Bewarethewumpus

Author : Craig Finlay

Stella was watching the blue plastic ice cube fall from her hand to the glass at quarter-G, about 2.25 meters per second. D-deck in the outer rings had the most gravity. And the emergency hatches on d-deck, recessed a further 5 feet out, actually delivered a little more than quarter G. Sometimes she laid flat on her back there, tried feeling the extra ounces she weighed.

A shadow fell across the glass on the floor in front of her. She looked up and saw Andrew peeking over the side of the hatch wall.

“Why are you drinking alone in an emergency hatch?” He asked.

“I like watching how it splashes at highest-G.”

Andrew looked around. No one else in the deck. The floors sloping up and away a hundred yards either side.

“You’re an odd duck, Stella.”

Stella laughed. “You’ve never seen a duck.”

“Sure I have.”

“Not a real one.”

“No,” he admitted.

They were silent a minute.

“This is the closest we can ever get to being in a gravity well,” she said.

“That’s probably best,” Andrew said. “I don’t think our knees would much appreciate it if we suddenly made them carry four times as much weight.”

“Exactly.”

“Exactly what?”

Stella stirred her drink with her finger. Watched the light in the brown liquid sluggishly recover. “Our bodies,” she said. “So much taller and skinnier than our parents. There’s no place else we could live.”

“Well there’s no place else we’re gonna live, so that works out, too.”

She laid flat on her stomach and pressed her nose to the small circular porthole. All stars faint and equal, slowly arcing.

“Is it?” she said.

Andrew sighed. “You okay, Stel?”

Stella rolled over. “They never asked us, Andy. We were born here and we’ll die here. We’ll do the same to our kids. We won’t ask them if they want it either.”

“That’s why they call it a generational ship, Stel.”

“And it never occurred to them that that meant several generations of slaves?”

Andrew’s mouth worked a bit. Through the porthole behind her he could see the windows of Main Section, soft and blue and always. They had the illusion of rising as the ring continued its eternal 32 minute-long rotation.

“We’re not slaves, Stel.”

“We might as well be. We can’t leave.”

“People on Earth used to couldn’t leave, either.”

“Earth had a hell of a lot more room, though.”

Andrew laughed. “You’ve never seen room.”

“Exactly,” and Stella stretched long, and Andrew watched her shirt pull up over her stomach, which fell away between her hip bones.

“Besides,” he said. “You tested out engineering. I tested out sanitation. Count your blessings. In a year we finish school and you’ll be learning how to run this place. I’ll be scrubbing it.”

Stella fixed her eyes on the boy. “It’s all the same, ship, Andy. We’re all going the same way.”

“Exactly!” Andrew slapped both hands on the rim of the hatch, and hopped upright. “Now come on, you. Zero-G soccer.”

She looked at him a while, backlit by the track lights. His knees the widest part of his legs, his mop of hair and high cheeks.

“No,” she said. “I’ll stay here a while. Find me later,” and rolled back onto her stomach.

Andrew sighed. “Fine.” He turned to leave, then caught himself.

“Stel?”

“Mmm?”

“No one ever got asked. Remember that movie about the slums? People got born there, too. They didn’t ask to be, but they were, and had to deal with it. So we live here. We keep this place going so in a few hundred years it gets somewhere. Just the way it is.”

Stella lay there alone for some time, watching the lights of Main Section leave her sightline.

“Yeah,” she said aloud. “That doesn’t make it right, though.”

Author : James Anderson

They called us handicapped. Our bodies didn’t develop the way other people’s did. We were weaker than them, we tired more easily. Some of us thought it was God, others just thought it was genetics. We didn’t know we were being prepared.

Decades after the war ended, humanity thought they had finally gotten it right. There was plenty of space for the survivors, food was plenty. For the first time anyone could remember, there was hope.

But the war had an effect no one foresaw. The scientists called it subnucleonic atmospheric degradation, whatever that is. All we know is that the weapons which had finally ended the war, had also poisoned the air. It didn’t manifest itself immediately, but by the time we noticed the effects, it was too late.

We needed a new home, somewhere out in the stars. Our scientists had already solved several of the most difficult problems posed by interstellar travel. Nuclear propulsion came from advances in missile technology. The hardened shield to protect travelers from cosmic radiation came from a need for protection from those same missiles. But mankind had not yet solved the debilitating issues associated with prolonged weightlessness on the human body. That’s where we came in.

Those of us in the Exploration Corps have all been diagnosed with various muscle diseases when we were young. Muscular dystrophy, fibromyalgia, even soft tissue sarcoma. Experiments showed that our health actually improved in space. We had been dealing with atrophying muscles all our lives, and in the weightlessness of space, what hindered the young, strapping astronauts of yesteryear was daily life to us.

So we will leave, and we will search the cosmos. There isn’t much time, but there will be enough for our small group of explorers to find a new home.

They called us handicapped, but now they call us the future.

I got a message on Twitter from an EarthBound fan named Adam the other day:

@ClydeMandelin I posted a link to the Mother 3 translation page on Miiverse, and got a warning that it was related to "criminal activity".

— Adam L. Welsh (@AwelCruiz) April 10, 2015

And he then sent some photos of the messages and warnings involved:

Apparently this isn’t just a MOTHER 3-only thing, though; something similar supposedly occurs if you post about Project M, a popular mod for Smash Bros. Brawl. I’m told that even sometimes just mentioning it as “PM” can get you in trouble, which is a little silly and bothersome when you want to use PM as an abbreviation for something else, like Paper Mario, for instance.

Anyway, just watch out – even if you mean well, don’t get yourself banned from Miiverse by linking to the MOTHER 3 translation!

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Author : Brandon Crilly

I finished chewing a bite of deep-fried haddock – my fourth such meal of the week – and said, “I beg your pardon?”

Across the table, my teacher-turned-colleague and very good friend stared at me over his glass of stout. He savored his next sip with exaggerated slowness.

“I said that I just realized something,” he repeated. “If men truly understood women, nothing on this world would ever get accomplished.”

“That part was clear. My problem was that I don’t quite understand your meaning.”

He smiled at me in the same wily manner that had taunted me for decades. “Consider this. If men knew exactly what women wanted – no, better, if men actually knew what women were thinking – they could get them at any time. Men would therefore do nothing else.”

Through another bite of haddock, I asked, “And by ‘get them,’ you mean…”

“Use your imagination.”

I tried my best to look unimpressed while I dislodged something from between my teeth.

“You don’t agree?” he asked.

“I just wonder about your fixations sometimes. Our purpose here is a little more nuanced than…”

I stopped as our waitress wandered over to refill my glass of water. My friend turned his attention on her. “A question, if you please. Consider: if men understood women perfectly, nothing would ever get accomplished. Agree?”

The waitress frowned for a moment. “No, everything would.”

“How do you mean?”

“If you understood exactly what we wanted, you’d know you have to get everything done to keep us happy. Like the camping gear my husband still hasn’t put away.”

I smiled at her lumping us in with ‘men’ – an ongoing testament to the work we had done on our appearance. She favored me with a wink and wandered away, no doubt assuming the matter to be settled.

By the crease in my friend’s brow, I already knew what he was going to propose.

“That was a challenge,” he declared. I mouthed along silently without needing to look up. “This must be tested!”

Since I knew there was no way to dissuade him, I simply waved him ahead.

With a dramatic flourish, my friend extracted his shifter from the pocket of his coat and placed it gently on the table. None of the other patrons paid him any attention. When he pressed his palm to the shifter, the tiny, crescent-shaped device began to glow. I closed my eyes, as its effects usually made me nauseous.

I noticed the silence first. When I opened my eyes, the pub was empty. By the dust on the tables, the empty bottles on the shelves, and the groundhog munching plants nearby, I gathered it had been that way for some time. Through the open double-doors, I could see a similar emptiness outside – save for a couple sitting atop a car across the street. If I had been more bashful I would have immediately averted my gaze.

“How far back did you affect the change?”

“Two years.” He looked almost gleeful.

“Good gods. Fine, I owe you the next meal.”

“At a place of my choosing?”

The couple atop the car distracted me briefly. “Yes, yes. Just get on with it.”

He beamed at me as he touched the shifter again. I closed my eyes and waited for the pub to return to its former glory. The din of activity returned, the patrons unaware of anything having happened.

Our waitress passed nearby and I tipped my glass in her direction.

As he finished his stout, my friend’s smile never wavered. I reminded him not to gloat and then returned to my meal.

What if, when Petunia Dursley found a little boy on her front doorstep, she took him in? Not into the cupboard under the stairs, not into a twisted childhood of tarnished worth and neglect–what if she took him in?

Nintendo is letting the past hold it back from moving toward the future.

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Secret mass surveillance conducted by the Drug Enforcement Administration is falling under renewed scrutiny after fresh revelations about the broad scope of the agency’s electronic spying.

On Tuesday, USA Today reported that for more than two decades, dating back to 1992, the DEA and the Justice Department “amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking.”

Citing anonymous current and former officials “involved with the operation,” USA Today reported that Americans’ calls were logged between the United States and targeted countries and regions including Canada, Mexico, and Central and South America.

The DEA’s data dragnet was apparently shut down by Attorney General Eric Holder in September 2013. But on Wednesday, following USA Today’s report, Human Rights Watch launched a lawsuit against the DEA over its bulk collection of phone records and is seeking a retrospective declaration that the surveillance was unlawful.

The latest revelations shine more light on the broad scope of the DEA’s involvement in mass surveillance programs, which can be traced back to a secret program named “Project Crisscross” in the early 1990s, as The Intercept previously revealed.

Documents from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, published by The Intercept in August last year, showed that the DEA was involved in collecting and sharing billions of phone records alongside agencies such as the NSA, the CIA and the FBI.

The vast program reported on by USA Today shares some of the same hallmarks of Project Crisscross: it began in the early 1990s, was ostensibly aimed at gathering intelligence about drug trafficking, and targeted countries worldwide, with focus on Central and South America.

It is also reminiscent of the so-called Hemisphere Project, a DEA operation revealed in September 2013 by The New York Times, which dated as far back as 1987, and used subpoenas to collect vast amounts of international call records every day.

There is crossover, too, with a DEA database called DICE, revealed by Reuters in August 2013, which reportedly contains phone and Internet communication records gathered by the DEA through subpoenas and search warrants nationwide.

The precise relationship between Crisscross, DICE, Hemisphere and the surveillance program revealed by USA Today is unclear. Whether or not they were part of a single overarching operation, the phone records and other data collected by each were likely accessible to DEA agents through the same computer interfaces and search and analysis tools.

A Justice Department spokesman told Reuters Wednesday that “all of the information has been deleted” and that the DEA was “no longer collecting bulk telephony metadata from U.S. service providers.”

What the spokesman did not say is that the DEA has access to troves of phone records from multiple sources — and not all of them are obtained from U.S. service providers.

As The Intercept’s reporting on Project Crisscross revealed, the DEA has had large-scale access to data covertly collected by the NSA, CIA and other agencies for years.

According to NSA documents obtained by Snowden, the DEA can sift through billions of metadata records collected by other agencies about emails, phone calls, faxes, Internet chats and text messages using systems named ICREACH and CRISSCROSS/PROTON.

Notably, the DEA spying reported by USA Today encompassed phone records collected by the DEA using administrative subpoenas to obtain data from phone companies without the approval of a judge. The phone records collected by the agency as part of Project Hemisphere and the data stored on the DICE system were also collected through subpoenas and warrants.

But ICREACH alone was designed to handle two to five billion new records every day — the majority of them not collected using any conventional search warrant or a subpoena.

Instead, most of the data accessible to the DEA through ICREACH is vacuumed up by the NSA using Executive Order 12333, a controversial Reagan-era presidential directive that underpins several NSA bulk surveillance operations that monitor communications overseas. The 12333 surveillance takes place with no court oversight and has received minimal Congressional scrutiny because it is targeted at foreign, not domestic, communication networks.

This means that some of the DEA’s access to mass surveillance data — records collected in bulk through subpoenas or warrants — may have been shut down by Holder in 2013. But it is likely that the agency still has the ability to tap into other huge data repositories, and questions remain about how that access is being used.

Photo: AP/Guatemalan U.S. Embassy

The post DEA Global Surveillance Dragnet Exposed; Access to Data Likely Continues appeared first on The Intercept.

Fans of Obscure Gera Facts will know I’m a big supporter of experimental multiplayer design, which is why when you first glance at Kieru I kindly ask you not to glaze over because it basically looks identical to MadWorld.

The game is heavily stylised, but it’s all for the sake of a really neat gameplay concept. “Kieru’s world is monochrome, as are the two teams of stealthy Ninjas who occupy it,” reads a block of text from the game developers, the little Aussie collective Pine Fire Studios. “A black Ninja in shadow or a white Ninja in the light are completely invisible to their oblivious opponents. Stealth, deception and sudden, surprise aggression will win the day.”

… [visit site to read more]

A Kansas man arrested and charged Friday morning for attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State was under surveillance by the FBI last year when he checked himself into a mental institution and was not regarded as an immediate threat, according to a document obtained by The Intercept.

In fact, the U.S. Army had approved the new recruit for a Secret clearance.

John T. Booker Jr., who also goes by the name Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, was arrested Friday and charged with attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State, plotting to use a weapon of mass destruction, and planning to destroy property with an explosive.

Yet in March 2014, Booker was already being watched by the FBI, who determined he had no ability to carry out an attack, according to a “Situational Information Report” issued last year by the FBI’s Kansas City division. Booker had in Feb. 2014 signed up to join the U.S. Army and had even been approved for a security clearance, the FBI document states.

Booker’s plans to join the Army were derailed the next month by his deteriorating mental health.

“BOOKER voluntarily checked himself into a mental health facility for evaluation on 26 March 2014; Kansas City Division is in contact with the facility and will be apprised if BOOKER is deemed healthy enough to be released. BOOKER has not been charged with a crime at present. BOOKER does not have access to a vehicle or other form of transportation at this time, nor is there evidence he possess firearms,” the report, issued March 30, 2014, stated.

What changed in the following year was not necessarily Booker’s mental state, but the introduction of two FBI informants into his life.

It is unclear when Booker was released from the mental health institution, but in Oct. 2014 he met the first of two FBI informants. By the spring of 2015, Booker had been introduced to the second informant — and, according to the indictment unsealed Friday, the two informants provided the 20-year-old with the materials and support that led to his arrest on Friday on charges stemming from his alleged plans to carry out an attack against Fort Riley in support of the Islamic State.

There were early warning signs of Booker’s interest in terrorism — and his mental instability. In the months prior to signing up for the U.S. Army — and being granted a secret-level clearance — Booker has posted a series of comments on social media, saying he wanted to “wage jihad” against America.

“I wanna be a martyr (shaheed)!!! YA, brothers and sisters,” Booker said in a comment on YouTube five months before enlisting in the military.

Around the same time, months before being approved for a security clearance, Booker posted in the comments section of a YouTube video showing graphic video of American soldiers under fire in Iraq in 2008. “I’m am Muslim. Muslims had no business in Iraq,” Booker wrote.

On March 9, a month after he enlisted at the Kansas City recruiting station, Booker posted a series of photos of Osama bin Laden holding various weapons. “Allahu Akbar J Sheikh Osama bin Laden and his army,” reads a post by one photo.

On March 15, a post on Facebook expressed Booker’s desire to die for his beliefs. “I want to be with my lord so bad that I cry but I will miss you guys I am not going to lie,” he wrote.

Those comments, and the initial FBI warning, were first written about by this reporter for FoxNews.com. An FBI spokesperson attempted to downplay the threat at the time.

“We have interviewed this individual,” the spokeswoman told this reporter at the time. “There is no imminent threat to public safety, nor should the public be concerned that this threat exists from an individual at large.”

Photo: FBI

The post Army Recruit Charged With Helping ISIS Watched by FBI, Given Clearance by Army appeared first on The Intercept.

Yesterday, Philadelphia finally got around to releasing the results of a long-in-the-works Comcast customer service survey of city residents, and the results weren’t very favorable for the cable company. Of course, Comcast, which had more than a month to review the report before it was made public, is now trying to discredit it, saying the consultants that put it together should have asked Comcast — and not the citizens of Philadelphia — for accurate data about customer service.

In a blog post inexplicably titled “A Philadelphia Love Story,” Comcast’s Exec VP David Cohen — who was the Chief of Staff for then-Mayor Ed Rendell the last time Comcast’s franchise agreement came up for renewal — writes that “We appreciate some of the positive conclusions in the consultant’s report [Ed. note: No duh], but overall believe many of the findings are inaccurate, over-stated, or misleading, and we will deliver comprehensive proof of those facts to the City.”

Cohen actually complains that the consultants hired to do the report chose to speak to actual Philadelphia residents about their Comcast experience rather than rely on data from the company.

“[The consultants] never contacted Comcast to solicit objective, verifiable data,” states the blog post, “resulting in conclusions that are not based on easily available and decisive data, and that are simply untrue.”

What’s curious is which statistics from the survey Cohen cherry-picks to complain about.

He claims that the 15% of survey respondents who said they got a busy signal while trying to call Comcast are lying, because Comcast’s in-house data puts it at only .05%.

As for the 61% of people whose calls weren’t answered within 30 seconds, Cohen claims that Comcast has this down to less than 10%, putting it in compliance with the FCC customer service standard.

But that’s it.

Sure, Cohen claims that “Similar discrepancies can be found in virtually all aspects of the consultant’s findings and report,” but why not single them out? If you’re going to debunk something, go all the way.

Which is why we note that Cohen doesn’t dispute the fact that Philadelphia had the lowest customer satisfaction level of all six markets surveyed by the consultants in the last six years, while also having the highest rates for service in those markets.

The Comcast post doesn’t take issue with the fact that nearly 2/3 of Philly subscribers had to call customer service in the previous year, or that billing issues were the top reason for calling the company.

It doesn’t try to explain away why 99% of the 1,759 written comments on the survey were unfavorable, with complaints about price hikes, bad customer service, slow and expensive Internet, and Comcast’s regional monopoly dominating those comments.

Whatever the actual data for busy signals and customers put on hold, the fact remains that a large portion of Philadelphia residents are unhappy with Comcast and the lack of options available.

If Comcast truly loved its home town, then it will have to do a better job of explaining why it chose Atlanta for the launch of its ultra-high-speed 2Gb fiber service over Philadelphia, which has the third-lowest level of broadband penetration among large American cities.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched the “Fight 215” online campaign, which calls for United States citizens to urge their elected representatives to allow Section 215 of the Patriot Act to expire in June.

Popular Canadian comedy duo the Letterkenny Brothers take some dumb hockey players down a peg. (Warning: copious cursing ahead!)

Sometimes you have to gamble. Sometimes you have to deny that you’re at a dead-end in life and push through. Sometimes you know you’re good at something and just want people to recognize it, and maybe pay you for it, too.

In June of last year, I got an e-mail from someone calling himself Robin Graves. He said we’d just met; we’d played Smash Bros. together during an E3 demo. He was the one who worked for Nintendo.

Robin, whose real name is actually Erik Swanson, went on to tell me that he dabbled in “recycled art”—crafts made out of trashed and repurposed objects. His most recent creation was a hot-pink Barbie Corvette that he’d ripped apart and transformed into a working N64. I thought it was cool, so I shared it on Kotaku, honoring his request that we leave out his real name.

Months later, Swanson sent me a long confession: this was actually just one step of a master plan he’d put together not long before we met. His goal wasn’t just to show off a cool piece of art he’d created—it was to get the attention of Nintendo’s highest executives including Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime. Swanson wanted them to know that he’s miserable there—and he wanted to persuade them to let him funnel his artistic passion into a new job. With my help.

“I absolutely love the company I work for and absolutely hate the job that I do,” Swanson told me. “So now if Nintendo won’t let me change jobs, I’m going to explore the route of creating my own.”

Impressive fan-made creations are not uncommon, and we spend a lot of time highlighting the creative accomplishments of gamers at Kotaku, as we did with the Corvette. But this is an unusual—and fascinating—case: here’s a guy who makes creative art and contraptions themed around Nintendo… and he also works at Nintendo. Yet he can’t stand it. For this fan, even getting a foot in the door wasn’t enough.

See, Swanson isn’t translating Zelda puzzles or helping Shigeru Miyamoto make the next Star Fox game—he works in a warehouse 30 minutes away from Nintendo of America’s main campus, where he does distribution, helping ship 3DS systems and amiibos across North America and Canada. Swanson’s job is to coordinate training for the many throngs of temp workers who come into Nintendo’s warehouse on any given week. He says it’s “very strategic”—and he says he hates it there, as much as he enjoys the occasional field trip to work the booths at PAX or E3. He wants something more creative.

“I’ve been miserable for a long time,” Swanson said in an e-mail. He’s worked at NOA for close to a decade now, and he says he’s applied to a lot of other jobs within the company, to no avail.

“For about eight years now I’ve been trying to find something else,” he told me. “I’ve tried for a lot of product testing, licensing… I’ll eventually get e-mails saying ‘I’m sorry but the job has been filled.’”

Meanwhile, Swanson has spent the past few months working on various crafts, ranging from Nintendo-themed spray paintings (like the Zelda art above) to elaborate machines like the N64 Corvette, which he made as a birthday present for his sister. Swanson said he’d always planned on trying to get the Corvette on Kotaku, but when he met us at E3 last year, he decided he’d just ask me directly. “I was at E3 and realized I was playing Smash Bros. with you so I tried the very direct approach,” Swanson said.

At first I was a little pissed, as any reporter would be when presented with a subject who’s trying to manipulate them. But it was hard not to empathize. Swanson comes across like a talented, passionate, eccentric artist who’s looking to turn his creative outlet into a career—except unlike most hobbyist artists, he already works for Nintendo. He just can’t find a way out of the warehouse.

Today, Swanson says he’s up to step two in his master plan: showing off one of his coolest creations yet, a Bowser figurine fashioned into a cigar lighter. Witness:

Rad, right? Swanson said he made it for the one and only Reggie Fils-Aime. He’d sent an e-mail to Fils-Aime on his Robin Graves account with a link to the video, but got no response, so he’s hoping the veteran Nintendo exec reads Kotaku. “With any luck he’ll take it and display it in his office,” Swanson said.

Once the cigar lighter is safe and sound on Reggie’s desk, Swanson will advance to step three: building a Zelda monstrosity that he hopes will get the attention of every Nintendo geek out there.

“I’m working on the most epic Zelda GameCube to date,” Swanson said. “It’s every Zelda nerd’s dream… It will be housed in/alongside the infamous Dark Link statue ($700 on Ebay) His shield will be the disc player. It will come with the Zelda collectors disc GameCube game that has like four Zelda games on it. And for shits and giggles I’m adding a Zelda amiibo disc in the bottom of the statue so it’s a giant Dark Link amiibo.”

Swanson says he’ll finish the project, put it on eBay, raise as much money as possible, and use the proceeds to help fly a sick child to visit Nintendo. “A few times a year, Make A Wish foundation sends a kid out to Nintendo HQ,” Swanson said. “I’d like to be able to finance one of these trips.”

And then, finally, Swanson hopes to channel all this energy into pitching a new job at Nintendo—a job that sounds, to the outside observer, like something of a pipe dream. “They’ve got archives [full of] furniture, equipment, displays,” Swanson said. “I could do some wonderful repurposed artwork with it… kinda clean out the basement, make some money for charity, make some great YouTube videos and see where that goes.”

As we were talking for this story, I asked Swanson if he was concerned at all that Nintendo would punish or even fire him for going public—after all, big game companies don’t like it when their employees speak to the press.

“That is a concern, yes,” he said. “A huge concern. But I really need something to happen. I feel stuck… it’s that unbearable feeling that I’m a loser. And I’m not.”

Will it ever happen? Will Swanson get his promotion? Hard to say. But Swanson sounds desperate—he says he’s struggling to take care of his three-year-old daughter after going through two divorces, and he recently had to move in with his sister to help make ends meet. This is his chance to do something extraordinary. “I’m now at my salary ceiling unless I want to go down the management path—which I don’t,” he told me. “Let’s just say this isn’t where I wanted to be at in my prime.”

It’s easy to imagine finding oneself in a similarly desperate situation, where even the dreamiest of dream jobs feels more like a trap than a fantasy. Sometimes, you’ve just gotta go for broke.

You can reach the author of this post at jason@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @jasonschreier.

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“OS X is for those who don’t want to know why or how their computers work. Linux is for those who want to know why or how their computers work.”

This parody video makes light of the difficulty involved in buying any new game console. Why can’t gamers have a burrito, and eat it too!

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In the foothills of the Dolomites, an hour or so north of Venice, Italy lies Ai Pioppi, a restaurant that’s home to an astonishing, giant, human-powered, kinetic-art theme park playground.

A controversial Transportation Security Administration program that uses “behavior indicators” to identify potential terrorists is instead primarily targeting undocumented immigrants, according to a document obtained by The Intercept and interviews with current and former government officials.

The $900 million program, Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques, or SPOT, employs behavior detection officers trained to identify passengers who exhibit behaviors that TSA believes could be linked to would-be terrorists. But in one five-week period at a major international airport in the United States in 2007, the year the program started, only about 4 percent of the passengers who were referred to secondary screening or law enforcement by behavior detection officers were arrested, and nearly 90 percent of those arrests were for being in the country illegally, according to a TSA document obtained by The Intercept.

Nothing in the SPOT records suggests that any of those arrested were associated with terrorist activity.

Those results aren’t surprising, according to those involved in the program, because the behavior checklist was, in part, modeled after immigration, border and drug interdiction programs. Drug smugglers and undocumented immigrants often exhibit clear signs of nervousness and confusion, or may be in possession of fraudulent documents.

“That’s why we started rounding up all the Mexicans,” said one former behavior detection officer.

The detailed 13-page report, taken from the SPOT program’s database, shows the number of referrals made by behavior detection officers, the reason for referral, details about the particular incident, arrests and reasons for arrests, and a brief summary of the incident. The Intercept is redacting the name of the airport involved, the identities of the behavior detection officers and other law enforcement agents involved in the referral or arrest, and passengers’ personal identifying information.

The statistics, though a small snapshot from 2007, appear to buttress repeated criticisms of the program by government auditors and outside groups, which allege that the program is being used to profile passengers based on their race.

The Intercept also interviewed a dozen current and former behavior detection officers, TSA officials, law enforcement agents and other government officials who have been closely involved in the program or monitored it. All of them said the program appears to be designed to target undocumented immigrants and drug smugglers.

Many items on the SPOT checklist are traditional clues for human smugglers and the people they are smuggling, such as “individuals who are seemingly unrelated but display identical dress or luggage.”

One former behavior detection officer described homing in on a “group of Latino guys and gals” wearing brand new outfits that looked like they were bought from a discount chain, like Walmart or JCPenney. “They all looked like they were totally lost and milling around like zombies in fresh clothes and haircuts,” the former officer said.

The behavior indicators point to people who appear confused or nervous because they’ve never been to an airport, may be carrying fake identification or none at all, and are scared about their illegal status being discovered. “You’re essentially making [federal air marshals] profile people,” the former behavior detection officer told The Intercept. “That checklist is ridiculous.”

Still, it has continued, and the TSA has refused to release details on almost every aspect of the program: its behavioral indicators and arrest data, as well as evidence of success in spotting actual terrorists. In March, the American Civil Liberties Union, expressing concerns the program was being used to racially profile passengers, sued the TSA, requesting a variety of documents related to the program.

Last month, The Intercept published TSA’s closely held list of over 90 indicators that behavior detection officers use to identify terrorists. The list, which included “bad body odor,” “whistling” and “excessive grooming,” has been widely ridiculed. The latest document obtained by The Intercept appears to back up previous concerns that the program is aimed at undocumented immigrants more than terrorists.

During a five-week period in 2007, behavior detection officers at this airport identified 429 passengers for secondary screening based on their behavior, after which 47 were referred to law enforcement. Thirty-four of those referrals were suspected undocumented immigrants or those traveling with expired visas.

Instead of terrorists, the officers often found undocumented immigrants who were trying to fly home and were nervous about being caught.

“Passenger spoke no English,” read the notes on several of the referrals.

“Passenger stated that she was in the country illegally and was returning home due [to] lack of work. She also stated that she was nervous due to her illegal status.”

Many of the referrals included statements like, “passenger stated he was nervous due to his illegal status.”

There were 16 arrests over the time frame covered by the report — and none of those arrested were terrorists. Fourteen of those arrested were described as “illegal aliens.” One of the arrests was of an intoxicated passenger who was denied boarding and assaulted an officer, and another person was arrested because suspected drugs and drug paraphernalia were found in his luggage.

Since its start in 2007, the SPOT program has been heavily criticized for its lack of scientific methodology, and even more importantly, its apparent lack of success in identifying would-be terrorists after almost eight years of operation. It’s a pessimistic assessment that even some within TSA share.

“If you’re looking for people who exhibit multiple criteria on the checklist to reach the point of secondary screening or law enforcement referral, you’re just looking for illegal immigrants,” said an aviation security official.

The embattled SPOT program has been the subject of numerous congressional, government and DHS investigations criticizing its effectiveness.

“The checklist misses so many signs of potential danger and really just shows signs of a nervous traveler,” said a current TSA employee involved with the program.

TSA did not respond to, or acknowledge, The Intercept’s multiple requests for comment.

Most of those interviewed supported the idea of deploying roving law enforcement officers at airports to search for potential terrorists, but were critical of nearly every aspect of the current program.

One senior homeland security official said the behavior checklist could work, but TSA’s behavior detection officers have not been properly trained to use it. “My guess is most of them wouldn’t have stopped bin Laden if he walked through their lane,” the official said.

Photo: Mark Lennihan/AP

The post Exclusive: TSA ‘Behavior Detection’ Program Targeting Undocumented Immigrants, Not Terrorists appeared first on The Intercept.

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By June 1, Congress must decide whether or not to reauthorize certain sections of the controversial USA Patriot Act (aka the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act), but even though it’s been nearly two years since former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed the NSA’s massive and far-reaching data collection programs, many Americans either are only vaguely aware or don’t understand because it’s not easy to immediately see how things like PRISM and MYSTIC affect your daily existence. That’s why John Oliver not only went straight to Snowden for an explanation of these programs, but to have him put the snooping in terms many Internet-era perverts can understand: penis photos.

“It’s difficult for most people to even conceptualize,” Snowden admits in the above interview on HBO’s Last Week Tonight. He then starts to explain about the invisibility of the Internet and the complicated connections involved when Oliver interrupts.

“This is the whole problem,” says Oliver. “I glaze over. It’s like the IT guy comes into your office and you go, ‘Oh sh*t — don’t teach me anything. I don’t want to learn. You smell like canned soup.'”

In order to show Snowden just how bored an uninformed a lot of Americans are, he plays some man-on-the-street interview footage demonstrating how little, if anything, people understand about Snowden and the NSA snooping scandal.

Then, referring to a previous Snowden anecdote about people at the NSA sharing nude photos caught in their mass data collections, Oliver shows another video of those same Americans saying they’d be horrified if their dick pics were floating around government offices, but many of them don’t believe it’s happening.

“The good news is there’s no program named ‘The Dick Pick’ program. The bad news is they’re still collecting everybody’s information, including your dick picks,” explains Snowden.

“This is the most visible line in the sand for people — Can they see my dick?” Oliver declares, handing Snowden a folder that purportedly contains a photo of Oliver’s genitals. “So let’s go through each NSA program and explain to me its capabilities with regards to that photograph of my penis.”

702 surveillance (aka Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which authorizes the NSA to collect massive amounts of data on people “believed to be located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information.”):

Snowden: “Section 702… allows the bulk communications of Internet communications that are ‘one-end’ foreign… so if you have your e-mail through Gmail hosted on a server overseas… if it at any time crosses outside the border of the United States, your junk ends up in the database.”

Oliver: “It doesn’t have to be sending your dick to a German?”

Snowden: “No, even if you’re sending to someone within the United States, your wholly domestic communication between you and your wife can go from New York to London and back and get caught up in the database.”

Executive Order 12333 (signed Dec. 4, 1981 by Pres. Ronald Reagan; authorized intelligence community to expand data collection operations):

Snowden: “E.O. 12333 is what the NSA uses when the other authorities aren’t aggressive enough or aren’t catching as much as they’d like.”

Oliver: “How are they going to see my dick? I’m only concerned about my penis.”

Snowden: “When you send your junk through Gmail. That’s stored on Google’s servers. Google moves data from data center to data center, invisibly to you without your knowledge. That data could be moved outside the borders of the United States, temporarily. When your junk was passed by Gmail, the NSA caught a copy of that.”

PRISM (an NSA surveillance that uses orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to collect stored data from large Internet companies):

Snowden: “PRISM is how they pull your ‘junk’ out of Google, with Google’s involvement. All of the different PRISM partners — people like Yahoo, Facebook Google — the government deputizes them be sort of their surveillance sheriff.”

Oliver: “Their a dick sheriff?”

Snowden: “Correct.”

Upstream (an NSA data collection technique that gathers in-transit information via the backbone of the Internet):

Snowden: “Upstream is how they snatch your junk as it transits the Internet.”

MYSTIC (the NSA’s program to collect data on all voice calls in certain countries):

Snowden: “If you’re describing your junk on the phone, yes [they’re collecting it]”

Oliver: “But do they have the content of that junk call, or just the duration of it?”

Snowden: “They have content as well, but only for a few countries. If you were on vacation in the Bahamas, yes.”

215 Metadata (Sec. 215 of the Patriot Act details how the government can compel companies to hand over information with regard to intelligence. Oliver is referring to the mass collection of metadata — non-content information like phone numbers, duration of calls, identities of those involved in call — from telecom providers):

Snowden: “No [the government can’t see your penis], but they can probably tell who you’re sharing your junk pictures with. Because they’s seeing who you’re texting and who you’re calling.”

Oliver: “If you called a penis enlargement center at three in the morning and the call lasted 90 minutes?”

Snowden: “They would have a record of your phone number calling that phone number — which is the penis enlargement center. They would say they don’t know it’s a penis enlargement center but of course they can look it up.”

To end the interview, Oliver asks, “Would your takeaway from all this be: Until such time as we’ve sorted all of this out, don’t take pictures of your dick?”

“No… you shouldn’t change your behavior because a government agency is doing the wrong thing,” explains Snowden. “If we sacrifice our values because we’re afraid, we don’t care about those values very much.”

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They say lightning never strikes twice — but one observant onlooker did catch two separate lightning strikes hitting planes approaching Seattle’s Sea-Tac Airport as they were landing. Both flights landed without incident, though those onboard say the moment the lightning hit the planes was a rough, albeit very brief experience.

A University of Washington student was outside trying to catch lightning on film while a thunderstorm moved into the area, reports KOMO News. He managed to capture two huge bolts of lightning as they moved through the planes.

“I was stunned for a second because I couldn’t believe what I just saw,” he said. “After the second (plane) got hit, I knew I was on to something spectacular!”

One plane was an Alaska Air flight coming in from Orange County, while the other was another Alaska Air plane heading in from Houston.

A passenger on the latter flight said she was sitting in the ninth row on the right side of the plane when the bolt hit.

“We were flying in and out of clouds, sunshine then darkness, sunshine then darkness,” she said. “I was looking out the window when I saw this bright flash and this streak of lightning hit the top-middle of the right wing near the engine.”

It appeared that the bolt exited below the wing she says, as there was a loud crack, lighting up the cabin for a brief second.

“There was this loud gasp in the cabin after it happened. The people behind me were starting to worry if it was going to affect the landing. It didn’t,” she said, adding that it was “startling.”

A passenger on the other plane from California said the moment the bolt struck the plane was probably “the worst turbulence you’ll ever feel for two solid seconds. It got people pretty shook up.”

Other than that, the flight was totally normal.

Scary as it sounds, lightning strikes on planes are pretty normal. The Federal Aviation Administration estimates that each plane gets hit by a bolt once a year. Planes are also built to withstand the effects of a big zap.

“Airplanes themselves are prepared for this kind of stuff and have the mechanics to manage lightning strikes,” Sea-Tac Airport public relations manager Perry Cooper told ABC News. “We did not receive any reports of precautionary landing alerts from any pilots Wednesday night either.”

Still, two planes in one storm? That, and the National Weather Service reported only five lightning strikes with the storm on its radar in Seattle.

Watch: Lightning strikes two jets on approach to Sea-Tac Airport [KOMO News]