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U.S. Considering Establishing New Bases in Iraq to Fight Islamic State

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U.S. Considering Establishing New Bases in Iraq to Fight Islamic State

Senior military and administration officials have said that the United States is considering a strategy to combat the Islamic State that would involve opening up a network of training bases across Iraq, the New York Times reports.

According to the Times, General Martin E. Dempsey described to reporters a series of what he referred to as “lily pads,” where the American military would train local security forces and tribesmen:

General Dempsey said the United States was still hoping the Iraqi government would find a way to engage Sunnis to beat back the Islamic State, but he also talked of what he called a “Plan B” in case that never happens.

“We have not given up on the possibility that the Iraqi government could absolutely be whole,” he said, but added that “the game changers are going to have to come from the Iraqi government itself.”

“If we reach a point where we don’t think those game changers are successful, then we will have to look for other avenues to maintain pressure on ISIL, and we will have to look at other partners,” he said.

The United States is still shipping arms and equipment to the Iraqi Army in Taqqadum, in Anbar province, where a training hub has already been established. (Four-hundred fifty Americans are already stationed there.) The supplies are intended for Sunni fighters working alongside the Iraqi who will theoretically hold Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar, if and when it is recaptured from ISIS.


Photo credit: AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.


Shaquille O'Neal Is A 9/11 Truther, According To His Own Website

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Shaquille O'Neal Is A 9/11 Truther, According To His Own Website

TNT host Shaquille O’Neal regularly delights audiences with his “Shaqtin’ A Fool” segment, but the Inside the NBA personality is probably due for a taste of his own medicine after revealing to the world this evening that he is a 9/11 truther.

That’s via his personal website and verified Facebook page, which urge readers to “take a closer look” into whether the 2001 terrorist attacks were “an inside job.”

We imagine somebody with better sense will intervene, here, so we’ve screenshotted the pages. Shaq.com is owned by Mine O’Mine, a licensing company of which Shaq is president, treasurer, and secretary. Perhaps Pete Carroll will soon be added to the board of directors?

Shaquille O'Neal Is A 9/11 Truther, According To His Own Website

Shaquille O'Neal Is A 9/11 Truther, According To His Own Website

h/t to Brian & Ben

To contact the author of this post, write to tim@deadspin.com (PGP key) or find him on Twitter @bubbaprog.

Leo & Kelly: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Wined

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Leo & Kelly: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Wined

In the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Clementine—played by Kate Winslet—says something about, “Meet me in Montauk.” Was she talking to Leonardo DiCaprio, actor and founding member of the Pussy Posse, and his beautiful sex friend who is also a recent Georgetown graduate, Kelly Rohrbach? No.

She was talking to the Jim Carrey character.

However, that didn’t stop Leonardo DiCaprio and Kelly Rohrbach from recently traveling to Montauk. According to a Page Six spy, the couple was seen “making out on a daybed and sipping rosé” at Montauk’s Surf Lodge, just days after they were seen on bicycles, and a few more days after they were seen vacationing in the Hamptons. Nice life.

More from the spy:

“They seemed very sweet with each other . . . Very affectionate.”

You know who else seemed very sweet and very affectionate with each other? Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet during certain parts of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Just saying...

50% model.


Image via Focus Features, Getty, Kelly Conaboy’s own hand. Contact the author at kelly.conaboy@gawker.com.

QUIZ: Are You Black?

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QUIZ: Are You Black?

It is a question that has plagued the minds of men and women for centuries: “Am I black?” many have wondered. Today—in light of the Rachel Dolezal news, in which the white NAACP president of the Spokane, Washington chapter pretended to be black for the last decade—we rid you of any and all uncertainty with our fool-proof quiz: Are You Black? Take it below.

The price of free journalism

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The free press is prized in theory, constitutionally protected in this country and elsewhere because of its value to society — and unpopular with public figures who are exposed or embarrassed by its work. As a business, media carries the usual risks, vulnerable to recession and changes in technology, and a special danger, which Gawker Media is now facing.

The Hogan lawsuit — which concerns a true but embarrassing story published by Gawker in 2012, and a swingers’ circle in the wrestler’s home town a few years before — is actually coming to trial, probably on July 6th. We win the argument eventually, but in the first round, the celebrity has a home-court advantage.

As I said to Peter Sterne of Capital: I have a simple editorial litmus test, which is: is it true, and is it interesting? The interest in is in proportion to the gap between the story that a brand or a celebrity brand is telling and the reality. The more the gap, the more interesting it is. Here, there was a gap between [Hogan’s] rather boastful sexual persona that was on display in these radio interviews and elsewhere and the real story, which made it interesting.

These cases are almost always settled, even if the law and the truth are on the side of the journalist as they are in this instance. To confirm the primacy of the First Amendment can take years and millions of dollars. Even the outside chance of a defeat in the first round is an unbearable risk.

I should make it clear: we would have settled too, in the interest of fighting another day, if Hogan’s demands were reasonable and the story flawed in any way. But now that the trial is on, we intend to fight it as far as we need to and we can.

I told the company all-hands last week, in an average year, the chance of disaster, some conjunction of events that would compromise the company’s independence and journalistic purpose, is about 1 in 50. I’m going to reuse a phrase from that meeting. We are currently at heightened risk levels. If you want a number: internally, we reckon about 1 in 10.

Being a tight community of free writers, independent as a company and committed to putting out the real story, Gawker Media can bear a higher level of uncertainty than most. I believe it’s more likely than not we emerge tested and stronger, clear in our responsibility to readers and the values of our writers’ profession. Without someone actually having the gumption to fight these cases, journalists might as well resign themselves to a role as liaisons for PR people and stenographers for celebrities.

In the interview in Capital New York, which went up this morning, Heather Dietrick of Gawker said: “Once you see that that topic is a matter of public concern, the law does not allow a judge or the plaintiff or the subject of the story to come along with a red pen and say, ‘I didn’t really like the way you said it here. I didn’t like the way you added this source material. I would’ve done this part differently.’ You don’t get a line item veto, basically. The journalist has freedom and the organization has freedom to write about that topic as they see fit.

This is an opportunity to tell our own story, our own real story, to a wider group of people. They may not be familiar with us. They may have preconceptions about New York media or the internet in general. On the other hand, there’s widespread distrust of the spin put out by celebrities, publicists, and the media they largely control — and an appetite for the real story, the story behind the story, which is Gawker’s specialty.

Heather Dietrick, Gawker’s President and General Counsel, says: I think as a common-sense matter, they’re going to see that, see what he’s talked about in the past. He’s talked about really, really graphic details of his sex life, again and again and again, including on the shock jock’s show. These are practical people. I think they’re going to see through him and say, ‘Give me a break. Take responsibility for what you did here.’

Above all, this is an opportunity to reaffirm the legal protection for free expression and the free press, in an age of ubiquitous marketing and spin. I didn’t really want to be this generation’s Larry Flynt, but the law is made by stories like this and cases like this.

This story was not the Pentagon Papers. Most stories aren’t. But it was true and interesting, and clearly within the law. As I told Capital: The story was a real sober take on a version of events that [Hogan] had been talking about. If you don’t defend that, then what do you defend? You might as well just take the First Amendment and tear it up.

What Is Code?: A Q&A With Writer and Programmer Paul Ford

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What Is Code?: A Q&A With Writer and Programmer Paul Ford

Yesterday, the brilliant and inimitable Paul Ford published a 38,000-word article in Bloomberg Businessweek, all about code. Which probably seems daunting, but every word of it is delightful, engaging, and will inevitably make you just a little bit smarter when it’s all over. I sat down with Ford to talk about coding, culture, Kinja, and with the prayer that some of his good sense would rub off on me.

The article is pretty clearly geared towards businessmen and women. How would you have written it different for something like Seventeen—or any sort of general audience, really?

You know, the thing is, they didn’t put any of those limits on me, they really didn’t. The person that’s written for is the editor of the magazine, Josh Tyrangiel. He was like, “I want you to write me an article about code because I just want to understand it. I manage all these web projects, and I get about 50 percent of them, so I want to know more.” So literally I wrote this for him so he could know more.

I read in one of your notes that this all really started as a short article and grew from there.

Oh yeah, it was ridiculous. It was like a game of chicken. It all really started over a year ago, and I just avoided dealing with it for six months or so. Just total procrastination, hid from the problem, didn’t answer emails, and then he was like, “Maaaybe it’s time now.” And then he started to troll me on Twitter.

That’s the only way to do it!

It really was. And it worked, so, he’s a very effective editor that way. Like he’ll just use whatever channel is necessary, and so I turned it in at around 6,000 words to start. And then 10,000. Then 12,000, and he just looked at it and he was like, “Keep going!” So kept going until I got close to 40,000 words, and then they were finally like, “Ok now we can cut.”

You spent a lot of time on general coding culture; do you think that you do need to understand the culture aspect to really *get* coding itself?

I mean, do you need to understand Kinja?

Well… honestly, I don’t understand Kinja.

[laughing] But you should, right? Like, you want to get in there, you want to figure out how Kinja works and who the product team are, and whatnot. I think it’s especially important in places like Gawker where everybody’s supposed to be talking together, and it can be really hard because you live in different worlds: The editorial world and the world of product and software. So I think that’s my goal and my fantasy: That I make it possible for people from one group to talk to the other group

Yeah, I mean, when I was reading the first few paragraphs, it was like, I am reading the story of Kinja right now.

[laughing] Right! You’re living it. You are living right in the middle of it. Because the goal of that organization is to make those two universes line up together. That’s how Nick Denton wants Gawker to succeed.

On that note, and I’m just kind of curious personally, how do you think Kinja is doing?

Oh, goodness. That’s a wonderful question. I think Kinja is... improving. I think it’s a fascinating platform, I like looking at it. I’ve made fun of it in public before. So the thing about that is that everybody has those problems—not just Kinja. I love how Kinja seems to be optimized for when stuff goes completely bananas. Like when Joel Johnson shows up and replies to the union post, and Kinja just shines in that moment. Because it just becomes totally crazy in there, and you’re just like, “What is happening?”

Basically, I think Kinja is the commenting platform that is correct for Gawker. Or I guess the mean way to say that would be that Kinja is the commenting platform that Gawker deserves. But I love Gawker! I read Gawker.

Going back to the piece, what was the most difficult concept for you to sort of translate into something actual humans could grasp?

That is a fantastic question. You know, in a funy way its not the technical stuf, because you can always go like, “Oh, version control. It’s just an infinte undo—you can metaphor your way through it. And if it’s clean enough and sensible enough, people will get it. They dont have to understand all the basics.

The hard part to convey, really, is the culture aspect. So talking about conferences and how they really do matter, how they’re kind of tribal, and how there have been all these cultural problems that play out at conferences that actually do connect back to technical issues. Trying to articulate culture really is harder than trying to explain the technology itself. So those are the parts I really struggled with. There’s a part in there where people talk about how to manage a single email field, and getting that conversation to the point that it felt honest was hard. So in a funny way, the parts explaining tech were less difficult than the narratives about the man in the taupe blazer or in the VP who wants to become an SVP, for instance. Trying to get that to be emotionally true was really hard.

You say at one point that the problem with women in the tech industry isn’t the women, and just leave it at that. But if you had to, why do you think the tech industry has an issue with women?

The tricky thing with that is, because this ended up being a piece written entirely by me, I’m just not the right voice to talk about the issue of women in technology. I’m a chubby white dude—I’m exactly the wrong person. Which is kind of why I said it’s about the men. The men have the power right now, and they’re the ones who have to make the serious ethical decisions necessary to get their shit together. And honestly, you can go really complex on this, and you can talk about all sorts of history and so on. But, I mean—have you had the situation where you’re in a room with a bunch of dudes and you just cannot believe how horrible they’re being?

I actually haven’t, thankfully.

Oh, good, that’s wonderful! Because I know a lot of women who have, and it’s really just all on the men. It’s not on the women to constantly be going “Ok, now wait a minute...” It’s on the people who currently have the power to create a situation where the people who don’t have power—but who could do meaningful work—are able to come along and do that meaningful work. And do it without having to pretend to be somebody that they’re not.

Do you think that the tech industry specifically fosters that? Or do you think it’s a general problem as a whole?

I think that’s culture in general, and I think it’s just emphasized in tech.

I mean, I think like anyone I have my suspicions. But the reality is that there’s no good science there. Like, “Oh computers, well, they’re just the people who really love xyz.” And you know, “Women and men and math, and so on.” But the reality is that even if that were true, even if—and I don’t buy this—but even if men had some weird mathematical capability, you’re talking about little tiny percentages. And it just doesn’t add up.

For some reason, a lot of money showed up, and there are some bad cultural nets in place, some ugly history in there, and tech just became this environment. Not everywhere, but especially in smaller companies, because large companies end up with better HR departments and organize themselves a little better. But i think it just became this very masculine space, and I think a lot of women are just like, “Ugh, I don’t want to deal with this.” And then as other jobs started opening up to women, they went and did them. Because why go work somewhere where you don’t want to go and deal with all these horrible dudes?

Yeah, definitely. And there was another line stuck with me. You said, “We use computers too much—which is to say a typical amount...”

I mean, I’m currently sitting in front of my laptop, while I talk to you on my phone computer on my ear. And then I will go get on the train, where computers will tell me that the doors are opening. And then there will be computer screens that tell me how to to go down to Union Square and tell me when the next train is. We’re just surrounded.

But do you think it’s “too” much? Like do you think there’s something inherently bad about that?

I think it’s just life, right? I mean of course it’s too much. I eat too much, and I drink too much. We just live in this bizarre land of plenty, and technology is just one of those things we have way too much of.

Do you think there’s some fundamental difference between, like, “Learning to code!” but then also “Learning about code!” Because it’s clear you think people should know how code works, but how important do you think it is for people to actually know how to do it?

I think it’s one of those things where, well, “Everyone should know everything!” Everyone should know how to become a really good, clear writer because it will give them more power and authority in their life. Everyone should learn how to do enough accounting that they can start their own business and manage their own bank account. So it feels like that to me like you need to know how it works. Obviously, it certainly wouldn’t harm anyone to take a couple of days of their life to learn how Python works, or how to build a small website.

After that, you’ve really got to spend some serious time working on it. So it depends on your human goal. The idea that everybody needs to learn to code all the time, though, I don’t know. Some people certainly seem to think that. I don’t know that we should be replacing Spanish with Javascript.That just feels a little like... we’ve got to take a real good, hard look at that before we make that decision as a culture. Personally, I want my kids—I have two little kids—to know both. I want them to know Spanish and I want them to know Javascript. But you know, I don’t really care if they grow up to be programmers. I just need them to know how the world works so that they can make the right choices.

That’s all I’m really going for with this. If you know how it works, you can make smarter choices for yourself. So one of my goals with this piece is for it to be harder, for someone who reads this (I hope) to be lied to. They should be able to ask smarter questions of the people around them and challenge them more. That’s always good.

What’s the feedback been like?

I mean, I knew that programmers were going to be reading it. They’re a huge, diverse group of people who are among the nudgiest human beings on the face of the Earth. I know this because I’m one, of them. And I’m already getting feedback that’s like, “Wellll, your Fortran might compile, but you’ve made some serious errors. And the thing is, they’re right! And I tried to really hedge that in the piece and be very clear; I’m not a great programmer. I’m very good at some things, but I’m not a great programmer. I wanted to give people a taste of what it’s actually like. That’s why the cover actually has some Python on it. And theres all these little “to-dos” saying things like, you need to figure out currency, and you need to figure out what to charge. So There are all these little notes that I put in there to make it more like a real program. Which basically means it’s going to be something that’s kind of half-assed, and that you’ve got to get back to and finish.

Have any of the responses surprised you at all?

What’s actually been tricky—and really worth making a point about—is that i think it’s hard for people who see my name on it, and realize it’s one big essay, to not really perceive that about 50 people actually worked on this. And it’s not even a book where it might be just five or ten people who are actually involved—an enormous staff of people worked on making this special. My name is on it, but it’s way, way beyond one person. I don’t even have a complete credits list; I’ve been trying to keep track of everyone who helped me, and I’m going to have to go back and use all of my emails to figure out who sent me messages. Because it’s probably 45 or so people. And that’s just really hard to get across. Like, people think that I made the little robots on the website.

Yeah, I’ve actually been wondering about that, too.

[laughing] No! My god, no. That was Toph Tucker, and Steph Davidson. She’s a total genius—all those people are amazing. So the web team in particular (and there’s about three or four people over there), they just completely rocked it. And with the writing—there are two editors working on it, multiple copywriters, people who edit, Josh Tyrangiel, the editor, went through it multiple times. I had a PR person helping me. It just never ended. I’m not even trying to communicate a sort of, “Oh, I’m so grateful.” It’s just sort of like, when people see my name and they’re thinking, “Oh my god, he built the website.” I just want to be like, Noooo freaking way. This is 40-50 people working for a month to make me look good, so its just bizarre. I’m totally not emotionally prepared for that.


Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com. Top image via Konami Code here.

On Lockdown: Life Inside Clinton Correctional Facility, Post Escape

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On Lockdown: Life Inside Clinton Correctional Facility, Post Escape

When Richard Matt and David Sweat escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility over the weekend, they left behind roughly 3,000 inmates. According to one of those inmates, life on the inside has been considerably more difficult since their dramatic exit.

A woman, who I’ll call Lindsay, contacted Gawker on Thursday to discuss what she’d heard from her father, an inmate at Clinton, about conditions at the jail this week. Nearly everything she’s learned comes from a letter her father sent on Sunday, June 7—the day after guards noticed the escape—and as such, should be taken with a grain of salt with regards to present conditions five days later. Lindsay asked that both her and her father’s names be concealed. She told us that in Dannemora, the tiny upstate New York village that houses Clinton, word gets around quickly. “Every officer has a family member there. Everybody knows everybody. So you can’t say shit up there about anybody,” she said.

Clinton has a reputation for roughness among New York state jails. It is “one of the last places you’d want to be in the state system,” Jack Beck of the nonprofit Correctional Association of New York told the New York Times. “Among incarcerated people it is notorious.”

Despite being in a different section of the jail from the “honor block” for well-behaved inmates, from which Sweat and Matt escaped, Lindsay’s father and his entire section were on lockdown as of Sunday, he wrote in his letter.

Update (4:12: p.m.): Linda Foglia, a spokeswoman for the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, confirmed that Clinton Correctional Facility was placed on lockdown status on the morning of Saturday, June 6, and “remains in that same status today.”

According to Lindsay, lockdown means that her father and his fellow inmates are not allowed out of their cells—which contain a bed, a sink, and a toilet—for any reason. Food is brought to them rather than served communally in the mess hall; time in the yard is canceled; prisoners’ in-house jobs are temporarily called off; showers are impossible. The New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, which operates Clinton, has not yet responded to a request for comment on the current conditions of the prison.

Lindsay said that her father ordinarily calls her every other evening, but she hasn’t heard from him since the letter.

“The second he got out, he would call,” she said. Because her father is usually allowed access to a phone from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on weekdays, she’s spent the past several days waiting by the phone at that time, hoping to hear that the lockdown is over. “And when there’s no call, I end up crying my eyes out,” she said.

Lindsay’s father also wrote in his letter that he’d been told little about the escape itself, and that his usual access to media had been cut off. At first, his television was entirely disabled, but later he was given access to a few non-news channels. Local radio stations were scrambled, incoming mail was prohibited, and commissary was suspended. Lindsay said that she has called Clinton every day since the escape, and has repeatedly been told that no visitors are allowed.

Lindsay said that her father was able to glean that two men had escaped and that they might have had help, but was unsure of their names. He wrote in his letter that “hotshots” and “bigwigs from Albany” had been visiting the jail, the presence of whom may have alerted him to the gravity of the situation.

Guards were initially rough on the inmates on the day of the escape, but had softened up and were “actually...pretty nice,” by the following day, considering the circumstances, Lindsay said.

“I guess everyone was kind of on edge, because they all felt like ‘How could we have let this happen?’” she said. Her father wrote that he was surprised that no inmates in the escapees’ section had “ratted” on them in exchange for a deal for preferential treatment from officials. He was also incredulous that no guards heard the escape in progress. “‘I don’t understand how no one could have heard this,’” Lindsay read from the letter. “‘It gets so quiet over here sometimes that I can hear people farting.’”

An inmate visitors’ “festival” was scheduled for Saturday, June 6, which meant that Lindsay and many other family members of prisoners happened to be in or near Dannemora as officials were learning of the escape. Lindsay saw her father on Friday, and “everything was normal,” she said, but on Saturday morning, her car was searched and turned away at a roadblock as she approached Clinton from her hotel in nearby Plattsburgh. She learned from another visitor that there had been an escape—news that did not hit the media until hours later.

“A bunch of us—there were probably like 20 or 30 girls—we just hung out in the hotel lobby, trying to figure out what’s going on,” she said. “Everyone’s freaking out. First of all, we have no names, so it could be one of our loved ones, and we’d have no idea. It was just crazy.”

Lindsay believes it might be another week before her father is taken off lockdown.“It’s sucking for everyone in there,” she said. “No one is worried about everyone on the inside. A lot of people think inmates are scumbags, but I think they forget that they’re fathers, grandfathers, sons, brothers. It’s somebody’s loved one.”


Image via AP. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

In Hot Girls Wanted, Porn Isn't 'Ruining' Women. Exploitative Labor Is.

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In Hot Girls Wanted, Porn Isn't 'Ruining' Women. Exploitative Labor Is.

Hot Girls Wanted, the newish documentary produced by actress Rashida Jones, is making headlines and earning some rave reviews—as well as getting panned by people in the adult industry and advocates for sex workers—for its depiction of one tiny sliver of the wide world of porn, a fly-by-night talent agency called Hussie Models, which operates out of a scuzzy little house in Florida. The movie centers around a handful of young women at the Hussie house at a particular time, but purports to be a window into “professional amateur” pornography as a whole, strongly hinting that it’s an industry that ruins many guileless young women who only wanted to be famous.

The idea that young women are being lured into the Big City only to have their virtue wrecked is a very old story, going back to the 19th century social purity movement and the Christian reformers who set up weekly soapboxes outside houses of prostitution. In Hot Girls Wanted, the general notion that porn irreparably or at least very seriously taints women is paired, a little shakily, with shots of writhing pop stars like Miley Cyrus. Its goal is somehow clear and vague simultaneously: Hot Girls Wanted is aiming to convey something about our sexually-saturated, erotically schizophrenic culture—but that something never resolves to anything much at all.

If amateur porn was, in fact, lying in wait within the recesses of the Internet to snatch very young women away from loving homes to plunge them deep into highly visible sexual slavery en masse, Hot Girls Wanted would highlight a trend of sexual corruption that no civil society should put up with. But the film’s obsession with sex kneecaps a much more important discussion on young women and labor: a discussion that in one way is specific to a small and unregulated corner of the porn industry in Florida, but speaks more generally to the way cultural shame contributes directly to exploitation.

At Vice, Susan Elizabeth Shepard has done an excellent, deep fact-check of the movie’s main claims: That more people visit porn sites each month than “Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined” (the basis for that claim being a no-longer-operating porn site called Paint Bottle). Or that the industry has “no federal regulations” (yes, but it has dozens of state and local ones, as well as federal obscenity laws that convicted extra-gross gonzo porn director Max Hardcore in 2008).

The film shows a group of young women arriving at the Hussie house after responding to a Craigslist jobs post offering “free flights to Miami for hot girls.” Hussie’s stock-in-trade is finding endless women like them, all in their late teens and early twenties to act in “professional amateur” porn. (“Pro am” isn’t defined terribly clearly, but the industry definition is, basically, someone who’s new to porn working with more established producers and directors.)

Hussie’s 23-year-old “talent agent,” Riley (who also acts in porn himself, something that apparently doesn’t merit the same sort of hand-wringing that extends to everyone else in the film) books them for a series of jobs that don’t seem to pay particularly well, and in some cases, involve extreme sex acts or very bad ideas. One young woman says she had unprotected sex and let the male actor ejaculate inside her for a mere extra $100, $40 of which she had to spend on Plan B.

The film lingers on the worst aspects of pro am, including some humiliating scenarios where women are subjected to choking, horrifying racial slurs and racialized scenarios in the case of Jade, a Latina actress, who appears in a vile-seeming series called Latina Abuse, and other things that most 19-year-olds wouldn’t be prepared for or mentally able to weather.

One of the primary issues with Hussie, which seems to have created many of the terrible working conditions depicted in the film, is that they’re unlicensed and un-bonded. Riley doesn’t seem to have to do anything to become a talent agent except call himself one. That’s because Florida has far fewer licensing requirements around pornography—which is why so many amateur outfits like Hussie flock there, away from places like California, which has much more stringent licensing laws.

That can be a serious issue for performers in Florida, says Mark Kernes. He’s a longtime columnist and film reviewer for Adult Video News, the porn industry bible. He also appeared in two movies himself, a number of years ago.

In Florida, Kernes says, there don’t appear to be any laws requiring talent agents to be licensed, and unregulated agencies like Hussie are more common. “They hire people for movies and web scenes, there are a couple companies down there, but they don’t have any sort of organization to essentially protect the actresses and to make sure the companies are doing business on the up and up,” he says. “I’m not aware of any licensed talent agents in Florida, and frankly I’m not sure Florida even has a law that requires agents to be licensed like they do in California.”

One of the sadder moments involves an 18-year-old named Rachel Bernard, who goes by “Ava Taylor” in the business. She’s asked to have sex with a much older co-star, which she does very reluctantly and while clearly freaked out. As she sits there, picking her nails and waiting with her eyes cast down for the scene to start, you’re willing her to walk out the door. She doesn’t.

“I was not into that last part at all,” she says afterwards, grimacing. “A lot of porn is like that. You’re like, ‘This is so just work right now.’”

At the end of the film, Hot Girls Wanted claims without elaboration that several of their subjects have “left” pornography. But in the case of Rachel, who was interviewed by Jezebel, the reality of life “after” porn is murky and fraught, like the thesis of the film itself.

Rachel says on camera that she’s grown weary of the industry both because it doesn’t feel safe, and it doesn’t seem to value her in any particular, individual way. “The amateur porn world, you’re just processed meat,” she says. “Everything is the same shoot. It’s always your first time,” and it’s always focused on male pleasure. “As long as you have boobs and a vagina and an ass, that’s all that really matters. They don’t care about who you actually are.”

For Rachel, though, the claim that she’s simply left porn glosses over what she says is a continuing struggle to get nude photos of herself removed from the website of a talent agency called LA Direct, one of the biggest players in California’s adult industry. LA Direct’s founder, meanwhile, claims that Bernard still works in porn and shot scenes as recently as last month, but is embarrassed to say so because of the publicity surrounding the film. (She’s appeared in at least one joint interview with the filmmakers and Jones.)

Bernard strongly denies that she’s still working in the industry. “I have no intention of ever shooting a scene again,” she told Jezebel in a recent interview conducted via Facebook Messenger.

In May of this year—shortly after the film premiered—a dominatrix named Goddess Vienna started tweeting that Rachel was still in porn, using the same name, Ava Taylor, and “working for a major escort company.” Indeed, photos of “Ava Taylor” are displayed on more than one website associated with the sex industry.

“She is still active in the industry,” says Derek Hay, founder of LA Direct. The agency operates primarily in Los Angeles; Hay, a former adult film actor himself, founded it in London in 2000.

LA Direct is a major player inn the adult industry; it’s also controversial in its own ways. Critics have implied anonymously over the years—or sometimes publicly—that the company encourages the actresses signed there to escort. You can find that claim a number of places, including on an infamous site called Porn Wikileaks that made it their business to “out” porn stars. At one point, in a now-cached thread that I won’t link to for privacy reasons, the Porn Wikileaker referred to Hay as a “pimp” and dug up what it claimed were the real names and dates of birth for many of the actress listed on the site. (As I was finishing this story Thursday afternoon, a separate site, The Real Porn Wikileaks, run by someone completely different, also put up a post saying that Rachel/Ava had shot scenes as recently as April and May—the clips are dated—and adding that she’s listed as an “available” escort on a site called The Erotic Review.) Correction: An earlier version of this story conflated Porn Wikileaks and the Real Porn Wikileaks. I regret the error.

One person also suggested to me that Hay also owns the Luxury Companion website, which promises close encounters with adult film actresses: “Meet your favorite adult star up close and personal.” The registration information for the website isn’t public and I couldn’t confirm or disprove that, or find any actress who said openly that she’d escorted working at LA Direct.

In an email exchange, Hay readily provided Rachel’s email address and encouraged me to speak to her. In a follow-up interview by phone, he said she’d been a client of LA Direct’s for “about a year,” coming there from Hussie, the Florida agency depicted in the film.

Hay has not seen Hot Girls Wanted—“I’m not going out of my way,” he says dryly. But he too, says Hussie isn’t operating by any professional standards he knows of: “Hussie is operating entirely illegally. They’re not licensed. Talent agents in almost all states need to be licensed and bonded to operate as a talent agent. The most heavily regulated state in regards to that is California. Again I haven’t seen the film, but Hussie is not of any kind of professional standard or what you’d expect of a talent agent.”

Hay wasn’t surprised to learn, from my summary of the film, that some of the women employed by Hussie seemed to become almost instantly disillusioned.

“Almost always they quickly learn that they’ve found themselves in situations that they want to get out of,” he says. “There’s no career with an illegally operating agency. You can maybe go and do whatever, some shoots and make some money, but there’s no career there. From what I understand, from the interview that I watched with the producers of that piece, is that his operation [Riley, the 23-year-old Hussie owner] is kind of like a puppy mill. Find as many as you can, have them shoot for a few weeks, and fly them out, back home.”

That, he says, is “the antithesis of what LA Direct does, which is very well known as a career-builder. Some of our clients are superstars in the business, who have been with us for the majority of their careers, seven, eight, nine years. Long careers in the adult business are possible.”

Yet it quickly became clear that Rachel and Hay are embroiled in a bizarre, ongoing disagreement about whether she’s actually still a client there. Rachel denies that she’s ever actually done any work for LA Direct, although she says she did sign a three-year contract with them.

“I was ‘recruited’ by a male talent who didn’t even work for Derek,” she says. “I was in the car and all of a sudden I was on speaker with Derek and then he convinced me to sign.”

But she says that when she decided she no longer wanted to do porn, preferring to focus full-time on working as a non-nude model, as well as trying to get into commercial photography, she was told there would be a $2,000 fee to remove her photos from LA Direct’s website.

“[Derek Hay is] trying to keep me in this contract and give me as much hell as possible,” she tells Jezebel.

Hay denies that Bernard would have to pay any fees to be taken off the site. He told Jezebel in an email that it’s “news to us” that Bernard no longer wished to be signed there:

She shot for just one of our clients five (5) times in 2015. And we have the invoices and checks to prove that, - so that is a very odd comment.

I have no knowledge of her wishing to cease working and she has not communicated that to us (as yet) though I understand she has received bad publicity as a result of this film (that took place before we began working with her),

It would be my thought this may be a ‘knee jerk’ reaction to that adverse publicity, that may fade or could actually be the catalyst for her exit from the business ultimately, who knows ?

Contracts with licensed agents compel an artist to work though that agency for the term of the contract, but do not compel an artist to work,

Any artist may cease working at any time of their choosing.

There is no fee to remove a model’s images from an agency website.

Countering the narrative that she’s been free to act on her will, Bernard provided Jezebel with screenshots of emails dated December 2014 though April 2015, in which she’s scolded by Hay for not showing up to a shoot, not responding to emails offering her work, or working with another agency. In the emails Bernard showed us, Hay takes on a scolding tone:

It is really quite odd that you would seek our representation after having a bad experience with an unlicensed agency previously, then tell us you’re quitting shooting before we even have a chance to work for you, then come back into the business, and instead of coming to us to really get going — you go to another unlicensed agency. It really makes no sense and has put you far behind where you could be in the business by now.

In April, according to the emails she provided, she told Hay she didn’t want to work with LA Direct anymore, and referenced a February 23 conversation in which, she writes, “You accepted my offer of a $2,000 buyout. I have saved my money to buy myself out.” In an April 15 email, Hay writes that he hasn’t heard from her about taking any jobs and says he’ll draw up a “separation agreement.”

That doesn’t seem to have happened.

“He still tries sending me work because my picture is still up, and I’ve quit,” she tells Jezebel. “It’s not fair. How can I be held to a contract in an industry that I am not even in anymore?”

Hay grew rather sniffy when I asked about the discrepancy between his story and Bernard’s. He reiterated that she’d shot for their clients five times, most recently in May, before excusing himself from the conversation:

Ava has shot five (5) times for this company in 2015

A very good client of ours,

We are fully paid up for these works.

I could not say if she wishes to pursue a career in photography now, I have no knowledge of this,

Forgive me but I have exhausted my appetite to dialogue further on this now, and have reminded myself why we usually decline response to such enquires.

Rachel says she did return back to porn a few months ago, shooting some scenes for a company called Porn Pros that she booked through Riley’s Hussie Models. But she says she had to do that just to pay off the massive taxes she’d incurred in the business: “That the only reason I went back and shot those few things is because I was in debt from all the taxes of porn. It put me so far in the hole. Now that I’ve paid that, I have no need for that industry.”

The Hot Girls Wanted filmmakers said they were aware of Rachel’s experience with LA Direct, as she’d been in California for the last months of their shooting in Miami, although it’s not mentioned in the film:

Rachel was in LA during the last months of our shooting in Miami so we don’t know first hand. But yes, we heard this was the situation from other sources at that time. And another young woman in the film had the exact same experience with LA Direct, but we cannot say which one for confidentiality reasons.

And even if Hot Girls Wanted oversimplifies Bernard’s experience—making no mention of her working for LA Direct or how she ended up on other websites associated with escort work—she says it was an accurate representation of her career and how she says she chose to leave it. (Hot Girls does also briefly mention that another woman in the film, Tressa, says pro am left her flat broke.)

“I feel like I was represented in the right way when it comes to me quitting to follow my dreams and how some amateur porn shoots are uncomfortable and scary,” she says. “But a lot of people think we’re summing up the whole industry but we aren’t. It’s the small section where the youngest girls start. And it’s worth a warning at least.” (She didn’t respond to questions about whether she’d worked for the Luxury Companions site, where her photos are also displayed, except to say that she doesn’t work there currently and that her photos “shouldn’t be there” either, and that she’d talked to that company about getting the pictures taken down, to no avail.)

As several film critics have pointed out, Hot Girls Wanted doesn’t seem to know what to say about young successful porn stars like Belle Knox, who’s mentioned briefly, or, as The Guardian points out, a cheery young woman named Karly who goes by Lucy Tyler and describes her experiences on camera as playing a character. (“She doesn’t really fit the movie’s alarmist agenda,” they observe, “which is rife with inter-titles of terrifying statistics and absurd montages of the Kardashians and Justin Bieber, suggesting that our modern culture has created this market of sexual exploitation out of whole cloth.”)

Lucy, too, announced in June that she was no longer working in porn:

In an email interview with Jezebel facilitated through their publicist, Hot Girls Wanted directors Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus defended the decision not to talk to anyone who’d had a longer career in porn, and reiterated a point they’ve made in several other interviews, that they weren’t trying to make any kind of statement about porn as a whole. Stories of successful professional porn stars, they write, were “not the story we were telling.”

The same way that Undefeated, a film about underprivileged inner city HS football players did not explore what football is like in other communities or for players at other stages of their career. Also, in the Miami pro-am space we were covering, we had off camera conversations with various porn content producers, directors and other talents who verified everything were hearing from the young women in the house. We clearly state in the film that this is the story of “pro-am” porn based in Miami (which where a lot of the production for huge sights [sic] like Bang Bros, Reality Kings, Team Skeet, Mofos happens). We did not purport to doing an entire industry analysis.

They are confident, though, that the film is an accurate representation of pro am in Miami or Florida as a whole:

Again, we feel confident that we had a grasp on what was happening and that it was larger than just inside Riley’s house. And we have heard from many young women since the film’s release who have contacted us to say that we got the story right but that because the film is currently so politicized within the industry, they cannot publicly make those statements for fear of losing future work.

Mark Kernes, the AVN columnist, is extremely well-connected in the adult world. Like Hay, he says, too, that Riley, the owner of Hussie Models, doesn’t look anything like a normal adult talent agent: “I haven’t heard one good thing about him.” In the instance where Rachel felt unable to leave the shoot where she didn’t want to have sex with an older man, Kernes says a good agent would’ve told her that she’s free to walk off the set at any time.

“All the good agents I know in this town would tell the women right up front, ‘Listen, if you get involved in something and you’re not comfortable with it, give me a call or just walk off the set. I will support you,’” he says. “At least they talk to the actresses about what they can expect. As far as I can tell, nobody did that to these women that were living at Riley’s house. I don’t get the feeling they were really getting any training whatsoever. That bothers me a lot. It’s not typical, at least not of the industry out here.”

He points out that many of the more extreme sex acts shown in the film—choking, deep-throating until a woman vomits—are usually highly staged and rehearsed.

“As much as I don’t like to watch that particular kind of scene, I can tell you that it’s all, all staged beforehand,” Kernes says. “The women, if they’re doing a scene like that they know exactly what they’re getting into: ‘This is a deep throat scene, have you ever deep throated before, would you like to try it?’ It’s all staged. It’s not as if anyone is forcing them to do this.” On some of the weirder scenes, he adds, “Some of them will eat stuff like creamed corn beforehand so they have something to barf up. Think of it as stunt work.”

The important thing, Kernes adds, is that everything being done is consensual, regulated, rehearsed, and every performer knows she can leave at any time. “As far as I’m concerned, to each their own. This is consensual stuff. I absolutely do not think it’s contributing to violence against women.”

The lack of safety standards, he says, is the aspect of Miami’s porn industry that Hot Girls Wanted does do a good job portraying (even if it fails to make clear that the no-rules rules in Miami don’t apply to the rest of the country).

“What the film does represent is only a very small part of the industry,” he says. “I’m even leery about calling it part of the industry.”

Hot Girls Wanted, for all its lingering shots on these young women, their suitcases full of scanty underwear, their faces and bodies as they’re being made up for the camera, has little advice to offer for young women who are interested in doing porn but would like to stay safe, away from both agencies like Hussie and bad business experiences like the one Bernard alleges she went through with Derek Hay and LA Direct.

Nor does it touch on the shaming of sex workers and porn actresses, which Kernes says in his experience can be far more toxic than having sex on camera.

“I have known several adult stars who were in the business, their parents had absolutely no idea, and they didn’t want them to,” he says. “Our starlet of the year for 1991 was a woman named Jennifer Stewart and she quit the business I think two months after receiving the award, because someone gathered up a bunch of her tapes and dropped them on her parents’ doorsteps. People do that. It’s disgusting, but people do it.”

Although the movie doesn’t touch on it, Bauer and Gradus say they do have some ideas for how Miami pro am could be safer and better regulated, including making sure that people shooting POV porn—something shot from the perspective of a man having sex with a woman—are actually professionals and not just random creeps:

Most of the stories we heard about our characters being scared or shooting till their throats unexpectedly bled (which we heard from a couple pro-am young women not in the film) occurred when they were shooting one on one. We would like to see some type of vetting process for “producers” who shoot POV porn. That would be a good start.

I asked what they’d tell a young woman who was thinking about joining the adult industry.

“Watch the film,” they wrote back. “See the possibilities of what not necessarily will happen but what *can* happen in porn, especially for the many young women who are entering the industry via a click of the mouse who at 18, might not have that much life experience.”

In the end, Kernes says, the general consensus in the adult industry is that the film hits on some truths about lower-end porn, while at the same time leaving him uneasy at the broader things the film might imply about porn as a whole.

“I don’t like this film,” he says bluntly. But after sitting through it and appearing on a panel with the filmmakers, he says, “My feelings about the people who made it aren’t quite as bad. But I have to tell you, there’s an awful lot of ignorance floating around about the adult industry, and this film doesn’t help.”

The panel Kernes appeared on recently included the filmmakers, some industry people and some anti-porn activists (including Gail Dines, a particularly poisonous and vehement anti-porn campaigner who once likened the BDSM site Kink.com to Abu Ghraib). Rachel was there too, and mentioned, with disdain and what looked like growing fury, licensed, bonded agents who mislead their clients.

“Licensed and bonded means absolutely nothing in porn,” she told Kernes and the rest of the panel. “Because the licensed and bonded, most well-known agent was the worst agent I’ve ever come in contact with, the most harmful and unprofessional. Just because he was licensed and bonded doesn’t mean anything for how he treats a girl.”

For example, she added, “He’s the one that’s putting them into escorting. He’s the one that’s putting them into ‘bachelor parties’ where really, you’re just showing up and having sex with all these guys at a bachelor party. So really, whether they’re licensed and bonded or not, it doesn’t change how they act. It almost makes them worse, because they think they have more power than the girl walking in there trying to do something. She has no ill intentions, but he has all of them, under the rug. He doesn’t say it in the beginning, but they trick you to sign that paper.”

In its limited way, Hot Girls Wanted does make clear that porn as an industry is still synonymous with titillation and shame, and obscured by both things as a consequence. Porn is not inherently tied to exploitative labor practices, but the idea that it is—replicated by talent agents, producers, and documentaries alike—only strengthens that tie.

Correction: This post has been updated to reflect that Real Porn Wikileaks has no affiliation with Porn Wikileaks.

Update, 3:30 p.m.: A tipster points out that Florida does indeed have a law on the books that requires talent agents to be licensed (whether it’s being enforced is a separate matter). There’s even a place to file complaints against unlicensed agents.

Among other things, an applicant on a talent agent license has to submit affidavits from people testifying to their “good moral character:”

The application must be accompanied by affidavits of at least five reputable persons, other than artists, who have known or have been associated with the applicant for at least 3 years, stating that the applicant is a person of good moral character or, in the case of a corporation, has a reputation for fair dealing.

That wouldn’t apply to Riley Reynolds, because again, courtesy of our very helpful tipster, here’s a list of his previous criminal charges , which include burglary and criminal mischief, back in 2008, when he was working in “production” at Steak and Shake. Court records show that Reynolds pled guilty to burglary of an unoccupied structure and criminal mischief over $1,000, both felonies.


Contact the author at anna.merlan@jezebel.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: 67B5 5767 9D6F 652E 8EFD 76F5 3CF0 DAF2 79E5 1FB6

Image via Hot Girls Wanted/Jim Cooke


Why It's Often Easier To Innovate In China Than In The United States

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Why It's Often Easier To Innovate In China Than In The United States

About a year and a half ago, I discovered this $12 “Gongkai” cell phone (pictured above) in the markets of Shenzhen, China. My most striking impression was that Chinese entrepreneurs had relatively unfettered access to cutting-edge technology, enabling start-ups to innovate while bootstrapping. Meanwhile, Western entrepreneurs often find themselves trapped in a spiderweb of IP frameworks, spending more money on lawyers than on tooling.

Further investigation taught me that the Chinese have a parallel system of traditions and ethics around sharing IP, which lead me to coin the term “gongkai”.

This is deliberately not the Chinese word for “Open Source”, because that word (kaiyuan) refers to openness in a Western-style IP framework, which this not. Gongkai is more a reference to the fact that copyrighted documents, sometimes labeled “confidential” and “proprietary”, are made known to the public and shared overtly, but not necessarily according to the letter of the law. However, this copying isn’t a one-way flow of value, as it would be in the case of copied movies or music. Rather, these documents are the knowledge base needed to build a phone using the copyright owner’s chips, and as such, this sharing of documents helps to promote the sales of their chips. There is ultimately, if you will, a quid-pro-quo between the copyright holders and the copiers.

Why It's Often Easier To Innovate In China Than In The United States

This fuzzy, gray relationship between companies and entrepreneurs is just one manifestation of a much broader cultural gap between the East and the West. The West has a “broadcast” view of IP and ownership: good ideas and innovation are credited to a clearly specified set of authors or inventors, and society pays them a royalty for their initiative and good works. China has a “network” view of IP and ownership: the far-sight necessary to create good ideas and innovations is attained by standing on the shoulders of others, and as such there is a network of people who trade these ideas as favors among each other. In a system with such a loose attitude toward IP, sharing with the network is necessary as tomorrow it could be your friend standing on your shoulders, and you’ll be looking to them for favors. This is unlike the West, where rule of law enables IP to be amassed over a long period of time, creating impenetrable monopoly positions. It’s good for the guys on top, but tough for the upstarts.

This brings us to the situation we have today: Apple and Google are building amazing phones of outstanding quality, and start-ups can only hope to build an appcessory for their ecosystem. I’ve reviewed business plans of over a hundred hardware startups by now, and most of them are using overpriced chipsets built using antiquated process technologies as their foundation. I’m no exception to this rule – we use the Freescale i.MX6 for Novena, which is neither the cheapest nor the fastest chip on the market, but it is the one chip where anyone can freely download almost complete documentation and anyone can buy it on Digikey. This parallel constraint of scarce documentation and scarce supply for cutting edge technology forces Western hardware entrepreneurs to look primarily at Arduino, Beaglebone and Raspberry Pi as starting points for their good ideas.

Why It's Often Easier To Innovate In China Than In The United States

Above: Every object pictured is a phone. Inset: detail of the “Skeleton” novelty phone. Image credits: Halfdan, Rachel Kalmar

Chinese entrepreneurs, on the other hand, churn out new phones at an almost alarming pace. Phone models change on a seasonal basis. Entrepreneurs experiment all the time, integrating whacky features into phones, such as cigarette lighters, extra-large battery packs (that can be used to charge another phone), huge buttons (for the visually impaired), reduced buttons (to give to children as emergency-call phones), watch form factors, and so forth. This is enabled because very small teams of engineers can obtain complete design packages for working phones – case, board, and firmware – allowing them to fork the design and focus only on the pieces they really care about.

As a hardware engineer, I want that. I want to be able to fork existing cell phone designs. I want to be able to use a 364 MHz 32-bit microcontroller with megabytes of integrated RAM and dozens of peripherals costing $3 in single quantities, instead of a 16 MHz 8-bit microcontroller with a few kilobytes of RAM and a smattering of peripherals costing $6 in single quantities. Unfortunately, queries into getting a Western-licensed EDK for the chips used in the Chinese phones were met with a cold shoulder – our volumes are too small, or we have to enter minimum purchase agreements backed by hundreds of thousands of dollars in a cash deposit; and even then, these EDKs don’t include all the reference material the Chinese get to play with. The datasheets are incomplete and as a result you’re forced to use their proprietary OS ports. It feels like a case of the nice guys finishing last. Can we find a way to still get ahead, yet still play nice?

We did some research into the legal frameworks and challenges around absorbing Gongkai IP into the Western ecosystem, and we believe we’ve found a path to repatriate some of the IP from Gongkai into proper Open Source. However, I must interject with a standard disclaimer: we’re not lawyers, so we’ll tell you our beliefs but don’t construe them as legal advice. Our intention is to exercise our right to reverse engineer in a careful, educated fashion to increase the likelihood that, if push comes to shove, the courts will agree with our actions. However, we also feel that shying away from reverse engineering simply because it’s controversial is a slippery slope: you must exercise your rights to have them. If women didn’t vote and black people sat in the back of the bus because they were afraid of controversy, the US would still be segregated and without universal suffrage.

Sometimes, you just have to stand up and assert your rights.

There are two broad categories of issues we have to deal with, patents and copyrights. For patents, the issues are complex, yet it seems the most practical approach is to essentially punt on the issue. This is what the majority of the open source community does, and in fact many corporations have similar policies at the engineering level. Nobody, as far as we know, checks their Linux commits for patent infringement before upstreaming them. Why? Among other reasons, it takes a huge amount of resources to determine which patents apply, and if one could be infringing; and even after expending those resources, one cannot be 100% sure. Furthermore, if one becomes very familiar with the body of patents, it amplifies the possibility that an infringement, should it be found, is willful and thus triple damages. Finally, it’s not even clear where the liability lies, particularly in an open source context. Thus, we do our best not to infringe, but cannot be 100% sure that no one will allege infringement. However, we do apply a license to our work which has a “poison pill” clause for patent holders that do attempt to litigate.

For copyrights, the issue is also extremely complex. The EFF’s Coders’ Rights Project has a Reverse Engineering FAQ that’s a good read if you really want to dig into the issues. The tl;dr is that courts have found that reverse engineering to understand the ideas embedded in code and to achieve interoperability is fair use. As a result, we have the right to study the Gongkai-style IP, understand it, and produce a new work to which we can apply a Western-style Open IP license. Also, none of the files or binaries were encrypted or had access controlled by any technological measure – no circumvention, no DMCA problem.

Furthermore, all the files were obtained from searches linking to public servers – so no CFAA problem, and none of the devices we used in the work came with shrink-wraps, click-throughs, or other end-user license agreements, terms of use, or other agreements that could waive our rights.

Thus empowered by our fair use rights, we decided to embark on a journey to reverse engineer the Mediatek MT6260. It’s a 364 MHz, ARM7EJ-S, backed by 8MiB of RAM and dozens of peripherals, from the routine I2C, SPI, PWM and UART to tantalizing extras like an LCD + touchscreen controller, audio codec with speaker amplifier, battery charger, USB, Bluetooth, and of course, GSM. The gray market prices it around $3/unit in single quantities. You do have to read or speak Chinese to get it, and supply has been a bit spotty lately due to high Q4 demand, but we’re hoping the market will open up a bit as things slow down for Chinese New Year.

For a chip of such complexity, we don’t expect our two-man team to be able to unravel its entirety working on it as a part-time hobby project over the period of a year. Rather, we’d be happy if we got enough functionality so that the next time we reach for an ATMega or STM32, we’d also seriously consider the MT6260 as an alternative. Thus, we set out as our goal to port NuttX, a BSD-licensed RTOS, to the chip, and to create a solid framework for incrementally porting drivers for the various peripherals into NuttX. Accompanying this code base would be original hardware schematics, libraries and board layouts that are licensed using CC BY-SA-3.0 plus an Apache 2.0 rider for patent issues.

And thus, the Fernvale project was born.

Fernvale Hardware

Compared to the firmware, the hardware reverse engineering task was fairly straightforward. The documents we could scavenge gave us a notion of the ball-out for the chip, and the naming scheme for the pins was sufficiently descriptive that I could apply common sense and experience to guess the correct method for connecting the chip. For areas that were ambiguous, we had some stripped down phones I could buzz out with a multimeter or stare at under a microscope to determine connectivity; and in the worst case I could also probe a live phone with an oscilloscope just to make sure my understanding was correct.

The more difficult question was how to architect the hardware. We weren’t gunning to build a phone – rather, we wanted to build something a bit closer to the Spark Core, a generic SoM that can be used in various IoT-type applications. In fact, our original renderings and pin-outs were designed to be compatible with the Spark ecosystem of hardware extensions, until we realized there were just too many interesting peripherals in the MT6260 to fit into such a small footprint.

Why It's Often Easier To Innovate In China Than In The United States

Why It's Often Easier To Innovate In China Than In The United States

Above: early sketches of the Fernvale hardware

We settled eventually upon a single-sided core PCB that we call the “Fernvale Frond” which embeds the microUSB, microSD, battery, camera, speaker, and Bluetooth functionality (as well as the obligatory buttons and LED). It’s slim, at 3.5mm thick, and at 57x35mm it’s also on the small side. We included holes to mount a partial set of pin headers, spaced to be compatible with an Arduino, although it can only be plugged into 3.3V-compatible Arduino devices.

Why It's Often Easier To Innovate In China Than In The United States

Why It's Often Easier To Innovate In China Than In The United States

Above: actual implementation of Fernvale, pictured with Arduino for size reference

The remaining peripherals are broken out to a pair of connectors. One connector is dedicated to GSM-related signals; the other to UI-related peripherals. Splitting GSM into a module with many choices for the RF front end is important, because it makes GSM a bona-fide user-installed feature, thus pushing the regulatory and emissions issue down to the user level. Also, splitting the UI-related features out to another board costs down the core module, so it can fit into numerous scenarios without locking users into a particular LCD or button arrangement.

Why It's Often Easier To Innovate In China Than In The United States

Above: Fernvale system diagram, showing the features of each of the three boards

Why It's Often Easier To Innovate In China Than In The United States

Fernvale Frond mainboard

Why It's Often Easier To Innovate In China Than In The United States

Fernvale blade UI breakout

Why It's Often Easier To Innovate In China Than In The United States

Fernvale spore AFE dev board

All the hardware source documents can be downloaded from our wiki.

As an interesting side-note, I had some X-rays taken of the MT6260. We did this to help us identify fake components, just in case we encountered units being sold as empty epoxy blocks, or as remarked versions of other chips (the MT6260 has variants, such as the -DA and the -A, the difference being how much on-chip FLASH is included).

Why It's Often Easier To Innovate In China Than In The United States

X-ray of the MT6260 chip. A sharp eye can pick out the outline of multiple ICs among the wirebonds. Image credit: Nadya Peek

To our surprise, this $3 chip didn’t contain a single IC, but rather, it’s a set of at least 4 chips, possibly 5, integrated into a single multi-chip module (MCM) containing hundreds of wire bonds. I remember back when the Pentium Pro’s dual-die package came out. That sparked arguments over yielded costs of MCMs versus using a single bigger die; generally, multi-chip modules were considered exotic and expensive. I also remember at the time, Krste Asanović, then a professor at the MIT AI Lab now at Berkeley, told me that the future wouldn’t be system on a chip, but rather “system mostly on a chip”. The root of his claim is that the economics of adding in mask layers to merge DRAM, FLASH, Analog, RF, and Digital into a single process wasn’t favorable, and instead it would be cheaper and easier to bond multiple die together into a single package. It’s a race between the yield and cost impact (both per-unit and NRE) of adding more process steps in the semiconductor fab, vs. the yield impact (and relative reworkability and lower NRE cost) of assembling modules. Single-chip SoCs was the zeitgeist at the time (and still kind of is), so it’s interesting to see a significant datapoint validating Krste’s insight.

Reversing the Boot Structure

The amount of documentation made available to Shanzhai engineers in China seems to be just enough to enable them to assemble a phone and customize its UI, but not enough to do a full OS port. You eventually come to recognize that all the phones based on a particular chipset have the same backdoor codes, and often times the UI is inconsistent with the implemented hardware. For example, the $12 phone mentioned at the top of the post will prompt you to plug headphones into the headphone jack for the FM radio to work, yet there is no headphone jack provided in the hardware. In order to make Fernvale accessible to engineers in the West, we had to reconstruct everything from scratch, from the toolchain, to the firmware flashing tool, to the OS, to the applications. Given that all the Chinese phone implementations simply rely upon Mediatek’s proprietary toolchain, we had to do some reverse engineering work to figure out the boot process and firmware upload protocol.

My first step is always to dump the ROM, if possible. We found exactly one phone model which featured an external ROM that we could desolder (it uses the -D ROMless variant of the chip), and we read its contents using a conventional ROM reader. The good news is that we saw very little ciphertext in the ROM; the bad news is there’s a lot of compressed data. Below is a page from our notes after doing a static analysis on the ROM image.

0x0000_0000 media signature “SF_BOOT” 0x0000_0200 bootloader signature “BRLYT”, “BBBB” 0x0000_0800 sector header 1 (“MMM.8”) 0x0000_09BC reset vector table 0x0000_0A10 start of ARM32 instructions – stage 1 bootloader? 0x0000_3400 sector header 2 (“MMM.8”) – stage 2 bootloader? 0x0000_A518 thunk table of some type 0x0000_B704 end of code (padding until next sector) 0x0001_0000 sector header 3( “MMM.8”) – kernel? 0x0001_0368 jump table + runtime setup (stack, etc.) 0x0001_0828 ARM thumb code start – possibly also baseband code 0x0007_2F04 code end 0x0007_2F05 – 0x0009_F0005 padding “DFFF” 0x0009_F006 code section begin “Accelerated Technology / ATI / Nucleus PLUS” 0x000A_2C1A code section end; pad with zeros 0x000A_328C region of compressed/unknown data begin 0x007E_E200 modified FAT partition #1 0x007E_F400 modified FAT partition #2 

One concern about reverse engineering SoCs is that they have an internal boot ROM that is always run before code is loaded from an external device. This internal ROM can also have signature and security checks that prevent tampering with the external code, and so to determine the effort level required we wanted to quickly figure out how much code was running inside the CPU before jumping to external boot code. This task was made super-quick, done in a couple hours, using a Tek MDO4104B-6. It has the uncanny ability to take deep, high-resolution analog traces and do post-capture analysis as digital data. For example, we could simply probe around while cycling power until we saw something that looked like RS-232, and then run a post-capture analysis to extract any ASCII text that could be coded in the analog traces. Likewise, we could capture SPI traces and the oscilloscope could extract ROM access patterns through a similar method. By looking at the timing of text emissions versus SPI ROM address patterns, we were able to quickly determine that if the internal boot ROM did any verification, it was minimal and nothing approaching the computational complexity of RSA.

Why It's Often Easier To Innovate In China Than In The United States


Above: Screenshot from the Tek MDO4104B-6, showing the analog trace in yellow, and the ASCII data extracted in cyan. The top quarter shows a zoomed-out view of the entire capture; one can clearly see how SPI ROM accesses in gray are punctuated with console output in cyan.

From here, we needed to speed up our measure-modify-test loop; desoldering the ROM, sticking it in a burner, and resoldering it onto the board was going to get old really fast. Given that we had previously implemented a NAND FLASH ROMulator on Novena, it made sense to re-use that code base and implement a SPI ROMulator. We hacked up a GPBB board and its corresponding FPGA code, and implemented the ability to swap between the original boot SPI ROM and a dual-ported 64kiB emulator region that is also memory-mapped into the Novena Linux host’s address space.

Why It's Often Easier To Innovate In China Than In The United States

Block diagram of the SPI ROMulator FPGA

Why It's Often Easier To Innovate In China Than In The United States

There’s a phone in my Novena! What’s that doing there?

A combination of these tools – the address stream determined by the Tek oscilloscope, rapid ROM patching by the ROMulator, and static code analysis using IDA (we found a SHA-1 implementation) – enabled us to determine that the initial bootloader, which we refer to as the 1bl, was hash-checked using a SHA-1 appendix.

Building a Beachhead

The next step was to create a small interactive shell which we could use as a beachhead for running experiments on the target hardware. Xobs created a compact REPL environment called Fernly which supports commands like peeking and poking to memory, and dumping CPU registers.

Because we designed the ROMulator to make the emulated ROM appear as a 64k memory-mapped window on a Linux host, it enables the use a variety of POSIX abstractions, such as mmap(), open() (via /dev/mem), read() and write(), to access the emulated ROM. xobs used these abstractions to create an I/O target for radare2. The I/O target automatically updates the SHA-1 hash every time we made changes in the 1bl code space, enabling us to do cute things like interactively patch and disassemble code within the emulated ROM space.

Why It's Often Easier To Innovate In China Than In The United States

We also wired up the power switch of the phone to an FPGA I/O, so we could write automated scripts that toggle the power on the phone while updating the ROM contents, allowing us to do automated fuzzing of unknown hardware blocks.

Attaching a Debugger

Because of the difficulty in trying to locate critical blocks, and because JTAG is multiplexed with critical functions on the target device, an unconventional approach was taken to attach a debugger: xobs emulates the ARM core, and uses his fernly shell to reflect virtual loads and stores to the live target. This allows us to attach a remote debugger to the emulated core, bypassing the need for JTAG and allowing us to use cross-platform tools such as IDA on x86 for the reversing UI.

At the heart of this technique is Qemu, a multi-platform system emulator. It supports emulating ARM targets, specifically the ARMv5 used in the target device. A new machine type was created called “fernvale” that implements part of the observed hardware on the target, and simply passes unknown memory accesses directly to the device.

The Fernly shell was stripped down to only support three commands: write, read, and zero-memory. The write command pokes a byte, word, or dword into RAM on the live target, and a read command reads a byte, word, or dword from the live target. The zero-memory command is an optimization, as the operating system writes large quantities of zeroes across a large memory area.

In addition, the serial port registers are hooked and emulated, allowing a host system to display serial data as if it were printed on the target device. Finally, SPI, IRAM, and PSRAM are all emulated as they would appear on the real device. Other areas of memory are either trapped and funneled to the actual device, or are left unmapped and are reported as errors by Qemu.

Why It's Often Easier To Innovate In China Than In The United States

The diagram above illustrates the architecture of the debugger.

Invoking the debugger is a multi-stage process. First, the actual MT6260 target is primed with the Fernly shell environment. Then, the Qemu virtual ARM CPU is “booted” using the original vendor image – or rather, primed with a known register state at a convenient point in the boot process. At this point, code execution proceeds on the virtual machine until a load or store is performed to an unknown address. Virtual machine execution is paused while a query is sent to the real MT6260 via the Fernly shell interface, and the load or store is executed on the real machine. The results of this load or store is then relayed to the virtual machine and execution is resumed. Of course, Fernly will crash if a store happens to land somewhere inside its memory footprint. Thus, we had to hide the Fernly shell code in a region of IRAM that’s trapped and emulated, so loads and stores don’t overwrite the shell code. Running Fernly directly out of the SPI ROM also doesn’t work as part of the initialization routine of the vendor binary modifies SPI ROM timings, causing SPI emulation to fail.

Emulating the target CPU allows us to attach a remote debugger (such as IDA) via GDB over TCP without needing to bother with JTAG. The debugger has complete control over the emulated CPU, and can access its emulated RAM. Furthermore, due to the architecture of qemu, if the debugger attempts to access any memory-mapped IO that is redirected to the real target, the debugger will be able to display live values in memory. In this way, the real target hardware is mostly idle, and is left running in the Fernly shell, while the virtual CPU performs all the work. The tight integration of this package with IDA-over-GDB also allows us to very quickly and dynamically execute subroutines and functions to confirm their purpose.

Below is an example of the output of the hybrid Qemu/live-target debug harness. You can see the trapped serial writes appearing on the console, plus a log of the writes and reads executed by the emulated ARM CPU, as they are relayed to the live target running the reduced Fernly shell.

bunnie@bunnie-novena-laptop:~/code/fernvale-qemu$ ./run.sh ~~~ Welcome to MTK Bootloader V005 (since 2005) ~~~ **===================================================** READ WORD Fernvale Live 0xa0010328 = 0x0000... ok WRITE WORD Fernvale Live 0xa0010328 = 0x0800... ok READ WORD Fernvale Live 0xa0010230 = 0x0001... ok WRITE WORD Fernvale Live 0xa0010230 = 0x0001... ok READ DWORD Fernvale Live 0xa0020c80 = 0x11111011... ok WRITE DWORD Fernvale Live 0xa0020c80 = 0x11111011... ok READ DWORD Fernvale Live 0xa0020c90 = 0x11111111... ok WRITE DWORD Fernvale Live 0xa0020c90 = 0x11111111... ok READ WORD Fernvale Live 0xa0020b10 = 0x3f34... ok WRITE WORD Fernvale Live 0xa0020b10 = 0x3f34... ok 

From this beachhead, we were able to discover the offsets of a few IP blocks that were re-used from previous known Mediatek chips (such as the MT6235 in the osmocomBB http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/MT62... by searching for their “signature”. The signature ranged from things as simple as the power-on default register values, to changes in bit patterns due to the side effects of bit set/clear registers located at offsets within the IP block’s address space. Using this technique, we were able to find the register offsets of several peripherals.

Why It's Often Easier To Innovate In China Than In The United States

Booting an OS

From here we were able to progress rapidly on many fronts, but our goal of a port of NuttX remained elusive because there was no documentation on the interrupt controller within the canon of Shanzhai datasheets. Although we were able to find the routines that installed the interrupt handlers through static analysis of the binaries, we were unable to determine the address offsets of the interrupt controller itself.

At this point, we had to open the Mediatek codebase and refer to the include file that contained the register offsets and bit definitions of the interrupt controller. We believe this is acceptable because facts are not copyrightable. Justice O’Connor wrote in Feist v. Rural (449 U.S. 340, 345, 349 (1991). See also Sony Computer Entm’t v. Connectix Corp., 203 F. 3d 596, 606 (9th Cir. 2000); Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc., 977 F.2d 1510, 1522-23 (9th Cir. 1992)) that

“Common sense tells us that 100 uncopyrightable facts do not magically change their status when gathered together in one place. … The key to resolving the tension lies in understanding why facts are not copyrightable: The sine qua non of copyright is originality”

and

“Notwithstanding a valid copyright, a subsequent compiler remains free to use the facts contained in another’s publication to aid in preparing a competing work, so long as the competing work does not feature the same selection and arrangement”.

And so here, we must tread carefully: we must extract facts, and express them in our own selection and arrangement. Just as the facts that “John Doe’s phone number is 555-1212” and “John Doe’s address is 10 Main St.” is not copyrightable, we need to extract facts such as “The interrupt controller’s base address in 0xA0060000”, and “Bit 1 controls status reporting of the LCD” from the include files, and re-express them in our own header files.

The situation is further complicated by blocks for which we have absolutely no documentation, not even an explanation of what the registers mean or how the blocks function. For these blocks, we reduce their initialization into a list of address and data pairs, and express this in a custom scripting language called “scriptic”. We invented our own language to avoid subconscious plagiarism – it is too easy to read one piece of code and, from memory, code something almost exactly the same. By transforming the code into a new language, we’re forced to consider the facts presented and express them in an original arrangement.

Scriptic is basically a set of assembler macros, and the syntax is very simple. Here is an example of a scriptic script:

#include "scriptic.h" #include "fernvale-pll.h" sc_new "set_plls", 1, 0, 0 sc_write16 0, 0, PLL_CTRL_CON2 sc_write16 0, 0, PLL_CTRL_CON3 sc_write16 0, 0, PLL_CTRL_CON0 sc_usleep 1 sc_write16 1, 1, PLL_CTRL_UPLL_CON0 sc_write16 0x1840, 0, PLL_CTRL_EPLL_CON0 sc_write16 0x100, 0x100, PLL_CTRL_EPLL_CON1 sc_write16 1, 0, PLL_CTRL_MDDS_CON0 sc_write16 1, 1, PLL_CTRL_MPLL_CON0 sc_usleep 1 sc_write16 1, 0, PLL_CTRL_EDDS_CON0 sc_write16 1, 1, PLL_CTRL_EPLL_CON0 sc_usleep 1 sc_write16 0x4000, 0x4000, PLL_CTRL_CLK_CONDB sc_usleep 1 sc_write32 0x8048, 0, PLL_CTRL_CLK_CONDC /* Run the SPI clock at 104 MHz */ sc_write32 0xd002, 0, PLL_CTRL_CLK_CONDH sc_write32 0xb6a0, 0, PLL_CTRL_CLK_CONDC sc_end 

This script initializes the PLL on the MT6260. To contrast, here’s the first few lines of the code snippet from which this was derived:

// enable HW mode TOPSM control and clock CG of PLL control *PLL_PLL_CON2 = 0x0000; // 0xA0170048, bit 12, 10 and 8 set to 0 to enable TOPSM control // bit 4, 2 and 0 set to 0 to enable clock CG of PLL control *PLL_PLL_CON3 = 0x0000; // 0xA017004C, bit 12 set to 0 to enable TOPSM control // enable delay control *PLL_PLLTD_CON0= 0x0000; //0x A0170700, bit 0 set to 0 to enable delay control //wait for 3us for TOPSM and delay (HW) control signal stable for(i = 0 ; i < loop_1us*3 ; i++); //enable and reset UPLL reg_val = *PLL_UPLL_CON0; reg_val |= 0x0001; *PLL_UPLL_CON0 = reg_val; // 0xA0170140, bit 0 set to 1 to enable UPLL and generate reset of UPLL 

The original code actually goes on for pages and pages, and even this snippet is surrounded by conditional statements which we culled as they were not relevant facts to initializing the PLL correctly.

With this tool added to our armory, we were finally able to code sufficient functionality to boot NuttX on our own Fernvale hardware.

Toolchain

Requiring users to own a Novena ROMulator to hack on Fernvale isn’t a scalable solution, and thus in order to round out the story, we had to create a complete developer toolchain. Fortunately, the compiler is fairly cut-and-dry – there are many compilers that support ARM as a target, including clang and gcc. However, flashing tools for the MT6260 are much more tricky, as all the existing ones that we know of are proprietary Windows programs, and Osmocom’s loader doesn’t support the protocol version required by the MT6260. Thus, we had to reverse engineer the Mediatek flashing protocol and write our own open-source tool.

Fortunately, a blank, unfused MT6260 shows up as /dev/ttyUSB0 when you plug it into a Linux host – in other words, it shows up as an emulated serial device over USB. This at least takes care of the lower-level details of sending and receiving bytes to the device, leaving us with the task of reverse engineering the protocol layer. xobs located the internal boot ROM of the MT6260 and performed static code analysis, which provided a lot of insight into the protocol. He also did some static analysis on Mediatek’s Flashing tool and captured live traces using a USB protocol analyzer to clarify the remaining details. Below is a summary of the commands he extracted, as used in our open version of the USB flashing tool.

enum mtk_commands { mtk_cmd_old_write16 = 0xa1, mtk_cmd_old_read16 = 0xa2, mtk_checksum16 = 0xa4, mtk_remap_before_jump_to_da = 0xa7, mtk_jump_to_da = 0xa8, mtk_send_da = 0xad, mtk_jump_to_maui = 0xb7, mtk_get_version = 0xb8, mtk_close_usb_and_reset = 0xb9, mtk_cmd_new_read16 = 0xd0, mtk_cmd_new_read32 = 0xd1, mtk_cmd_new_write16 = 0xd2, mtk_cmd_new_write32 = 0xd4, // mtk_jump_to_da = 0xd5, mtk_jump_to_bl = 0xd6, mtk_get_sec_conf = 0xd8, mtk_send_cert = 0xe0, mtk_get_me = 0xe1, /* Responds with 22 bytes */ mtk_send_auth = 0xe2, mtk_sla_flow = 0xe3, mtk_send_root_cert = 0xe5, mtk_do_security = 0xfe, mtk_firmware_version = 0xff, }; 

Current Status and Summary

After about a year of on-and-off effort between work on the Novena and Chibitronics campaigns, we were able to boot a port of NuttX on the MT6260. A minimal set of hardware peripherals are currently supported; it’s enough for us to roughly reproduce the functionality of an AVR used in an Arduino-like context, but not much more. We’ve presented our results this year at 31C3 (slides).

The story takes an unexpected twist right around the time we were writing our CFP proposal for 31C3. The week before submission, we became aware that Mediatek released the LinkIT ONE, based on the MT2502A, in conjunction with Seeed Studios. The LinkIT ONE is directly aimed at providing an Internet of Things platform to entrepreneurs and individuals. It’s integrated into the Arduino framework, featuring an open API that enables the full functionality of the chip, including GSM functions. However, the core OS that boots on the MT2502A in the LinkIT ONE is still the proprietary Nucleus OS and one cannot gain direct access to the hardware; they must go through the API calls provided by the Arduino shim.

Realistically, it’s going to be a while before we can port a reasonable fraction of the MT6260’s features into the open source domain, and it’s quite possible we will never be able to do a blob-free implementation of the GSM call functions, as those are controlled by a DSP unit that’s even more obscure and undocumented. Thus, given the robust functionality of the LinkIT ONE compared to Fernvale, we’ve decided to leave it as an open question to the open source community as to whether or not there is value in continuing the effort to reverse engineer the MT6260: How important is it, in practice, to have a blob-free firmware?

Regardless of the answer, we released Fernvale because we think it’s imperative to exercise our fair use rights to reverse engineer and create interoperable, open source solutions. Rights tend to atrophy and get squeezed out by competing interests if they are not vigorously exercised; for decades engineers have sat on the sidelines and seen ever more expansive patent and copyright laws shrink their latitude to learn freely and to innovate. I am saddened that the formative tinkering I did as a child is no longer a legal option for the next generation of engineers. The rise of the Shanzhai and their amazing capabilities is a wake-up call. I see it as evidence that a permissive IP environment spurs innovation, especially at the grass-roots level. If more engineers become aware of their fair use rights, and exercise them vigorously and deliberately, perhaps this can catalyze a larger and much-needed reform of the patent and copyright system.

Want to read more? Check out xobs’ post on Fernvale. Want to get involved? Chime in at our forums. Or, watch the recording of our talk below.

Team Kosagi would like to once again extend a special thanks to .mudge for making this research possible.

Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang is a hardware hacker and entrepreneur in Singapore. He is the author of Hacking the Xbox and created the Chumby. Follow him on Twitter. This post originally appeared in December 2014 on his blog, which you should read.


Contact the author at annalee@gizmodo.com.
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PGP fingerprint: CA58 326B 1ACB 133B 0D15 5BCE 3FC6 9123 B2AA 1E1A

True Confessions Are Written With Tears Only

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True Confessions Are Written With Tears Only

But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.

“Poor Franny has no original clothes,” Jimmy Fallon told People about his six-month-old baby:

“Every single thing you’re like, ‘Aww, I remember when Winnie used to wear that,’ and she’s already rolling her eyes like, ‘When am I getting my own things?’”

How I wish I didn’t know anything about myself and this world!


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

Crack Open a Vintage Bottle and Watch This Vintage Rachel Dolezal Video

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Happy Rachel Dolezal Day. In the video above, uploaded in 2012, Dolezal talks art, commerce, old white men, and diversity. Nice!

Did you know that an anagram for “Rachel Dolezal” is “Race Hazed Loll?” How perfect.

Gun Nuts Troll Facebook Post Praising Navy's USS Gabrielle Giffords

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Gun Nuts Troll Facebook Post Praising Navy's USS Gabrielle Giffords

They must have roamed the internet, thirsty, like wild dogs of the African savannah, until they found it: A popular military veteran’s Facebook site, gently praising the Navy’s christening of the USS Gabrielle Giffords. It was a veritable oasis, drawing in the pack of gundamentalists: There was water here.

On Saturday, the naval service will ceremoniously smash a bottle of bubbly on the hull of the Giffords, a small littoral combat ship (LCS) designed for operations close in to shore. But the vessel’s modest displacement is even more diminutive next to the umbrage of certain freedom-loving gun-fondlers. Unsurprisingly, they cannot believe America went and named a ship after that gun-grabbing liberal! What’s surprising is how willing they are to manifest that anger, and sign their names to it.

Giffords, of course, is the former Arizona congresswoman shot in the head and brain-damaged by a crazy man four years ago in broad daylight in an attack that killed six. She has since become an advocate for stricter gun laws, with mixed results. The spouse of a Navy captain and astronaut, Giffords is also widely respected for her advocacy of veterans’ issues. So it seemed natural that Doctrine Manan anonymous Army officer whose tongue-in-cheek comic strips and ruminations about military life have won him a global following among vets—posted a brief Facebook salute to Giffords and the Navy Friday morning:

Gun Nuts Troll Facebook Post Praising Navy's USS Gabrielle Giffords

Doctrine Man is no small potatoes. His following, chronicled in the New York Times and Foreign Policy, extends from Camp Eggers in Kabul to the E-ring of the Pentagon. And his stated mission—“To further professional discourse on key national security issues, with a little humor on the side”—engenders unusually civil debates between ideological foes among his 34,000 Facebook followers. Of Giffords, he tells me, “I’ve met her personally and spoken with her at length. She’s a wonderful woman who really cares about our people.” Which is why the responses to his Giffords post by gun-lovers took him aback:

Gun Nuts Troll Facebook Post Praising Navy's USS Gabrielle Giffords

Gun Nuts Troll Facebook Post Praising Navy's USS Gabrielle Giffords

(The “CIC”—combat information center—of a fighting ship is its nerve center, colloquially referred to as the ship’s “brain.”)

Gun Nuts Troll Facebook Post Praising Navy's USS Gabrielle Giffords

Gun Nuts Troll Facebook Post Praising Navy's USS Gabrielle Giffords

Gun Nuts Troll Facebook Post Praising Navy's USS Gabrielle Giffords

Gun Nuts Troll Facebook Post Praising Navy's USS Gabrielle Giffords

Gun Nuts Troll Facebook Post Praising Navy's USS Gabrielle Giffords

Gun Nuts Troll Facebook Post Praising Navy's USS Gabrielle Giffords

“I respect and encourage disagreement, but when comments cross the line into personal attacks or become clearly demeaning, there’s a problem,” DM says. “We should be able to have meaningful dialog without resorting to such behavior.”

But it’s the internet! This is what happens on the internet, right? Sure, you expect it on Allen West’s website, or Infowars, or Hannity comment boards, or an online startup for grumpy right-wing vets, fever swamps all. Heck, much of this—snarking about brain damage, wishing a perceived political adversary’s death—is pretty tame as online dickery goes in those parts. But DM is still hopping mad the crazies popped a squat on his real estate.

“Every once in a while, a thread goes sideways,” he says. “Part of this is natural misogyny, but there’s some political fuel there, too. But the victim shaming is unbelievable. I don’t know where those guys even came from. None of them are regular commenters.”

Gun Nuts Troll Facebook Post Praising Navy's USS Gabrielle Giffords

Gun Nuts Troll Facebook Post Praising Navy's USS Gabrielle Giffords

The funny thing is, there’s plenty to critique here—the naming of a ship after a living politician, the possible use of that name as a hedge against defense cuts—but, you know, that’s discourse, and this is just another Friday on the internet. “Some people,” DM says, “just have a knack for taking the ‘social’ out of social media.”


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

Explainist: Did Something Just Happen With "Fast-Track" or Whatever?

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Explainist: Did Something Just Happen With "Fast-Track" or Whatever?

House Democrats derailed “fast-track” today, putting the Trans-Pacific Partnership, President’s Obama’s pet trade free-trade agreement, in jeopardy. You may have some questions about what that all means. Questions like:

What’s TPP? And “fast-track,” what is that? Why is Barack Obama yelling at Democrats and calling that nice Elizabeth Warren a liar? What should I, a cool liberal internet person who doesn’t actually pay close attention to horrifically boring political news, think about this? What is the Correct and Smart Position?

To which I am tempted to say: Fuck off, I’m not your mom and I’m not Vox dot fucking com. If you want to understand the goddamn news you have to actually read widely from a variety of sources, you can’t look at one fucking chart and pretend you know what you’re fucking talking about.

But that would be unproductive. So let’s “explainer the news.”

You hopefully know, at a bare minimum, that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a free-trade deal between the U.S. and various Asian and Pacific Rim nations. The Obama administration wants Congress to approve it with a straight up-or-down vote. Conservatives, who hate Obama, and left-leaning Democrats, who hate the unchecked political power of multinational corporations, don’t like TPP.

Today, the president made an unexpected last-ditch effort to woo progressives to his side, bringing Labor Secretary Thomas Perez along for a closed-door meeting with House Democrats. (This after months spent publicly insulting and dismissing left-leaning critics as, at best, ill-informed, and, at worst, dishonest.) The House Progressive Caucus was... less than impressed:

Today’s House vote was about “fast-track.” Fast-track ensures that the final deal will get a straight up-or-down vote in Congress, without amendments or alterations. It also gives the president (and his successor) a six-year window in which all trade deals get the same treatment — no amending, just approval or disapproval. The argument for fast-track is that in a negotiation with multiple foreign parties, those parties need to feel confident that American negotiators have the authority and political ability to deliver what they promise.

This isn’t a ridiculous thing to ask for. Think of the Iran nuclear negotiations, where American conservatives and Iranian hardliners both take the same position: it doesn’t matter what Obama promises because the Republicans will shred the deal, whatever it is, the first chance they get. In an actually functional political system, it might make sense to support fast-track but oppose the TPP itself.

This is not that world, and since opposing fast-track could sink the TPP completely, pro-labor Democrats are opposing fast-track.

Today’s vote was a bit more complicated than that, because Congressional procedure and tradition are stupid. House Republicans tied fast-track — something most Republicans support — to “TAA,” legislation that offers a bit of public assistance to workers harmed by free trade agreements — something most Democrats support. Fast-track approval could only happen if TAA passes. The idea was that Democrats get to vote for TAA and against fast-track, and Republicans get to do the opposite, and fast-track happens without either side casting votes that will get them in trouble with their bases. This is a pretty standard way of doing business in Congress, and President Obama’s case today was that Democrats should vote for TAA even if they oppose fast-track, because they do approve of what TAA does on its own. For once, no one was convinced.

For Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) and others there’s nothing crooked about opposing TAA, if it accomplishes the goal of killing fast track.

“If you’re against TPA and you believe that TAA is going to allow it a better chance to pass, from a legislative point of view, that’s playing it straight. So in a sense, he was saying he didn’t mind people opposed to him, but play it straight,” Rangel said. “And some people were offended that he was challenging their integrity as it relates to TAA. But if a piece of chocolate is going to make you feel good, but it’s got a poison pill in it, I don’t see why you can say that the chocolate is good by itself.”

Just before the TAA vote, Nancy Pelosi herself — a pretty reliable promoter of the party line — announced that she’d be opposing TAA, making it officially acceptable for House Democrats to turn on the president. And they did, with a flood of “no” votes coming after it was apparent that TAA was doomed. House Republicans went on to vote for fast-track, but that was meaningless symbolism — their own rule meant that fast-track was dependent on TAA passing.

Now is the part where I have to make up another “question” to “explainer.”

OK so why do some, but not all, Democrats support TPP (an idiot asks) (j/k you’re great you’re just too busy to keep up with all this complicated political stuff!)?

The TPP will be, broadly, good for business, and most elite Washington Democrats do genuinely believe that what’s good for business is good for America (and the world). What has made the TPP debate a bit frustrating is how those Democrats (including the president) have simply refused to seriously engage with arguments to the contrary. As usual, these Democratic elites are shocked and personally offended that they actually have to justify and explain their policy priorities to their left-leaning cohorts.

When they recover from that shock, the liberal pro-TPP argument goes something like this: There are stronger labor and environmental protections in this deal than in any previous deal. If we don’t dominate these markets, China will, and they care even less about labor standards and environmental protection than we do. And finally, TPP’s effect on American jobs will be minimal. It’s not NAFTA, because NAFTA already happened.

That last point is actually true! Any domestic job losses and wage-suppression that TPP causes (and, remember, one major point of free trade deals is to make labor cheaper, so it will cause those things) will be minimal, because the worst has already happened. The American manufacturing base is already totally eroded — we can’t lose millions of jobs we don’t have — and wages have been stagnant for decades. Ain’t no turning back now!

That point also serves to undermine one of the foundational arguments in favor of the deal, which is that free trade deals grow the American economy. The thing is, trade is already extremely free. That battle was already won. Here’s Simon Johnson on the best-case scenario for the TPP:

The best pro-TPP research is by Peter A. Petri, Michael G. Plummer, and Fan Zhai (see this helpful webpage). Until recently, the TPP discussions did not include Japan, and in that scenario US income gains would have been at most only $23 billion per annum in 2025 – a tiny increase (0.1 percent) relative to what will be a $20 trillion economy, precisely because we have extensive free trade agreements with those 10 countries already.

Now that Japan is likely to participate, this creates a further potential $17.6 billion of income gains for the US through trade in 2025. But it remains very unclear to what extent Japan will really liberalize, for example by reducing the non-tariff barriers that make it hard to sell US-made autos there, so such gains may prove elusive.

It is also safe to predict that the vast majority of those projected gains, if they actually do materialize, will flow straight to the top, as income gains from previous trade deals have tended to do.

The argument TPP advocates think ought to be most compelling is one that should be familiar to critics of the president’s immigration and healthcare policies: That a trade deal negotiated under this president, even if it’s not perfect, is going to be far better than one negotiated under a future Republican president (or perhaps even one negotiated under a future Clinton president). According to this line of thought, something like the TPP is inevitable, free trade always wins out, the neoliberal consensus is unshakable, and you’d rather have Obama negotiating this deal than Jeb Bush or (god help us) Scott Walker.

As with all political arguments, there are smarter and dumber versions of it. For an example of the latter, see Jonathan Capehart’s Washington Post column today. The thesis is that the left should trust Obama on this because he is good and would never do bad things, because he’s good so why would he???

And, sure. An Obama-negotiated TPP is going to be less bad than a deal negotiated under a GOP president. That’s a good argument for opposing that deal, too, if it ever comes up.

One more pretend-question, posed in a condescending faux-casual “friendly” style, from my imaginary and deeply lazy interlocutor:

Tell me why to hate TPP?

There are two elements of the deal that are — or should be — poison pills to any left-leaning Democrat: Intellectual property protectionism and investor-to-state dispute settlement.

For a “free trade” bill, the TPP is going to include a lot of protectionism. All available evidence shows that American negotiators seek to make our (incredibly stringent) copyright and trademark standards the norm for all of our trading partners. For fans of free culture, this is an annoyance; instead of reforming our terrible copyright laws, we’re exporting them. For fans of not dying from treatable diseases because pharmaceutical companies use government-granted monopolies on treatments to keep prices ridiculously high, the deal is likely to be a disaster. This is why Doctors Without Borders is among the groups opposing TPP.

The biggest pharmaceutical issue at play is data exclusivity for a class of drugs called “biologics.” Brookings has a useful factual summary of what that means. Basically, for these drugs, current U.S. law gives a pharmaceutical company a 12-year window during which the FDA cannot approve any generic alternative developed using the protected drug’s clinical trial data. This generally means that during those 12 years, generics aren’t just not approved, they’re not even developed. The industry seeks to make that 12-year window the norm among all our trading partners. As Brookings says: “For the 11 countries besides the U.S. that are involved in the TPP, current data exclusivity protections range from zero (Brunei) to eight years (Japan).” The idea is that if they get 12 years in this deal, they’ll be able to push for 12 years with all our other trading partners, too.

The White House and its supporters have not come close to justifying this to anyone who doesn’t already believe that ensuring pharmaceutical company profits is inherently good. This is the best the Washington Post editorial board can do on exclusivity:

The United States already has free-trade agreements, including chapters on pharmaceuticals, with several of the TPP countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Peru, Chile, Mexico and Singapore), so the additional integration under the new deal would not change the status quo dramatically. It’s true that, as critics say, President Obama’s trade negotiators are shooting for the 12 years of data protection, and higher prices that come with it, that developers of cutting-edge biologic medicines enjoy under U.S. law. They’re unlikely to get it, because the maximum term in the other TPP countries is eight years. A compromise is already under discussion that would finesse the issue while allowing the only truly poor TPP country, Vietnam, quicker access to cheaper “bio-similar” versions of the drugs.

In other words: (1) It won’t be worse than the status quo, even though (2) Obama is trying to make it worse than the status quo, but (3) he probably will fail, and even if he doesn’t (4) there will be one carve-out for one poor country. (Maybe! We actually don’t and can’t know any of the final details.) You can see why the left has not been terribly receptive to the entreaties of trade advocates.

Nearly every leaked document has shown the Obama administration pushing a pro-pharmaceutical company agenda, trying its hardest to undermine foreign regulation of drug prices and marketing. The best argument supporters have made thus far is not that the Obama administration is pushing to make the deal more progressive, but that the administration’s attempts to make it worse are likely to be opposed by other nations.

The protectionism is maddening. The Investor-State Dispute Settlement provision is genuinely alarming. Here’s one definition of ISDS, from Rachel Wellhausen, an academic at the University of Texas-Austin:

ISDS, or Investor-State Dispute Settlement, is the international system whereby multinational corporations (MNCs) can sue the governments of countries in which they invest for violating their property rights. International treaties give MNCs access to ISDS, under which ad hoc international tribunals decide whether or not an MNC deserves compensation. There is no appeals system in place.

In other words, ISDS is how multinational corporations can fight regulations they don’t like in foreign countries by appealing to private tribunals accountable to no voters or citizens. Under ISDS, corporations already regularly bring cases against governments for interfering with trade by banning toxic additives, regulating tobacco marketing, invalidating drug patents, and nationalizing exploitative factories and plants. If the tribunals rule in favor of the corporations — which they frequently do — they impose financial penalties, often quite large, against the governments. No one other than multinational corporations has access to this process; there’s nothing similar for labor law violations, for example. It is effectively an attack on sovereignty by the forces of international investment.

When critics like Joe Stiglitz and Elizabeth Warren have mentioned this, Obama has responded by saying that they can’t know what the details of the secretly negotiated agreement, and that this deal has finally solved all the problems with ISDS, but you can’t know how exactly you just have to trust him, they fixed it. Again, this hasn’t won him many new admirers.

Still, most observers have tended to believe that liberals would cave, or lose, and free trade would win out, mainly because it always does. During the Obama era, labor, still one of the most important parts of the Democratic coalition, has been consistently unable to push Democratic leadership to address its demands, because they have no leverage. Democrats have had no reason to fear that union money would begin going to Republicans instead, whereas the finance and industry money Democrats also depend on is much less likely to remain loyal.

This time, though, the AFL-CIO said fuck it and began issuing credible threats, from freezing donations to promising to fund primary challenges and run attack ads against Democratic candidates in the next general election. (Labor’s courage is strengthened by the comforting fact that we’re still more than a year away from the next presidential and Congressional elections.)

What is still unexplained, and perhaps unexplainable, is precisely why President Obama is expending so much time, effort, and political capital on this particular deal. His second term has been about doing what he can to establish a legacy without necessitating any assistance from Congress, but a trade deal is not exactly legacy-securing stuff.

There will probably be a TAA re-vote next week. So, still plenty of time for Democrats to cave.

Let’s wrap things up:

Are there any bad memes about the TPP?

Explainist: Did Something Just Happen With "Fast-Track" or Whatever?

Explainist: Did Something Just Happen With "Fast-Track" or Whatever?

Explainist: Did Something Just Happen With "Fast-Track" or Whatever?

Explainist: Did Something Just Happen With "Fast-Track" or Whatever?

Consider yourself explainered-to.

Top photo: A banner flown over Manhattan this January by Doctors Without Borders/via Getty Images

500 Days of Kristin, Day 138: ChicagNO

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500 Days of Kristin, Day 138: ChicagNO

In recent interview with Elle (dot com), Kristin Cavallari expressed distaste for the city of Chicago—the city that her husband plays football for, and the city that, just last month, she claimed to really “know.” Well, Kristin knows what she does not like. “Chicago’s just not home,” she told Elle (dot com).

Some Chicagoans are mad about this, not that Kristin cares.

While her husband just signed a $126 million contract extension to play for the Bears through 2020, Kristin already has one foot out the Big Onion. “Chicago’s just not home,” is just modern Kristin’s version of flipping the bird at Audrina on The Hills. (Audrina is like Chicago; both can fuck off.)

Let the bridges she burns light the way.


This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

Talking About War and Secrecy

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Talking About War and Secrecy

Last week I spoke with Joseph L. Flatley at The Kernel for their Interviews Issue. He was kind enough to let me talk about working in military intelligence, insider threats and my new book about drones coming out in July. I need to expand my thoughts on supersaturation and the information age mirroring the end of the Cold War, but other than that, it’s a pretty good take on how I think these days. Read the entire interview below.


For the last 40 years, William M. Arkin has been studying war: first for the Army, when he was a military analyst stationed in West Berlin, then for groups like the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Human Rights Watch. He has also been a columnist for the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. In 2010, Arkin made waves coauthoring the series “Top Secret America” with Dana Priest for the Washington Post (later published as a book of the same name). Recently he launched Phase Zero, a Gawker blog covering national security issues. His latest book, Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare, arrives July 28.

I think a lot of people would assume that an intelligence analyst would have a hawkish worldview, but after your stint in the military, you went on to organizations like NRDC and Human Rights Watch. Was there a change in your worldview, having served in the military?

Not at all. I was against the Vietnam war; I came from a liberal democratic family. I decided to join the military; it was my own decision that this was the best way for me to go to graduate school. I chose to go to intelligence; I chose to go to Berlin. And though I was maybe unusual in the sense that I was liberal and I was a New Yorker and a Jew and all those things—and I certainly came up against people in those days who were John Birchers in the military, or what today we call neocons but are just crazy right-wing people. But, you know, so what? I just did my job, and I did my job fantastically, and I was the best analyst in the Berlin command. It didn’t change anything about me—pro-war, anti-war, nothing. It just sort of took away the mystique of the military in the first regard, the mystique of intelligence work in the second, and gave me an appreciation for the fact that this endeavor of war is a part of the human condition and it’s never going to go away.

For me, a career of being a military expert and studying war is not in any way about stopping this or that war or seeking peace, although it’s a wonderful goal to have. It’s more a recognition that war is with us; it’s with us every day in one form or another. The best approach to it is to understand it, and to clamor to have some democratic influence over it, and to ensure that the standards of war reflect the standards of society.

How did you go from studying the Soviet Union for the Pentagon to studying and writing about the United States military?

When I was in intelligence, I was expected to be an expert on the armed forces of the Soviet Union and East Germany. It’s not to say that I didn’t do a good job or I didn’t have an abundance of intelligence available to me to make analysis and assessments, but the one thing that I felt like I was completely missing was any appreciation of the strengths or weaknesses of the United States. I realized that that was endemic throughout the entire intelligence establishment—that people could be experts on the enemy and not really know very much about themselves, and therefore what expectations existed regarding how we might formulate war plans or defenses, or what the capacities are, or even what the net assessment between the two sides might be. What does it mean when you stack up those numbers, one against another? What kind of a discount do you provide to Russian tanks versus American tanks, or what kind of capability do you really ascribe to a Soviet battalion when you know that half the guys are drunk and disgruntled conscripts versus some unit in the United States that maybe doesn’t face those problems.

So, this began my post-Army desire to really understand the U.S. military better. Immediately, 40 years ago, I came up against the secrecy that everyone thinks is the product of 9/11 or Bush or Obama, but it was exactly the same then. To really understand what was going on in the military, to really understand what the intelligence community was doing, to really understand to what degree there were things going on that were maybe illegal or controversial required exactly the same kind of work that one does today. Just imagine it with index cards and going to libraries, as opposed to this sort of instant gratification world that we have today.

Do you find that on the level of the military or the government, that the true nature of how a war is being conducted is being obfuscated in order to be able to get away with stuff that the population might not agree with?

No, never. But then, I don’t know this thing that you just called “the military.” You know, there’s lots of different actors, and they have different interests, and they have different cultures and subcultures, and somebody in the conventional army might be willing to do or want to do, or the degree of risk that they might want to take would be completely different than what some black special operator might be willing to or want to take. So the military is not one entity.

I would go even one step further and say that it’s far worse today than it was 40 years ago, in terms of wrapping your head around the technologies and the ins and outs of everything that’s going on. It’s far, far more complex. I mean, there’s so much going on in so many different places. The technologies range from the most discreet and secret cybertechnologies, all the way through to directed energy weapons, which are not even kinetic in nature.

I’ve been reading on your blog about “inside threats” and “homegrown terrorism.” Is that one of the way things have changed over the years? Are the various intelligence agencies looking at the American public itself more than it was 40 years ago?

Well, again, yes and no. There were certain periods in the McCarthy era or whatever where the internal security controls were much greater than they are now. It’s not a constant. But I think that there are some things that have changed since 9/11, and the distinction between what is military and what is civilian, the distinction between what is intelligence and what is law enforcement, the distinction between what is domestic and what is foreign, has eroded. And those are really important distinctions to maintain, and the more that they are eroded, the more that we face a situation where the rules that are in place to protect our civil liberties and privacy, the rules that determine how we fight wars, and how we conduct our relations in the world begin to be more and more weakened and made less definitive.

That worries me more than anything else, because terrorism is about ignoring the distinction between military and civilian; it’s about ignoring the distinction between organized warfare—that is, state warfare—and non-state warfare. When we begin to behave in the same manner, when we begin to obscure what is military and what is civilian, when we begin to operate in such a way that what is overt and what is covert becomes an intrinsic part of our overall national security and foreign policy, then we’re signalling to those who wish us harm that we have the right, or we hold the right, to ignore those distinctions when we feel like it.

Was there a point over the last several years that you started to see this distinction being to erode?

I think that I saw it really in the 1990s, in the Clinton administration. It seemed to me that the advent of a reliable, long-range, unmanned cruise missile as a tool in the U.S. arsenal began to signal to the rest of the world that we were going to enforce some form of punishment in an extrajudicial way. Drones are merely a follow-on to that technology, but they would not exist if the proposition of the “right” to attack some place wasn’t accepted as the norm of international behavior.

Without declaring war on Iraq or other places, we’ve shot cruise missiles during the 1990s. It established two norms: One was that we would do this, and we had the right to do this, without asking for the international community’s approval, except in the most perfunctory or the loosest possible way. And second, it signalled to those who we were attacking that there was something about the new mode of warfare that we were undertaking, that made us immune to counterattack.

I don’t have any hesitation in saying that I think that 9/11 happened to some degree because we attacked the Muslim nations and terrorist organizations with cruise missiles and covert action and sanctions and airpower and secrecy, and built up a well of hatred on the part of Al Qaeda and others, and the only way that they would be able to fight back was to attack the civilian objects of the nation.

I think people see the United States as becoming a sort of testing ground for a lot of surveillance and military intelligence. I’m wondering if things have really changed that much in the last 40 years. Is this the “Big Brother” society that we’ve been warned about?

I think it is, except I think there’s “Big,” but there’s no “Brother.” The technology has advanced so rapidly in the last decade or so that of course the NSA and military and other intelligence establishments and the FBI and the local police and the local authorities are drowning in data, and they don’t know what to do with it.

But is there a “Brother” that’s behind it all, that’s pulling the strings in a political way to victimize or focus on an enemies list of some sort? I think the answer is, “not yet.” The means of that surveillance state are being built, but if there’s a smart goofball at the NSA that can put this stuff together for political gain, I’ve never found him or her. But that’s the thing: We’ve built a system that’s basically manned by technicians and software specialists, and even though they may call themselves intelligence analysts, what they really are are people who specialize in a piece of software. So the kind of real analysis that we think of when we think of an investigative case, or a deep problem trying to be solved, that’s happening in the same exact way that it’s always happened. And the mass collection of information that happens as a result of the growth of technology is a separate endeavour that doesn’t necessarily overlap with the old style work that is being done.

Does the FBI still follow people and conduct traditional investigations, in which I’m sure occasionally it goes after the wrong person or it goes after someone for the wrong reason? Absolutely. But we see it all the time, and that’s why we have to be a vigilant public, and never accept the faith that they can work without adult supervision. But at the same time, what I see happening is I see the FBI spending as much of its time and energy becoming a part of the intelligence community and becoming mesmerized with data-mining and link analysis and big data and thinking that this is the way they’re going to catch criminals in the future.

I liken the sort of apogee of mass surveillance of the NSA and data mining and big data fascinations of the intelligence community with the end of the Cold War. At the end of the Cold War, we got to the point where, with the MX missile, we could now stuff 10 multi-hundreds of megaton warheads onto the top of one missile (MIRVs). With the Trident II, we were even going to get up to 14, and the number of weapons was going to get back to the thousands, and [it was supposed to be] a wonderful technological achievement. But the fact of the matter is, even people inside the system felt, “OK, we don’t need 10 warheads, 14 warheads on these missiles.” We’ve actually come to a point where, like in basic chemistry, we’d supersaturated the system.

I think something happened broader in society that said, “this is absurd,” and one of the things that was negotiated in the Reagan and Bush administrations was that we negotiated limits on how many warheads you could put on a missile, and the MX never survived. In a way, the little connection between miniaturization if you will, technology, in the nuclear sphere became the opening gambit in what we’re now seeing in the intelligence sphere. Which means everything got smarter: more computers, more smartphones, more data, more tweets and more emails and more texts. The numbers are just astounding.

So you need better and better techniques and storage to surveil. That doesn’t even mean to monitor, that just means to get the shit in, to collect it. I think that that sort of similarity of the nexus of miniaturization and superb technology, it’s a question of: Do we need it this much? Do we need to go the way that technology goes? I think that’s a question that we’re just starting to ask with [Edward] Snowden. If we can just get away from the pompous polemics of Snowden and understand the technology and the absolute obliviousness of the government, in terms of understanding its own technology and its own activities, then I think we can actually have an influence over shaping what the information environment should be as we move forward.

Read the original interview here.http://www.amazon.com/Unmanned-Drone...

[Photos via William Arkin and Nan Palmero/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Jason Reed.]


Rachel Dolezal's Art Is Hell(a Good)!

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Rachel Dolezal's Art Is Hell(a Good)!

Today’s theme on the internet is “Pick Apart the Life of Rachel Dolezal, the White Lady Who Pretended to Be Black for a While.” Okay fine, have you gazed upon her many works of art?

Rachel Dolezal was an artist—and not without talent. She has a personal blog showing many of her works, and offering them for sale. How many of these have you bought today?

Rachel Dolezal's Art Is Hell(a Good)!

Rachel Dolezal's Art Is Hell(a Good)!

Rachel Dolezal's Art Is Hell(a Good)!

Rachel Dolezal's Art Is Hell(a Good)!

Rachel Dolezal's Art Is Hell(a Good)!

Rachel Dolezal's Art Is Hell(a Good)!

Rachel Dolezal's Art Is Hell(a Good)!

Rachel Dolezal's Art Is Hell(a Good)!

The top one is called “Hell.”

[These and other works available for purchase on Rachel Dolezal’s blog]


Contact the author at Hamilton@Gawker.com.

Toddler Hears Rage Against the Machine for the First Time, Goes Berserk

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Toddler Hears Rage Against the Machine for the First Time, Goes Berserk

At last: proof that the familiar impulse you feel upon hearing Rage Against the Machine—to strip naked, wrap yourself in an American flag, shatter the nearest window, roll around until the shards cover your tender flesh, wrap your body around a stranger, set yourselves a flame, then hurtle off a trampoline like a star-spangled porcupine bomb toward the nearest instrument of oppression—is an innate response, like sucking down air or recoiling when your hand touches a flame.

Below, watch the two-year-old son of Redditor gabew101 enter full-on, stank-faced beast mode upon hearing “Bulls on Parade” on Guitar Hero—the first time he’d ever experienced the righteous oblivion brought on by Zack, Tom, and co., according to his dad.

Just wait until he hears “Tire Me.”

Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Did Times Reporter Jonathan Mahler Smoke Weed with Nick Denton? Yes.

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Did Times Reporter Jonathan Mahler Smoke Weed with Nick Denton? Yes.

The New York Times today published a big profile of Gawker Media boss Nick Denton and the company’s future. The piece opens, appropriately enough, with Denton smoking weed, as he is known to do:

It was a mild spring evening, and Mr. Denton, who is 48, was standing on the fire escape of his SoHo loft in a long-sleeve T-shirt and jeans, smoking a joint and drinking a glass of red wine with his husband, Derrence Washington; Tommy Craggs, the executive editor of his media empire; and me.

“Me” is the respected Times media reporter Jonathan Mahler, whose presence (and ambiguous sentence construction) raises the following question: Did the respected Times media reporter Jonathan Mahler smoke weed with Nick Denton?

The rest of the profile—which the Times apparently intended to publish next week but rushed out after Capital New York dropped their own Denton profile on Friday morning*—does not explicitly address this matter. So we went to the principals to see if Mahler inhaled.

Here’s Nick Denton:

From: Nick Denton
Date: Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 2:36 PM
Subject: Re: did mahler
To: Keenan Trotter

He only had a puff—and probably just to encourage me. A modern journalist at work!

Tommy Craggs (via Slack):

[2:38 PM] Tommy Craggs: I’m no narc, Keenan
[2:38 PM] keenan: nick says he was!!!
[2:39 PM] Tommy Craggs: I’m no narc

And Jonathan Mahler himself:

From: Mahler, Jonathan
Date: Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 2:38 PM
Subject: Re: quick question from gawker
To: Keenan Trotter

Thanks!

Nick’s recollection is correct. (I thought I made that clear in the piece, no?)

After sending the email above, Mahler called Gawker to discuss the fact that yes, he did consume weed with Denton in his capacity as a Times reporter; he requested that the telephone conversation be held off-the-record.

All of this is especially noteworthy given what Denton tweeted shortly after Mahler’s profile came out:

While the Times subjects new hires to drug tests, it’s not clear whether on-the-job marijuana smoking would be frowned upon by Mahler’s editors. A glance at the paper’s guidelines on accepting gifts suggests that his participation was acceptable, given the cultural milieu in which he found himself: “In some business situations and in some cultures, it may be unavoidable to accept a meal or a drink paid for by a news source.”

Or weed.

Email or gchat the author: trotter@gawker.com · PGP key + fingerprint · Photo credit: Getty Images

According to CNN and WPTZ, Clinton Correctional Facility employee Joyce Mitchell will be arrested to

A Brief History of Pretending to Be Black

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A Brief History of Pretending to Be Black

Rachel Dolezal may have been the most audacious person to ever attempt to pass herself off as black, but she certainly was not the first. Here is a brief history of people, white and otherwise, pretending to be black.

1959: John Howard Griffin

Griffin, a white man, wrote a well-regarded book titled Black Like Me, in which he darkened his skin in order to pose as a black man in the segregated South. Griffin underwent medical procedures—including taking pills, grilling himself under a lamp and rubbing a stain into his body—in order to change the color of his skin.

Here (via The Guardian) is the passage from the book in which he describes seeing himself as “black” for the first time:

“In the flood of light against white tile, the face and shoulders of a stranger,” he writes, “a fierce, bald, very dark Negro glared at me from the glass. He in no way resembled me … I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I had no kinship … I looked into the mirror and saw reflected nothing of the white John Griffin’s past. No, the reflections led back to Africa, back to the shanty and the ghetto, back to the fruitless struggles against the mark of blackness.”

Griffin ended up paying a physical toll for writing his book: several years after it was published, he was stopped on the side of a road with a flat tire when a group of white men came upon him and beat him with fists and chains.

1990: Vanilla Ice

Vanilla Ice became a sensation specifically because he was white, but, man, he really did not want to be white. The man born Robert Matthew Van Winkle got himself a fade and concocted a backstory that was, at best, partly embellished to make him seem more, uh, authentic than he really was. Via a People article from 1990:

Touring (until Dec. 18) as the opening act for M.C. Hammer, Ice still loses his cool when critics suggest that his fast success has more to do with pale skin than cool raps. “It’s not about skin color,” he insists. “Rap is from the streets and I’m from the streets. That’s why a lot of people accept me.”

Well, that’s the gospel according to Ice, who has said that he was a poor street kid, won three pro motocross titles, went to the same Miami high school as 2 Live Crew’s Luther Campbell and nearly died after that knife fight in ritzy Coral Gables, Fla. Others who know him, however, tell of a well-off kid named Robby Van Winkle who spent many of his teen years in Texas, won motocross trophies only on the amateur circuit and drove a white IROC Camaro Z28 in high school.

Ice might not have gone over that balcony on account of Suge Knight, but any notion of street cred certainly did.

2001: Jordan Sargent

In seventh grade I wore red Sean John terry cloth shorts.

2011: Gwyneth Paltrow

Here is an advertisement campaign that Gwyneth Paltrow, daughter of beloved white actress Blythe Danner, participated in four years ago:

A Brief History of Pretending to Be Black

Gwyneth Paltrow is not African.

2011: Chet Haze

The son of incredibly famous white person Tom Hanks desperately wanted to be black long before he bravely defended his right to use the n-word. In 2011, he remixed Wiz Khalifa’s hit “Black and Yellow,” rapping, “White kicks/ Purple kush/ This is college, hittin’ blunts after hittin’ books.” Alas, his name will always be “Chet.”

2012: Iggy Azalea

Iggy Azalea became a superstar thanks to her 2014 single “Fancy,” but the rapper raised in Mullumbimby, Australia was trying to convince you that she actually grew up in Atlanta as early as 2012, when she rapped like a person whose mouth was full of mashed potatoes on her breakthrough song “Pu$$y.”

2013: Dave Wilson

Two years ago, a man named Dave Wilson won a seat on the Houston Community College Board, beating a 24-year incumbent in what was considered a major upset. Here, via Politico, were some of Wilson’s campaign strategies:

The anti-gay activist printed mailers for his campaign featuring pictures of African-Americans that said, “Please vote for our friend and neighbor Dave Wilson.” The pictures came from the Internet, Wilson said.

He also included a line on the mailer that said he was endorsed by Ron Wilson, the name of a longtime African-American state representative from Houston. The Ron Wilson mentioned on the mailer, however, is Dave Wilson’s cousin, he wrote in fine print.

Dave Wilson is white.

2015: Twitter Trolls

Random white people on the internet have been pretending to be black probably since its invention, but it reached its nadir earlier this year when Twitter racists pretended to be black people looting Baltimore under the hashtag #BaltimoreLootCrew.

2015: Vijay Chokalingam

Earlier this year, Vijay Chokalingam, the brother of Indian-American actress Mindy Kaling, bragged about getting into medical school in the late-90s by saying he was black. He probably should not have done this.

Who did I miss? Please let me know in the comments.


Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

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