stole vast quantities of encryption keys
7. As director of the digital liberties organization Bolo Bhi, Farieha Aziz has been at the forefront of the campaign to modify the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2015, currently under consideration in Pakistan.
8. Netzpolitik released confidential documents to the public exposing Germany’s plans to launch bulk surveillance programs
9. a District Court struck down an 11-year-old gag order imposed by the FBI on Nicholas Merrill, the owner of Calyx, an internet service provider.
10. Kakao (formerly Daum Kakao), owns a South Korean internet company with a popular messaging service
11. The U.N. Human Rights Council
12. Moxie Marlinspike (& team), founder of Open Whisper Systems, an open source software group that freely offers the programs Signal, TextSecure, and Redphone
13. Kate Westmoreland is a cybercrime and human rights expert with Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society. Her January paper, Foreign Law Enforcement Access to User Data: A Survival Guide and Call for Action,
14. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO has vocally resisted government demands to weaken the company’s data security practices

Villains

1. Hacking Team, covertly sold advanced communications surveillance services and resources to multiple governments and entities with poor records on human rights.
2. Prime Minister Manuel Valls, pushed through dangerous new legislation that lacks clarity and precision, and authorizes French intelligence services to exercise broad surveillance powers without prior judicial approval or oversight.
3. Pablo Romero Quezada is the former director of Ecuador’s intelligence agency, the Secretaría Nacional de Inteligencia (SENAIN)
4. Attorney General Githu Muigai fought to preserve Kenya’s Security Laws despite a High Court judgment overturning the legislation.
5. Canadian MP Steven Blaney was the sponsor of Bill C-51
6. U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron

7. Anthony Batts, former Commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department in the U.S. Acting under a nondisclosure agreement with the FBI that was signed by a previous commissioner, the Baltimore Police Department used the “Stingray” surveillance device 4,300 times

8. Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi argued before India’s Supreme Court that privacy is not a fundamental right
9. Spanish Judge Javier Gómez Bermúdez jailed seven people without specifying the individualized charges or facts attributed to each suspect, forcing the defendants to make statements without knowing what they were accused of.
10. Telefonica
11. Prime Minister of Thailand, Prayut Chan-o-cha approved legislation to create a National Cybersecurity Committee
12. Washington Post Editorial Board suggested that the U.S. Congress could compel Apple and Google to use their “wizardry” to create a “Secure Golden Key” for the government to access otherwise secure user data
13. Gerhard Schindler is president of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND)
14. U.S. Senator Richard Burr, As chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Burr has been a driving force behind the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) legislation