The National Security Agency is lying to us. We know that because of data stolen from an NSA server was dumped on the Internet. The agency is hoarding information about security vulnerabilities in the products you use, because it wants to use it to hack others' computers. Those vulnerabilities aren't being reported, and aren't getting fixed, making your computers and networks unsafe.
On August 13, a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers released 300 megabytes of NSA cyberweapon code on the Internet. Near as we experts can tell, the NSA network itself wasn't hacked; what probably happened was that a "staging server" for NSA cyberweapons -- that is, a server the NSA was making use of to mask its surveillance activities -- was hacked in 2013.
The NSA inadvertently resecured itself in what was coincidentally the early weeks of the Snowden document release. The people behind the link used casual hacker lingo, and made a weird, implausible proposal involving holding a bitcoin auction for the rest of the data: "!!! Attention government sponsors of cyber warfare and those who profit from it !!!! How much you pay for enemies cyber weapons?"
Still, most people believe the hack was the work of the Russian government and the data release some sort of political message. Perhaps it was a warning that if the US government exposes the Russians as being behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee -- or other high-profile data breaches -- the Russians will expose NSA exploits in turn.
But what I want to talk about is the data. The sophisticated cyberweapons in the data dump include vulnerabilities and "exploit code" that can be deployed against common Internet security systems. Products targeted include those made by Cisco, Fortinet, TOPSEC, Watchguard, and Juniper -- systems that are used by both private and government organizations around the world. Some of these vulnerabilities have been independently discovered and fixed since 2013, and some had remained unknown until now.
All of them are examples of the NSA -- despite what it and other representatives of the US government say -- prioritizing its ability to conduct surveillance over our security. Here's one example. Security researcher Mustafa al-Bassam found an attack tool codenamed BENIGHCERTAIN that tricks certain Cisco firewalls into exposing some of their memory, including their authentication passwords. Those passwords can then be used to decrypt virtual private network, or VPN, traffic, completely bypassing the firewalls' security. Cisco hasn't sold these firewalls since 2009, but they're still in use today.
Vulnerabilities like that one could have, and should have, been fixed years ago. And they would have been, if the NSA had made good on its word to alert American companies and organizations when it had identified security holes.
Over the past few years, different parts of the US government have repeatedly assured us that the NSA does not hoard "zero days" the term used by security experts for vulnerabilities unknown to software vendors. After we learned from the Snowden documents that the NSA purchases zero-day vulnerabilities from cyberweapons arms manufacturers, the Obama administration announced, in early 2014, that the NSA must disclose flaws in common software so they can be patched (unless there is "a clear national security or law enforcement" use).
Later that year, National Security Council cybersecurity coordinator and special adviser to the president on cybersecurity issues Michael Daniel insisted that US doesn't stockpile zero-days (except for the same narrow exemption). An official statement from the White House in 2014 said the same thing.
The Shadow Brokers data shows this is not true. The NSA hoards vulnerabilities.
Hoarding zero-day vulnerabilities is a bad idea. It means that we're all less secure. When Edward Snowden exposed many of the NSA's surveillance programs, there was considerable discussion about what the agency does with vulnerabilities in common software products that it finds. Inside the US government, the system of figuring out what to do with individual vulnerabilities is called the Vulnerabilities Equities Process (VEP). It's an inter-agency process, and it's complicated.
There is a fundamental tension between attack and defense. The NSA can keep the vulnerability secret and use it to attack other networks. In such a case, we are all at risk of someone else finding and using the same vulnerability. Alternatively, the NSA can disclose the vulnerability to the product vendor and see it gets fixed. In this case, we are all secure against whoever might be using the vulnerability, but the NSA can't use it to attack other systems.
There are probably some overly pedantic word games going on. Last year, the NSA said that it discloses 91 percent of the vulnerabilities it finds. Leaving aside the question of whether that remaining 9 percent represents 1, 10, or 1,000 vulnerabilities, there's the bigger question of what qualifies in the NSA's eyes as a "vulnerability."
Not all vulnerabilities can be turned into exploit code. The NSA loses no attack capabilities by disclosing the vulnerabilities it can't use, and doing so gets its numbers up; it's good PR. The vulnerabilities we care about are the ones in the Shadow Brokers data dump. We care about them because those are the ones whose existence leaves us all vulnerable.
Because everyone uses the same software, hardware, and networking protocols, there is no way to simultaneously secure our systems while attacking their systems whoever "they" are. Either everyone is more secure, or everyone is more vulnerable.
Pretty much uniformly, security experts believe we ought to disclose and fix vulnerabilities. And the NSA continues to say things that appear to reflect that view, too. Recently, the NSA told everyone that it doesn't rely on zero days -- very much, anyway.
Earlier this year at a security conference, Rob Joyce, the head of the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) organization -- basically the country's chief hacker -- gave a rare public talk, in which he said that credential stealing is a more fruitful method of attack than are zero days: "A lot of people think that nation states are running their operations on zero days, but it's not that common. For big corporate networks, persistence and focus will get you in without a zero day; there are so many more vectors that are easier, less risky, and more productive."
The distinction he's referring to is the one between exploiting a technical hole in software and waiting for a human being to, say, get sloppy with a password.
A phrase you often hear in any discussion of the Vulnerabilities Equities Process is NOBUS, which stands for "nobody but us." Basically, when the NSA finds a vulnerability, it tries to figure out if it is unique in its ability to find it, or whether someone else could find it, too. If it believes no one else will find the problem, it may decline to make it public. It's an evaluation prone to both hubris and optimism, and many security experts have cast doubt on the very notion that there is some unique American ability to conduct vulnerability research.
The vulnerabilities in the Shadow Brokers data dump are definitely not NOBUS-level. They are run-of-the-mill vulnerabilities that anyone -- another government, cybercriminals, amateur hackers -- could discover, as evidenced by the fact that many of them were discovered between 2013, when the data was stolen, and this summer, when it was published. They are vulnerabilities in common systems used by people and companies all over the world.
So what are all these vulnerabilities doing in a secret stash of NSA code that was stolen in 2013? Assuming the Russians were the ones who did the stealing, how many US companies did they hack with these vulnerabilities? This is what the Vulnerabilities Equities Process is designed to prevent, and it has clearly failed.
If there are any vulnerabilities that -- according to the standards established by the White House and the NSA -- should have been disclosed and fixed, it's these. That they have not been during the three-plus years that the NSA knew about and exploited them -- despite Joyce's insistence that they're not very important -- demonstrates that the Vulnerable Equities Process is badly broken.
We need to fix this. This is exactly the sort of thing a congressional investigation is for. This whole process needs a lot more transparency, oversight, and accountability. It needs guiding principles that prioritize security over surveillance. A good place to start are the recommendations by Ari Schwartz and Rob Knake in their report: these include a clearly defined and more public process, more oversight by Congress and other independent bodies, and a strong bias toward fixing vulnerabilities instead of exploiting them.
And as long as I'm dreaming, we really need to separate our nation's intelligence-gathering mission from our computer security mission: we should break up the NSA. The agency's mission should be limited to nation state espionage. Individual investigation should be part of the FBI, cyberwar capabilities should be within US Cyber Command, and critical infrastructure defense should be part of DHS's mission.
I doubt we're going to see any congressional investigations this year, but we're going to have to figure this out eventually. In my 2014 book Data and Goliath, I write that "no matter what cybercriminals do, no matter what other countries do, we in the US need to err on the side of security by fixing almost all the vulnerabilities we find..." Our nation's cybersecurity is just too important to let the NSA sacrifice it in order to gain a fleeting advantage over a foreign adversary.
“We live in the shadows,” explained Javier, a Hudson Valley farmworker, while describing his life to me. “We are treated like unknown people . . . We are not paid well and cannot ask for more.” A worker on another farm said, “They treat us like nothing; they only want the work . . . Whether we like it or not, we have to like it.”
Some of today’s liveliest political conversations concern agricultural production and distribution. But these discussions are also among the most confused.
Exploitative conditions on factory farms have rightly drawn the attention of academics, activists, and journalists. Indeed, the vast majority of research on farmworkers focuses on the largest farming sites. Consumers are offered countless reasons to avoid produce from them — but few alternatives other than to “buy local.”
Much contemporary food writing argues that when we buy locally grown food directly from farms, we not only secure fresher, more seasonal produce, but we also create an intimate, trusting relationship with the farmer. This supposed bond reinforces the common understanding that the local food production process is more wholesome than the industrial agricultural system.
Food writers and scholars have highlighted the many positive aspects of local food systems: economic and social justice, the sense of community facilitated by face-to-face interactions with food producers, and the civic engagement and democracy promoted by alternative agri-systems.
For example, as Barbara Kingsolver argues in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, “‘locally grown’ is a denomination whose meaning in incorruptible.” Later in the book she addresses the poor pay and conditions of workers on factory farms, citing their average annual income of $7,500. Clearly, she intends readers to feel grateful that local farms offer a more just and well-paid alternative.
Or take another prominent example: in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a landmark in the new food literature, Michael Pollan describes two types of farming — industrial and pastoral — and offers no in-between.
In promoting local diets as healthy and righteous alternatives to the capitalist-industrial monoculture food system, such writers have sold us an idea premised on a false dichotomy.
On one hand, they demonize factory farms for poisoning the land and local waterways, for confining and mistreating animals, and for exploiting their workers in the name of earning profits. On the other hand, they promote local agriculture as the antidote to the factory farms’ corporate ills.
By shopping at the farmers market or joining a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, consumers support smaller (though not necessarily small) farmers, keep food dollars local, encourage limited pesticide use, and ensure animals are treated humanely.
Marked for Exploitation
In their praise of small farms, food writers use terms like local, alternative, sustainable, and fair to distinguish local food production from the hated factory farm. But they often conflate these terms. And with all of the positive attention heaped on local farms, it is easy to imagine that these benefits extend to their workers.
But my research, dating back to 2000, reveals that working conditions on local farms in New York’s Hudson Valley are not very different from those on the factory farms that dominate the headlines.
Of the farm hands I met, 99 percent were foreign born. The vast majority, 71 percent, were non-citizen Latinos; 20 percent were on H-2A guest-worker visas and hailed from Jamaica or Latin America. Most of the Latinos spoke little English, had low literacy in their native languages, and, on average, received a sixth-grade formal education.
The lack of English skills actually benefits their employers, who see learning the language as a stepping-stone to becoming American. The problem with American workers, farmers told me, is that they don’t have a work ethic.
Hudson Valley farmworkers were not primarily migrant workers: they lived in New York year-round, even if their farm jobs were seasonal. About one-third of those I met also lived with their families. This family reunification counters the workers’ loneliness, but it also undermines their financial goals.
Manuel expounded on this point:
I currently have nothing. You make dollars, but here you spend dollars, not like at home where the money goes further. The situation would be different if I made money here and sent it back to my country, but my family is here. You honestly cannot save money here.
The workers reported even worse economic exploitation in their home countries: age discrimination in factory work, bosses who paid in food, and subsistence living.
One comment raised both environmental issues and the retraction of irrigation programs and farm subsidies in Mexico post-NAFTA: “I used to have my own potato farm, but there is no water. Nothing happens with land that is dead.”
Those I spoke to also described their fear of losing their jobs or being deported. They also did not know their rights.
These factors, coupled with their desire to return home, created a vulnerable workforce willing to make tremendous sacrifices. To protect vital income for their families, they kept their heads down, set aside concerns about their own well-being, and complied with employer demands.
Many acutely analyzed their positions — they were utterly dependent on farm wages, lonely, and alienated.
A twenty-two-year-old Guatemalan woman broke into tears when she described how much she missed her home. She spoke to her mother often over the phone, but said she never related her sadness or complained about the work. Like others I interviewed who downplayed their hardships, her goal was to optimize her income even as she was painfully aware of her meager earning potential.
The work they perform is difficult, dirty, and strenuous; it requires repeated bending or crouching, sometimes with sharp implements, and sometimes in extreme weather for long hours. “You are dead by the end of the day; your arms and your feet ache because of standing all day,” one worker said.
A field hand told me he thought dogs were treated better than he was. But then he got worried that he was telling me too much. Many workers were reluctant to share stories about their working conditions, using phrases like “I better not say” and expressing fear of reprisals.
There are stories of wage theft, human trafficking, sexual harassment, illegal firings, and intimidation. But even if employers were prosecuted for such violations of existing law, the job would still exploit workers.
In New York — as in most other states — farmworkers do not have a right to a day of rest, they do not have a right to overtime pay, and they do not have a right to collective bargaining.
This means that some work eighty to ninety hours a week, for minimum wage, sometimes over seven days. Farmworkers argue that the law sets them up for exploitation since it fails to recognize them as equal to other workers. Heriberto, a farmworker who has given public talks, tells New Yorkers that they should be embarrassed by these laws.
Workers’ disempowerment in the workplace is the most critical issue they face. While getting paid for hours worked is the most basic element of the labor contract, many farmworkers reported that their paychecks would arrive missing several hours. But, like many of the most vulnerable laborers, they were too afraid to say anything.
The Price of Proximity
The farmer-worker relationship on small farms takes the form of a complicated kind of paternalism, which I call the price of proximity. This paternalism serves as an important way to control labor.
It is the flip side of the intimacy consumers imagine they share with local, smaller-scale farmers. On the farms I visited, labor contractors were few, and there were no middle managers. As a result, farmers were in direct relationship with their workers.
Paternalism exists when the boss oversees some aspect of a worker’s life outside the labor relationship — like when a farmer houses workers. What my research revealed, however, were deeper levels of this relationship.
Farmers gave their workers excess produce or the use of farm vehicles, allowed their families to live with them, protected them from local authorities, and made vague promises — perhaps a green card or the prospect of land.
These benefits served workers well, yet none of them were codified in the labor contract. And there’s the rub — employees must act like “good workers” if they want to continue receiving these perks.
An apple picker nicely summed up the complexity of paternalism. When I asked how he would deal with a workplace problem, he responded, “Honestly, I wouldn’t know what to do, because the boss is a good person and gives us a home and doesn’t charge us rent.”
The price of proximity derives directly from the intimate relationships developed on the farm. And workers understand they can never “pay back” these benefits, except with their quiescence.
These conditions rarely come up in discussions about locally sourced foods. We don’t think about workers on local farms. Instead, we assume these farms are mom-and-pop operations, or imagine that farm laborers have the sustainable jobs that the local food movement has promised.
We have oversimplified alternative agriculture’s economy, while glorifying the ethos of family farming. As a result, we have largely ignored farmworkers.
Taught to Be Quiet
Whether they were undocumented or guestworkers, Luis summed up a sentiment I heard repeatedly: “If you behave there is work”
My interviews revealed that farmworkers feared employer retaliation. A service provider I spoke to described his same experience: “They usually signal with their finger going across their throat, signaling that their head will be chopped off — not meaning that in reality, but that they won’t [be able to] come back.”
Since the threat of deportation is real, and since employers, by law, do not have to verify their employees’ documents, workers with false documents will try to limit their grievances to deflect attention from their legal status.
Javier eloquently summed up the predicament: “When I am alone, I think ‘even if the cage is golden we are still locked up.’ What good is it to earn dollars if we are locked up?”
One foodie acquaintance told me she didn’t have to worry about labor conditions on the CSA program she belonged to since the farmer employed guestworkers. But the guestworkers I interviewed would not agree.
Guestworkers repeatedly told me that they were “taught to be quiet.” They explained that if they joined a union or questioned their employment benefits, they would not be allowed to return to the United States.
These workers also felt exploited by the system as a whole: their home government takes a cut of the funds they earned. As a former guestworker put it: “They hire us out and they make a fortune. We make the least.”
These comments reveal not only that guestworkers are pressured to maintain good conduct, but also that they face institutionalized modes of labor discipline.
Romantic Agrarianism’s Long Shadow
The food movement that shapes our thinking today is the latest revival of romantic agrarianism. The concept — which promotes the American romance with farming — is grounded in historic traditions from the country’s founding.
In The Age of Reform, Richard Hofstadter lays out romantic agrarianism’s three key mythologies: farmers are economically independent and self-sufficient; farming is intrinsically a natural and moral activity; and farming is the fundamental industry of society.
Romantic agrarianism is not only a formative component of American ideology, it also determines the political economy of food. What’s more, it does not have to be taught. Children are fed these lessons from a young age, starting with babies’ first board books.
Romantic agrarianism is particularly potent in the Hudson Valley, a fabled agricultural region. The region’s cultural identity trades on the currency of agrarian values and epitomizes precisely those farming sectors that have benefited most from the economic stimulus promised by alternative and local food movements.
Today, food writers play a critical role in shaping our understanding of farming. Too often they uncritically reproduce this romanticism and as a result obfuscate labor concerns. (To his credit, Michael Pollan has more recently encouraged foodies to consider worker conditions.)
Consider the following quote from an article in the foodie magazine Edible Hudson Valley: “Traditional agricultural values of generosity and cooperation, rooted in the Hudson Valley, seem infused in each batch of cheese produced.”
Food organizations should play an important role, but we need bold leaders. Last year, an New York City–based group approached me to organize a panel that would explore a different side of the farm labor issue. But after a bit of discussion, they dropped the event since the board was concerned about putting farmers on the defensive.
Real Solidarity
Advocates for sustainable local food systems do not completely ignore labor concerns. Foodies and food writers have backed recent campaigns by workers on factory farms, including the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’s effort to pressure Wendy’s — along with fourteen other corporate food giants who purchase Florida’s fresh tomatoes — to join the Fair Food Program.
On the West Coast, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, a Washington State farmworker union, spearheaded a 2016 boycott of Driscoll’s berries. The boycott builds on a spring 2016 effort in Baja, Mexico where thousands of berry pickers went on a successful strike to improve their conditions and highlight Driscoll’s profits.
If we are sincere in our solidarity with farmworkers, we must pay equal attention to labor conditions at smaller farms. Organic produce is thriving because consumers said they wanted it; animals are treated better because consumers said they cared.
While supporting farmworker efforts against corporate giants is commendable, we also need look in our own backyards and confront our local farmers — which should be one of the benefits of intimacy.
And that’s only the start. Those concerned with the politics of food need to think more clearly than Kingsolver, Pollan, and the other avatars of the “locavore” movement about the range of problems contemporary farms, industrial and “pastoral” alike, face — and to be more sanguine about the limits of consumer activism.
The plight of hyper-exploited workers on small farms will remain hidden if activists continue to portray factory farming as a unique evil facilitated by some kind of spiritual disconnect from the land, rather than one particularly telling example of capitalism’s inhumanity.
There is much to admire about small, local farms. But any serious effort to address the food supply chain must be big and international.
Until there is a food movement that takes place on those terms, produce cultivated under fair labor conditions will stand for little more than “organic” and “cage-free” do now: the costly mark of good conscience available only to the small few who can afford it.
Dotter is the project of Swedish animal rights advocate and vegan, Maria Jansson.
Not that Dotter’s personal choices should have an impact on whether you like her music or not, but her loving and Sixties attitude does spill across into her music, which can be described as all-embracing pop.
After collaborating with producers online, she decided to head to Stockholm: not only to study music, but to also to benefit from the potential connections that can be found in a capital city. “I found a guy who wanted to record a demo with me,” she recalls. “And then we fell in love, so I’ve stayed in his studio ever since.”
That connection with producer Dino Medanhodzic also sparked a rich creative partnership as they crafted her breakthrough single ‘My Flower’, her follow-up ‘Dive’ and this summer’s new track ‘Creatures of the Sun’.
Talking of the theme behind ‘Creatures of the Sun’ she explains “It’s interesting to think about all of the coincidences that led to us being here on earth. All of my ancestors before me have led to this moment. It could’ve been totally different. Whether you’re a human or an animal or a flower, every second in life we’re important to the earth. And when we die we go back to the earth.”
Sounds like: Susanne Sundfør, Zella Day, Florence + The Machine, Lana Del Rey, Abba
A salmon enters a Whooshh ‘salmon cannon’ on Washington state’s White River. Photo: Whooshh.
Hydroelectric energy is hugely important to Washington state. It accounts for about one third of Washington’s energy consumption, more than any other energy source, and dams power jobs all over the state.
But these dams can be a huge problem for another important part of Washington’s industry: salmon.
Enter the “Salmon Cannon,” a fish-shooting device developed by Bellevue, Wash., based Whooshh Innovations that can send Salmon flying over any dams in their path.
The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., has been awarded a $300,000 grant from the Department of Energy to study the cannon. The tech is currently classified as “experimental,” but if the study finds it to be safe and effective it could be labeled for use at dams around the country.
In a video on the Whooshh Web site, Todd Deligan, vice president of fish transport, notes that they are hoping to “provide a new platform from which to think about fish passage.”
The company adds that its system “depends on gentle pressure differentials to ‘whooshh’ fish through a soft, flexible tube to their destination.”
PNNL has studied the cannon before, but not with this scope. Check it out in action:
The grant comes from the Department of Energy’s Small Business Vouchers Pilot, which funds independent studies on tech developed by small businesses. This year’s 41 recipients included two other Seattle area startups: Bothell-based Neah Power Systems and Seattle’s Oscilla Power, whose tech uses energy from ocean waves to generate power.
A natural advantage of a gig economy company is that there's no clear idea of who should be in the union, even if it becomes legal!
This doesn't even mention the pending US Chamber of Commerce lawsuit... what a meeeess
by Heidi Groover
Eight months after Uber and Lyft drivers won the right to unionize, the city is still struggling to implement the law. HG
In December, Seattle passed a never-before-tried law allowing drivers for app-based ride companies like Uber and Lyft to unionize. The legislation came after outcry from drivers who said they suffer from low wages and unexpected deactivations on the platforms. The law, passed unanimously, had the potential to flip power dynamics in the gig economy on their head.
But eight months later, the unionization law is stalled in city bureaucracy and drivers have not yet taken a vote on whether to organize.
In recent weeks, city staff have told the Seattle City Council they're having trouble deciding who should be considered a "qualified driver" and allowed to vote on unionization. Should anyone who signs up to drive for an app be allowed to vote, even if they only give one ride a month? Or should the law only cover drivers who depend on their app to make their living? In that case, what should be the cutoff for hours worked or rides given?
Drivers and advocates have filled council chambers during two meetings this month, some demanding "one ride, one vote" and others arguing for a higher threshold. The Seattle Times reported earlier this month that Teamsters 117, the union that advocated for the law, believes Uber is advocating for "one ride, one vote" to "dilute the voting pool."
Now, with pushback guaranteed either way, no one in city hall wants to make the decision.
Although the city council passed the unionization law, staffers for the city's Finance and Administrative Services Department—who answer to the mayor—were left responsible for creating the rules to implement it. Yesterday, those staffers told the the council that the mayor doesn't want his staff to make the call.
"The mayor feels that since he did not sign this legislation, the council needs to weigh in on this very complicated decision," David Mendoza, a policy adviser to the mayor, told the council during a meeting of the equity and governance committee, which is overseeing the law, yesterday.
But the city council doesn't want to make the decision either. Council members seemed surprised, calling the statement from Mendoza "new information."
"That's your job, not ours," Council President Bruce Harrell told Mendoza. (Harrell said he doesn't believe qualified drivers should include people who only drive once, but doesn't know what the cutoff should be.)
It's not the first time Murray has tried to avoid this law. When the council considered it in December, he refused to take a position. When they passed it, he declined to either sign or veto it.
In order to hash out a potential definition of "qualified driver" to bring to the council, FAS staff said they plan to survey drivers to try to find out their demographics and how much they drive—data Uber and Lyft don't want to hand over themselves. But they admitted the survey was unlikely to make the decision about who should be a "qualified driver" any easier. And the council agreed.
"I think a survey would be incredibly helpful, particularly because we can’t get any of that data from the companies that hold it," Council Member Lorena González said. "I’m just questioning how helpful it will be to me as policy maker."
Now, thanks to this next-level bureaucratic avoidance, the path forward—and how much longer drivers will have to wait to organize—is in limbo. FAS staffers said they will craft a definition in coming weeks to present to the council for a vote. It's unclear whether the council will comply or try to force FAS to make the decision.
Originally, the rules for the unionization law were supposed to be approved by September 19. Harrell's committee next meets on September 7, when the council could extend that deadline.
Floating around mysterious galaxies lie Nicole Gustafsson's futuristic ecosystems, angular planets that contain crystals, luminescent waterfalls, and alien plant life. These worlds, sometimes lit by two or more moons, contain the same pastel shades found in 80s sci fi and video games, yet depict visuals unlike any our own solar system has seen. Gustafsson paints her otherworldly illustrations using Acryla Gouache, applying each one directly to wood panel.
The works included are from two series of Gustafsson’s titled “Celestial Spaces” and “Fantastic Spaces,” each of which was inspired by her interest in space and mineral studies. You can purchase postcards and prints of these celestial paintings on her Etsy shop Nimasprout, and read more about her process on her blog. (via The Creators Project)
This weekend I saw a guy walking around the airport dressed in this T-shirt—and it made me have FEELINGS!
At first I was like, "Boy, that guy flew into the wrong city." But then I was like, "Ummm... wait... I think that t-shirt might be awesome?" What follows are eight reasons why it might be awesome.
REASON ONE: It is a muscle tee. REASON TWO: It depicts Trump riding atop a GOLD-PLATED Trump tank (bearing a Trump license plate, just in case you didn't know the tank belonged to Trump). REASON THREE: Explosions! REASON FOUR: Falling money! REASON FIVE: An American eagle firing a machine gun! REASON SIX: 7-Eleven Big Gulp advertising. REASON SEVEN: "You're Fired!" printed on the tank's cannon. REASON EIGHT: It's 100 percent polyester.
Anyway, while the Trump Tank muscle tee might be a bit too "high profile" for someone like me, maybe YOU want the shirt? Get it here. Just stay away from airports.
"Like the Freudian patient eager to repress guilty memories, current training programmes serve psychiatry’s old inferiority complex among other medical specialties by repressing mountains of hard-earned wisdom about treating the whole complex psychological person. It is an astonishing self-abandonment."
After decades of practising as a psychotherapist, I am convinced that our treatment of psychosis is thoroughly wrong-headed
State of the art deep reinforcement learning algorithms take many millions of interactions to attain human-level performance. Humans, on the other hand, can very quickly exploit highly rewarding nuances of an environment upon first discovery. In the brain, such rapid learning is thought to depend on the hippocampus and its capacity for episodic memory. Here we investigate whether a simple model of hippocampal episodic control can learn to solve difficult sequential decision-making tasks. We demonstrate that it not only attains a highly rewarding strategy significantly faster than state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning algorithms, but also achieves a higher overall reward on some of the more challenging domains.
Twenty-five years ago artists Catherine King and Wayne Adams made the realization they would never have enough income to afford real estate so they made a fairly radical decision: they would build an island. Currently moored off the coast of Vancouver Island about 45 minutes by boat to the nearest town, their sprawling floating house is called called “Freedom Cove.”
The completely mobile island is made of 12 tethered sections that incorporates four greenhouses, living quarters, a kitchen, workshop, art gallery, a lighthouse and even a dance floor. Adams estimates the structure weighs in around 500 tons (a million pounds) and says everything was constructed with a handsaw and hammer without the aid of power tools. In this short clip Great Big Story takes a brief glimpse inside this supremely unusual residence.
“Adam’s Office” (2016), oil on canvas, 120 x 160 cm
Spanish artist Paco Pomet (previously) references the appearance of vintage vacation photos and vast historical landscapes in his surreal oil paintings, works that offer a subtle humor from their often grayscale palette. By rendering limbs as freakishly elongated tubes and adding touches of neon green and orange, Pomet brings his images of the past into the future, hinting at a post-apocalyptic realm where humans are forced to live beside the radioactive waste that has lead to their bodies’ defects.
Pomet had his third solo exhibition with Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica earlier this summer. You can see more of his work on his portfolio site.
“Childhood” (2016), oil on canvas, 60 x 80 cm
“The Visitor” (2016), oil on canvas, 120 x 140 cm
“The Vermilion Case” (2016), oil on canvas, 60 x 80
“Social” (2016), diptych, oil on canvas, 120 x 180 cm
“The Landlord” (2016), oil on canvas, 120 x 140 cm
The revelation that an undercover FBI agent encouraged a would-be terrorist to “Tear up Texas” shortly before he opened fire on a “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, last year raises new concerns about FBI counterterrorism efforts that were already under fire for manufacturing terrorism cases rather than halting them.
According to an affidavit filed in a related case last week, Elton Simpson — one of two men who donned body armor and fired assault weapons before being shot dead by a Garland police officer — had been corresponding with an undercover FBI agent. And in a text message roughly a week before the attack, as they discussed the cartoon contest, the agent had exhorted Simpson to “Tear up Texas.”
The FBI, in the affidavit, explained the comment as “an effort to continue their dialogue” with the suspect.
But testing the willingness of suspects to take certain steps in a conspiracy is one thing; actively encouraging them to commit a violent, criminal act is another.
“The FBI uses informants and undercover agents to pressure suspected ISIS sympathizers into committing acts of violence, so that they can then be prosecuted. The Garland shooter case is the most striking illustration yet of the dangers of this approach,” says Arun Kundnani, a lecturer on terrorism studies at New York University. “Essentially, it suggests the government may be manufacturing the very threat it is supposed to be countering.”
Kundnani called for “an independent congressional investigation of the FBI’s tactics.”
The extensive role played by the undercover agent was first reported by the Daily Beast.
Though sting operations are generally seen as an appropriate tool for infiltrating criminal organizations or conspiracies, their use is more problematic in contemporary terrorism cases involving isolated individuals. In those cases, the concern is that the informant or undercover agent could plant the idea to actually conduct an attack in the mind of a suggestible or unstable person.
“These cases always have a lot of gray area and there has always been a question of how far the FBI should go when they get involved in these sting operations,” said Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. “But if you’re going to target potentially unstable, vulnerable individuals in undercover sting operations, you have to examine the potential consequences of having these types of discussions with them.”
The utility of sting operations has changed in the era of Islamic State, Greenberg said. Terrorist groups in the past, including al Qaeda, tended to have more coherent plots and mature conspirators. “There are several factors which make it harder to control a situation with informants in ISIS cases, including the instability, vulnerability, and, frequently, the young age of most ISIS recruits,” Greenberg said. “Not only is there often a lack of a specific plot in mind, there tends to be a real sense of suicidal thinking and self-hatred in their motivations that can make it more difficult to control a situation.”
“We just don’t know what happened in this case, but it’s a real warning sign that the foreseeable consequences of acts are now unknown,” she adds. In none of the previous cases is the FBI known to have actively encouraged violence, nor dealt with anyone equipped and prepared to carry out an imminent, violent act. Here they seemingly did both.
FBI Director James Comey has said there are active investigations of suspected ISIS sympathizers ongoing “in all 50 states.” But little is known about the nature of the individuals held under suspicion or what methods the FBI is using to investigate them.
The New York Timesreported in June that since February 2015, two thirds of terrorism prosecutions related to Islamic State have involved undercover operatives.
And in recent years a number of plots have materialized involving seemingly unstable individuals interacting with government informants. This January, a 25-year-old man with a history of psychiatric problems was arrested after attempting to attack an upstate New York bar with a machete — with the assistance of a government informant who helped provide him with the machete. And in October 2014, a former army recruit was introduced to FBI informants after being released from of a mental institution. Months later, he was arrested for plotting to attack a military facility — with a fake bomb provided by the informants.
Although more than 100 alleged Islamic State plots have been documented in the United States since 2014, it’s unclear how many would have materialized without the involvement of informants or undercover agents. Such cases nevertheless help inflate the public fear of terrorism and feed the misconception that terrorist sleeper cells are ubiquitous in the United States.
The escalation of FBI tactics to actively encouraging violent actors in these investigations would be a dangerous step.
Many of the targets of prior terrorism investigations did not demonstrate any ability to prepare for an actual attack without the FBI providing their equipment. But the Garland shooters did.
And had they been more competent in their assault, the result could have been one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in recent U.S. history – an attack that was encouraged by the FBI.
Top photo: FBI crime scene investigators document the area around two deceased gunmen and their vehicle outside the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas, in May 2014.
An 18-year-old recently arrested on terrorism charges in Arizona has the mental capacity of a child and had been in regular contact with the FBI for years before his arrest, according to family members, former teachers, and medical documents reviewed by The Intercept. Mahin Khan was arrested July 1 on charges of plotting to support the Taliban as well as the militant group the Islamic State and commit acts of terrorism in the local community.
People close to Khan say that he suffered from serious mental and emotional illnesses and that the FBI was aware of this, having met with him regularly since he was a young teenager. According to medical records and statements from family members, he was first referred to the FBI after sending a threatening email to one of his teachers at the age of 15. After an initial meeting with the FBI, he spent 45 days at an inpatient psychiatric facility for evaluation. His family says this stay at the facility was coordinated with FBI officials. Agents reportedly continued to meet with Khan regularly after he returned home and continued to do so up until the time of his arrest.
A community activist told The Intercept that after Khan’s initial contact with the FBI, he began regularly meeting with the teenager in an attempt to mentor him. He said that during these meetings, Khan had exhibited obvious signs of mental illness. “He was unable to even tie his shoelaces and his mother would have to do it for him. He would say things supporting extremism and terrorist groups but then would later start crying and apologizing,” the activist said. The activist did not want to be named for fear of retribution from law enforcement.
His statement echoed those made by a former tutor of Khan’s in an interview with local Arizona media, in which the tutor said Khan had “the mentality of a 6-year-old” and he had told Khan’s mother that there was no point in having him tutored as he was “unable to learn anything.”
In a statement released to local media shortly after Khan’s arrest, his family said he was developmentally delayed and suggested that he suffered from autism. The statement also mentioned that “three years ago, Mahin went through an extensive inpatient psychiatric evaluation under the directive and supervision of the FBI. The evaluation documented the extent and severity of his mental health.”
Medical documents reviewed by The Intercept seem to confirm that Khan suffered from cognitive impairments. A developmental evaluation conducted by psychologists last year found that Khan “requires considerable support from parents to complete day-to-day skills.” It also said that he had been adversely impacted by the loss of his older brother, who died after suffering cardiac arrest a year earlier.
Another document released by his former therapist’s office stated that doctors observed Khan, “acts younger than his stated age,” adding that his “concept formation and mental processing also lack maturity and forethought.”
Further medical records showed that Khan had been taking anti-psychotic medication in recent years.
His parents say that the FBI routinely visited Khan since he was first referred to the agency at the age of 15. During these visits, which occurred every few months, no lawyer was present, as Khan’s family assumed the FBI had been meeting to “help him.”
The FBI declined to comment as the case is still pending. The Arizona Attorney General’s Office did not respond to requests for comment.
An undated photo of Khan provided by his family.
Source: Khan family
A judge denied Khan bond at a July 20 hearing. He now faces the prospect of several decades in prison on a number of charges, including conspiracy to commit terrorism and conspiracy to commit misconduct involving weapons. In contrast to the vast majority of terrorism cases in the U.S., Khan’s case is being tried at the state level.
At an initial hearing, a Joint Terrorism Task Force agent reportedly confirmed that authorities had provided Khan with a prepaid cellphone so that he could communicate with a government informant. In the course of his conversations with that informant, Khan is alleged to have indicated his willingness to kill hundreds of people, while also musing about attacking a local motor vehicle registration office or a Jewish community center.
But due to the level of Khan’s psychological impairment, it is questionable whether he was actually capable of acting on any of these statements. His documented history of mental illness and young age (he was legally a minor when the investigation against him started) suggest he may have been more well suited to psychiatric treatment than an elaborate sting operation. The national headlines trumpeting the case as a thwarted instance of homegrown terrorism seem to diverge from the reality of Khan’s reduced mental circumstances.
“Mahin is 18, but mentally he is like a child,” his father, Atif Khan, said. “He doesn’t even have a driver’s license because he can’t pass his test, he can’t even tie his shoes or take care of himself in the most basic ways. We didn’t let him have a phone because we didn’t trust him with one, but now we have found out that he had been using a phone given to him by the FBI.”
Court documents indicate the formal investigation began as early as February of this year. On June 18, Khan turned 18 and was arrested shortly afterward. “They waited until two weeks after his 18th birthday to arrest him, but even now he doesn’t understand the gravity of the things going on around him,” his father said.
Had authorities arrested him beforehand, Khan would have potentially faced less punitive legal consequences as a minor. Shortly after he was taken into custody, Khan was assaulted by other inmates in the local jail. He has since been placed in segregated confinement.
In addition to the impact on Khan’s own life, activists in Khan’s local community who spoke to The Intercept expressed frustration that the FBI’s informant had discussed with Khan a plot to attack a Jewish center, leading to sensational news headlines that have strained interfaith ties they had been working to build. A story on recent terrorism convictions by AlterNet accused the FBI of “stoking divisions” among Muslim and Jewish communities in the course of some of its informant-directed investigations.
“The FBI knew all along that he was not a real threat on his own,” Khan’s father said, adding that the government had allowed him to board a flight to Minnesota to see family members during the same period he had been conversing with its informant.
“They were meeting with us and saying they were there to help him, but meanwhile they were trying to trap him at the same time,” Khan’s father said.
The molecular structure of a silica gel, shown in this illustration of a chemistry textbook or syllabus, has been described as "the chemical composition of a latina orgasm."
On May 23, ProPublica published an article on a software program designed to predict the likelihood of future criminal conduct. The company that sells the program, Northpointe, responded with a 37-page critique of our work. We addressed the main thrust of the company’s concerns here. Our replies to the company’s methodological criticisms follow.
ProPublica neglected to consider the base rate in the interpretation of their results. This is an error in judgment about the probability of an event. The error occurs when information about the base rate of an event (e.g., low base rate of recidivism in a population) is ignored or not given enough weight.
This is not correct. ProPublica accounted for the difference in recidivism rates in a statistical test known as a logistic regression. That test found that when adjusting for recidivism, criminal history, age and gender across races, black defendants were 45 percent more likely to get a higher score. In addition, we calculated likelihood ratios, which are useful for assessing how well a test performs independent of base rate. The likelihood ratios we calculated showed that the Northpointe test performs differently across races. For black defendants, the likelihood ratio is lower than for white defendants. This means that a white defendant who has a higher score is more likely to recidivate than a black defendant who gets a higher score.
ProPublica combined the High and Medium levels and refer to this level in their article as “Higher Risk.” Thus, PP’s analysis of classification errors is for the Low cut point. This has the effect of inflating the false positive rate and the corresponding base-rate sensitive Target Population Error (1-PV+).
This is not correct. In our analysis, the disparity in false positive rates was starker when we adjusted the cut points as suggested by Northpointe. When adjusting the cut points to only include “High” risk scores, black defendants who did not go on to commit new crimes were three times as likely as white defendants to be classified as high risk.
ProPublica based its decision to group the medium and high scores together on Northpointe’s user guide, which states: “scores in the medium and high range garner more interest from supervision agencies.”
Not so. Northpointe is describing the positive and negative predictive values of the test. We reported the differences in true and false positive rates for black and white defendants.
ProPublica failed to report that the comparisons of the false positive rate and true positive rate for blacks and whites at the study cut point (“Low”, “Not Low”) for the VRRS and GRRS were inconclusive.
We did not report false positive rate and true positive rate comparisons because they do not offer additional insight into the question at hand: Are higher scores distributed unequally between black and white defendants? In fact they are. Black defendants who did not recidivate were more likely to be labeled higher risk.
The reverse logistic regression models are misspecified. And the relative risk ratios from the reverse regressions are miscalculated and misinterpreted.
Our logistic model wasn’t trying to predict who would recidivate. We were trying to identify a possible relationship between race and receiving a high score when controlling for other variables like age, gender and criminal history. We found that black defendants have greater odds of getting a high score that cannot be explained by these other factors. Then we even controlled for future recidivism, and still found that the racial gap couldn’t be explained.
Elsewhere in our methodology, we ask another question. Is the difference in recidivism risk between a high- and low-scoring black defendant different than that gap for a high- and low-scoring white defendant? If there is a difference in the increased risk associated with those scores within races that would mean a high score means something different for a black defendant than a white defendant.
In other words, when you compare black and white defendants with similar characteristics, black defendants tend to get higher scores.
Northpointe compared across races without correcting for other factors. But when making a comparison like this, it’s necessary to correct for other factors like age, gender and prior crimes. When we did that, black defendants with higher scores were less risky than comparable white defendants. In other words, as underlying risk increases, scores will increase more for black defendants than white defendants. Which bolsters our finding in the logistic regression instead of contradicting it.
ProPublica conducted analyses in different samples that yield disparate results. The best AUC results were obtained in Sample A. Sample A consists of persons with complete case records.
This assertion is correct but misleading. ProPublica used two different samples in its analysis. In the logistic regression, which does not factor in time, we included only people for whom we could obtain two years’ worth of recidivism data for an apples to apples comparison. The other analysis, known as a Cox regression, is able to take time into account. So for that analysis we could justifiably include cases where we did not have a full two-year window (i.e. those with less time to recidivate). This model did show lower accuracy, as Northpointe points out, but that’s not the result of unfairly manipulating the data, but rather using the most complete data possible compatible with the technique in use. One way of visualizing the difference in errors across scores such as those produced by Northpointe’s risk assessment tool is something called an ROC curve. The curve visualizes the predictive power of a model. The more the curve bows toward the upper left-hand corner, the more accurate the test.
In its analysis, Northpointe presents ROC curves for black and white defendants, claiming that because the curves are very similar their visualization disproves ProPublica’s analysis. However, the curves they included were “smoothed,” a technique that concealed differences between black and white ROC curves. The problem with this is that a smoothed curve is appropriate for continuous variables, but the decile scores produced by Northpointe’s tool are discrete (they must be a whole number between 1 and 10). This smoothing minimized the error differences between populations across scores. ProPublica plotted the unsmoothed curves here, clearly showing differences between the black and white ROC curves.
This is not accurate. ProPublica’s detailed methodology paper never uses the term “percent accuracy.” Instead we report concordance index values as an indicator of predictive accuracy. This is not a novel interpretation. In fact, in its own validation study published in 2008, Northpointe refers to the c-index as being a measure of “predictive accuracy.”
There are overlapping time intervals in the Cox survival analysis data frame (Sample C). The stop-start time intervals in the survival data frame should not overlap. For example if the first start-stop time interval for a case is 0–100, the next time interval should start after 100, but not before 100.
This is correct, but doesn’t change the results. We analyzed 10,985 defendants who were assigned a risk score for Violent Recidivism, of which four have overlapping time intervals. We regret the errors, but excluding those cases would not change the outcome of our calculations.
Different norm sets may have been used for the decile scores. PP did not control for norm set. This would affect the location of the cut point for the study classifier (“Low” vs. “Not Low”).
ProPublica used the designations of ‘low’, ‘medium’ and ‘high’ that Northpointe actually assigned to each of the defendants in our data. Following the advice in Northpointe’s user manual, we collapsed the medium and high categories.
That manual states: “scores in the medium and high range garner more interest from supervision agencies than low scores, as a low score would suggest there is little risk of general recidivism,” so we considered scores any higher than “low” to indicate a risk of recidivism in our analysis.
ProPublica describes the sample as pretrial defendants. It is not clear what the legal status was at the time of assessment for the cases in the sample.
Incorrect. The Broward County data used in our analysis indicates the legal status of the defendant at the time they were scored. ProPublica limited its analysis to defendants whose scores were assigned during pretrial because that is the primary use of the score in Broward County.
U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning tried to kill herself on July 5 in her cell at Fort Leavenworth military prison. Now, military officials are considering filing charges in connection to the suicide attempt that could make the terms of her imprisonment much more punitive — including indefinite solitary confinement — while possibly denying her any chance of receiving parole.
According to a charge sheet posted by the American Civil Liberties Union, Manning was informed by military officials on Thursday that she is under investigation for “resisting the force cell move team,” “prohibited property,” and “conduct which threatens.” In the weeks following her suicide attempt, she has been active on social media, thanking her followers for their moral support.
Manning’s treatment in prison since her 2010 arrest has repeatedly generated outrage among civil liberties advocates. The punitive tactics that have been employed against her include stripping her naked in her cell on a nightly basis, extended solitary confinement, and denial of medical necessities like eyeglasses. In 2011, then-State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley publicly described Manning’s treatment in prison as “ridiculous, counterproductive, and stupid.”
Following a 14-month investigation into Manning’s treatment by the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, the U.N. accused the U.S. government of holding Manning in conditions that constituted “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment,” particularly with regard to the extended use of pretrial solitary confinement. The harsh measures the military has employed during Manning’s detention have led to suspicions that the government is attempting make an example of her over her whistleblowing activities.
The latest threat to charge Manning with offenses related to her own attempted suicide seems to be proceeding in the same spirit of abusive treatment.
“The government has long been aware of Chelsea’s distress associated with the denial of medical care related to her gender transition and yet delayed and denied the treatment recognized as necessary,” ACLU attorney Chase Strangio said in a statement. “Now, while Chelsea is suffering the darkest depression she has experienced since her arrest, the government is taking actions to punish her for that pain. It is unconscionable and we hope that the investigation is immediately ended and that she is given the health care that she needs to recover.”
In a statement released by Manning after her 2013 guilty plea on espionage charges, she asked for a pardon and said that she had been motivated by moral outrage over details of U.S. military killings and torture of civilians in Iraq. “In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture,” she said. “If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society.”
Manning is currently six years into serving a 35-year sentence.
Today, we received a very important email. The subject line: "DATA: Seattle defeats Portland as nation’s most 'hipster' city."
WE FUCKING DID IT Y'ALL!!
This groundbreaking study, which measures major metropolitan cities' hipsterdom based on how many "microbreweries, record stores, music dealers, thrift shops, tattoo parlors, music and live entertainment, bicycle dealers and non-chain coffee shops" they have, comes from "big data" marketing service provider Infogroup. Their e-mail also included terms such as "the cool and connected" and "lamestream establishments."
They also note: ""Seattle may be the birthplace of Starbucks, but its large number of single-location coffee shops (38 percent of all 'hipster' businesses) brought Seattle to the top."
Riveted? Dying to know the country's other (sub-par) hipster bastions? Here ya go:
Infogroup ranked the following as the top 10 hipster cities in the U.S.:
1. Seattle 2. Portland 3. Denver 4. Sacramento, Calif. 5. Grand Rapids, Mich. 6. San Diego 7. Providence, R.I. 8. Pittsburgh 9. San Francisco 10. Rochester, N.Y.
WE'RE #1! WE'RE #1 WE'RE #1!!!!
How did Seattle beat out the likes of Portland and San Fran-fucking-cisco? I'll let the geniuses explain:
Though Portland in recent years has arguably been considered the country’s most “hip” city, Seattle took the top spot partly due to its high concentration of single-location coffee shops. Single-location coffee shops make up 38 percent of “hipster” businesses in Seattle and 29 percent in Portland. Both cities boasted a significant microbrewery presence as well, making up 10 percent of businesses of interest in Seattle and 14 percent in Portland.
“By pinpointing the business characteristics of unique communities, such as 'hipsters,' where consumers turn to local as opposed to larger chain companies, Infogroup gives marketers and business owners an advantage to gain market share,” said Matt Graves, chief data officer at Infogroup. “Our insights find a high correlation between types of businesses and consumer preferences that creates an opportunity for growth in the community.”
Beginning over a decade ago, the country’s surveillance court intervened to limit the FBI’s ability to act on some sensitive information that it collected while monitoring phone calls.
The wrangling between the FBI and the secret court is contained in previously undiscloseddocumentsobtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC. The documents, part of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, were shared with The Intercept.
The documents reveal that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) told the FBI several times between 2005 and 2007 that using some incidental information it collected while monitoring communications in an investigation — specifically, numbers people punch into their phones after they’ve placed a call — would require an explicit authorization from the court, even in an emergency.
“The newly obtained summaries are significant because they show the power that the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] has to limit expansive FBI surveillance practices,” Alan Butler, an attorney for EPIC, wrote in an email to The Intercept.
Additionally, The Intercept independently obtained sections of the FBI’s 2011 Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide describing how the FBI currently deals with information it obtains after getting a court order for what’s called a “pen register,” or “trap and trace” on a target — a capability built into the phone lines that records incoming and outgoing phone numbers for a particular phone. The 2011 guide is currently public but heavily redacted.
The Operations Guide, in addition to shedding light on how the FBI uses pen registers, reveals that the surveillance court’s pushback more than a decade ago has become internal FBI policy.
During an investigation, the FBI is often interested in who a target is talking to — what calls they make and receive, and where those calls physically originate.
By simply telling a judge the information is “relevant,” the FBI can demand that a phone company, or email or other online provider, immediately hand over any and all “telephone numbers, email addresses, and other dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information.” That information can sometimes include locational data. They don’t need to notify the target or demonstrate probable cause that he or she committed a crime to get it.
But the FBI’s monitoring can end up getting more information than just phone numbers, though pen-register and trap-and-trace orders are not intended to get any “content” that would provide insight into the substance or subject of a communication.
For example, the numbers people punch into the phone after making a call can reveal financial or personal information — like a credit card number, a social security number, a PIN, a prescription number, or any other type of response via automated telephone prompts. The “term of art” for this information is “post-cut-through dialed digits.”
The FBI in the 2011 Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide has described the digits dialed after someone makes a call as “content.”
Following the release of documents by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, many have described the secretive court as a “rubber stamp” because it rarely rejects a surveillance request. But there’s nuance in what the judges have challenged or modified in response to requests over the years.
Between July and December in 2005, the surveillance court approved pen registers and trap-and-trace devices to target “at least 138” people.
However, one judge started asking the FBI more probing questions about what exactly it did with post-cut through dialing digits it “incidentally” obtained with those orders — launching what Butler describes as an “open secret” fight between the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and FBI over the information. The judge’s request for a “memorandum of law” appears in the July 2006 Department of Justice report to Congress on its use of FISA pen registers, obtained by EPIC. Some of that pushback was documented by Wired in 2008.
In May 2006, the government told the court that it had the authority to collect that sensitive information, and would “in some cases … specifically seek authority for secondary orders requiring a service provider to provide all dialing, routing, addressing or signaling information transmitted by a target telephone, which, in light of technological constraints, may include content and non-content digits alike,” the report continues. (According to the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, the FBI agent requesting the pen register has to specifically ask for any additional dialing information following the first nine or 10 digits — it isn’t automatic.)
The government also insisted it wouldn’t actually use that information in an investigation — unless there’s an emergency, that is, to prevent death, serious physical injury, or “harm to national security,” though it’s never made explicit what exactly that means.
Between January and June in 2006, the surveillance court modified some of the FBI’s applications to stop it from using that information without additional permission, no matter the urgency.
The court “had made modifications to the government’s proposed pen register orders,” reads the biannual report to Congress obtained by EPIC. “Although the [FISA Court] has authorized the government to record and decode all post-cut-through digits dialed by the targeted telephone, it has struck the language specifically authorizing the government to make affirmative investigative use of possible content” unless permission is specifically granted by the court.
The surveillance court wasn’t the only judicial body rejecting the FBI’s requests to hold on to the additional dialing information. In July 2006, a magistrate judge in Texas denied an application for a pen register because filtering technology would not eliminate the additional content information. That led then-chief judge of the surveillance court, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, to ask the government to respond to the Texas court, and explain how it might impact decisions in foreign intelligence investigations.
The government said the court should basically ignore the decision — and take note of new revisions to the USA Patriot Act, which said the government could obtain “noncontent” dialing information. (Because there isn’t technology that can reliably separate out content from noncontent when it comes to this type of dialing information, the law basically allows for all of it, the government argued.)
In 2006, the court had not yet written a formal decision on whether or not the government could keep getting this information — let alone use it in an investigation.
But “most” of the judges continued to strike the “emergency” language from the FBI’s requests, despite the government continuing to insist that “the proposed exception is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment” because its use is so rare.
By August 2006, the court asked the FBI to produce an entire report on how the dialing information obtained through pen registers is stored and kept in its databases. By 2007, the court reported that it modified 18 different government requests out of 98 within six months.
The secret court continued to delete language that would allow the government to use the post-cut-through dialed digits in an emergency — and added a time limit on when it could come back to ask to use that content.
By 2011, the court’s resistance appeared to enter into formal policy, according to the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide section obtained by The Intercept. The FBI, the guide states, can never in these cases use information like credit card numbers or social security numbers obtained after dialing a phone number, “even in cases of emergency.”
However, that exception still applies in criminal cases, according to the 2011 Operations Guide. “In an emergency,” information obtained from the numbers people dial “may be used as necessary in criminal investigations to prevent immediate danger of death, serious physical injury, or harm to national security,” reads the section on post-cut through dialing digits. And if the target is calling a bank, for example — the FBI cannot get the account number from the call, but it can use the call as a lead and subpoena the bank for that information instead.
Butler points out that despite the FBI and the secret court’s fight over the information, it is basically impossible to tell whether that information triggered investigative leads agents wouldn’t have otherwise had without the pen register.
The FBI declined to comment on the previously redacted portions of the 2011 Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide obtained by The Intercept as well as the FOIA documents obtained by EPIC.
“The Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide establishes the FBI’s internal rules and procedures, and describes the FBI’s authority to use specific investigative tools as determined through the Constitution, U.S. statutes, executive orders, and the AG Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations,” Chris Allen, an FBI spokesperson, wrote in an email. “These rules are audited and enforced through a rigorous compliance mechanism designed to ensure that FBI assessments and investigations are subject to responsible review and approval.”
For over a year, Swedish scientist Simon Morris has been experimenting with levitating plants, growing common flora while suspended in the air. This system, called LYFE, consists of a planter that hovers just over an oak base powered by strong magnetism. Through this invisible force field house plants are able to hover while also turning slowly to give equal sunlight to each of their sides.
Every LYFE planter is designed as a geodesic form, paired minimally with its discrete base to draw attention to the action of the vessel rather than the piece itself. You can read more about LYFE on their Kickstarter and see Morris’s other floating home accessory, FLYTE, on their website. (via Design Milk)
Like a double exposed photograph or hazy dream, Eric Roux-Fountaine‘s paintings capture worlds just slightly outside of our known reality, magical moments dotted with starlight and ghostly orbs. Within the softly painted works, tightrope walkers teeter through tall forests at dusk, while couples zing through the air on carnival rides set in front of the moon.
Roux-Fountaine approaches each of his paintings in the same way a director might work with a film, casting the characters of his works with a loose interpretation. “At no time am I trying to depict a place in a literal way, because I think we paintThe with our culture as much as with our nature,” said the French artist. “And the memory, or the feeling we keep of a place or a scene, is sometimes more interesting than the ‘raw’ reality. People depicted in paintings are more like actors. They appear in a scene then, it is up to everyone to put together the movie!”
Many of Roux-Fontaine’s works are inspired by his frequent travels throughout Central America, India, and Eastern Europe. He is represented by Galerie Felli in Paris, M Fine Arts in Boston, and Waltman Ortega Fine Art in Miami where he was in the group exhibition “Territories of Beyond” earlier this year. You can see more of his surreal paintings on his website. (via Hi-Fructose)
I just wanted to thank the librarian from Beacon Hill for coming to the Jungle months ago and talking to me and my neighbors like we are people and not diseases. You gave me hope when I needed it the most and thought the whole city hated us…
In planning an upcoming conference and nonviolent action aimed at challenging the institution of war, with the conference to be held at American University, I can't help but be drawn to the speech a U.S. president gave at American University a little more than 50 years ago. Whether or not you agree with me that this is the best speech ever given by a U.S. president, there should be little dispute that it is the speech most out of step with what anyone will say at either the Republican or the Democratic national convention this year. Here's a video of the best portion of the speech:
President John F. Kennedy was speaking at a time when, like now, Russia and the United States had enough nuclear weapons ready to fire at each other on a moment's notice to destroy the earth for human life many times over. At that time, however, in 1963, there were only three nations, not the current nine, with nuclear weapons, and many fewer than now with nuclear energy. NATO was far removed from Russia's borders. The United States had not just facilitated a coup in Ukraine. The United States wasn't organizing military exercises in Poland or placing missiles in Poland and Romania. Nor was it manufacturing smaller nukes that it described as "more usable." The work of managing U.S. nuclear weapons was then deemed prestigious in the U.S. military, not the dumping ground for drunks and misfits that it has become. Hostility between Russia and the United States was high in 1963, but the problem was widely known about in the United States, in contrast to the current vast ignorance. Some voices of sanity and restraint were permitted in the U.S. media and even in the White House. Kennedy was using peace activist Norman Cousins as a messenger to Nikita Khrushchev, whom he never described, as Hillary Clinton has described Vladimir Putin, as "Hitler."
Kennedy framed his speech as a remedy for ignorance, specifically the ignorant view that war is inevitable. This is the opposite of what President Barack Obama said recently in Hiroshima and earlier in Prague and Oslo. Kennedy called peace "the most important topic on earth." It is a topic not touched on in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. I fully expect this year's Republican national convention to celebrate ignorance.
Kennedy renounced the idea of a "Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war," precisely what both big political parties now and most speeches on war by most past U.S. presidents ever have favored. Kennedy went so far as to profess to care about 100% rather than 4% of humanity:
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan places the blame for this weekend’s failed coup attempt on an Islamic preacher and one-time ally, Fethullah Gulen (above), who now resides in Pennsylvania with a green card. Erdogan is demanding the U.S. extradite Gulen, citing prior extraditions by the Turkish government of terror suspects demanded by the U.S.: “Now we’re saying deliver this guy who’s on our terrorist list to us.” Erdogan has been requesting Gulen’s extradition from the U.S. for at least two years, on the ground that he has been subverting the Turkish government while harbored by the U.S. Thus far, the U.S. is refusing, with Secretary of State John Kerry demanding of Turkey: “Give us the evidence, show us the evidence. We need a solid legal foundation that meets the standard of extradition.”
In light of the presence on U.S. soil of someone the Turkish government regards as a “terrorist” and a direct threat to its national security, would Turkey be justified in dispatching a weaponized drone over Pennsylvania to find and kill Gulen if the U.S. continues to refuse to turn him over, or sending covert operatives to kidnap him? That was the question posed yesterday by Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor of Guantánamo’s military commissions who resigned in protest over the use of torture-obtained evidence:
If Fethullah Gulen is considered a threat to Erdogan & Turkey's gov't doesn't Turkey have a right to drone strike him in Pennsylvania? @CNN
That question, of course, is raised by the fact that the U.S. has spent many years now doing exactly this: employing various means — including but not limited to drones — to abduct and kill people in multiple countries whom it has unilaterally decided (with no legal process) are “terrorists” or who otherwise are alleged to pose a threat to its national security. Since it cannot possibly be the case that the U.S. possesses legal rights that no other country can claim — right? — the question naturally arises whether Turkey would be entitled to abduct or kill someone it regards as a terrorist when the U.S. is harboring him and refuses to turn him over.
The only viable objection to Turkey’s assertion of this authority would be to claim that the U.S. limits its operations to places where lawlessness prevails, something that is not true of Pennsylvania. But this is an inaccurate description of the U.S.’s asserted entitlement. In fact, after 9/11, the U.S. threatened Afghanistan with bombing and invasion unless the Taliban government immediately turned over Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban’s answer was strikingly similar to what the U.S. just told Turkey about Gulen:
The ruling Taliban of Afghanistan today further complicated the status of Osama bin Laden and rejected the ultimatum of the United States that he and his lieutenants be handed over to answer for their suspected role in last week’s terrorist attacks in the United States.
The Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, said at a news conference in Islamabad, “Our position in this regard is that if the Americans have evidence, they should produce it.” If they can prove their allegations, he said, “we are ready for a trial of Osama bin Laden.”
Asked again whether Mr. bin Laden would be surrendered, the ambassador replied, “Without evidence, no.”
The U.S. refused to provide any such evidence — “These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion,” said President George W. Bush at the time — and the U.S. bombing and invasion of Afghanistan began two weeks thereafter, and continues to this day, 15 years later. The justification there was not that the Taliban were incapable of arresting and extraditing bin Laden, but rather that they refused to do so without evidence of his guilt being provided and some legal/judicial action invoked.
Nor are such U.S. actions against individual terror suspects confined to countries where lawlessness prevails. In 2003, the CIA kidnapped a cleric from the streets of Milan, Italy, and shipped him to Egypt to be tortured (CIA agents involved have been prosecuted in Italy, though the U.S. government has vehemently defended them). In 2004, the U.S. abducted a German citizen in Macedonia, flew him to Afghanistan, tortured and drugged him, then unceremoniously dumped him back on the street when it realized he was innocent; but the U.S. has refused ever since to compensate him or even apologize, leaving his life in complete shambles. The U.S. has repeatedly killed people in Pakistan with drones and other attacks, including strikes when it had no idea who it was killing, and also stormed a compound in Abbottabad — where the Pakistani government has full reign — in order to kill Osama bin Laden in 2010.
U.S. drone kills of terror suspects (including its own citizens) are extremely popular among Americans, including (in the age of Obama) those who self-identify as liberal Democrats. Yet it’s virtually certain that Americans across the ideological spectrum would explode in nationalistic outrage if Turkey actually did the same thing in Pennsylvania; indeed, the consequences for Turkey if it dared to do so are hard to overstate.
That’s American Exceptionalism in its purest embodiment: The U.S. is not subject to the same rules and laws as other nations, but instead is entitled to assert power and punishment that is unique to itself, grounded in its superior status. Indeed, so ingrained is this pathology that the mere suggestion that the U.S. should be subject to the same laws and rules as everyone else inevitably provokes indignant accusations that the person is guilty of the greatest sin: comparing the United States of America to the lesser, inferior governments and countries of the world.
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A judge denied Khan bond at a July 20 hearing. He now faces the prospect of several decades in prison on a number of charges, including conspiracy to commit terrorism and conspiracy to commit misconduct involving weapons. In contrast to the vast majority of terrorism cases in the U.S., Khan’s case is being tried at the state level.
