Ben Jackson

At​ the height of spy mania during the First World War, two British agents were sent to East Anglia in a car fitted with a Marconi radio receiver. Their aim was to intercept illicit messages crossing the sea. ‘They left London at noon,’ Basil Thomson, then head of the Met’s Criminal Investigation Department, later recalled in Queer People (1922). ‘At three, they were...

Twitter has been notoriously bad at dealing with online harassment. ‘We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,’ Dick Costolo, the company’s CEO, said in a leaked memo in February. ‘I’m frankly ashamed of how poorly we’ve dealt with this issue during my tenure.’ Twitter’s rules prohibit only ‘direct, specific threats of violence’. Anita Sarkeesian received rape and death threats on Twitter when she tried to raise $6000 for a series of short films examining gender tropes in video games.

Caroline Lucas became the Green Party’s first MP when she won Brighton Pavilion in 2010. Two years later she resigned as leader of the party in England and Wales and was replaced by Natalie Bennett. In 2011, the Greens took minority control of Brighton and Hove City Council, and in 2013 Jenny Jones, who has represented the Greens in the London Assembly since 2000, became a peer in the House of Lords. At the beginning of 2014, the party had 15,000 members; now the figure is closer to 60,000 (Ukip and the Lib Dems have about 45,000 each).

Sometimes​ there’s nothing more useful than bad news. So when it was confirmed at the start of September that Canada’s economy was in recession, the leaders of the opposition parties were turning cartwheels on their way to the stump. ‘The news that is consuming Ottawa today is old hat to Canadians across the country,’ declared Justin Trudeau, the Liberal...

In January​ 2011, Aaron Swartz was arrested for downloading 4.8 million academic articles from the digital archive JSTOR, using a laptop hidden in a broom cupboard on the MIT campus. He was 24, and already a respected and influential computer programmer. As a teenager, he had helped develop RSS, a syndication format that led to the explosion in popularity of blogging, and Markdown, an easy...