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Head of NYPD Civilian Review Board Resigns One Day After Being Sued By His Own Director

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Head of NYPD Civilian Review Board Resigns One Day After Being Sued By His Own Director
Image: AP

The chair of New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent government agency tasked with reviewing complaints against the NYPD, announced his resignation today. The news comes one day after the CCRB’s executive director filed a lawsuit him, alleging that he referred to her and other female employees as “pussies” and “[trampled] on the rights of and [retaliated] against those who complain about his misogynistic views.”

Yesterday’s lawsuit was just the latest of this year’s scandals for Richard Emery. In February, the New York Daily news reported that the chairman’s private civil rights law firm was representing a man who was suing New York City over police misconduct after filing a CCRB complaint. When police union leaders freaked out about it, Emery said they were “squealing like a stuck pig,” which was either a very careful word choice or a very careless one.

Then came the suit from CCRB executive director Mina Malik, which claimed, among other things, that Emery retaliated against her by cutting her responsibilities and “laying the groundwork for (her) eventual termination” when she complained about his alleged misogyny.

Emery addressed his resignation in a press release distributed by the mayor’s office this afternoon. “After a lengthy substantive discussion with the Mayor, he and I agree that the confluence of recent circumstances will preclude me from further fulfilling my goals as Chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board (“CCRB”),” he wrote. “The issues of inhibitions on my law practice, several of my recent public statements and recent litigation have created daily distractions from the success of the CCRB.”


“Officers involved in one in every six deaths recorded during the first quarter of 2015 have a year

Report: Trump Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowski Will Not Be Charged With Battery of Breitbart Reporter

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Report: Trump Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowski Will Not Be Charged With Battery of Breitbart Reporter
Photo: Getty Images

Politico is reporting, based on multiple unnamed sources, that the attorney general of Florida’s Palm Beach County will not file battery charges against Donald Trump’s combative campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, after a Breitbart reporter named Michelle Fields filed a police report against him last month:

The decision not to press charges against Corey Lewandowski is scheduled to be announced on Thursday afternoon by Palm Beach County State Attorney David Aronberg. [...]

Many lawyers said they just didn’t think jurors would think of this case as a battery, even though it met the technical threshold for the crime under Florida law, which essentially defines battery as unwanted touching.

Lewandowski’s run-in with Fields, during which he clearly manhandled her in an attempt to move her away from his boss, led to an internal meltdown at Breitbart News, culminating in an anti-Semitic blog post targeting its own editor-at-large Ben Shapiro, who resigned shortly after Breitbart’s management effectively side with Lewandowski—and, by extension, Trump’s campaign—over their own reporter.

http://gawker.com/how-breitbart-...

Lewandowski, who turned himself in to the Jupiter, Florida police department in March, continues to serve as Trump’s campaign manager, although in a reportedly diminished capacity. According to Politico (and The Blaze), Fields may still pursue defamation charges against him, based upon his public statements in which he denied touching her and cast doubt on her credibility.

Recode asks: “Did Jack Dorsey send beard shavings to rapper Azealia Banks to promote Square Cash?”

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Recode asks: “Did Jack Dorsey send beard shavings to rapper Azealia Banks to promote Square Cash?” Well—did he? For the GIF-filled answer, click here.

Who Was The Actual Best Player In The NBA Every Year During Kobe Bryant's Career? 

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Who Was The Actual Best Player In The NBA Every Year During Kobe Bryant's Career? 
Photo via AP

Kobe Bryant’s career spans a remarkable amount of NBA history, from the late years of the Chicago Bulls dynasty through the rise of the Golden State Warriors. If there’s been one constant through all those years, it’s that the best player in the league has never, ever been Kobe Bryant.

In 1996-97, when Kobe was a rookie teenage bench player, the top performer in the NBA was 24-year-old Grant Hill, who put up 21.4 points, 9.0 rebounds, and 7.3 assists per game for the Detroit Pistons. By Pro Basketball Reference’s calculations, that gave Hill a league-leading Value Over Replacement Player of 7.9. Kobe’s VORP was 0.1.

This season, as Kobe limps into retirement, Pro Basketball Reference gives Stephen Curry a VORP of 9.4. Kobe’s VORP is -0.3.

Between those two outlier seasons, Kobe blossomed into one of the most famous and high-scoring players in the NBA. He did not, however, blossom into the best player of any year. By VORP, he never even reached second-best. He never had a season as good as Grant Hill had in 1996-97; he never had one as good as Steph Curry is having right now; in between, he never had the top season of any player in the league.

Does VORP show the whole picture? Of course not. Kobe also never led the league in win shares, win shares per 48 minutes, player efficiency rating, or any other advanced stat. (He did lead in usage rate a few times, as he would.)

Here’s the year-by-year list of VORP leaders for Kobe’s career. The years Kobe made the top 20, his position on the leaderboard is included. So we can see that in his 2007-08 MVP season, he was third with a VORP of 6.0, while non-MVP LeBron James put up a VORP of 10.1. Kobe ranked in the top 10 as early as 2002-03 (well behind league leader Kevin Garnett) and as late as 2012-13 (well behind league leader James). It’s testimony to his very particular kind of staying power.

1996-97 Grant Hill, 7.9 (Kobe 0.1)

1997-98 Karl Malone, 6.9 (K0be 1.1)

1998-99 Jason Kidd, 4.1 (50-game season) (Kobe 2.1)

1999-2000 Shaquille O’Neal, 9.3 (Kobe 4.7, 12th)

2000-01 Steve Francis, 7.0 (Kobe 4.4, 20th)

2001-02 Tim Duncan, 8.1 (Kobe 5.0, 12th)

2002-03 Kevin Garnett, 9.0 (Kobe 7.1, 4th)

2003-04 Kevin Garnett, 9.8 (Kobe 4.7, 8th)

2004-05 Kevin Garnett, 9.3 (Kobe 4.5, 16th)

2005-06 LeBron James, 9.5 (Kobe 6.5, 5th)

2006-07 LeBron James, 7.6 (Kobe 5.3, 6th)

2007-08 LeBron James, 10.1 (Kobe 6.0, 3rd)

2008-09 LeBron James, 11.6 (Kobe 4.9, 6th)

2009-10 LeBron James, 10.9 (Kobe 4.0, 13th)

2010-11 LeBron James, 8.2 (Kobe 4.1, 12th)

2011-12 LeBron James, 7.6 (Kobe 2.4)

2012-13 LeBron James, 9.8 (Kobe 5.1, 7th)

2013-14 Kevin Durant, 8.5 (Kobe -0.2)

2014-15 Stephen Curry, 7.9 (Kobe 0.7)

2015-16 Stephen Curry, 9.5 (Kobe -0.3)

Report: Chicago Police Department Racist as Hell

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Report: Chicago Police Department Racist as Hell
Photo: AP

According to a new report issued by the Police Accountability Task Force, police in Chicago have “no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color,” confirming empirically what people in the community have known intuitively for decades.

The panel, established by Mayor Rahm Emanuel late last year, found that 74 percent of the hundreds of people shot by the nation’s third-largest police force in recent years were African-American, the Associated Press reports, even though only 33 percent of the city’s overall population is so.

http://gawker.com/rahm-emanuel-i...

“Reform is possible if there is a will and a commitment,” the report concluded—that commitment begins with acknowledging the department’s “sad history.”

The mayor acknowledged that the city must “honestly confront the past,” the Chicago Tribune reported Wednesday. However: “I don’t really think you need a task force to know we have racism in America, we have racism in Illinois or that there is racism that exists in the city of Chicago and obviously can be in our departments.”

Indeed, the panel comes to the same conclusion:

The linkage between racism and CPD did not just bubble up in the aftermath of the release of the McDonald video. Racism and maltreatment at the hands of the police have been consistent complaints from communities of color for decades. And there have been many significant flashpoints over the years—the killing of Fred Hampton (1960s), the Metcalfe hearings (1970s), federal court findings of a pattern and practice of discriminatory hiring (1970s), Jon Burge and his midnight crew (1970s to 1990s), widespread disorderly conduct arrests (1980s), the unconstitutional gang loitering ordinance (1990s), widespread use of investigatory stops and frisks (2000s) and other points. False arrests, coerced confessions and wrongful convictions are also a part of this history. Lives lost and countless more damaged. These events and others mark a long, sad history of death, false imprisonment, physical and verbal abuse and general discontent about police actions in neighborhoods of color.

“The question isn’t, ‘Do we have racism?’ We do,” Emanuel said. “The question is, ‘What are you going to do about it?’” To that end, he appointed Eddie Johnson the city’s new superintendent.

“We have racism in America. We have racism in Chicago. So it stands to reason we would have some racism within our agency,” Johnson told reporters when he was sworn in. “My goal is to root that out.”

Let's Pause to Appreciate Obama's Clear and Obvious Love of the White House Science Fair 

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Let's Pause to Appreciate Obama's Clear and Obvious Love of the White House Science Fair 

President Obama has a genuine rapport with the nation’s kids and teens that has made the White House Science Fair a special treat during his tenure, and God knows what the official White House position on “science” will be come March 2017. So let’s take a moment to savor this annual event one last time.

First, some highlights from years past. For instance, the 2012 marshmallow gun:

Let's Pause to Appreciate Obama's Clear and Obvious Love of the White House Science Fair 

This is model demonstrates the expansion of polymers, part of a 2014 participant’s sandless sandbags.

Let's Pause to Appreciate Obama's Clear and Obvious Love of the White House Science Fair 

Good robot, teens.

Let's Pause to Appreciate Obama's Clear and Obvious Love of the White House Science Fair 

Snapshots with Girl Scouts were also good. Look at this bunch of superheroes from 2015:

Let's Pause to Appreciate Obama's Clear and Obvious Love of the White House Science Fair 

FYI, these girls also brought him his very own tiara, which he proceeded to wear for a picture.

Let's Pause to Appreciate Obama's Clear and Obvious Love of the White House Science Fair 

This year, the president came every bit as determined to have a good time while recognizing these kids’ achievements. Here he is first-bumping a nine-year-old:

Let's Pause to Appreciate Obama's Clear and Obvious Love of the White House Science Fair 

He visited with the Girl Scouts again, specifically Troop #1484, who worked to make a local retirement community more eco-friendly.

Let's Pause to Appreciate Obama's Clear and Obvious Love of the White House Science Fair 

Here he is controlling a robot via mobile phone, examining a contraption built by a trio of young New Yorkers to clean subway rails.

Let's Pause to Appreciate Obama's Clear and Obvious Love of the White House Science Fair 

The accompanying caption on this one explains:

President Barack Obama laughs as he hugs Rebecca Yeung, 11, from Seattle, Wash., next to her sister Kimberly Yeung, 9, as they show him their homemade “spacecraft” that features a photograph of their late cat and is made of archery arrows and wood scraps which they launched into the stratosphere via a helium balloon that records location coordinates, temperature, velocity, and pressure and reports the data back to them.

Not sure what my sister and I were doing at 9 and 11, but it did not involve homemade spacecraft out of archery arrows, wood scraps, and helium balloons.

Let's Pause to Appreciate Obama's Clear and Obvious Love of the White House Science Fair 

It almost makes the presidency look fun! (The presidency is the farthest thing imaginable from fun.)

Let's Pause to Appreciate Obama's Clear and Obvious Love of the White House Science Fair 

Photos via AP Images, Getty.

Hmm


After His Honeymoon, Ted Cruz Immediately Bought 100 Cans Of Soup

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Thanks to CNN’s town hall, America just got another glimpse into the waking hell that is Heidi Cruz’s daily life. Tonight’s entry into the Heidi Cruz catalogue of the macabre: A newlywed Ted Cruz celebrates by buying 100 cans of Campbell’s Chunky soup.

http://gawker.com/ted-cruz-only-...

The story defies any logical, human explanation, so I’ll let Heidi do the talking:

When I married Ted, we got back from our honeymoon, and he went off to the store and came home by himself. And I was completely shocked to see that he arrived back at our apartment with literally 100 cans of Campbell’s Chunky soup. I never bought 100 of anything.

This was shocking to me, so we had a tough conversation about it. I said, “You don’t buy 100 of anything, much less canned soup. We can’t do this. I’ll be making things.” He said, “No, I know you. you won’t be making things.”

So the next morning, it was a weekend morning, I loaded up our car before he woke up and returned every single can. And when I got home, I called my mother just to make sure I’d done the right thing as a newlywed. And she emphatically disagreed with me. And so when Ted opened the pantry, I had to quickly tell him that I would go back and buy those cans again.

Questions abound.

First and foremost—why? What did this “tough conversation” consist of? Did Heidi really go back to the store to re-buy 100 cans of soup? Did she re-buy the soup in the same variety and quantity? How long does it take Ted to finish 100 cans of soup? Heidi, are you okay? You know you can tell us if you’re not okay? Also—why?

We’ve reached out to Campbell’s and also deep within ourselves for comment, and will update if and when we hear back.

Until then, if you have any information at all about what Ted Cruz did with 100 cans of Campbell’s Chunky™ soup, please do let us know.

This Is NOT What Locker Room Talk Is Like

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This Is NOT What Locker Room Talk Is Like
Pic via Stephen Marche/ Shutterstock

Public Service Announcement: millions of men who have spent time in locker rooms wish to make it clear that the following is not an accurate account of male “locker-room talk.”

No matter what Stephen Marche would have you believe in his Guardian story about the “Red Pill” men’s-rights dudes on Reddit:

It’s funny, because Jessica, my editor at the Guardian, had the same idea. Wasn’t The Red Pill just an updated version of locker-room talk? No, I said, it’s nothing like locker-room talk. Well, she asked, what’s locker-room talk like, then?

Locker-room talk goes like this: you say to your friend, my God, did you see the tits on that yoga instructor, and your friend says, it hurts you, doesn’t it, and you say it does, it does, and he says you know I’ve sucked tits like that before, and you say yeah right and he says really and you say who and he says in Brazil and you say of course it would be an unverifiable claim, and he shrugs and you laugh and he laughs.

Stop.

I’ve never heard this conversation in a locker room but maybe I don’t go to enough men’s yoga classes.

Study: Mortality Rate for Homeless Youth in San Francisco 10 Times Higher Than That of Their Peers 

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Study: Mortality Rate for Homeless Youth in San Francisco 10 Times Higher Than That of Their Peers 
Photo: AP

A new study, reportedly the first of its kind, from the UC Berkeley school of public health has found that the mortality rate for homeless youth in San Francisco is 10 times higher than their peers who have a place to live.

Dr. Colette Auerswald—a pediatrician, adolescent medicine specialist, and associate professor of public health at UC Berkeley—and her research team studied a cohort of 218 street-recruited homeless youth (ages 15 to 24) from 2004 to 2010. Two thirds were male and one third were female. Eleven members of the cohort—about five percent—died over the course of the study. Three of them committed suicide, one was the victim of homicide, and the others succumbed to substance abuse.

“This population is highly stigmatized. That stigma leads to neglect and, in turn, to increased mortality,” Auerswald said in a press release. “All the deaths in this cohort were preventable.”

An estimated 1,378 homeless youth sleep on San Francisco’s streets on any given night.

“This is a phenomenon of our greater and greater acceptance of the poverty of children,” Auerswald said. “I was born in the 60s, grew up in the 70s. There were men, alcoholics, on the street in Washington DC. They were suffering. But there weren’t legions of young people on the street.” The Guardian reports:

Auerswald and her research team did not seek out young people for the study by connecting with them at drop-in centers or other programs; those homeless youths tend to be at lower risk.

Instead, they headed to Haight Street first, a popular San Francisco neighborhood for young homeless people to congregate. The researchers talked to youths there, asking about their lives and about other places where such homeless kids gather. Then they went to the new spot and asked the same questions.

The researchers were able to map where young homeless people in San Francisco actually congregate, like “the African American youth coming to Market Street selling marijuana and escaping violence in their own communities, the survival sex in this other neighborhood, the white kids who travel.”

“We were interested in meeting youth ‘where they’re at’ on the street, not in services,” Auerswald told the Guardian. “Setting foot in services is a big act of faith that a large amount of kids don’t do.”

Young homeless women are even more vulnerable than young homeless men: The mortality rate of the young men in the study was 9.4 percent greater than their peers, while that of young women in the study was 16.1 percent greater than theirs.

“Women are in a very vulnerable place socially on the streets,” Auerswald said. “And they’re often in exploitative relationships where they are dependent on people who are hurting them in order to survive.”

The New York Times Finally Sniffs Out a Hoax

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The New York Times Finally Sniffs Out a Hoax
Photo: Getty

Last week, a letter showed up at the offices of the New York Times. It was addressed to editor Dean Baquet and signed by Petro Poroshenko, the president of Ukraine.

Poroshenko, the letter said, was requesting a conference call to discuss a Times editorial that called the president out for his wavering commitment to rooting out corruption. A call was set up between Poroshenko and the Times editorial board, but as the paper writes today, things were immediately amiss:

The translator told the journalists that the president, who has been identified as an account holder in the Panama Papers revelations about offshore accounts, had $500 million stashed in them.

The translator also quoted the voice identified as Mr. Poroshenko’s as saying he did not want to return the money to his country, in part because he did not want to pay taxes on it.

That assertion was so outlandish, said Michael Slackman, international managing editor for The Times, that it helped confirm suspicions about the veracity of their interview.

The people on the Ukraine end of the phone call spoke in Russian — unusual for senior Ukrainian officials. The signature on the letter, it turned out, was identical to a Google image result for Mr. Poroshenko’s signature. The email address for his press officer was a Gmail account. Further, Mr. Poroshenko speaks fluent English and regularly conducts interviews with foreign journalists in that language.

Yesterday, an edited version of the recording was uploaded to a YouTube account named “Vovan222prank.”

The suspicion of both the Times and Poroshenko’s administration is that Russian loyalists—likely tied to the Kremlin—hatched a plan to embarrass Poroshenko, whose country has been feuding with Russia for several years, by having “him” claim he wanted to maintain the sanctity of his controversial offshore fortune.

Congratulations are in order for the Times, which has been on the wrong end of several obvious hoaxes in the last several years. Finally, someone did some journalism over there.

Is This How Robert De Niro Fell in With the Anti-Vaccine Crowd?

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Is This How Robert De Niro Fell in With the Anti-Vaccine Crowd?

Robert De Niro appeared on The Today Show Wednesday to make it crystal clear that he personally supported the inclusion of anti-vaccination film Vaxxed in the Tribeca Film Festival. A Facebook photo posted yesterday shows that he also met recently with a group of people well-known in anti-vaccination circles, including Jim Carrey and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The photo was posted by Eric Gladen, the filmmaker behind Trace Amounts, an anti-vaccination documentary that premiered last year. Gladen’s picture shows De Niro and his wife Grace standing with Jim Carrey, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (who is, yes, one of Those Kennedys and who thinks vaccines cause autism). Also present were Gladen himself and John Raatz, a PR and marketing guy from a small New Agey-sounding firm called The Visioneering Group.

“This was from our meeting last week in NYC,” Gladen wrote. “Big things in the works with these powerhouse people.”

Jim Carrey also tweeted the photo:

Seeing De Niro with Gladen gives us some insight into what he may believe these days. Trace Amounts claims, basically, that there’s mercury in vaccines and it’s making your kids sick. That is not true. At one point, years ago, there was thimerosal in some vaccines, a form of ethylmercury used as a preservative. Out of an abundance of caution, it was removed in 2001, But ethylmercury is much less toxic than methylmercury (which should be avoided even in small doses). The World Health Organization says the doses of thimerosal once found in vaccines are safe, and studies have found no causal relationship between thimerosal exposure and any negative effects on an infant’s neurological or physcal development.

In his Today appearance yesterday, De Niro said he’s not “anti-vaccine,” and then clarified: “I want safe vaccines.”

That statement ignores the fact that, according to broad medical and scientific consensus, vaccines are very, very safe. It’s also the type of language that anti-vaccination activists use: suggesting that the jury is still out on vaccines and that all they’re asking for is more discussion. That was Jim Carrey’s argument during a lengthy Twitter rant in July, where he suggested that vaccines are full of “toxins.”

It’s also one of Gladen’s main talking points: that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe” because they’re chock-full of mercury. Gladen, it should be noted is also selling tickets to a fundraiser planned for March benefitting something called The Mercury Project. The keynote speakers are Robert F. Kennedy and Alicia Silverstone, who’s also anti-vaccine. She tweeted supportively yesterday about De Niro’s disastrous Today appearance:

All that suggests that De Niro and Carrey are perhaps gearing up to become the new celebrity faces of debunked, nonsense claims about vaccine safety.

It’s terrifically depressing, but also really, really interesting: how in the hell did De Niro fall in with these folks? After all, Jim Carrey’s connection is clear: it’s Jenny McCarthy’s fault. But De Niro’s son Elliot, who has autism, is 18 years old; De Niro didn’t have much to say about vaccine safety during the height of Jenny McCarthy’s anti-vaccination fame, around 2009.

That suggests that De Niro got involved in this murky world sometime in the last five or six years. But how?

We may have an answer: A tipster suggested to Jezebel that De Niro met Andrew Wakefield, the former doctor who authored the now retracted and debunked “vaccines cause autism” study, in 2010. That’s when De Niro was in Austin filming Machete, in which he played a racist Senator. Wakefield lives in Austin with his wife and children now, having left his native England amid a cloud of controversy.

Machete was written and directed by filmmaker Robert Rodriguez. He and his then-wife Elizabeth Avellan wrote a glowing blurb for one of Wakefield’s books, Callous Disregard.

From Amazon, all weird ellipses in the original:

“Meeting Dr. Andy Wakefield changed our lives and . . . we are forever grateful. His wise and measured advice about vaccinations helped us dodge a bullet . . . Our fourth son [had] multiple allergies and repeated infections . . . We now fully realize [he] would have been a victim of immune overload had we followed the regular vaccine schedule. . . . [He] is [now] bright and healthy . . . This book provides a terrifying insight into what has been happening behind the scenes as efforts redouble to silence Dr. Wakefield . . . It is a wake-up call to those who think [he] is anything other than a modern day hero fighting for all of our children.”

Respectful Insolence, a very good science blog, also explores the Rodriguez- De Niro connection as a possible way that De Niro found his way into the anti-vaccination world. And The Texas Observer reported in 2013 that Rodriguez and Avellan also raised money for the Thoughtful House Center for Children, which Wakefield founded in 2004 as an autism research center. He resigned in 2010; Thoughtful House has since changed its name and appears to have cut all ties with Wakefield.

It really seems as though we’re gearing up to face another publicity blitz from the anti-vaccine lobby. The last, McCarthy-led round contributed to declining vaccine rates in some wealthy pockets of Southern California. What fresh public health disaster does this one have in store?


Jim Carrey and Robert De Niro attend the 90th Birthday Celebration of Jerry Lewis at The Friars Club on April 8, 2016 in New York City. Photo via Getty

Bernie Sanders Supporters Should Avoid the Word "Whore" When Discussing Hillary Clinton

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Here is a rule of thumb for Bernie Sanders supporters across this great nation: When talking about the Democratic primary, which pits Sanders against Hillary Clinton, do not use the word “whore.”

“Whore,” in the context of politics, is a popular term. It can be an effective and cathartic way to refer to a politician who seems wedded to interests that run counter to those of the public. As you may know, “whore,” outside politics, generally refers to a woman who accepts money for sex.

In the video above, taken at a Sanders rally last night in New York, an opening speaker, Dr. Paul Song, told the crowd that “Medicare for all will never happen if we continue to elect corporate Democratic whores who are beholden to Big Pharma.” This morning, Sanders had to apologize for Song’s choice of words:

Song, for his part, says he wasn’t talking about Clinton specifically, but many Democrats, generally.

We can agree or disagree about whether Dr. Song set out to use his platform to call Hillary Clinton a whore. But no doubt there are other words one can use to refer to the phenomenon of people “in congress who are beholden to corporations and not us.” Surely, Bernie Sanders supporters would say they are smart enough to come up with some.

[via TPM]

Huge NYC Pension Fund Is Dropping Hedge Funds, Which Are a Ripoff

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Huge NYC Pension Fund Is Dropping Hedge Funds, Which Are a Ripoff
You can invest in this without paying any hedge fund managers.

New York City’s $60 billion civil employees pension fund has just decided to drop all of its investments in hedge funds. That’s the sound of one more nail being hammered into a coffin.

http://gawker.com/retirees-are-h...

Today, the board of the pension fund (called NYCERS) voted to liquidate its hedge fund holdings and cease investing in hedge funds in the future. Reuters reports that those holdings were $1.7 billion in the fund’s last report.

Why should pension funds, which manage the retirement money of thousands of regular, middle-class workers, stop investing in hedge funds? The short answer is “because hedge funds charge exorbitant fees and overall those fees are a complete waste of money.” Every pension fund in America should go down the same path as NYCERS, because research has established that pensions everywhere are funneling billions of dollars to Wall Street money managers and not getting anything valuable back in return. One recent study of 11 public pension funds estimated that their investments in hedge funds—which are alluring to pension fund managers because they promise steady, predictable returns, protection from market volatility, and/ or outsized profits—were actually responsible for $8 billion in lost investment revenue.

That is money that could have gone to middle class retirees. Instead, it went to millionaire hedge fund managers. That is not good management.

It is inevitable that more pensions will follow this lead. Word is getting out (about math).


I Wish This Massive NYPD Corruption Scandal Were Just a Little Sexier

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I Wish This Massive NYPD Corruption Scandal Were Just a Little Sexier
(The real) Frank Serpico testifies at a Knapp Commission hearing. Image: AP

Yesterday, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said that the current federal investigation into corruption in his department is likely the worst since the Knapp Commission—the municipal probe into the department prompted by Frank Serpico way back in 1970. But really, compared to that, this latest scandal is boring as hell.

Forty years ago, NYPD corruption was bloody and dramatic: The Knapp Commission uncovered cops who covered up a mob murder, who bought drugs, who sold out an informant to gangsters who wanted to kill him. This year’s scandal is about...high-ranking officers who let a fancy businessman buy them trips to the Caribbean? Something like that? I read and write about the NYPD just about every day and even I can’t bring myself to care that much about it.

http://justice.gawker.com/one-of-new-yor...

You don’t even need to go back to the late ‘60s and early ‘70s to find corruption worthy of adaptation into a gritty, street-level thriller. In the early ‘90s, New York had Michael Dowd, who used to drive a red Corvette purchased with drug money into work every day, and whose forays into cocaine trafficking inspired the Mollen Commission, the spiritual successor to Knapp. About a decade before that, there was the 77th Precinct scandal, in which one cop was so freaked out about his own drug- and gun-running that he asked his buddy to shoot him so he could leave the department on disability pension and escape the prying eyes of internal investigators. Even last month’s Queens Karaoke bar protection racket was more interesting than the current FBI investigation.

Times Square’s sex carnivals and drug dealers have been replaced by wax statues and sneaker stores; and coke-slinging cops have been replaced by a chief of department who bought a custom-made backgammon set for his rich friend.

Give me secret meetings on dank streets under elevated trains. Give me blinking neon lights, give me prostitutes, give me stimulant-induced paranoia. Give me a car chase! It’s not that this latest scandal isn’t bad, or that the people involved shouldn’t be prosecuted. I’m just saying: Would it kill them to be a little more entertaining? To borrow language from a thousand thinkpieces about the changing city, what we’re looking at is the corporate, sanitized version of NYPD corruption.

The Untold Story of the Teen Hackers Who Transformed the Early Internet

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The Untold Story of the Teen Hackers Who Transformed the Early Internet
Bill Landreth, former teen hacker of the early 1980s, now homeless in Santa Monica on March 18, 2016 (Photo by Matt Novak)

On October 12th, 1983, Bill Landreth called his friend Chris in Detroit to chat. Chris frantically explained that the FBI had raided his house. “Don’t call me anymore,” Chris said in what would be a very short conversation. Bill didn’t know exactly what was happening, but he did know this: If the FBI had come for Chris, then he might be next.

The next day, around a dozen FBI agents stormed Bill’s parent’s house just outside of San Diego, amassing piles of evidence including a computer that Bill, then 18, had hidden under his sister’s bed. Bill and Chris, who was 14 at the time, were the leaders of a coalition of teen hackers known as The Inner Circle. In a single day, the FBI conducted coordinated raids of group members across nine states, taking computers, modems, and copious handwritten notes detailing ways to access various networks on what was then a rudimentary version of the internet.

The Inner Circle was a motley group of about 15 hackers, almost all teenagers, from Southern California, Detroit, New York, and roughly five other regions of the US. Bill, Chris, and other members of their collective had been accessing all kinds of networks, from GTE’s Telemail—which hosted email for companies like Coca-Cola, Raytheon, Citibank, and NASA—to the Arpanet, which was largely used by university researchers and military personnel until Milnet was completed in the mid-1980s. Chris was fond of boasting on message boards about hacking the Pentagon. The Inner Circle wasn’t the only teen hacking group of the early 1980s, but their interference with both government networks and the email accounts of large corporations put them on the FBI’s radar. Along with the 414s, a group busted around the same time, the raids made national headlines. The Inner Circle’s actions would inspire a complete overhaul in how computer crime was prosecuted, through the introduction of the country’s first anti-hacking laws in 1984.

I decided to track down members of The Inner Circle, and find out what happened during their heyday and infamous bust, and where it’s led them today. In the process, I’ve obtained 351 pages of FBI documents about early-80s teen hacker communities through a Freedom of Information Act request. The pages are heavily redacted, but they fill in some of the many holes that remain about The Inner Circle, the FBI’s crash course in computers, and the teen computer underground of the early 1980s.

The story of Bill and Chris is one of simple curiosity, and the birth of the modern internet in an era before computer hacking laws existed. It was an era when most of America—including virtually everyone in the FBI—couldn’t tell you what a modem was. This period, from roughly 1979 until 1983, was a mythical Wild West for kids who became interested in computers, and saw the rising popularity (and declining price) of personal computers as well as the release of the movie Wargames. The kids of this period were early adopters, and they got into plenty of trouble.

After WarGames came out in June 1983, every wannabe hacker with more money than sense went out and got a computer and modem from places like RadioShack, thinking they could get their fingers close to the big red button. It didn’t work that way, of course. But there were plenty of other hijinks that kids of the early 1980s could pull with a computer, a phone line, and the special brand of fearlessness that comes with youth.

The FBI started tracking The Inner Circle in 1982, but it wasn’t until late 1983 that they’d finally bust the group. In large part, that bust was possible because of a 42-year-old pseudo-vigilante hacker known as John Maxfield—a former phone phreak who fancied himself the proto-internet’s sheriff. Maxfield gained the trust of teen hacker communities on bulletin board systems (BBSs) in the early 1980s and fed the information to the FBI.

Maxfield provided the FBI with the intelligence they needed on The Inner Circle’s exploits, especially when it came to the hacking of Telenet’s Telemail email system. Chris, frustrated and bored, had started deleting emails of Coca-Cola executives and using administrator passwords to change the names on accounts. GTE, the company that operated the Telemail service, wasn’t pleased. After all, the hackers were using Telemail “illegally.” Which is to say, for free. FBI documents spell out just how much time was being stolen by these kids, right down to the penny. For example, use of BMW’s messaging service by unauthorized users in September, 1983, cost GTE $0.29. Unauthorized use of Raytheon’s accounts in the same month totaled $298. But it was the widespread loss of faith in the system’s security that was most damaging to GTE.

I spoke with Bill and Chris, but was unable to connect with any other of The Inner Circle members or Maxfield. A letter sent to Maxfield’s last known PO Box has yet to receive a reply, and the last known number I could find for him was disconnected. For all I know, he’s dead. Or he’s elderly and keeping a low profile. Maxfield always tried to stay off the radar, but after he was exposed as an FBI informant in late 1983, he became the most loathed man on the internet.

The Untold Story of the Teen Hackers Who Transformed the Early Internet
Bill’s tablet, coffee, lighter, and DIY apple pipe for his medical marijuana (Photo by Matt Novak)

When I met Bill Landreth at a Starbucks in Santa Monica, he was sitting quietly at a table drinking coffee with two bags on the the seat across from him, and a bag of blankets in the corner. A pipe made out of an apple and filled with what I assumed was medical marijuana sat at the table next to his coffee and Samsung tablet. A passing cop glanced at the spread but didn’t raise an eyebrow.

Arranging our meeting was tricky, because Bill isn’t sure where he’ll be sleeping from night to night. Now 52, with a slight goatee and a tussle of wavy hair that nearly reaches his shoulders, Bill has been living on the streets for 30 years. But if it weren’t for his receding hairline and a certain grayness to his gaze, he’d probably pass for a decade younger. There’s something assertive yet firmly guarded about the way he speaks. It’s as though Bill’s a man who’s not afraid to say what he thinks, but still worries about saying something out of line in front of me.

In our conversation, he was calm, affable, and clearly intelligent, and almost immediately began rattling off computers and computing languages of which I have little to no background or understanding.

Bill got his first computer in 1980, he tells me. It was a TRS-80 from RadioShack. He was 14 or 15, and explains that he planned to get the version with 8K of memory using $500 he had saved. His dad offered to pitch in another $500, and he got the 16K version with a cassette tape drive for storage. He also picked up a 300 baud modem.

Bill was a quick learner, and developed a knack for the BASIC programming language. From there he’d learn other languages, and his desire to explore the world of computing became overpowering. After he’d conquered one area, there was always something new around the corner. He was an explorer; more interested in mapping the entire terrain than in penetrating deep into any given network. Bill, who would take up the moniker The Cracker, found community with an emerging group of misfits online. They gave him a sense of place in the new world he was traversing.

“You didn’t really meet many of the other people,” Bill says. “You could go out of your way to try to.” But Bill’s connections were through his modem and phone.

He’s the son of two hippies who spent much of his childhood living a semi-nomadic lifestyle. His dad, an astronomy lover, built telescopes under the brand name Essential Optics. But he only charged people for parts at cost, and hardly charged anything for his labor. The only moderate business success Bill’s father ever had was selling grow lamps in the 1970s. He even bought full page ads for the lamps (ostensibly to grow tomatoes) in High Times magazine.

Despite his friend Chris’s warning on October 12, 1983, Bill wasn’t sure that the FBI was coming for him when they did. Aside from his grow-lamp business, Bill’s dad had a tendency to go up to Big Bear (a rural, touristy area about four hours outside of LA) to pick up LSD and cocaine. To this day, Bill’s still not convinced that there wasn’t some attempt by the FBI to get at his father through him.

But they had come for Bill. Along with other teenage nerds in his collective, Bill was “hacking” the first commercial packet-switched network, Telenet. The Telenet network (now owned by Raytheon) was inspired by the structure of the Arpanet, and had local hosts in 52 cities by the early 1980s. Tapping into that network’s mail system allowed Bill and his hacker friends to make local calls to chat, rather than tricking the phone system into letting them make long distance calls for free—a necessity if you wanted to post on a BBS outside your area code without amassing huge bills.

Someone told Bill that administrator accounts for GTE’s Telemail simply used a capital A for the password. “So I would just try last names with capital A and I would get a lot of accounts,” Bill tells me. “So that was what let me in to be able to make other people’s accounts, and we’d just have conversations.”

Bill’s plea agreement is thin, with just eight pages detailing his “crimes.” In 1983 there were no computer hacking laws, but the courts in Virginia clearly thought that penetration of computer networks was a serious crime, even if nothing was stolen. So Bill was charged with wire fraud, which essentially amounted to the crime of making three phone calls with his computer.

When we leave Starbucks and go to lunch, Bill packs up his tablet and charger and puts on his backpack. He throws his clear plastic bag, filled with blankets and a small tent, over his head, carrying the enormous parcel with the weight distributed on his pack and the back of his neck.

As we eat, Bill tells me stories of the past 30 years, of his struggles with mental illness and living on the streets of San Diego, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara. We trade stories about the different psychiatric medications we’ve tried. I’ve been having issues with my depression and mood stabilizer meds, which make me incredibly tired throughout the day. Bill’s convinced that self-medication is the way to go. He shares that he’s been diagnosed as manic depressive and has had a few involuntary trips to the local mental health facility via police—the “taxi service,” as he calls them. Bill tells me that when it comes to basic hygiene, he showers at his brother’s place in town. I can’t bring myself to ask why he doesn’t live with his brother.

Throughout lunch I try asking in at least three different ways what Bill’s motivation for hacking was. Each time, it was like asking someone why they’d read a book or watch a movie. Bill says he just wanted to know what was out there. There’s a blunt cadence in his tone that makes me believe him, and the FBI documents bear this out. When he’d crack into financial institutions it was always shallow. He wasn’t looking to steal a million bucks or get deep into any system for personal gain. But he did enjoy being a voyeur. Bill and his friends would often pull pranks, like getting all the phone operators from a certain area on a giant conference call together. Chris even got a bunch of senior military personnel on what must have been the most confusing phone call of all time.

The Untold Story of the Teen Hackers Who Transformed the Early Internet
A heavily redacted page from the FBI’s file on the Inner Circle hacking group

Despite having his home raided and computer equipment seized, Bill wouldn’t be charged for nine months. He says he didn’t want to get a lawyer and was confident that he could fight on his own. Bill tells me his strategy would’ve been to convince a jury or judge that his crime was like walking into a huge mansion, unlocked. He just wanted a look around. As Bill explains his thought process I hold my tongue, knowing that this line of reasoning makes sense to someone who grew up in a hippie family and the Western ethos of exploration that often comes with it. But I also knew that it wouldn’t have worked for a second in front of a federal judge on the other side of the country.

Bill’s father convinced him that he needed a lawyer; a move Bill still thinks was a mistake. They struck a deal, giving Bill three years probation for pleading guilty to three counts of wire fraud. Bill’s family moved to Alaska and Bill moved in with friends in Poway, California. Without a computer, he went dark on the BBS boards. He attended the University of California-San Diego for a while, but soon traveled to Mexico and then to Oregon. He never told his probation officer where he was going, and was picked up in Oregon and flown to San Diego, where he served 3 months in jail.

After getting out, Bill knew he had to find a way to make money. He weighed about 120 pounds at the time and needed income. Bill says he was “sort of fasting,” though his eyes betray that he probably didn’t have any money for food. Rather, he found his desire for a computer even more important than his hunger.

“I really wanted a computer but I couldn’t figure out how to make money to buy a computer,” Bill says. “When I first bought a computer [in 1980] I already had $500, but by this time I didn’t really have any money saved up or anything.”

So he cut out all the headlines he’d collected from friends across the country; splashy sensationalistic spreads about The Cracker’s big FBI bust. He found a literary agent, and wrote his entire book proposal by hand before hammering it out on an old typewriter. His agent got two responses, one from Microsoft, which offered a $5,500 advance. The book, co-authored by Howard Reinghold, was published in 1984 under the title Out of the Inner Circle. Bill immediately spent the entire sum of his advance on a new computer.

The Untold Story of the Teen Hackers Who Transformed the Early Internet
Bill Landreth in high school circa early 1980s (left) Bill Landreth on the cover of his book Out of The Inner Circle (right)

When his royalty checks started drying up around two years later, Bill looked for work here and there. He took a job with Scientology that promised $200 a week selling books, but quickly learned that he’d be making $1 a day and promptly quit. Today he’s able to feed himself, buy medicinal weed, and sometimes splurge on a tablet thanks to Social Security payments and California food stamps. But he hasn’t had a stable home since high school.

Bill’s entire existence is stuffed into three bags, and keeping an eye on them is a constant struggle. When his stuff is stolen, he often doesn’t know if it’s by other homeless people or the police. He says he has to buy new blankets once every three weeks. And his $150 Samsung tablet is always in danger of getting stolen.

Bill’s life, he says, is a constant stream of indignities and harassment from police. They enforce ordinances arbitrarily and inconsistently, trying to push homeless people out of sight. Bill tells me of a bridge he was sleeping under in Santa Barbara. An officer approached him, handcuffed him, searched all his belongings, and told him he couldn’t sleep on that side of the road under the bridge. He was cited for “illegal camping” but was told that sleeping on the other side was okay. So the next night he moved across the street. The police officer came back and gave him another ticket. Bill figures he has about $10,000 in unpaid legal fees and fines—most of it interest on the debt that grows and grows over time.

It couldn’t be further from the life of Chris, the 14-year-old who exchanged a brief phone call with Bill after his own FBI raid. Chris’s story is that of a kid who grew up to thrive in the culture of our burgeoning internet. With just a few minor tweaks, Bill’s story could have been similar. Bill tells me he hasn’t talked with Chris in 30 years, and they never met in person. But he has only fond memories of their friendship from halfway across the country.

I spoke with Chris over the phone under the condition that I not use his real name. In the early 1980s he was known online as the Wizard of Arpanet, a moody punk who bragged incessantly about the networks he’d penetrated. Today, he’s an upstanding family man “working with computers” (he declined to get specific) in a suburb of Detroit.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve talked about the Wizard of Arpanet days,” Chris tells me over the phone from his home outside Detroit. Chris was 14 when the FBI came knocking on his door.

Chris was an Atari guy, and his first computer was an Atari 2600. “You could plug in a basic cartridge and it had like 1k of memory and you could do some cool stuff with it. Then you kinda stepped up to the Atari 400, which was cool because you could do some programming but then you could get the modem—that 300 baud modem on there. Then you started to figure out what you could do with a 300k baud modem.”

Much like Bill, Chris found that his computer was a connection to the outside world; a sense of community that he couldn’t find elsewhere. “Growing up in Detroit there wasn’t a vast amount of things to do, so you had this modem and you start exploring,” Chris says. “You find your first bulletin board and then that bulletin board has a little bit of information on it and you kind of... that’s what intrigued me. In a general sense it hasn’t really revolutionized much from there—you called in to the bulletin board, you post messages, and you call in back and forth. It was a lot slower and there were no graphics, but the essential kind of concept was the same [as today].”

The key to hacking in the early 1980s was figuring out how to make free phone calls. Phone phreakers had been doing this since the 1960s, but it was even more vital for precursors to our modern internet. Dialing into a BBS in your area code wouldn’t cost too much. But if you were in Detroit and wanted to access a board outside your area code, that meant long distance calls. And long distance calls used to be damn expensive. So any computer hacker worth his salt quickly learned how to “hack” the phone company—and that’s what the Wizard of Arpanet started doing.

“That opens up the world,” Chris tells me. “Now I can call a BBS in New York or I can call this board over here in San Diego. And then you start getting out there.”

And once you were “out there,” the hackers of The Inner Circle and elsewhere would have a variety of ways to break into networks. Except that during this period, security was so weak that “break” is too strong a word. An operating manual could yield active administrator passwords for a variety of systems simply because nobody bothered to change the default passwords.

Chris’s true love, though he’s reluctant to talk about it today, was hacking the Arpanet and military systems. In fact, that’s how I found him. I was researching what kind of espionage the Soviet Union was conducting on the Arpanet and Milnet in the 1980s. We know of a few Soviet hackers who were looking for state secrets, but there were also kids like Chris rummaging around MIT, Stanford, and UCLA for fun.

“Then we started to get some of the Arpanet stuff, and somehow I got one of the main dial-in connection points,” Chris tells me. “And from there it was just kind of discovering all the different hosts.”

“Once you were able to get into one, I was able to get the full host list. So I got the full list of hosts on the Arpanet just from snooping around. From that point I was able to go through and just test them all out,” Chris says. What he had tapped into was known as a TIP, sort of like a super-modem that routed information along the Arpanet. According to the FBI documents I obtained, the military and researchers at the various nodes on the Arpanet had not detected the penetration. Their informant, the BBS narc John Maxfield, was the one who learned about it straight from the Wizard of Arpanet’s mouth.

Chris had no idea that he was constantly being watched by one of his own. Maxfield, who went by the handle Cable Pair on BBS boards, was never approached by the FBI about the activities he was observing in the early 1980s. Instead, Maxfield approached them. He’d later recall walking into the FBI to tell them about the kids swapping software on BBS boards. The FBI replied that this sounded like a bad thing, but got tripped up when he started using words like “modem.” They had no idea what he was talking about.

But after Maxfield’s initial contact, he developed a long term relationship with the agency. He set up meetings with hackers to gather evidence firsthand, and once allowed the FBI to photograph the kids from across the street in a massive sting operation.

“He invited a bunch of the different hackers from around the country to visit [him in Detroit]. So we all got together—it was like a hacker jam session—at the guy’s offices with all this phone equipment and computers,” Chris says. High school and college kids came from around the country. “It was like… ‘let me show you what I can can do,’ and ‘let me show you this.’”

Maxfield would say later that he was particularly impressed by the Wizard of Arpanet’s skills. Chris had no idea that he was incriminating himself with every keystroke. “The FBI took pictures of everybody that came and went, and they also had some early sort of keyboard monitors back then to see what was going on,” Chris says. “I happened to show them, ‘hey here’s the whole host list for the Arpanet! Take a look at this! This is pretty cool, I can get on any of these computers!’”

Maxfield rarely talked to the press after the raids, but journalist Patricia Franklin spoke to him for her 1990 book Profits of Deceit: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Fraud. When I contacted Franklin recently, she wasn’t surprised that Maxfield was hard to track down. He was secretive and self-righteous, she said, and used the same rhetoric that has become common in the 21st century whenever people talk about hacking or copyright infringement.

“Hacking is a completely impersonal, dehumanized crime,” Maxfield told her. “None of them would dream of taking a knife or a gun and mugging someone on the street. The hacker doesn’t know his victim and the victim never knows the hacker. There is never any physical risk involved. They are introverted thrill seekers.”

That tone would ooze out of the heavyweights at the FBI and elsewhere when it came to software and movie piracy. “You wouldn’t steal a... fill in the blank” is now little more than a punchline in online circles. But at the time, it was the best way to make the case that intellectual property should be considered real property and that virtual locks should be considered real locks. Maxfield literally compared himself to the Lone Ranger.

“With a computer, hackers can carry out their wildest fantasies,” Maxfield said in the late 1980s according to Franklin’s book. “And there is no one supervising them. It’s the alternative to a street gang. The hacker is a street-corner hood, except today the meeting place is a bulletin board.”

Maxfield became so infamous that the first issue of the legendary 2600 magazine, in January of 1984, dedicated its cover to the October 1983 raids and the outing of Maxfield as an FBI informant.

When Chris was finally busted, the FBI turned his bedroom upside down and took all his computer equipment. But Chris’s mother, who was home at the time, later defended him in an Associated Press article. “He bragged he knew how to do it, but he said he would never harm anything if he got in,” she said in 1983. “He would just look and leave. It was just the thrill of getting in.”

The FBI had two problems. One was that they were losing the public relations battle in the press. There are extensive notes in the FBI file about the fact that they’d have to tread lightly, since they were dealing with so many juveniles. The second problem was that there weren’t really any computer hacking laws. “Breaking into” a computer system wasn’t illegal, unless you took a broad interpretation of wire fraud law, as the FBI did with Bill. But since Chris was just 14, they struggled with whether to charge him.

The LA Times ran stories with headlines like “FBI Won’t Go Lightly on Whiz Kids,” but ultimately the agency did go easy on group members who were under 18. It was a calculated move, and one that would pay off, since so many Americans had no idea what hacking was. The idea that the FBI was picking on innocent, curious kids gained traction in communities like Irvine, California, where four of the hackers had their computers confiscated.

The Untold Story of the Teen Hackers Who Transformed the Early Internet
Four group members at a press conference on October 13, 1983 after getting raided. From left: Wayne Correia (17), Gary Knutson (15), Gregg Knutson (14), and David Hill (17)

The local Irvine newspapers questioned heavy-handed FBI tactics, as kids held press conferences insisting that they didn’t do anything wrong. In fact, they pointed their fingers at Bill Landreth, The Cracker, for getting them involved. Bill’s physical isolation from the other hackers—like the four who knew each other in Irvine (two were brothers)—made him a mysterious figure in the press. Unlike the kids from higher income families, Bill had avoided the attention of newspapers.

The FBI never charged Chris with anything. He went back to school and relished in his new celebrity. “I got a lot of newspaper clippings, and then I became very popular and then I got a lot of girlfriends, and it was all good,” Chris says, laughing.

By the end of October 1983, the same month as the raids, the FBI was asking Congress for stronger anti-hacking laws. Or, rather, hacking laws at all. But to do that, the agency acknowledged that they’d have to redefine the legal meanings of both “property” and “trespassing.”

“Right now there is a void in the law,” FBI Deputy Assistant Director Floyd Clarke testified. “Our experience indicates that certain legal issues involving computer-related crime could be clarified, particularly the definition of property in the sense of a computer program having its own clearly defined inherent value, and the issue of trespass.”

The FBI would get their laws—and the teen cowboys of the Wild West would simply continue chasing sunsets. The first computer hacking law, the Counterfeit Access Device and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (US Public Law 98-473, 1984), was enacted in 1984. But the laws would only grasp at the low-hanging fruit. Richard C. Hollinger’s 1990 paper “Hackers: Computer Heroes or Electronic Highwaymen?” argued that the laws only addressed the least disruptive elements in hacker society:

Currently we are in the midst of a paradox. The computer criminals doing the least harm and who are generally the least involved in malicious activities, “hackers,” have become almost the exclusive prosecutorial focus of computer crime law enforcement.

Bill and Chris were in the “least harm” category; they hadn’t stolen anything but time, if that can be considered a crime. The true computer thieves were those inside a given organization. A 1984 study by the American Bar Association, cited by Hollinger, found that 77 percent of computer crime was committed by a company’s own employees.

Essentially every computer hacking law passed since 1984 is a cousin of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. And the original Act itself is still being used (sometimes ham-handedly) by law enforcement today. It’s the law that internet activist Aaron Swartz was charged under after he downloaded a massive cache of academic papers. Swartz faced fines of $1 million and 35 years in prison. He took his own life in January of 2013 before the case was heard.

When I went to Santa Monica to meet Bill, I was pretty sure I’d hear a story about how the FBI had ruined his life. But I left believing that it hadn’t. The world ruined Bill’s life—a world that couldn’t quite find a place for his particular talents, faults, and petty mistakes. While it’s a cliche, it’s hard not to think that perhaps Bill was ahead of his time in many ways. He was smart enough to see vulnerabilities no one else could in what would become the modern internet. Legislation was drafted because few people in law enforcement had even thought what The Inner Circle did was possible, and digital security is now more important than ever. People get six-figure salaries to find vulnerabilities in networks today. But being just four years older than Chris meant Bill was tried as an adult and saw his life set on another course.

The Untold Story of the Teen Hackers Who Transformed the Early Internet
Bill Landreth in Santa Monica on March 18, 2016 (Photo by Matt Novak)

In Los Angeles it’s not uncommon to walk by familiar faces, briefly famous but now forgotten. Nobody does a double take when they see Bill. Instead, given that he’s one of the roughly 40,000 people sleeping on LA’s streets on any given night, people tend to avert their eyes from his gaze.

I thank Bill for sharing his story with me, and I leave him in Santa Monica. The world seems content to punish him for the victimless crimes he committed over three decades ago. But that’s certainly not unique to Bill or computer hackers. Who knows how his life would’ve turned out if he’d been embraced by the FBI, rather than prosecuted?

I asked Bill what was in his future. He says he’s thinking about writing something—maybe a book or a screenplay. But mostly he just isn’t sure. “I’ll probably end up not getting that far along,” Bill tells me with a nervous chuckle before we part ways. “I’d like to buy a house. But I don’t know.”

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"It's More Relevant Than It Should Be": Green Room Director Jeremy Saulnier on His Skinhead Horror Bloodbath in Backwater Oregon

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"It's More Relevant Than It Should Be": Green Room Director Jeremy Saulnier on His Skinhead Horror Bloodbath in Backwater Oregon
Photo: A24

Director Jeremy Saulnier wasn’t trying to reflect today’s political climate when he set out to make Green Room—it just kind of happened. The gruesome horror thriller—in which a down-and-out punk band plays a Nazi skinhead venue in backwoods Oregon and finds themselves fighting for their lives—opened last year at Cannes. Since then, much has happened to breathe relevancy into a throwback punks vs. skins narrative. Namely: Donald Trump and his legion of racist supporters.

Classic horror cinema is often conversant with its time—George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead explored racism in the turbulent late ‘60s, and Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left was that director’s response to the carnage of Vietnam. The fantasy catharsis often comes via characters who exhibit extraordinary heroism when thrust into previously unthinkable situations. But just like Saulnier stumbled into a narrative that has more political weight than it did just last year, so do his characters stumble into and out of their predicament. When the members of the punk band at the center of Green Room take a gig they shouldn’t have taken out of financial desperation, they find themselves barricaded in the aforementioned Nazi venue’s green room after witnessing the aftermath of a murder. The small-time band quickly becomes the prey of a group of white supremacists led by a character played by Patrick Stewart.

As Saulnier did in 2014's Blue Ruin, in the considerably more brutal Green Room he plays with the notion of ordinary people in extraordinary situations. His nominal protagonists are not particularly smart, strong, or capable of enduring their predicament, often to their peril, frequently hilariously, and always in service of the film’s tension. In a A24's New York office a few weeks ago, I spoke to Saulnier about violence, race, and relevancy. An edited and condensed transcript of our conversation appears below.

Gawker: You got an R rating with a high level of gore. Was that a surprise?

Jeremy Saulnier: I was expecting more of a battle, but it passed.

Why do you think that is?

I think it’s America. If I had a vagina in there it’d be NC-17.

A dick and you’d be run out of the country.

But I’ve got just lots of gore. I’m kind of excited by it because I have a problem with [the idea that] because you don’t see a certain amount of blood, you can kill 400 people and it doesn’t matter. And then films like the ones I make, they get stopped, censored. I think if you feel the brutality, if it’s a gut punch when someone dies, it’s way healthier, no matter how graphic it is, than feeling zero impact.

Superhero movies trivialize death to an extent that horror movies have traditionally been blamed for, but that’s much worse, I think.

It’s just part of the carnage, you gotta have a certain amount. You have to destroy a whole city.

The scene in Green Room wherein a pit bull mauls a character’s throat—was that inspired by the similar attack scenes in Dario Argento’s Suspiria and/or Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond?

Not directly. It’s more inspired by my own little nightmares. I’m actually a big dog lover, but a few years ago my daughter was attacked by a dog. It got under my skin. It was a black lab, a real nice breed. Dog fighting was more of a theme politically. One of the few things about this movie is it comes across as this chaotic, unfolding disaster. It’s very haphazard and impulsive, but there’s a few little thesis statements in there and one of them is about dogs, and people, and learned aggression and how we breed ourselves and breed dogs to cause so much carnage, yet at our core, it’s just not our nature. Pit bulls are a very friendly breed, they just happen to cause the most fatalities because of how they’re built and how they’re bred, and that’s all humans. The dogs themselves are trained to have gameness, which is unrelenting will, to never stop fighting and to latch on until death. And it’s like: We did that. And we celebrate it, and we have the dogs fight, and we’re sitting there betting on it. It’s really kind of sick. It was more of a theme than an homage, not that I’m not influenced by all the films that I’ve watched, including Fulci.

What are your other thesis statements?

I usually keep those [to myself]. The thesis is never my intention. It’s more creating a story that I find compelling. For Blue Ruin, there’s so much injected into it by other people regarding political statements, referencing whatever, like, gun laws in Virginia, but it wasn’t supposed to be political. For Green Room, I was just a little more aware, as these statements and examinations would evolve naturally. I would be like, “I can say this when I go to France. I’ll tell ‘em it’s about American conservative power structure,” and it kind of is.

But that’s just about humans, how people at the top of the food chain don’t get their hands dirty, they misinform the masses, who fight each other and create carnage, meanwhile whatever ideology they’re fighting for is complete bullshit and the people at the top are protecting their own interests. That’s very much Green Room, and very much what’s happening in our country. I couldn’t help but make those parallels as I was writing them. And then I snuck in a few details to hit that. But... oh shit, I’m talking about it. I usually reserve that till after the film’s out.

With Green Room, you have made a movie about race, or at least where race is a dominating theme, with virtually no people of color.

There is an Arab and a Jew that we snuck into the band, but that was the thing: In the casting call you had to kind of pass for white to be amongst this band that would be welcomed into a white power enclave. It’s a little odd but it doesn’t usually get discussed because it does seem native to the environment. I’m part of the problem.

I interpreted this movie as a morality tale, with the dominating morality being: You reap what you sow.

Yeah.

Nobody here is without fault in your larger conversation about race. If you’re willing to rub elbows with white supremacists as a white person in this capacity, you’re condoning their ideology.

It depends. Rubbing elbows I think is maybe how we can bridge the divide. Like pit bulls aren’t inherently savage, I think people aren’t inherently racist. A big part of the skinhead culture is recruiting through a very pure attraction to a subculture and a music, or love of music that happens to be very aggressive and serves as an outlet. People are generally searching for camaraderie and a home, and just to repurpose whatever aggression or hurt they might have, and [then they] distort it and point it in the wrong direction. That’s a huge part of all of this. A lot of people who are racist think that they’re just realists and they’re just misinformed.

Being in the punk world in the hardcore scene in D.C., I was rubbing elbows with Nazi skinheads every show. But they also attracted violence. They were not really welcome, but yet they were there.

As far as the [protagonist band] playing a show, the danger is they do dismiss, “Oh, there’s skins at every show.” They don’t really understand what they’re getting into. It isn’t until the lights go out and the whole venue’s clear that it’s just them versus the Nazi skins.

I felt like the movie was asking me how much I would put up with in this situation, how much as a viewer I could tolerate within the characters, just in terms of relating to them. Imogen Poots’s character has that line, “I’m not a Nazi”...OK, but she’s still there, embedded in this scene of Nazis. There’s a dubiousness that comes with entering this environment, and what you sign away at the door.

Yeah, and for me it was just not to judge, knowing that you can easily get in with the wrong crowd if it’s the right time. Again, I think people are looking for a place to feel safe. It was about having people emerge from their stereotypes and not because Nazis are great people, but because people aren’t inherently Nazis. People in this film are forced to, in this insane siege situation and the conflict that arises, just forget all that shit. Their ideology, their affiliation, their labels are irrelevant to the situation and that’s one of the parts of the film that’s designed. As you strip that shit away, and you get down to just humans, we see them for who they are.

And that’s recurring in your movies. As in Blue Ruin, you present these horror/suspense tropes and then you wonder aloud onscreen, “What if an actual human being were in this situation?” as opposed to a usually teenaged protagonist whose wit and strength is effectively superhuman.

Exactly. It’s just so fun, and it’s what drives me. Like, “What the fuck would I do?” When I can actually inhabit the characters on either side of this door, it’s about just staying true to actual logic and motivation. I think it’s fun to have no cheap cinematic escape for people. You let ‘em butt up against an impossible situation and then someone dies. It’s not like, oh, then some kind of random act or clever twist will save them. Nope. I didn’t plan on the death order, I just let it happen and I was kind of traumatized when I wrote it when I would lose a character. It wasn’t up to me. It was up to where I positioned them in a story. Then when I couldn’t write my way out of it, they died.

You said you were in the hardcore scene in D.C. How much did you need to research on white supremacists before writing this movie?

We’d be at shows, and we wouldn’t really chat with the Nazi skinheads, but they were there. Being from the suburbs, Nazi skinheads did not walk around my neighborhood, but in D.C., they were there. It was very disturbing to see that, people wearing swastikas in broad daylight at a matinee show. They were very much a part of the scene throughout the country, and my buddies and I watched this HBO documentary, this America Undercover documentary, on a skinhead group down in the South. The culture seemed, when it was exposed in that light, very odd and kind of sad. You could see it was about a certain brotherhood. The people were there because they wanted a home, because someone’s teaching them how to be racist, how to go have a little 17-person march at the state capitol and wave a Confederate flag. It’s just very odd, it’s surreal to see that in modern-day America, this was back in the ‘90s. But their affiliation with the punk rock/hardcore scene was inherent to what my experiences were.

There was definitely additional research, but that was more about digging into the culture so that I could throw it away. In Green Room, there’s no speeches about ideology and recruitment. We get as far as [Patrick Stewart’s character announcing], “The racial advocacy workshop next Wednesday is still on unless you hear otherwise.” We’re not here to have big speeches about Nazism, it’s really about what’s the real ideology in play, and that we find out layer by layer as we navigate this punk rock music venue. It’s much more than that. There’s a motive that is driving this leader that has nothing to do with this grand purpose.

It was very prescient of you to set a movie in this world with all the Trump stuff that has happened since you started working on it.

Unbelievable. I sent this to my buddy in France, he’s a distributor, and he was like, “Punks vs. skins, are you serious? Is this a 1980's movie?” I was like, “Well, it’s actually a 1990's movie. This is more of a throwback to what I know.” I had to account for many things like cell phones, and social media, and the fact that I was in the hardcore scene at its very peak. I had to account for the fact that it’s not what it used to be and there’s this band on the fringes trying to scavenge what’s left of this scene. The scene is thriving in this remote venue, but it’s not what they expected. Unfortunately since my friend dubbed it a 1980's throwback, the film has become surprisingly relevant. You get militias in Oregon having a siege situation take place with the FBI, you’ve got this whole uptick, you’ve got shootings in South Carolina, and the Confederate flag, and Trump. It’s really disturbing. It’s now more relevant than it should be. That wasn’t my intention. I’m sad that it is so relevant.

Green Room opens in select theaters on Friday.

Vladimir Putin has insinuated that Goldman Sachs is behind the leak of the Panama Papers.

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