Senator Lindsey Graham (R-John McCain’s sad shadow), a man loathed by conservatives for supporting immigration reform and loathed by non-conservatives for supporting all wars everywhere forever, is running for president. CNN reports that Graham “hopes that his track record on foreign affairs will give him the advantage in a wide-open primary fight.”

In elite Washington, Graham is considered a foreign policy sage because he always, invariably supports foreign adventurism. His “track record on foreign affairs” includes fervent support for the Iraq War, just one of the many wars Graham would like America to wage and continue waging as long as possible. He’s called for American military action in Libya, in Syria, and in Iran, and he has flirted with the idea of escalating hostilities against Russia, because while a cold war may not be as fun was a regular war, it is still a war.

One might think that this man who loves war so much must have fought in one of them. Indeed, for years, Graham encouraged people to believe that he had. Funny story: He hadn’t.

Graham was in the Air National Guard during the Persian Gulf War. His service never took him out of South Carolina, but when he entered politics, he referred to himself as a “veteran.” In 1998, the truth came out. From a 1998 Associated Press story (via Bob Somerby):

ASSOCIATED PRESS (2/19/98): U.S. Rep. Lindsey Graham’s military service record has been called into question because the Republican congressman, who never went overseas, calls himself as a Gulf War veteran.

Graham’s Internet web site biography lists him as an Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm veteran, although he never got closer to the war than McEntire Air National Guard Base near Columbia [South Carolina] where he was a military lawyer.

Graham never claimed to have seen combat, but the wording of his biography certainly didn’t discourage people from believing he had. It had the intended result, as seen in this 1998 story from The Hill (via Media Matters):

Yet almost all of the standard political biographies about Graham describe his military record inaccurately. “USAF, 1990, Pursian (sic) Gulf” is how Who’s Who in America and affiliated biographical books list him. The Almanac of American Politics states that Graham “was called up to active duty and served in the Gulf War.”

In 2002, as Graham was running for Senate, his biography still claimed he was a “veteran,” and it still regularly led to him being described as one in the press.

Now that he’s officially a presidential candidate, it is time to thank Lindsey Graham for his service (creating fodder for blog posts).

Photo by Getty

The World Naked Bike Ride, which is exactly what it sounds like, came to Kent, U.K., over the weekend, and the participants had barely got their kits off before organizers ejected a bloke for popping a stiffy.

The Cambridge News got the story from a shocked witness:

“Everyone was taking their clothes off to get ready for the ride. I heard gasps and I turned around - it was a horrible sight. It’s fair to say he was overexcited and got aroused. It looked like he was enjoying the event a bit too much. One of the organisers went over to him and told him to put his trousers on while speaking on a walkie-talkie to police.”

“The man looked sheepish when he was spoken to by the police.”

Race organizer Barry Freeman confirmed the incident on Facebook, writing “We do not accept this behavior and he was dealt with and removed before the ride started.”

British participants in the World Naked Bike Ride, feel free to leave your trousers at home, but try not to show everyone and the Queen your bloody stonker. Floppy dicks only! Quite.

On your bike then, m8.

[h/t Complex, Photo (from a WNBR in Melbourne) via Getty Images]

As you may know, Emma Stone plays a character named “Allison Ng” in the new Cameron Crowe movie Aloha. Her character, who’s supposed to be a quarter Hawaiian and a quarter Chinese, is meaningfully non-white within the framework of the story; according to Entertainment Weekly, she’s a “Hula dancing expert with a functional knowledge of Hawaiian folk guitar who rhapsodizes about the islander spiritual energy mana when she isn’t attempting to save the archipelago from a creeping military-industrial complex.”

Isn’t it so cool when a former white savior character gets to show her range by being a mystically exotic non-white savior character too?

Before we get any further, let’s recap some facts about Hawaii, natively known as Hawai’i:

• It’s an archipelago
• settled by Polynesians and other Pacific Islanders
• whose destruction at the hands of white people began in the late eighteenth century, when Captain Cook’s crew decimated the native population with tuberculosis and STDs
• whose native monarchy was later overthrown at gunpoint by the British in 1843
• which was later illegally annexed by the United States with the help of the economically oppressive white minority
• which remains U.S. territory despite the fact that Bill Clinton signed a resolution in 1993 “apologizing” to the Native Hawaiians for the “deprivation of their rights to self-determination”
• in which white people remain a decided minority at around 25 percent.

Now, let’s recap some facts about Aloha, which was also originally called Hawaii:

• It’s a movie
  
• directed by a white man
• about Hawaii
  
• called Aloha
  
• starring a 100 percent white cast
  
• in which one of these white cast members plays a woman named “Allison Ng.”

As it happens, the embarrassing contrast between these two lists did not trigger any meaningful change during the long process of the movie’s making. For example, Amy Pascal’s emails on the subject of Aloha included cogent messages such as “I LIKSE HAWAII THE BEST ACTUALLY BETTER THAN ALOHA” and “TOOMANY BONES IN THIS MOVIE” and “if he is alive what is the point of the funeral”—but none about known Asian, Emma Stone.

In other words, many, many people must have observed this casting without raising meaningful issue about it—a group that includes Emma Stone, Emma Stone’s close friends, and the executives who presumably were all, “Emma Stone for Allison Ng? Perfect. Very tight. Subversive, and I just love that the character’s Asian.”

Like every case of big-budget whitewashing, the problem is not so much what this means in the specific instance: if all non-white people in America are dead accustomed to identifying with white characters and inhabiting white narratives, surely (kill me) it is technically allowable to admit the possibility of identification going the other way around. I also will not admit visual plausibility as a viable issue: American history is a history of wildly surprising race-passing, and people of many races and racial combinations are “believable” as any number of the same.

The problem, more, may be visible in the aggregate: the number of people who thought it was fine to make an all-white movie called ~*~ Aloha ~*~ about the only state with an Asian majority population; the fact that—as Fusion pointed out—Asian characters comprise a highly stereotypical 6.6 percent of characters on network TV, despite many of those shows being set in New York City, which is 12 percent Asian, or California, whose percentage bumps up to 15.

But I think the real problem, for me, is that I’m finding this super fucking boring instead of upsetting. The problem for me is I’m that used to it. Asian erasure is so normalized (and much worse, codified in patterns of professional advancement) that I can’t even get my blood up about the idiocy that allowed these castings: Emma Stone as Allison Ng, but also Josh Hartnett as an Inuit sheriff, Jake Gyllenhaal as the Prince of Persia, Carey Mulligan as the “Latina” love interest in Drive, Scarlett Johannson as the Asian lead of Ghost in the Shell—all the while audiences happily flip their shit about, say, Cinna and Rue in the Hunger Games being black.

The real problem is that I long ago figured out I’d just have to rustle up my own disproportionately high self-confidence without ever seeing people who look “like me” onscreen—because it was the only option, and continues to be.

Contact the author at jia@jezebel.com.

Image via Sony

The watershed profile that accompanies Caitlyn Jenner’s debut on the cover of Vanity Fair paints a picture of a woman who is happy, healthy, and “finally free” to live her life on her terms. But of course, the path to liberation was long, winding, and hard—and not everything in Jenner’s personal life is perfect.

Writer Buzz Bissinger reveals that Jenner’s older children, Burt, Cassandra, Brandon, and Brody—from two marriages prior to the Jenner-Kardashian union—have refused to appear on the upcoming E! reality show that will document Caitlyn’s life in the wake of her transition to womanhood.

While the Kardashian kids—including Kendall and Kylie, Jenner’s daughters with Kris Kardashian—have bonded with Jenner onscreen for the last eight years, Jenner’s other four kids have remained behind the scenes and sometimes removed from her life altogether. Now, per Bissinger, “they disagree with their father’s decision” to produce her reality show for E!, the same network that houses Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Bissinger writes,

... [D]espite numerous entreaties from their father as well as the head of E! programming, the Jenner children refuse to participate, forgoing financial gain and exposure in the process. At first their decision did not seem to register with Caitlyn. She kept hoping they could be persuaded because she knows from eight years on Keeping Up with the Kardashians the necessity of a family dynamic for ratings success. When she realized the decision was final, she became increasingly frustrated and on one occasion hurled profanities. She told me she felt “terribly disappointed and terribly hurt.”

Though the Jenner kids are vocally supportive of their father’s transition, the Vanity Fair piece suggests that they remain skeptical of the Kardashian machine and question whether an E! reality show would be more committed to affecting social change than devolving into madcap spectacle.

Complicating matters is Jenner’s history of absence from the elder kids’ lives, which Bissinger details in the profile. Jenner herself admits:

I have made a lot of mistakes raising the four Jenner kids. I had times not only dealing with my own issues but exes. [It was] very traumatic and there was a lot of turmoil in my life, and I wasn’t as close to my kids as I should have been.

Bissinger notes, in interviews with Jenner’s past wives Chrystie Crownover and Linda Thompson, that Jenner was not present at daughter Cassandra’s birth, nor at son Brandon’s high school graduation. Son Burt says things really fell apart when Keeping Up With the Kardashians was born:

“I think the nail in the coffin for the relationship was the beginning of the TV show,” in 2007, said Burt. “There was a you-aren’t-part-of-this kind of thing. Kris made the choice to make a good TV show that was in their image and brand.” As she put it in a book she wrote called Kris Jenner … and All Things Kardashian, the title “Keeping Up with the Kardashians and the Jenners just didn’t have the same ring to it.”

Given Burt’s assessment, you can’t blame the Jenner kids for being skeptical of reality TV.

The good news is that since Jenner’s transition, her relationship with her kids has gotten stronger—in part, she says, because she does not have anything left to hide. Bruce Jenner was “always telling lies,” she tells Bissinger. Caitlyn Jenner “doesn’t have any lies.”

Burt is optimistic about the change: “I have high hopes that Caitlyn is a better person than Bruce. I’m very much looking forward to that.”

Cassandra adds, “I feel like he’s been the closest to us and the best parent when he’s been moving toward his true identity.”

Jenner’s reality show is set to premiere this summer.

Image via ABC. Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

I mean, can you imagine?

Can you imagine what it would be like to make the world a better place simply by existing?

I’m actually nauseated right now because I’ve never seen anything so cute in my life and my body just doesn’t know how to handle it.

Things, Ranked:

1. Wally
2. Everything else.

I have never seen anything better. Wally is the No. 1 thing of all time.

Per his Instagram bio (run by the “Molly” in the handle): Wally is an English angora who lives in Massachusetts. He is 10 months old and a Cancer.

Per my gut: Wally is our lord and savior.

[via Daily Mail]

If you have a telephone number that has ever been called by an inmate in a federal prison, registered a change of address with the Postal Service, rented a car from Avis, used a corporate or Sears credit card, applied for nonprofit status with the IRS, or obtained non-driver’s legal identification from a private company, they have you on file.

They are not who you think they are. They are not the NSA or the CIA. They are the National Security Analysis Center (NSAC), an obscure element of the Justice Department that has grown from its creation in 2008 into a sprawling 400-person, $150 million-a-year multi-agency organization employing almost 300 analysts, the majority of whom are corporate contractors. [A list of contractors known to be associated with NSAC can be viewed here.]

The Center has its roots in the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force (FTTTF), a small cell established in October 2001 to look for additional 9/11-like terrorists who might have entered the United States. But with the emergence of significant “homegrown” threats in the late aughts, the Task Force’s focus was thought to be too narrow. NSAC was created to focus scrutiny on new threat, specifically on Americans, particularly Muslims, who might pose a hidden threat (the Task Force became a unit within NSAC’s bureaucratic umbrella). As Americans began traveling abroad to join al-Shabaab and then ISIS, the Center’s dragnet expanded to catch the vast pool of “youth” who also might fit a profile of either radicalism or law-breaking. Its mission runs the full gamut of “national security threats...to the United States and its interests,” according to a partially declassified Justice Department Inspector General report. That includes everything from terrorism to counter-narcotics, nuclear proliferation, and espionage.

NSAC not only has a focus beyond foreign investigations or terrorists, but in the past year-and-a-half, according to documents obtained by Phase Zero and extensive interviews with contractors and government officials who have worked with the Center and the Task Force, it has also aggressively built up a partnership with the military, taking on deep background investigations of foreign-born and foreign-connected soldiers, civilians, and contractors working for the government. Its investigations go far beyond traditional security “vetting”; NSAC scours certain select government employees, contractors and their affiliates, examining multiple layers of connected relatives and associates. And the Center hosts dozens of additional “liaison” officers from other government agencies, providing those agencies with frictionless access to private information about U.S. residents that they would otherwise not have.

Today, through a series of high-level classified authorities and commercial relationships, the Center has access to over 130 databases and datasets of information comprising some two billion records, over half of which are unique and not contained in any other government information warehouse. The Center is, in fact, according to interviews with government officials, the sole organization in the U.S. government with the authority to delve deeply into the activities and associations of foreigners and Americans alike. From its unmarked office in the Crystal City neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia, the Center can not only gain access to the full gamut of intelligence databases of the U.S. government, but also query and retain information contained in law enforcement and commercial data. It also conducts live searches, and retains classified and open datasets of identity and transactional data for later examination. In some ways then, the data that the Center accesses and regularly trawls against its data mining protocols is the FBI’s equivalent of NSA’s bulk collection, the examination of databases with the hope of finding triggers or links to terrorists rather than the specific accessing of information to look at an individual or even group of individuals. [A partial list of some of the databases used by NSAC and FTTTF can be seen here.]

The Center’s powerful perch—and its virtually unlimited reach—brings the federal government closer than ever to the Holy Grail of connecting every dot, a dream that has been pursued by terrorist hunters since the failures that permitted the 9/11 attacks 14 years ago. The data access and analytic methods it uses grew out of a retrospective analysis of the vast reams of data about the 19 hijackers that law enforcement and intelligence agencies had indicators off, but never acted on. The Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force (originally called “F-tri-F” by insiders) meticulously reconstructed the actions of the 19 hijackers and other known law-breakers—how they lived their day-to-day lives and what they did to avoid intelligence detection—to find patterns and triggers of potential wrongdoing. They created thousands of pages of chronologies covering the 19 hijackers from the moment they entered the United States, trying to recreate what each did every day they were here.

Those patterns then became profiles that could be applied to vast amounts of disparate and unstructured data to sniff out similar attributes. Those attributes, once applied to individuals, became the legal predicate for collection and retention of data. If someone fit the profile, they were worthy of a second look. They were worthy of a second look if they might fit the profile.

Beyond public records and what appears on the internet, beyond news articles or what’s in law enforcement databases—but in addition to all of those things—the mere presence of a name becomes justification enough. NSAC’s methods turn the notion of legal predicate—a logical proposition or an earlier offense that justifies law enforcement action—on its head. Using big data analysis to discover non-obvious and even clandestine links, the Center looks not just for suspects, but for what the counter-terrorism world calls “clean skins”—people with no known affiliation to terrorism or crime, needles in a giant haystack that don’t necessarily look like needles. Or people who aren’t needles at all, but who might become needles in the future and thus warrant observation today.

The American people have repeatedly rejected the notion of a domestic intelligence agency operating within our borders. Yet NSAC has become the real-world equivalent. Along the way in its development though, the Center has rarely been discussed in the federal budget or in congressional oversight hearings available to the public. And being neither solely a part of the intelligence community (IC) nor solely a law enforcement agency (and yet both), it skirts limitations that exist in each community, allowing it to collect and examine information on people who are not otherwise accused of or suspected of any crime.

Homeland Security Presidential Directive-2 (HSPD-2), signed by George W. Bush in October 2001, established FTTTF and directed it to use “advanced data mining software” to find and prevent “aliens who engage in or support terrorist activity” from entering the United States. Though data mining was at the center of its mission, other agencies—particularly the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) and the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA)—funded the development of many of the techniques. These efforts, nevertheless, ran into public opposition because of legal and civil liberties overreach: the ominous-sounding Total Information Awareness program was abandoned in 2003 and CIFA was shut down in 2008. With the CIA restricted from collecting information and conducting operations that were purely domestic, a gap existed. And though the NSA, which has been promiscuously described as the successor to total information awareness, conducts extensive data mining and advanced analytics to crunch its bulk data collection, it is still restricted to only intercepting electronic communications.

As data mining research and applications moved forward, and as the NSA built up its cyber empire, the FBI also transformed. FTTTF, which was administratively placed within the FBI in 2002, helped the Bureau evolve into what is now referred to as an “intelligence driven” law enforcement agency. In other words, stop crimes (in this case terrorist attacks) before they occur through the use of proactive and predictive intelligence. The National Counterterrorism Center is responsible for the foreign threat, while the FBI is responsible for the domestic. In 2004, the White House also mandated that FTTTF be provided “full access” to homeland security and intelligence databases.

To “satisfy unmet analytical and technical needs,” in 2006, the FBI established the National Security Analysis Center (NSAC). According to NSAC’s first budget:

The NSAC will provide subject-based “link analysis” through the utilization of the FBI’s collection data sets, combined with public records on predicated subjects. “Link analysis” uses data sets to find links between subjects, suspects, and addresses or other pieces of relevant information, and other persons, places, and things… the NSAC will provide improved processes and greater access to this technique to all [National Security Branch] components. The NSAC will also pursue “pattern analysis” as part of its service to the NSB. “Pattern analysis” queries take a predictive model or pattern of behavior and search for that pattern in data sets. The FBI’s efforts to define predictive models and patterns of behavior will improve efforts to identify “sleeper cells.” Information produced through data exploitation will be processed by analysts who are experts in the use of this information and used to produce products that comply with requirements for the proper handling of the information.

NSAC formally expanded the focus of the Task Force beyond just foreign terrorists. The internal data mart expanded in 2008 to support proactive work to identify potential counterintelligence and nuclear-proliferation threats via advanced analysis of financial, communication, and travel records. Both the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have conducted investigations and obtained documents on FTTTF and the FBI’s data-collection efforts. That work, and additional documents obtained by Phase Zero, paint a picture of a massive, overlooked domestic intelligence operation with a mission that goes far beyond catching foreign terrorists.

One joint project between NSAC and the Department of Energy Office of Intelligence/Counterintelligence began to seek out foreign spies or businesspeople who were trying to infiltrate U.S. laboratories and entities. The Center has also provided assistance to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an inter-agency effort that vets foreign corporations investing in U.S. businesses. Under the Amon Project, in 2009, the Center started a program to look at foreign-connected scientists working in or with U.S. industry for potential counterintelligence markers. It analyzed data to identify potential targets and other threats through telephone and Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) pattern/link analysis, constantly monitoring a set of communications feeds between Known Intelligence Officers (KIOs) and Suspected Intelligence Officers (SIOs) of foreign governments residing in the United States, as well as unknown targets.

But the targets weren’t just foreign. Under Project Scarecrow, the Center has done data mining on sovereign citizens and other domestic threats. After receiving intelligence that helicopters might be used in future terrorist attacks, the Center data-mined 165 American-based pilots with helicopter licenses who were from “designated countries of interest.” Working with the Philadelphia police, the Center batch-matched dates of birth with licensed drivers to isolate a set of Pakistani men thought to be potentially connected to a terrorist group. The identities of foreign-born or connected hazardous materials (HAZMAT) drivers in the U.S. were added to a group of “special interest individuals” constantly run against suspect datasets. Under the Finding Terrorists in the United States (FINDUS) project, data-mining was used to find unlocated and even unknown individuals. A Syria Screening Cell was set up to support the screening of candidates for the manning of the Free Syrian Army in the fight against ISIS. By virtue of their presence in NSAC, Pentagon investigators now also have access to highly restricted datasets of known and suspected terrorists and their potential links to the United States, including two called Bedrock and Shoebox.

In many cases, according to individuals who have worked for FTTTF and Center contractors, target groups of thousands of individuals are checked and rechecked every month in a “batched” data processing search. As part of the Amon project, for instance, thousands of Chinese and Taiwanese nationals working in or with U.S. industry are constantly under investigation, their names thrown into the computers monthly looking for derogatory or suspicious information. According to an FTTTF document obtained by Phase Zero, an average of 6,000 target packages a month are prepared by the Center, many resulting in leads to law enforcement authorities, but the majority just human metadata living in perpetual link analysis limbo. The volume of data open to Center, and the complex queries made have resulted in the Task Force building four unique software systems to manage analyst access and data management.

The Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force was always meant to be a proactive lookout, using data mining and the full gamut of public and private information to identify hidden operatives based upon their associations, movements or transactions. An internal document provided to Phase Zero describes the Task Force as organizing “data from many divergent public, government and international sources for the purpose of monitoring the electronic footprints of terrorists and their supporters, identifying their behaviors, and providing actionable intelligence to appropriate law enforcement, government agencies, and the intelligence community.” And their supporters. And their supporters. And their supporters. How many mouseclicks away is your name?

[Art by Jim Cooke. All other documents from the FBI.]

You can contact me at william.arkin@gawker.com, and follow us on Twitter at @gawkerphasezero. If you are into the theater of being underground, you can anonymously deliver tips through the Gawker Media SecureDrop. I’m open to your input and your questions, tough questions.http://www.amazon.com/American-Coup-...

Have you ever visited Robert Downey Jr. in one of his rental homes while he’s on location for a film and thought, “Huh. I don’t think I’ve ever been here before, but it feels so familiar.” Maybe you thought, “I’m having total ‘déjà vu’ right now, if you’re familiar with the concept.” Well, there’s a simple reason for that.

According to an Us Weekly source:

“Whenever [Robert Downey Jr.] rents a place, he has all the same furniture sent so there’s consistency from rental to rental.”

But how does he move it from place to place? The source continues:

“It comes in big semis.”

And why does he do it? The source continues:

“He does it for a sense of comfort.”

Ahh. See, now that makes sense. An incredible scoop.

Image via Getty. Contact the author at kelly.conaboy@gawker.com.

Atlantic City casinos are going bankrupt left and right, largely due to a major oversupply of casinos on the east coast and nationwide. New Jersey’s proposed solution? Build more casinos.

Three more casinos in north New Jersey?

You utter morons. You local-yokel, bucket-headed morons.

Debated for years, the topic of North Jersey casinos has pitted North Jersey lawmakers against pro-Atlantic City forces. The issue jumped to the political forefront last Wednesday when Gov. Chris Christie said he would be in favor of allowing casinos in North Jersey if some of the revenue is used to aid Atlantic City.

Gov. Chris Christie said he would be in favor of eating a dozen doughnuts for breakfast as long as he got some real good exercise wiping up the crumbs afterwards.

[Photo of a now-bankrupt casino: Flickr]

Contact the author at Hamilton@Gawker.com.

Spring’s dramatic weather fluctuations have lately made dressing difficult for some—but Kristin Cavallari’s style is only getting more stylish and good. We think. We thought? Who knows; let’s ask People.

In a blog post on the magazine’s site titled, “9 Reasons Kristin Cavallari Is Even More Stylish Than We Thought,” the author—who will remain nameless out of respect—argues that nine new facts about Kristin prove she is even more stylish than we thought.

We have discussed two of these reasons already: 1) Kristin is “getting ready for long hair again” and 2) Kristin is “not superstitious about her game day outfit (or meal!)”

Here is a third reason, according to People, that may convince you:

“Her sons are really starting to get into game day style.”

Kristin, who is married to Bears quarterback Jay Cutler, elaborates:

I love dressing my boys up every game, and get a ton of inspiration on Pinterest. Last year, my oldest son Camden really knew when Jay was on TV and he really understands it now, so it makes it a lot of fun. And this year I’ll take him to all the games, so it’s gonna be an exciting season.

You know the old saying: Put clothes on a baby, put yourself in Vogue...baby!

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photos via Getty]

Sure, you’re already doing a lot to save water—plucking the almonds from your granola each morning and shaming your grass-owning neighbors daily on Twitter. But when will you get serious about the drought and install a pool?

That’s the logic currently being promoted by a group of pool industry lobbyists who are claiming that pools save water. Here’s the argument: An in-ground pool is better for the drought because it uses about a third of the amount of water required to keep a lawn of the same size green and lush, says the California Pool and Spa Association:

“We’re not saying, ‘Solve the drought, put in a pool,’ but the bottom line is people who put in a pool are making a decision to do something more water efficient with their backyard. They’re saving water,” said John Norwood, the California Pool and Spa Association’s president. “Pools are landscaping.”

By positioning a pool not as a frivolous McMansion accoutrement but as a “landscaping element” which can replace a water-guzzling lawn, the Let’s Pool Together campaign turns pool owners into saviors when it comes to water scarcity. A splashy website offers resources and information on how YOU can join the conservational elite, saving water by chlorinating tens of thousands of gallons of it for your own backyard recreation.

“California is facing an unprecedented drought! Pool owners are already saving water. But we can all do more!”

Among the information presented are “pool facts” for homeowners. For example: “Did you know a bath uses 70 gallons of water? Spas and hot tubs are just as relaxing and save water!” Or try this one: A pool includes decks and patios around it, argues the site, which means even less grass will be planted in a backyard. Also, important note for the kids: Pools can save water but not if you’re having fun in them! Too much splashing wastes water. SORRY KIDS.

Someday we won’t have any more lawns, just pools

Could this propaganda generated by the aquatic-industrial complex be accurate? Here’s what Let’s Pool Together claims: “On average, water use, including filling, in the first year a pool is installed is 26,250 gallons. An 800 square-foot lawn uses approximately 30,000 gallons per year.”

The average American pool is about 20,000 gallons in size and then, yes, you have to refill it. While it’s harder to estimate the average amount of water used to keep a lawn green depending on yard size, turf type, and climate, it’s certainly feasible that a homeowner could use 30,000 gallons of water to water a lawn over the course of a year. The average American household uses 300 gallons of water a day, and about a third of that is water used outside the home itself. So yes, technically the math is correct.

How to keep your pool drought-friendly: Put on a cover to prevent evaporation and NO cannonballs

But unfortunately for everyone, pool sales are down—way down—as cities in the more-arid-than-normal West are putting a freeze on approving new pool permits or preventing homeowners from filling and topping off pools. Why would cities do this when clearly pools are the answer to all our water problems???

I agree: Cities should not stop people from building pools. If you want to build a pool to help the people of California—because why else would you want one, really?—go ahead and tear out your lawn. Many cities offer lawn buyback incentives, so perhaps you could use that to help finance the initial investment required for your own drought-busting infrastructure.

But you actually don’t even need to install the actual pool to make a difference. Just dig a big hole in your backyard—big enough to bury $20,000 in cash. Then simply water your lawn-less yard half as much as you did the year before. Voila, you’ve saved water!

[AP]

Deadspin Men Should (Usually) Not Wear Sandals | Gizmodo Oh Goddamn It, Netflix Is Testing Ads | Kotaku In Defense Of The Flood, Halo’s Most Hated Enemy | Lifehacker Eight Popular Ticket and Traffic Law Myths, Debunked | Kinja Popular Posts

Since 2012, the website Politwoops has tracked which tweets U.S. lawmakers delete from their Twitter accounts—usually due to innocent typos or simple errors, and sometimes due to more embarrassing mistakes. Last month, however, the site abruptly stopped working: The last deleted tweet listed on its main page, by Rep. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, is dated May 15. Politwoops has not been updated in the two weeks since.

So what happened? Twitter did not respond to a request for comment, but a statement from Nicko Margolies of the Washington-based Sunlight Foundation, the open-government advocacy group that runs Politwoops, indicated the problem was on Twitter’s end:

Politwoops is dealing with an issue related to the access to Twitter data. We’ve appealed through Twitter’s support process and are waiting on a response. Unfortunately, in the meantime the site is not up-to-date.

In a blog post published at midnight on Friday, Margolies described Politwoops’ predicament as an “outage,” but the language of his statement to Gawker seems to suggest Twitter cut off Politwoops’ access to the Twitter API, or application program interface, through which software developers access Twitter’s database of tweets and users.

Twitter’s Developer Agreement & Policy, which governs usage of the site’s API, appears to forbid the deliberate preservation of any deleted tweets. Under the subheading “Maintain the Integrity of Twitter’s Products,” the document tells developers:

Only surface Twitter activity as it surfaced on Twitter. For example, your Service should execute the unfavorite and delete actions by removing all relevant Content, not by publicly displaying to other users that the Tweet is no longer favorited or has been deleted.

This would be a big impediment for Politwoops, whose entire purpose is publicly displaying tweets that have been deleted by public figures. In the past, the site apparently complied with Twitter’s demands by having each deleted tweet personally reviewed by a Sunlight Foundation staffer before publication (see sidebar). It’s unclear whether Twitter considered this loophole in compliance with their developer policy.

Margolies did not return subsequent requests for comment. And, as of today, Politwoops is still not working.

If you know any more about this, please get in touch.

Leonardo DiCaprio, actor and founding father of the Pussy Posse, is making the most of his late spring. The big horny fun man reportedly partied with hot sex friend Kelly Rohrbach this weekend in the Hamptons, and boy was his rental home nice.

Leonardo DiCaprio has been bumming around the New York metropolitan area for a bit now, which might make you wonder: “What about the LA club 1Oak? Leonardo DiCaprio must be spending a significantly larger amount of time meditating in order to feel grounded, being so far away from his home: LA club 1Oak.”

You’re right, I bet. However, PageSix reports DiCaprio brought a little bit of LA club 1Oak to him this weekend, scooping up club owner Richie Akiva and bringing him along for the Kelly Rohrbach sex trip:

The duo, spotted getting close at LA club 1Oak back in April, took a seaplane out east with a group of friends including the club’s owner, Richie Akiva.

The group stayed for one night in a six-bedroom $5,000 rental home, of which you can see photos here. It looks very nice. Would I stay there for a night with Leonardo DiCaprio, Kelly Rohrbach, Richie Akiva, and a handful of other models? Yes, I would. Oh—but what about those other models? Certainly there were some; according to a PageSix onlooker, the whole group of them went to dinner together:

“There were two blondes and one brunette next to him,” said an onlooker.

One must assume Kelly Rohrbach is one of the “blondes” in the onlooker’s description of this scene, no offense to Kelly Rohrbach. (I know you, Kelly Rohrbach, are the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition’s “Rookie of the Year” and that you are a 2012 Georgetown graduate and that you have the most beautiful name with which a young woman could be blessed, but not everyone does.) (No offense!) (I already said no offense, Kelly Rohrbach, calm down.) So, in that case we can say this trip was almost certainly:

60% Model

A healthy percentage.

Images via Getty. Contact the author at kelly.conaboy@gawker.com.

A Swedish woman was taking the A train to JFK Airport yesterday evening when a man attacked her and sliced her neck with a sharp object, according to the New York Post.

The Post reports that 29-year-old woman was taken to Jamaica Hospital for non-life-threatening injuries and later released. The man—who the NYPD says is between 25 and 30, and was last seen wearing a black sweater and sweatpants—reportedly attacked the woman without warning or provocation.

The woman reportedly missed her flight, though it’s not clear if she’s still in the country. Next time she visits New York City she should consider bringing Swedish police officers with her as protection.

h/t Gothamist. Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

This week, certain key sections of the notorious Patriot Act—the law that gives the NSA its snooping powers—automatically expired. Don’t get too excited just yet, though: they’re probably coming back with a few changes. Here’s what we know, and what it means for your privacy.

What Happened to the Patriot Act?

You might have heard in the news that “the Patriot Act is expiring.” This isn’t technically true. The Patriot Act, as a whole, is still in effect. There are a lot of parts that are not controversial (or at least, not as controversial) and they will remain in place. However, certain provisions that give the NSA authority to spy on both Americans and foreigners were set to expire. At midnight on Monday, that finally happened. They’re probably going to return, but one thing at a time. Here’s what the provisions in question entail:

• Section 215: Bulk metadata collection: This section is the one that allegedly allows the NSA to collect metadata for every phone call made to and from the U.S. in bulk, even if the U.S. citizens involved are not part of an investigation. It’s worth pointing out that a U.S. Court of Appeals has already ruled that this program exceeds the scope of what the Patriot Act authorizes, but it has not yet ordered the program shut down, because Congress was debating the program at the time anyway.
• Unidentified roving wiretaps: A lesser known program, Section 206 authorizes the NSA to receive permission from secretive FISA courts—courts that are not accessible to the public which grant warrants for surveillance—allowing them to wiretap any communication method that a suspect may use to communicate. If a target throws away a burner phone, the NSA could tap a different line without needing a new warrant. Worse yet, the NSA would not need to identify the name of the target.
• Lone wolf warrants: This particular provision allows the NSA to receive warrants from FISA courts for electronic surveillance of a suspect without showing that the person is connected to any known terrorist group or foreign power. It’s worth mentioning that this particular provision has reportedly never been used, indicating that it’s reasonable to let it expire for practical reasons as well as privacy ones.

All of these provisions (as well as many others) have been set to expire multiple times over the last decade, but Congress and the President(s) have ultimately decided to extend the programs repeatedly until now. While some in Congress have tried to prevent reauthorization or tweak the law, all those attempts have failed. This time around, for the first time Congress has allowed the above provisions to expire, which means the opposition is getting somewhere. They’ll likely be back, but with a few key limitations.

Those limitations came in the form of the USA FREEDOM Act, a bill with an acronym so silly it sounds like Marvel made it up. In its current form, the bill makes some important changes to the Patriot Act, but most privacy groups such as the EFF and the ACLU don’t think it’s enough. Here are some of the key changes:

• The government can’t collect bulk phone records, but corporations can: Rather than allowing the government to collect huge swaths of phone record data, the USA FREEDOM Act would offload the process to the companies that manage that data. The government can then request information provided they choose a specific “selector”, like a person’s name. This means the government itself wouldn’t have the data, but corporations like Verizon and AT&T would still be required to have a database the government could access when it needed to. Which, depending on how easily the government can access that data may be a distinction without a difference.
• The public would have an advocate at FISA court hearings: The one thing stopping the NSA from getting to your data (like the kind phone companies would now be required to hold) are the FISA courts. In the past, FISA court hearings were typically held behind closed doors with no opposing arguments, no appeals, and virtually no oversight. Under the USA FREEDOM Act, whenever the NSA needs to ask these courts for permission to do something, there would be a public advocate there to argue in favor of protecting your data. Of course, that still leaves some problems like who appoints this advocate, but it’s also better than what exists now.
• New accountability tools would help Americans know what’s going on: In addition to having a public advocate at FISA court hearings, the new bill would require the government to publish the results of significant decisions. This means that the public would get to know how some of these tools are being used and what the justification is. Additionally, the bill would require the government to publish statistics about the usage of surveillance programs. However, there is still the possibility that the results of the FISA court hearings would be withheld for “national security reasons”, which is the same problem we have now.

Depending on where you fall on the privacy vs. security spectrum, these changes can sound good or bad. They would still allow the government to access your phone metadata records, but would change how it’s implemented. As legal expert Amie Stepanovich explained to Vox, even this limited approach could still result in the government getting data on millions of non-targets. This bill would also see the return of the roving wiretap and lone wolf provisions, completely unchanged. We’d also possibly see a bit more accountability, but not nearly as much as privacy advocates like the EFF or the ACLU would like.

The USA FREEDOM Act is currently up for debate in the Senate where, if approved, it will go to the President’s desk to be signed into law. Until the Senate votes on the bill, though, it’s still possible that changes could be made. This means that it’s also possible for you to call your senators and voice your concerns and support (or lack thereof).

What Could Happen Now

As it stands right now, the House has approved this version of the USA FREEDOM Act, which means it’s just waiting on approval from the Senate. On May 23rd, the Senate voted against the bill at the urging of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. McConnell has, up until this point, wanted a clean renewal of the existing Patriot Act provisions, without modifications. Without his support, neither the Patriot Act renewal, nor the USA FREEDOM Act could pass.

However, on Sunday, May 31st, during a special session of Senate, McConnell chose to support the USA FREEDOM Act, rather than allow the Patriot Act provisions to expire entirely. With this renewed support, the Senate was able to vote to move forward on it, which means that it will either be passed, or at the very least the Senate will debate any improvements they want to make before passage.

Due to procedural rules, however, the Senate couldn’t vote to pass it on Sunday. That delay is what resulted in the lapse of the provisions mentioned above—in other words, the Senate didn’t want to let them expire. They just waited too long to save them. It is likely, though, that the Senate will vote to pass the USA FREEDOM Act in some form or another. That vote could happen as early as today if the Senate wants to hurry. It could also incorporate any number of changes, depending on how the negotiations play out. We won’t know for sure how things will change until the bill passes, but it seems unlikely at this point that all of the expired provisions will stay expired.

Update: As expected, the Senate passed the USA FREEDOM Act with a vote of 67-32. The Senate could not agree to add any amendments, so the bill will go to the President for signing unaltered. That means the return of Section 215 (in the hands of the phone operators, rather than the NSA directly), as well as the changes to the FISA court system will be implemented.

What Isn’t Changing at All

Regardless of what happens with the USA FREEDOM Act, the provisions being debated right now are not the entire package. The NSA still has a number of authorities to monitor or collect data. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing! The NSA’s job is to monitor potential threats to the United States. The difference between domestic and foreign surveillance is a complex one, but suffice to say that unwarranted surveillance of US citizens, and unnecessary surveillance of foreign nations probably isn’t going to make anyone sleep well at night.

That being said, there are still some problematic provisions that aren’t even part of this debate. Chief among them is Section 702. This section became famous when we first learned about NSA programs like PRISM that allow the collection of internet communications. 702 authorizes the collection of internet communications that have at least one destination outside the United States. This means that, for example, if a U.S. citizen sends a message to someone overseas, that data could be collected and stored in the NSA’s databases.

Worse yet, Section 702 does not require that those destinations be a person or even intentional. As an example, Google tends to transfer data between its data centers in complex ways. Sometimes, your data may travel outside the borders of the United States, even though both the sender and recipient of those messages are within the US. In those cases, the NSA may have the authority to require tech companies to hand over that data.

A number of programs like PRISM, MYSTIC, and the NSA’s upstream data collection are authorized (or, at the very least, the NSA claims they are authorized) by Section 702. That means these programs are still in effect until or unless Congress does something to end them. Given that the USA FREEDOM Act—which has virtually no effect on Section 702—is the only bill with any major support in Congress right now, it’s unlikely another NSA-related bill will pop up anytime soon.

What You Can Do

The Senate will likely be voting on this debate very soon, so if you want to call your senators and urge them one way or another, now is the time. Passage of the USA FREEDOM Act would mean that some unpopular powers would return to the NSA, along with some much-needed accountability rules would be in place.

Failure to pass it, on the other hand, would mean that Congress would have to start from scratch if it wants to reform the NSA or bring back any expired powers. With the Presidential and Congressional elections looming, giving the NSA any new powers would be a politically risky strategy. Of course, that may also make it harder to pass any necessary reforms.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a clear answer one way or the other right now. However, for the last decade or so, Congress has universally agreed to renew all of the Patriot Act’s provisions without any amendments or changes at all. The fact that these provisions have lapsed at all means that you have a golden opportunity to make your voice heard.

Illustration by Tara Jacoby, photos by Gage Skidmore and Wikimedia Commons.

The Kremlin’s network of professional propaganda-spewing internet trolls is large. According to one former insider, there are thousands of Russians who work full-time jobs publishing social media updates, internet comments, and blog posts specifically designed to foment hatred for the U.S. and support for the Russian government. And their trolling may not be limited to the web, or to Russian soil.

Last fall, a widely advertised photography exhibition called Material Evidence. Syria. Ukraine opened at ArtBeam, a large, warehouse-style gallery in Manhattan. Though it purported to give an unbiased look at the recent violent unrest in each of the titular countries, Material Evidence stunk unmistakably of pro-government propaganda. The Ukraine section of the exhibition broadly depicted all Euromaidan protesters as neo-Nazis, and several of the Syrian photos were provided to organizers by the Syrian government itself.

Curator Benjamin Hiller told me at the time that despite apparent connections to Russia’s far-right press, a loose collective of independent photojournalists was behind the exhibition, not a reactionary media mogul or shady disinformation agency. When I asked Hiller’s assistant about Material Evidence’s finances, she told me that a mysterious man brought a bag of cash to a previous installment of the show and left it for the organizers without any explanation. Given Russia’s alliance with Syria and obvious interest in quelling Ukrainian dissent, it felt like the Kremlin—or someone acting in its interests—may have been involved.

In his New York Times Magazine feature about the Internet Research Agency—the official name given to the Kremlin’s online rabble-rousing department—former Gawker writer Adrian Chen provides a link between Material Evidence and Russia’s troll army. After following a number of social media accounts that had previously been revealed as Internet Research puppets, Chen noticed that several affiliated dummy Facebook profiles had signed up to attend the exhibition.

When I got home, I searched Twitter for signs of a campaign. Sure enough, dozens of accounts had been spamming rave reviews under the hashtag #MaterialEvidence. I clicked on one, a young woman in aviator sunglasses calling herself Zoe Foreman. (I later discovered her avatar had been stolen.)

Whether or not Internet Research actually produced Material Evidence, it seems clear that the agency at least provided PR support for the mysterious exhibition. Chen also notes that Hiller later disassociated himself with the Material Evidence project, citing its “misinformations” and “nonjournalistic approach.”

The Material Evidence puzzle makes up a relatively small portion of Chen’s story, which also establishes connections between Internet Research and U.S. news hoaxes regarding Ebola, a fake police shooting, and a supposed ISIS attack at a nonexistent chemical plant, as well as a bizarre attempt to paint Chen himself as a neo-Nazi supporter in the Russian media. I highly recommend reading the article in full.

Image via Material Evidence/Facebook. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Bangladeshi authorities have charged 42 people with murder in the 2013 Rana Plaza building collapse that killed more than 1,100 garment workers. If we see an international minimum wage in our lifetime, they won’t have died in vain.

An AP investigation has forced the FBI to admit that it uses at least 13 dummy corporations with planes like the one shown above to fly low-and-slow aerial spy missions over U.S. cities, capturing video and sometimes cellular signals from 30 cities in 11 states in a recent month.

The agency’s domestic flying operations have garnered headlines before, as when its planes were caught over Baltimore during the recent unrest, or when FBI aircraft tried (and reportedly failed) to assist in catching Faisal Shahzad, the wannabe Times Square bomber. But the Associated Press story suggests the federales are more brazen, and less accountable, than you could even imagine:

The planes’ surveillance equipment is generally used without a judge’s approval, and the FBI said the flights are used for specific, ongoing investigations. The FBI said it uses front companies to protect the safety of the pilots and aircraft. It also shields the identity of the aircraft so that suspects on the ground don’t know they’re being watched by the FBI.

In a recent 30-day period, the agency flew above more than 30 cities in 11 states across the country, an AP review found... Details confirmed by the FBI track closely with published reports since at least 2003 that a government surveillance program might be behind suspicious-looking planes slowly circling neighborhoods.

How’s it done? With a freaking fleet of Cessnas and a simple flight procedure:

The AP traced at least 50 aircraft back to the FBI, and identified more than 100 flights since late April orbiting both major cities and rural areas.

One of the planes, photographed in flight last week by the AP in northern Virginia, bristled with unusual antennas under its fuselage and a camera on its left side. A federal budget document from 2010 mentioned at least 115 planes, including 90 Cessna aircraft, in the FBI’s surveillance fleet...

Most flight patterns occurred in counter-clockwise orbits up to several miles wide and roughly one mile above the ground at slow speeds. A 2003 newsletter from the company FLIR Systems Inc., which makes camera technology such as seen on the planes, described flying slowly in left-handed patterns.

Most of the aircraft registrations, the AP said, are signed by a Robert Lindley, who “is listed as chief executive and has at least three distinct signatures among the companies.” Those would be the “13 front companies that AP identified being actively used by the FBI [and] are registered to post office boxes in Bristow, Virginia,” right by a municipal airport.

The most hilariously shameless part of the FBI’s subterfuge, however, may have come when it begged the AP to protect its dummy corporations:

The FBI asked the AP not to disclose the names of the fake companies it uncovered, saying that would saddle taxpayers with the expense of creating new cover companies to shield the government’s involvement, and could endanger the planes and integrity of the surveillance missions.

The AP laughed that one off. It’s posted a bunch of documents online where you can read the names of all the FBI’s fake companies, including NG Research, the one that did the Baltimore surveillance last month.

[Photo credit: AP Images]

Contact the author at adam@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: FD97 D50A DE57 3943 4534 1A49 FA8B 74B4 A7A0 07BE

Promposals: a cool teen trend where kids come up with flashy, public ways to ask each other to fingerbang and drink vodka from covert flasks on a crowded dance floor. Sometimes they go according to plan, and sometimes they very much do not.

Bear witness to an exercise in performative humiliation that went down at Park Ridge High School last month, when a boy teen did not realize the girl teen he was asking out in front of 2,000 people already had a date. Whoops.

The promposer, one Patrick Smith, seems to be taking the rejection in stride despite social media suggestions that he might want to get suicide counseling or finish school online. He’s now added “rejection-famous” to his Twitter bio.

“‘I spent a bit of time planning the proposal, I really thought she was going to be the one,” Smith told the Daily Mail, “‘I was pretty confident she would say yes.”

Smith went on to prompose to another girl—by holding up a sign outside her house—and they’re now planning to go together.

“I talked to her friends beforehand to make sure she wasn’t going with anyone,” he said. A lesson is learned, but the damage is irreversible.

People seem less concerned with the promposee’s equally real embarrassment, but PRHS cheerleader Jen Malespina seems pretty sanguine about being put on the spot in front of frickin’ everybody. She’s retweeting articles about the incident and generally just playing it cool on the beach because it’s summer and fuck homework.

How did any of us ever survive high school?

[h/t Barstool]

In an attempt to expose the absurdity of treating other human beings with respect, prophet and presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee told the crowd at the 2015 National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville, Tennessee in February this:

For those who do not think that we are under threat, simply recognize that the fact that we are now in city after city watching ordinances say that your 7-year-old daughter, if she goes into the restroom cannot be offended and you can’t be offended if she’s greeted there by a 42-year-old man who feels more like a woman than he does a man.

Do you see what’s happening? Your right to be offended is under attack! Soon the phrase, “Won’t somebody please think of the children!” will be banned and then we will no longer have nice lectures like the one that this post is about. And then what?

Huckabee continued:

Now I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE. I’m pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, “Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today.” You’re laughing because it sounds so ridiculous doesn’t it?

I don’t need to tell you that this is a willful misreading of what it means to be transgender or what’s behind the cause for trans equality. It should be noted, though, that Huckabee thinks other people’s brains go there—there being a locker room full of naked female high school students—because that’s where his brain goes. This lecherous scenario is his invention. No one was thinking of exposed budding breasts until Huckabee invoked them.

And yeah, Mike, all this time men have just been respectfully waiting for an excuse to sneak up on women in public restrooms and attack them. Once the men have the women in their clutches, we’ll have to invent a word for what happens next. I choose “rape.” Let’s do everything we can to make sure rape never becomes a reality by continuing to treat trans people like utter garbage, collectively as a society.

Huckabee kept spewing:

There is something inherently wrong about forcing little children to be a part of this social experiment I’m not against anybody. I’d just like for somebody to bring their brain to work some day and not leave it on the bedstand when they show up to govern.

There’s something inherently wrong with molesting young girls, but Huckabee forgave his “good friend” Josh Duggar for doing so, so whatever!

You can watch Huckbee’s entire speech, which was just uploaded to YouTube, here (via Buzzfeed):