No, that’s not Hewlett-Packard the day after Fiorina laid off 30,000 employees, it’s last night’s tech policy town hall in Iowa. I’m not sure if you can count the gentleman looking over his shoulder on the right as an attendee, as he looks ready to leave at that very moment. The CARLY for America Super PAC went with a slightly different shot:
Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7
Tea Party Republican and Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore, a lunatic, made headlines last week when she sent out her family’s gun-themed Christmas card. Audio from a newly surfaced radio segment shows Fiore admitting that she would like to use those guns to shoot Syrian refugees “in the head.”
During the November 21 episode of her weekly Las Vegas radio show, Walk the Talk with Michele Fiore, the assemblywoman said plainly that she did not sign onto a statement from Republican assemblymen opposing Syrian refugees settling in Nevada because she would rather murder them herself.
“What—are you kidding me? I’m about to fly to Paris and shoot ‘em in the head myself!” she claimed, per Talking Points Memo. “I am not OK with Syrian refugees. I’m not OK with terrorists. I’m OK with putting them down, blacking them out, just put a piece of brass in their ocular cavity and end their miserable life. I’m good with that.”
In a statement to local Las Vegas news station KSNV this morning, Fiore claimed that she would only murder terrorists. “I’m not going to back down,” she said. “I never said I would shoot a Syrian refugee, period. What I said if it came down to a terrorist or myself I would not hesitate to kill a terrorist…period.” You can listen to the audio on Fiore’s campaign website.
If there is any question as to how Michele Fiore feels about guns and using them to kill, please see her sexy 2016 “Second Amendment Calendar” that she released last month.
Fiore is currently running to represent Nevada’s third district in Congress.
Photo via AP. Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.
Yesterday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump called on the United States to ban all Muslims
http://deadspin.com/tom-brady-says...
This isn’t an accusation that Brady personally harbors racist values. But Brady has repeatedly and voluntarily hitched his celebrity wagon to Trump’s, to their mutual benefit, and if he was willing to rub brand auras when Trump was merely a bombastic curio, it’s worth knowing if he’s changed his mind now that Trump has fully emerged as a dangerous demagogue who is so close to real power he can taste it. We are willing to pay to find out because we don’t trust the NFL press to do it on their own.
The Brady-Trump friendship dates back 13 years, and Brady has expressed an admiration for Trump that goes beyond their frequent golfing outings. “He always gives me a call and different types of motivational speeches at different times,” Brady said when asked about the “Make America Great Again” hat that Trump had sent him and which he displayed in his locker. “He obviously appeals to a lot of people.”
He indeed does, though maybe not quite as many after announcing his intentions to stop all Muslims at our borders. (Of course, his final tip into overt fascism may only gain him more popularity among the Youtube commenters who make up the electorate.)
In the face of previous controversy, Brady walked back his endorsement of Trump, saying “I don’t even know what the issues are.” Well, here’s an issue that’s easy for even the apolitical to grasp, and it’s grotesque and unconstitutional.
The only reason Trump has been allowed to get this far is the fawning deference he’s cultivated among the famous and influential—folks like Tom Brady. In a just world, he’d be a shunned fringe candidate, treated less seriously than David Duke. In our world, the NFL’s biggest star cozies up to a man who advocates ethnic cleansing—who happens to be one of three or four people with a realistic chance at becoming the most powerful person on earth—and the NFL media giggles because it’s eager for any celebrity shine.
One hundred dollars goes to the first reporter who asks Tom Brady if he still supports his friend Donald Trump and his plan to ban Muslims from America, and if not, why he doesn’t. Payable by cash, check, or donation to your charity or PAC of choice.
The protracted fight to secure the release of video showing a Chicago cop killing unarmed teenager Laquan McDonald
On the same day in which the city held a press conference to screen footage of an officer shooting Ronald Johnson—footage captured just a week before was McDonald killed—officials released yet another video depicting grave police misconduct. This one shows officers repeatedly tasering a man named Philip Coleman, who was being held in police lockup on the city’s South Side.
Johnson later died. An autopsy attributed his death to a reaction to an antipsychotic drug, but, as the Chicago Tribune reports, it also “showed that Coleman had experienced severe trauma, including more than 50 bruises and scrapes on his body from the top of his head to his lower legs.”
In a statement, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who has responded for calls for his head with a newfound damning rhetoric, called the treatment of Coleman inexcusable.
“I do not see how the manner in which Mr. Coleman was physically treated could possibly be acceptable,” Emanuel said. “While the Medical Examiner ruled that Mr. Coleman died accidentally as a result of treatment he received in the hospital, it does not excuse the way he was treated when he was in custody. Something is wrong here — either the actions of the officers who dragged Mr. Coleman, or the policies of the department.”
Nonetheless, the Tribune reports, “police oversight officials last year ruled the officers’ actions with Coleman were justified.”
Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.
Yesterday, while Donald Trump was calling for a ban on Muslims entering America, Bernie Sanders was calling for a carbon tax.
http://gawker.com/a-carbon-tax-i...
A carbon tax—a mechanism for putting a price on the carbon emissions that are causing global warming—is our best, easiest, and most realistic hope for slowing down carbon emissions in a meaningful way in a relatively short time frame. Makes carbon expensive, and you will see how amazingly fast polluters are able to curtail their pollution. The overwhelming logic of a carbon tax is agreed upon
As part of Bernie Sanders’ full climate change plan, announced yesterday, explicitly advocates a carbon tax as a way to achieve its goal of cutting carbon emissions by 40% by 2030. This makes Bernie Sanders, by my reading, the only major presidential candidate of either party to call for a carbon tax.
Martin O’Malley and Hillary Clinton have both offered climate change plans that call for an aggressive push towards clean energy, but neither have explicitly included a carbon tax. And Republican candidates do not support a carbon tax, despite the fact that it is in many ways a conservative dream: a market-based solution to a problem that will generate revenue that could be used to lower other taxes.
It is easy to say we want to phase out dirty energy production. It is hard to actually do it unless there is a strong economic incentive to do so. A carbon tax is that incentive. We need it.
[Photo: AP]
If there’s one thing Donald Trump knows, it’s how to get on TV—and after his xenophobic policy pivot last night, get on TV he did. In fact, the Donald spent the last 18 hours on a whirlwind tour of the cable networks parroting the same canned provocations over and over: Did you see that thousands of people lined up to get into his speech? Have you even heard of the World Trade Center attack? How about the other World Trade Center attack? Did you see this poll saying the Muslims are going to murder us all in our sleep?
Here are the lowlights of the media circus that very predictably followed Trump’s calculatedly awful campaign announcement:
Donald’s first stop was a friendly one, so to speak: He called in to speak with an incredulous Greta Van Susteren Monday night not long after making the announcement.
High point: Donald accuses Chris Christie of getting Obama elected.
“He should be focused on the hug he gave President Obama, which might have given Obama the victory,” Donald says.
Low point: Donald admits it—he has Muslim friends.
“Does this apply to your Muslim friends” Susteren asks.
“No of course not,” Donald laughs.
Next up was Good Morning America, his first call-in of the morning.
High point: Donald Trump recounts a history of terrorism in America.
“We had the World Trade Center, we had the pre-World Trade Center. Remember, a lot of people forget now, they tried to blow it up twice. We had so many other incidents. And we had now the last incident in California.”
Second high point: Obama ignored Donald Trump’s tweet.
“Our president, I watched him make a fool of himself the other night with a speech that nobody still knows. I tweeted out, ‘Is that all there is?’ He didn’t say anything.”
Low point: Donald clarifies he’s not like Hitler, he’s like FDR, if FDR were more like Hitler.
http://gawker.com/donald-trump-i...
Next, an increasingly hoarse Donald called into CNN, where he and Chris Cuomo argued about things like what percentage of Muslims living in the US want to kill us (“Donald, we wouldn’t even put that poll on the air. it’s a hack organization with a guy who was dismissed from the conservative circles for conspiracy theories. you know that,” said an exasperated Cuomo. “Take a look a the Pew poll,” says Trump.)
High point: Donald expands his history of terrorism in America into the future.
“We had the World Trade Center number one. We had World Trade Center number two. We had many other things happen. Then the other day we had the California attack... You’re going to have many more World Trade Centers if you don’t solve it. Many, many more. And probably beyond the World Trade Center.”
Low point: Donald starts complaining that Obama policies make it easy for Syrian Muslims to enter the country while keeping the Syrian Christians out.
“Chris, let me ask you this. You have a large portion of people from Syria that are Christian,” Trump says. “Why aren’t we allowing the Christians in? We only allow the Muslims in. Why aren’t we allowing the Christians in?
“That’s not true. That’s just not true. Does it matter to you that it’s not true?” Chris Cuomo asks.
“It is largely true,” Trump replies.
High point: The end.
Image via AP. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.
Your favorite travel mug, Anker battery chargers
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Here’s your no brainer deal of the day: Buy a $25 Papa John’s gift card for full price, and Groupon will toss in a pair of free one topping pizzas to go with it. Enough said. [$25 Papa John’s Gift Card + 2 Free Pizzas, $25]
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Anker makes some of the best and most popular
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The sturdy PowerCore 20,100mAh power bank is a steal at $28, while the smaller PowerCore+ features an aluminum case and supports Quick Charge 2.0. The Lightning cables aren’t as cheap as some of the others we’ve posted, but they’re wrapped in kevlar, and rated to last five times longer than Apple’s.
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While it’s not as simple to use as a Nespresso, this Mr. Coffee espresso machine is affordable at $136 (especially considering it includes a milk frother), and doesn’t require expensive pods to use. Plus, its 15 bars of pressure are more than sufficient for a great shot of espresso. [Mr. Coffee Cafe Barista Espresso Maker with Automatic Milk Frother, $136]
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Sick of being floss-shamed by your dentist, but don’t actually want to floss? This Philips Sonicare Airfloss electric flosser uses pressurized air and tiny drops of water or mouthwash to obliterate food scraps and plaque between your teeth. Just hold down the button, move the tip from gap to gap, and it’ll automatically fire once per second.
The flosser is currently marked down to $60, which would be a match for Amazon’s all-time low on its own, but if you clip the coupon on the page, you’ll get an additional $10 discount at checkout. [Philips Sonicare Airfloss Electric Flosser, $50 after $10 coupon]
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Today only, Amazon’s selling your undisputed favorite travel mug
Yeah. Solid deal on those. Suggest people buy them as the “What the fuck do I give this person gift”
These mugs typically sell in the $18-$20 range, and today’s deal represents the best price Amazon’s ever offered. Just be sure to grab one before the deal cools off. [Contigo Autoseal Gold Box]
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If you’re starting to get a little bored of Fallout 4, Amazon will sell you a copy of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate (one of the 12 best games you can own for PS4
http://kotaku.com/assassins-cree...
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You know those giant wall wart power supplies that cover up like five different outlets on your surge protectors? These ingenious mini extension cords move them out of the way, and free up that precious outlet space. [Etekcity 10-Pack Power Extension Cord Cable, $15 with code G9PXXHAT]
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Is your monitor high enough
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Want to outfit your kitchen with All-Clad gear, but without taking out a second mortgage on said kitchen? All-Clad’s 24 hour “Factory Second” sale features huge discounts on dozens of scratch & dent pans, appliances, and tools. [All-Clad VIP 24-Hour Factory Second Sale. Use Code ALLCLADVIP]
If you ever pay for iOS apps, movies, music, or iCloud storage with your credit card, you’re throwing money down the drain. Instead, stock up on iTunes gift cards at a 20% discount, and grab some to give as gifts while you’re at it. [$100 iTunes Gift Card, $80]
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If you still haven’t upgraded to 802.11ac, this well-reviewed NETGEAR router is down to an all-time low $70 today. There are faster routers out there with better range, but this should be more than sufficient for most apartments and smaller homes. [NETGEAR Wireless Router - AC 1200 Dual Band Gigabit, $70]
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I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you don’t have a pressing need for a laminator. But even so, odds are that it’d come in handy at least a few times per year, so you might as well add one to your home office while it’s on sale for $17. Just note that this is a Gold Box deal, meaning this price is only available today, or until sold out. [Scotch Laminator Gold Box]
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Need a cheap and easy gift idea? This $7 flip book can help your friends discover creative new curses and insults. Is it useful? No. But it’s fun. [Creative Cursing: A Mix ‘n’ Match Profanity Generator, $7]
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What’s better than Super Smash Bros.? Super Smash Bros. in your pocket. [Super Smash Bros. Download, $20]
Come on, you know you want this thing. [Star Wars Battlefront Deluxe Edition (PS4) with Han Solo Fridge, $100]
Also available for $9 more on Xbox One.
These stick-anywhere LED lights are great for closets, cabinets, and hallways, and today on Amazon, if you buy one, you can get a second for free.
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Just in time for holiday travel, you can save $20 on RAVPower’s FileHub Plus today, which is actually three travel-friendly devices in one:
[RAVPower FileHub Plus, $30 with code YVZT6QGO]
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If you missed out on Black Friday, Target just restarted the best Apple Watch deal we’ve seen to date. Every model they sell comes with a $100 gift card today, including the cheapest $350 Sport models. [Target Apple Watch Sale]
KMASHI’s cheap battery packs are some of the most popular items we’ve ever posted, and their well-reviewed 15,000mAh model is down to just $13 today, an all-time low. This beefy battery is perfect for long camping trips, flights, and power outages, and would make a great holiday stocking stuffer. [KMASHI 15000mAh External Battery Power Bank, $13 with code M6UP4WVR]
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Nintendo’s New 3DS XL was selling for $180 seemingly everywhere on Black Friday, but if you held off, Amazon just knocked an extra $5 off the price. [Nintendo New 3DS XL, $175]
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A good diet is one that drains you both physically and spiritually.
For only $99 per day (plus delivery fee), Sakara Life will bring a big bag of greens and water to your door. What makes their $24 “Beauty Water” so special? Business Insider finds out:
I asked DuBoise and Tingle exactly why this water is so special. Apparently, it has trace minerals, rose oil, and silica, which “makes your water wetter so your cells actually uptake more water,” as DuBoise informed me, something I’m still trying to comprehend. Rose oil, she said, helps people de-stress.
As a method to drain the wastrel rich of their wealth and bodily strength all at once, I support this diet.
[Pic via]
According to the FBI, the first two things your kids should attempt in any active shooting situation are 1) run or, if that’s not possible, 2) hide. According to Fox & Friends, Little Johnny needs to stand his goddamn ground.
In a segment earlier today, Elizabeth Hasselbeck brought on two martial arts instructors who have apparently been busy teaching children the art of running at active shooters. But as Media Matters points out, never once does anyone explain that staying to fight should be an absolute last resort.
Hesselbeck starts by noting that “in an active shooter situation, five seconds can mean the difference between life and death. But there are some things you can do and your children can do to make a difference.”
She then asks trainer Tony Morrison (not that Toni Morrison) whether “we need to be having this conversation.” Tony replies:
Well, we can’t make our kids ignorant about the fact that the world is a dangerous place right now.... We start by telling them what kinds of things to look for, to be more vigilant, to start paying attention to their surroundings, and we call it situational awareness.
When Tony’s assistant successfully disarms him of his stapler, Elizabeth remarks on the fact that she then “turned and used some moves on him.” So if your school-age child manages to somehow approach and steal an active shooter’s gun, should they then keep pummeling the presumably enraged murderer—or should they run?:
Once you engage the gunman, you have to—you have to just take him out. You have to fight strong. So you’re not actually going to try and get away until you actually make sure that you’ve done some damage to him. Because if you don’t, then he’ll just pursue you.
“Once you engage the gunman, you have to take him out” is a “stop, drop, and roll” for a new generation of American children.
If you really want to keep your children as safe as possible, don’t ever let them watch Fox & Friends.
[h/t Media Matters]
Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.
The most popular comment in the history of the New York Times website is by a Canadian, explaining why Canada is better than the U.S. You love to be told why you suck, America.
“I think Mr Trump’s somewhat knee-jerk reaction to this, saying that all Muslims should be banned from coming into America was perhaps for him a political mistake too far.” — Nigel Farage, leader of Great Britain’s far-right populist anti-immigration party UKIP, to the BBC.
Kristin Cavallari, author of the forthcoming memoir Balancing in Heels (formerly titled Balancing on Heels
That’s because “Holiday Interior Decorating Inspiration,” by Kristin Cavallari, has been marked as an “exclusive” article on the app. Kristin’s exclusive articles cost $2.99—per month
Gawker is not paying for Kristin’s app, so all I can say about Kristin’s holiday interior decorating inspiration is this: It came straight from Kristin’s brain.
Also it’s not free.
This has been 500 Days of Kristin.
[Photo via Getty]
Jeb Bush has suffered at the hands of Donald Trump, who has taken special glee in taunting all of his weaker opponents in the Republican field, but especially so the one-time presumed frontrunner from a previously untouchable political dynasty. Today, Jeb revealed what might be his final attempt at felling the orange beast: perpetuating the conspiracy theory that Trump was planted in the GOP race by the Clinton family.
This conspiracy is extremely delicious, though for obvious reasons not-quite mainstream. Still, the idea that Trump is purposefully sabotaging the Republican race has been percolating long enough that we covered it at-length back in August.
http://blackbag.gawker.com/is-donald-trum...
Yet, like just about every other counter-Trump attack, an affiliation with the Clintons has not proven to slow Trump’s momentum. In August it was revealed that Hillary Clinton had attended Trump’s wedding in 2005, but in a debate the day after that story broke Trump was able to deftly spin the association by essentially implying that he had bought Hillary’s influence.
http://gawker.com/donald-trump-i...
Who knows if the Bush campaign thinks that throwing its weight behind this rumor will actually work, but, uh, it can’t be worse than whatever else they’ve been doing.
[image via Getty]
Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.
A monthlong Gizmodo investigation has uncovered compelling and perplexing new evidence in the search for Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. According to a cache of documents provided to Gizmodo which were corroborated in interviews, Craig Steven Wright, an Australian businessman based in Sydney, and Dave Kleiman, an American computer forensics expert who died in 2013, were involved in the development of the digital currency.
Wired reported this afternoon that Wright and Kleiman were likely involved in creating Bitcoin. Gizmodo has been following a similar trail for weeks, one that in recent days has included face-to-face confrontations with Wright’s business partners in Sydney and interviews with Kleiman’s closest associates in Palm Beach County, Florida. Gizmodo also obtained confirmation from on-the-record sources that Wright claimed on at least two occasions that he and Kleiman were both involved in the creation of Bitcoin.
In early November 2015, Gizmodo received a series of anonymous tip emails from someone who claimed to not only know the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, but who also claimed to have worked for him. “I hacked Satoshi Naklamoto [sic],” the first message read. “These files are all from his business account. The person is Dr Craig Wright.” What followed was a package of email files apparently pulled directly from an Outlook account belonging to Craig Wright, an Australian academic, computer engineering expert, and serial entrepreneur with a litany of degrees and corporations to his name.
Last year, Wright publicly announced his plan to establish the “world’s first Bitcoin bank.” Wright’s LinkedIn page lists him as the CEO of DeMorgan Ltd, a company whose website describes it as “focused on alternative currency, next generation banking and reputational and educational products with a focus on security and creating a simple user experience.” Among DeMorgan’s subsidiaries, also listed on its website, are C01n, a Bitcoin wallet company; Coin-Exch, a Bitcoin exchange; and Denariuz, the aforementioned Bitcoin bank, and one of the top supercomputers in the world.
Several of the emails and documents sent to Gizmodo point to a close relationship between Wright and Kleiman, a U.S. Army veteran who lived in Palm Beach County, Florida. Kleiman was confined to a wheelchair after a motorcycle accident in 1995, and became a reclusive computer forensics obsessive thereafter. He died broke and in squalor, after suffering from infected bedsores. His body was found decomposing and surrounded by empty alcohol bottles and a loaded handgun. Bloody feces was tracked along the floor, and a bullet hole was found in his mattress, though no spent shell casings were found on the scene. But documents shared with Gizmodo suggest that Kleiman may have possessed a Bitcoin trust worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and seemed to be deeply involved with the currency and Wright’s plans. “Craig, I think you’re mad and this is risky,” Kleiman writes in one 2011 email to Wright. “But I believe in what we are trying to do.”
Writing about Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin originator’s pseudonym, is a treacherous exercise. Publications like the New York Times, Fast Company, and the New Yorker have taken unsuccessful stabs at Satoshi’s identity. In every instance, the evidence either hasn’t added up or those implicated have issued public denials. And then there was Newsweek, whose 2014 story “The Face Behind Bitcoin” is easily the most disastrous attempt at revealing the identity of Satoshi. The magazine identified a modest California engineer, whose birth name was Satoshi Nakamoto but who went by Dorian, as the creator of Bitcoin. The story resulted in a worldwide media frenzy, a car chase, and—after Dorian’s repeated denials and legal threats—a great deal of embarrassment for Newsweek.
All of which means that the real Satoshi Nakamoto is still out there. And although Bitcoin has yet to upset the free market and establish the crypto-libertarian monetary utopia that its boosters once anticipated, the currency doesn’t appear to be going away: its users span the globe, with some analysts predicting 5 million worldwide by 2019. Bitcoin isn’t just some cryptographic niche. It’s an outrageous, brilliant phenomenon concocted by either a single subversive genius or a group of them. The digital currency went from being worth fractions of a penny in 2009 to $1,200 per coin just four years later, built on a network that makes wiring money anywhere as simple as sending an email, and that aims to singlehandedly render the entire global financial system obsolete. If Satoshi Nakamoto revealed himself to the world, he (or they) would be lauded as one of the greatest living minds of computer science—and the target of incessant, global scrutiny.
Craig Wright is not modest. On the website of Panopticrypt, one of his many companies, Wright describes himself as “certifiably the world’s foremost IT security expert.” In a May 2013 blog post titled “Morning Manifesto,” Craig proclaims to himself and the world:
I will make a solution to problems you have not even thought of and I will do it without YOUR or any state’s permission! I will create things that make your ideas fail as I will not refuse to stop producing. I will not live off or accept welfare and I will not offer you violence. You will have to use violence against me to make me stop however.
And at an October 2015 panel discussion with fellow Bitcoin experts (including Nick Szabo, long suspected by many as being the real Satoshi), Wright is asked to introduce himself. “[I do] a whole lot of things that people don’t realize is possible yet,” he replied. When asked by the moderator for clarification, Wright said that “I’m a bit of everything...I have a masters of law...I have a masters in statistics, a couple doctorates, I forget actually what I’ve got these days.” When asked how he got involved in Bitcoin, Wright pauses before replying: “uhh, I’ve been involved in all of this for a long time...I try and stay...I keep my head down.”
That’s all circumstantial evidence. But the hacked emails and other documents, if authentic, show Wright making repeated claims to being Satoshi Nakamoto over a period of years starting in 2008, before Nakamoto published the now-legendary white paper introducing the world to Bitcoin.
The most persuasive evidence from the apparently hacked account is a message dated January 8th, 2014, which shows Wright emailing three colleagues from satoshi@vistomail.com, the email address that Nakomoto used to regularly communicate with early Bitcoin users and developers. In this thread, with the subject line “Fear of the future,” Satoshi@vistomail.com strategized about lobbying Australian Senator Arthur Sinodinos on the matter of Bitcoin regulation:
The email includes a signature with the name Satoshi Nakamoto and a phone number that belongs to Craig Wright. The reply-to field, which determines where responses to the message will be sent, lists an email address that, according to Google, belongs to Craig Wright. Also included in the cache of messages is this reply from Andrew Sommer, a partner at Sydney-based law firm Clayton Utz, which represented Wright at the time the emails were exchanged:
The hacker-tipster also included multiple PDF files that contain what appear to be a transcript of a meeting about Bitcoin regulation between Wright, his attorney, and the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), as well as the minutes of a subsequent meeting of the ATO and Wright’s attorney. Wright appears to have been trying to persuade the Australian government to treat his Bitcoin holdings as currency, as opposed to an asset subject to greater taxation. Without this regulatory move, his business interests would be scuttled. During an interlude in one such meeting, Wright makes an oddly casual admission of his identity as Satoshi (highlighting added):
A request to confirm the authenticity of the document sent to Auscript, the transcription service whose logo appears at the top of the file, was denied on the basis of company policy. A request sent to the ATO was also denied on the basis of state confidentiality.
Multiple phone calls to Wright suggest that the material is, at the very least, not fabricated: In an initial call placed in November, he said he “couldn’t talk about” the documents we’d received, or the suggestion that he is Satoshi Nakomoto. On a subsequent call, in which lines from his purported emails were read back to him, an audibly unsettled Wright asked “how did you get that?” and stated “you shouldn’t have that.” He also confirmed that the people CCed in the first email were his attorney, accountant, and a coworker at one of his companies, DeMorgan Ltd. After those two calls, Wright stopped answering the phone, did not respond to emails, and made his Twitter account private.
Andrew Sommer, the attorney, refused to comment on the contents of the email or meeting transcripts, but did confirm that Wright was his client.
Contacted by phone, Wright’s ex-wife Lynn recalled her husband working on Bitcoin “many years ago,” but noted that he “didn’t call it Bitcoin” at first, but rather “digital money.” She also confirmed Wright’s friendship with Dave Kleiman: “I knew Dave...I knew they were friends and they talked about stuff, different things that were happening in the geek world...half the time he was taking I wouldn’t listen, hence the ex.” When asked specifically if Wright was the inventor of Bitcoin, Lynn replied “I’m not going to comment on things that we talked on.”
Ramona Watts is Craig Wright’s wife, a director at his company DeMorgan, and a recipient of Wright’s apparent email from Satoshi@vistomail.com. Reached by Gizmodo at their home in an moneyed suburb north of Sydney and asked about Wright’s role in creating Bitcoin, Watts at first only smiled, shook her head, and began to close the door. When asked if Wright was the inventor of Bitcoin, she smiled coyly again and shut the door.
John Chesher was Wright’s accountant, a recipient of his Satoshi email, and was present at one of the ATO meetings. When reached at his apartment via intercom and asked whether he’d ever received an email from Craig Wright using Satoshi Nakamoto’s email address, Reached at his home and asked about Wright’s role in creating Bitcoin, Chesher responded, “I might’ve...that was a year ago.” When asked if he had ever told the Australian Tax Office that Wright was in possession of a Satoshi-sized Bitcoin sum, he replied, “I may have.”
Ann Wrightson, a former employee of Wright’s who was also present at an ATO meeting, confirmed to Gizmodo that the meetings took place. She noted that she has cut all ties with Wright and Watts and is much happier for it: “Personally, he’s a nice fella, but, um, business-wise, I don’t believe he’s… He’s not a model to aspire to.” We asked Wrightson directly whether Wright had invented Bitcoin, and she demurred: “I’d prefer not to actually incriminate himself or incriminate myself...I’m sure if you’re a reporter, you can find other people to answer that for you.”
When a Gizmodo reporter visited the office of DeMorgan, Wright’s firm, Ramona Watts attempted to steer employees away from speaking to him, as seen above.
A purported email from March 28, 2008, months before Satoshi Nakomoto published the white paper that laid out the Bitcoin framework, appears to show Wright divulging the idea of a “new form of electronic money” to Kleiman for the first time. “I need your help and I need a version of me to make this work that is better than me,” the sender wrote, seemingly presaging the Satoshi persona.
Several years later, after Bitcoin’s value had exploded and the currency had permeated mainstream consciousness — and months before online accounts associated with Satoshi Nakomoto went dark — Wright wrote to Kleiman, with apparent fatigue, about the secrecy around his identity: “I cannot do the Satoshi bit anymore,” he wrote. “They no longer listen. I am better as a myth.”
The hacker also provided a PDF file of what appears to be an unfinished draft of a legal contract between Wright and Kleiman forming a secret Bitcoin trust in the Seychelles, a notorious tax haven in the Indian Ocean. The contract shows Dave Kleiman in receipt of 1,100,111 bitcoin, to be repaid to Craig Wright on January 1, 2020. Several reports, including an oft-cited technical analysis by Bitcoin expert Sergio Demian Lerner, estimate Satoshi Nakamoto’s legendary Bitcoin fortune at around 1 million BTC — a figure that nearly matches the amount in the Seychelles trust. It also lists five PGP keys — files that are used to establish encrypted lines of communication over email — that will be used to manage the trust. Searching for those keys in a public database reveals that one belongs to Wright, one belongs to Kleiman, and two belong to Satoshi Nakamoto.
The contract also contains a clearly incomplete sentence fragment and several other strange details and inconsistencies. On June 9, the date on the document, one bitcoin was valued at roughly $31, meaning that the million-bitcoin cache would have been worth about $31 million U.S., but the document values the sum at just $100,000. The contract also claims that Wright is facing bankruptcy. According to Australian public records, Wright filed for personal insolvency in 2006 and was denied, but records make no reference to an insolvency petition in 2011.
The contract stipulates that if Kleiman should die, “Dr Wright will be returned shares in the Tulip trust and company 15 months after my death at his discretion.” Perhaps most bizarrely, it includes a similar stipulation for Wright’s death, bequeathing all holdings to Ramona Watts, his wife and colleague, minus a sum that would be used “to show the ‘lies and fraud perpetrated by Adam Westwood of the Australian Tax Office,” an Australian government employee whom he blamed for an unfortunate regulatory ruling against one of his Bitcoin-related companies.
In the contract, Kleiman also vows not to divulge “the origins of the satoshin@gmx.com email,” an email account used by Satoshi Nakamoto to publish the research paper announcing Bitcoin the world.
Patrick Paige and Carter Conrad, who run a Palm Beach County business called Computer Forensics, LLC, in which Kleiman was also a partner, formed their own suspicions about Satoshi’s identity after receiving a string of bizarre communications from Wright following Kleiman’s death in 2013.
Days after their friend and partner died, Paige and Conrad sent an email about his passing to a group of associates who may have only known Kleiman through a computer screen. He was rendered paralyzed from the chest down by a motorcycle crash while working for the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department in 1995, and spent the final years of his life hospitalized with a deadly infection of the bacterium MRSA. Against his doctors’ recommendations, Kleiman left the hospital and returned to his home after nearly three years of treatment in 2013, Paige and Conrad said. The infection stopped his heart and killed him just weeks later.
Kleiman’s hospitalization only exacerbated what was already an isolated, sedentary lifestyle. “That motherfucker was on the computer nonstop,” said Paige, meaning that many of Kleiman’s relationships were strictly digital, and those friends wouldn’t be immediately aware of his death.
Among the recipients of that 2013 email was Craig Wright, a man whom Paige and Conrad understood to have a casual working relationship with their late friend. Wright and Kleiman had authored a paper together five years earlier on the mechanics of overwriting hard drive data, and they corresponded sometimes about other technological esoterica. So it was a surprise when, days after sending the email, they came across a mournful video about Kleiman on Wright’s YouTube channel. In the video, Wright narrates footage from Kleiman’s various TV appearances, growing increasingly emotional. By the end, Wright is audibly choking back tears. “I’m proud to say I knew Dave Kleiman,” he concludes. “I’ll miss you, Dave. You were my friend, and I’ll miss you.”
Paige didn’t know what to think of the video, but it wasn’t a total shock that Kleiman had maintained such an intense and largely secretive bond with a peer in a different hemisphere. Stranger, however, was a document that Paige and Conrad received in their business mailbox several months later, which bore an Australian return address and informed them that their late partner was no longer legally affiliated with a company called W&K Info Defense Research. The name was totally unfamiliar to both men, and, because the notice didn’t seem to require any action from them, they ignored it.
According to public records, W&K was founded in Palm Beach County in 2011, with Dave Kleiman as its registered agent and Kleiman’s home address as its place of business. In 2014, after Kleiman’s death, it was reinstated as an LLC with a new registered agent, a new place of business, and Coin-Exch, one of Wright’s companies, listed as an “authorized person.” A document purporting to show minutes of a meeting between Wright’s attorney and the ATO, which was provided to Gizmodo by Wright’s apparent hacker, also makes reference to W&K. In the minutes, Wright’s accountant John Chesher calls W&K “an entity created for the purpose of mining Bitcoins,” and states that Wright and Kleiman founded the company together.
The document also shows Chesher speaking about Wright’s spectacular Bitcoin fortune and indicating that Kleiman may have amassed a similar amount. It reads in part:
Craig Wright had mined a lot of Bitcoins. Craig then took the Bitcoins and put them into a Seychelles Trust. A bit of it was also put into Singapore. This was run out of an entity from the UK. Craig had gotten approximately 1.1 million Bitcoins. There was a point in time, when he had around 10% of all the Bitcoins out there. Mr Kleiman would have had a similar amount. However, Mr Kleiman passed away during that time.
According to Jeremy Gardner, a longtime Bitcoin investor and co-founder of the College Cryptocurrency Network, it is doubtful that anyone but Satoshi could’ve amassed Bitcoin holdings of that size: “I don’t think anyone comes that close, honestly.” However, Gardner also doubts that even Satoshi would still have that many coins:
The only person who could really have a million, and I imagine it’s much less than that, if any at all, is Satoshi. Anyone else who ever came close to owning that much, which I don’t believe ever happened, has long since liquidated a substantial portion of what they held (as the value of their holdings would have have gone up well over 250x).
The only thing zanier than Satoshi Nakamoto’s fabled Bitcoin vault would be the thought of another person possessing “a similar amount”—unless the stockpile was being held in some sort of secret monetary trust.
The next communication that Paige and Conrad received from Wright was stranger still. Emails provided to Gizmodo, the authenticity of which were confirmed by Paige and Conrad, show that in February 2014, 10 months after Kleiman’s death, Wright emailed the pair to tell them about a mysterious project he’d been working on with their friend. As part of this undertaking, Wright wrote, Kleiman had mined an enormous amount of bitcoins—an amount “too large to email.” Wright asked them to ensure that Kleiman’s computers were safe, and to check whether their hard drives contained wallet.dat files, the pieces of software that contain bitcoins and their owners’ account information. On a subsequent phone call with Wright, a baffled Paige asked for more information about the partnership with Kleiman. After that, he said, Wright assumed a clandestine tone. “Can I trust you?”
According to Paige, Wright eventually told him that Kleiman was the creator of Bitcoin. Later, he clarified that the cryptocurrency was invented by a group of people which included Kleiman. If that was true, Kleiman was likely sitting on a fortune when he died in April 2013—even if he were in possession of only half of Satoshi’s fabled million-bitcoin stockpile, that would have been worth about $65,000,000 at the time of his death. Wright made clear to Paige that he wasn’t after the money—he only wanted to make sure that it made its way into Kleiman’s estate and didn’t sit gathering dust in a digital vault.
Paige was stunned by the idea that his friend had achieved such an amazing feat, but when he considered it further, it didn’t fall apart entirely. Paige regularly refers to Kleiman as a genius in conversation, and his expertise in computer security aligns with the skill set that would have been needed to build—or at least contribute to—the bitcoin protocol.
Still, there were major questions. Another 2014 email provided to Gizmodo shows Paige telling Wright that Kleiman mentioned Bitcoin to him just once, and this month said he doesn’t recall the digital currency coming up any other time in his daily conversations with his partner. And according to those who knew him well, Kleiman needed money badly—his house was under foreclosure and he spent nearly three years in a VA hospital before he died. If Dave Kleiman were Satoshi Nakamoto—or one of several Satoshis—wouldn’t he have cashed out at some point?
Shyaam Sundhar, a computer security professional who coauthored an academic paper with Kleiman and Wright in 2008, doubted and expressed dismay at the idea that either man was involved in Bitcoin’s creation. “Our conversations has only been pertaining to HDD project,” he responded to an inquiry via email, referring to their research on hard drive data. “I would hope that what you have stated is mere rumors, since I have never heard any such thing about Craig or Dave.”
Paige and Conrad left the matter unresolved, and Wright stopped calling and emailing them after he made contact with Kleiman’s brother, the executor of Kleiman’s estate. “We knew one day a reporter would come calling,” Paige said. “But we left it at that.”
In November, after being contacted by Gizmodo, Paige emailed Wright to ask whether he planned to release any information about Kleiman’s—and by extension, his own—involvement in creating Bitcoin. “Not yet. We are in the process of finalising some of the research. I was hoping we could be at the point of release before the reporters started sniffing,” Wright responded. He added in a later email, “When it all comes out, there is no way Dave will be left out.”
While he was alive, Kleiman kept an aluminum-encased USB drive on his person at nearly all times. If there really is a cache of Kleiman’s bitcoins or anything else linking him to Satoshi, Paige said, “I guarantee that drive has some shit in it.” According to Paige, when Kleiman died, his brother, Ira Kleiman, took possession of it.
Ira Kleiman declined to speak on the record about whether he is in possession of his brother’s hard drives. Described by acquaintances as guarded and private, Ira Kleiman also refused to meet with a reporter in person or speak over the phone, opting instead to send dozens of cagey and cryptic emails and SMS messages in an exchange that lasted several days. He claimed that after his brother’s death, Wright contacted him and told him that he and Dave Kleiman were involved in creating Bitcoin, and also alleged to possess documents provided to him by several sources that might corroborate the information provided to Gizmodo by Wright’s apparent hacker. However, Kleiman declined to provide any concrete information about those documents or their sources, and would not answer when asked if he believed that Wright had been telling him the truth.
Additional reporting from Sydney by Daniel Strudwick
Top image by Jim Cooke. Contact the authors at andy@gawker.com and biddle@gawker.com.·
PGP fingerprint: 35B1 D6A7 BCED 9F9C C7D3 C9D7 65FA 8F8C 5B62 4809
Sam Biddle Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7
After calling for a “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” yesterday
http://gawker.com/donald-trumps-...
In response to the first question, Trump claimed his “Muslim friends” support his fascist ideas:
Not at all. We have to do the right thing. Somebody in this country has to say what’s right. I have great respect and love—I have people that I have tremendous relationships with, they’re Muslim. And Barbara, they agree with me 100 percent.
Trump also said he’s not a bigot and is “probably the least [bigoted] of anybody you’ve ever met.”
Finally, Trump claimed, “I’m the worst thing to ever happen to ISIS.”
The worst thing, indeed.
In other news, the AP reports that Trump will visit the Muslim-majority kingdom of Jordan at the end of this month.
Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.
Early Monday morning, NBC Phildalphia reports, the manager of a North Philadelphia mosque discovered a bloody, severed pig’s head that surveillance footage later showed had been thrown at the building from a red pickup truck.
This is the second time the the Al Aqsa Islamic Society has been targeted in recent weeks: a few days after the Paris attacks, an unidentified called and left a voicemail.
“I hope you people are happy about what you did in Paris,” the man said, according to NBC. “I’d just like to state for the record that Allah is a piece of pork shit.” The Quran prohibits Muslims from eating pork.
Philly police said they are stepping up patrols around houses of worship all over the city, the Associated Press reports:
The police department meanwhile hopes to enhance security video that shows someone throwing the animal’s head out the passenger door of a red pickup truck, Commissioner Charles Ramsey said Tuesday. No arrests have been made in the Sunday night incident outside the Al Aqsa Islamic Society in west Philadelphia.
The Quran, the holy book of Islam, prohibits Muslims from eating pork, and pigs have been used to taunt or offend Muslims. Last year, attackers in Greece left a pig’s head and painted anti-Muslim slogans outside an Islamic studies center in Athens. Similar incidents have also occurred in France.
Mayor Michael Nutter has promised a $2,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in any hate crime case, the AP reports. The FBI is also investigating the incident.
“I don’t know if they want to treat us like pigs or we look like pigs or act like pigs,” Nabil Khalil, the manager of the Al Aqsa Islamic Society, told NBC. “You’re always going to be looking over your shoulder.
Image via Google Maps. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.
On Tuesday evening, the Associated Press reported that Donald Trump would visit Jordan, a majority-Muslim monarchy, during his trip to Israel at the end of December. Trump promptly tweeted that he would not be visiting Jordan. (Probably for the best
“It was not immediately clear whether Trump would meet personally with King Abdullah there, but his campaign told U.S. government officials he wants the meeting,” the AP had reported.
“Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to questions about the trip. The U.S. government was making preparations based on Trump’s plans. Trump has Secret Service protection for his safety.”
His tweet, of course, is not exactly a denial of the AP’s story, as it leaves open the possibility that there was a trip being planned that has now, for whatever reason, been canceled. (Spite, perhaps?)
Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to questions about the trip from Gawker.
Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.
The Washington Post reports that Diane Rehm—the 79-year-old host of WAMU’s The Diane Rehm Show—will be retiring after the 2016 election.
Rehm, the Post writes, “has been in discussions with WAMU management about her future for the past several months.” Noted the Post’s original story, before it was updated with comment from Rehm:
The station would like her to continue, but Rehm has occasionally expressed weariness with the daily routine of preparing her program, said people briefed on the discussion, who spoke anonymously because no announcements or firm decisions have been made. They said that the decision about leaving the air is up to Rehm.
“My thinking is that I’ll stay on the air until the election because I really want to see how this will go,” Rehm said later. “My feeling is, I have a number of ideas and I’m perfectly happy doing something different...where I’m not forced to get up at 5 a.m. every morning to prepare for a show. I’ve been doing that for 37 years. Maybe I’ll get to sleep until 7 or 7:30 a.m., like other people do.” Sounds like a good idea to me!
Rehm’s career has been—to use a hackneyed term—inspirational. She started at WAMU in 1973 as a volunteer on The Home Show. In an industry (and world) that was even less friendly to women than it is now, Arab-American Rehm had plenty going against her: she didn’t have a college degree, was nearing 40, and was also raising two kids. After a few promotions, six years later she took over a program called Kaledioscope, which was renamed The Diane Rehm Show in 1986 (Tagline: “One of her guests is always you”). The show is now distributed by NPR at hundreds of stations around the country, with millions listening each day.
Rehm has also written three books: her memoir Finding My Voice, a book about marriage co-written with her late husband John, and a book about her dog Maxie. She’s won a Peabody and a National Humanities Medal. Public radio has a notably limited number of woman voices
http://jezebel.com/right-wing-blo...
WAMU said they will announce Rehm’s “full transition plan” later. Despite her exit, it’s clear her legacy lives on: though it’s early still, only women have been named as potential successors to her chair.
Contact the author at dries@jezebel.com.
Image of Rehm in 1998 with Desmond Tutu via WAMU.
After conducting an online poll earlier this month, the Working Families Party voted “overwhelmingly” to endorse Bernie Sanders for president. “Really, the endorsement is more about the WFP than it is about the presidential race,” one party activist told Politico NY.
Two Syrian families of six were settled in the Dallas and Houston areas on Monday, the Associated Press reports, and another family of four was settled near Indianapolis. “They seem very happy,” a spokeswoman for the International Rescue Committee, Lucy Carrigan, said.
More than two dozen Republican governors, including Greg Abbott of Texas and Mike Pence of Indiana, said they would refuse to accept new Syrian refugees in their states after the attacks in Paris. Texas even filed a federal lawsuit to block resettlement efforts, though it eventually backed off.
“We can reassure all Texans that the refugees are receiving a warm and compassionate welcome from staff and volunteers,” said Aaron Rippenkroeger, president and CEO of Refugee Services of Texas.
Meanwhile, a Syrian couple and their two small children arrived safely Monday night in Indianapolis, where they have relatives, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis said in a statement. It said the family fled Syria three years ago and underwent two years of security checks before being allowed to enter the U.S.
Archbishop Joseph Tobin said he considered Gov. Mike Pence’s recent request to not bring the family to Indiana until Congress had approved new legislation regarding immigrants and refugees. But he said he welcomed them anyway because helping refugees “is an essential part of our identity as Catholic Christians.”
“It was almost like breathing a sigh of relief that they have arrived,” Carrigan said. “This has been a long journey for them, and it’s been a long journey for a lot of Syrian refugees.” Nine more refugees are expected in Texas later this week.
Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.
