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The Moment I Began Selling Secrets To The Russians -- Or So They Thought

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The Moment I Began Selling Secrets To The Russians -- Or So They Thought

I gripped the wheel tightly and steered the Jeep toward the warehouse. My heart was thumping so hard I thought Oleg might be able to hear it in the passenger seat.

“You okay?” he asked in that flat, stiff English of his.

“Totally,” I lied.

The air was chilly for early April, but the morning was unusually bright. The year was 2008, nearly two decades after the Berlin Wall tumbled and the Cold War was consigned to the history books. The Jeep was a black-on-black SRT8 6.1-liter Hemi V8 with 425 horsepower and all the subtlety of a cinder block through a giant plate of glass.

I’d been waiting for this day for almost two years. Ted and Terry, my FBI handlers, had been gaming it out with me for nearly six months. What would I say when Oleg asked how much money I wanted? What would I do if he pulled out a gun? Lately, things between us had grown unusually tense. The agents had done what they could to prepare me. But all along they kept telling me, “You have to be ready to think on your feet.”

What the hell did that mean? Think about what?

(Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from author Naveed Jamali’s new book How To Catch A Russian Spy, now on sale from Scribner. -PG)

http://www.amazon.com/How-Catch-Russ...

As I eased the Jeep to a stop in front of the old brick building, Oleg was staring straight at me. I knew this was a big day for him as well. The documents I’d promised, cockpit manuals for two of the U.S. Navy’s most important combat aircraft, weren’t classified TOP SECRET.

But you couldn’t just buy them on Amazon or eBay. These were the technical operating procedures that American pilots relied on in Iraq and Afghanistan. These two fat, blue three-ring binders told you everything you needed to know in the pilot’s seat.

A handoff like this one, I knew, would inspire Oleg’s Russian imagination. But it would do more than that. It would help convince his bureaucratic superiors in Moscow that he had recruited a potentially valuable mole in New York, a well-placed American civilian capable of delivering U.S. military data. I was the kind of American asset the secret-hungry Russians searched for, someone with the motivation and the technical expertise to deliver the goods.

“We make an excellent team, you and me,” Oleg said.

The binders were inside a large cardboard box in the trunk of my other car, a black Corvette Z06, which was parked inside this huge auto-storage warehouse on a quiet back street in suburban Westchester County, twenty miles north of New York City. The box was too heavy to drag into a restaurant or a coffee shop, which was where Oleg and I usually met. So he and I came up with an alternate plan. He would take the Metro-North train from Grand Central. I’d meet him at the station in Hastings-on-Hudson. The warehouse was down by the water, two blocks away.

“You could make a lot of money,” Oleg said as I keyed my PIN into the security keypad outside the warehouse and the metal slats groaned up.

“What’s a lot?” I asked him.

“That Corvette you are so proud of?”

“What about it?”

“You could buy ten.”

I did love fast American cars.

As I pulled the Jeep inside, the warehouse was chilly and dark. But once I flipped my headlights on, I could see the rows and rows of parked vehicles. Expensive sports cars covered with monogrammed tarps. A Mustang, a Lotus, a Porsche, various Benzes and BMWs — the weekend cars of affluent city people. There was also a giant dump truck and a couple of vintage fire engines. Even in this light, I could tell the fire engines were gleaming red.

The warehouse was deathly quiet. As far as I could tell, Oleg and I were the only people around.

As I drove deeper inside, Oleg glanced left and right and then behind us. What was he expecting? A dozen FBI agents rushing the Jeep? A spetsnaz special-forces team from the Russian GRU? I understood why he might feel jumpy. I felt jumpy, too. “The Corvette is down this row and to the right,” I said as calmly as I could. So much was on the line, for Oleg and for me, I couldn’t afford to screw anything up.

Just then, a horrible squealing sound went off. I gasped, and Oleg froze. It took a second for me to realize where the alarm was coming from. For some reason, the Jeep’s radar detector had gotten tripped.

I scrambled to quiet it, but the off button wasn’t where I thought it should be. Damn, that thing was loud! The noise was designed to be heard over a roaring engine on the interstate with the windows open or the air conditioner on and the audio system blasting. In a closed-up Jeep at three miles an hour in a quiet suburban warehouse, that little sucker really screamed. After a couple of frantic seconds that felt like an hour and a half, I found the right button. “It’s okay,” I said to Oleg. “It’s only my radar detector.”

I wasn’t sure what had made the device go crazy. Maybe my hidden recorder had set it off somehow. Maybe Oleg had something on him. I didn’t know. I just didn’t want anything spooking him.

“We’re right up here,” I said, relieved to be in silence again.

Getting my hands on the cockpit manuals wasn’t nearly as difficult as I’d expected. All it took was a ride to Long Island and a couple of well-crafted lies. Ted and Terry drove me to the office of a major defense contractor and sent me inside alone. I told the friendly clerk I was a researcher with a small tech company preparing a digital database system, and I needed some test documents. The only question was what I wanted.

NATOPS, the blue binders said. Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization. “You wanna catch a spy, you gotta do a little spying,” Terry said with a shrug as we drove back to the city that day.

Now I was about to hand them directly to Oleg, who was finally breathing steadily once more. I parked the Jeep behind the black Corvette, pulling in at a careful angle.

“Before we start,” Oleg said, “can you turn off your phone, please?”

“My phone?” I answered. “Okay.”

He’d never asked me to do that. I knew he was worried I was recording him with my cell phone. He was right that I was recording him, just wrong about how. So I didn’t only turn the phone off. I opened my door. I quickly scanned the area, making sure no one was around. And I set the phone on the hood of a sleek black BMW M6 parked next to us.

“Better?” I asked Oleg.

“Thank you,” he said.

I had passed that test.

“You wanna have a look?” I asked him. Oleg stepped out of the Jeep and stood next to me behind the Corvette. I opened the trunk. The cockpit manuals were just where I’d left them.

Oleg stared for a moment. Then he picked up the manuals, confirming that both of them were there. One was for the F-14 Tomcat fighter jet. The other was for the E-2 Hawkeye early-warning aircraft.

Oleg concentrated first on the F-14 binder. As he flipped through the pages, I glimpsed a sketch of the fighter jet’s instrument panel. I saw several schematic diagrams and other charts and graphs. There were drawings and blocks of dense gray type. Oleg stared intently, looking almost transfixed.

“You wanna sit in the Jeep and have a closer look?” I asked him.

He nodded.

I lifted the big cardboard box from the Corvette trunk and placed it on the concrete. Then I reached with my right hand to close the trunk.

I don’t know what I was thinking. Obviously, I wasn’t thinking at all. Or at least I wasn’t paying attention to the precise location of Oleg’s head.

“Awwwww!” he screamed.

Somehow I’d managed to slam the trunk on the back of Oleg’s skull. I heard a horrible clunk as the metal hit bone, and then two more very loud screams. “Owww! Eewwww!”

It all happened so quickly, I didn’t know what to think.

I knew I’d done something profoundly stupid. I had done it at the worst possible time. Just as Oleg and I were moving together from covert to operational. Just as the noose was settling around his neck. Just as I was convincing him that he could really trust me. Just as I was proving what a valuable asset I could be. We were taking this leap together into espionage—and I’d slammed the damn trunk on his head.

As I leaned over to check how badly I had hurt him, terrible thoughts were racing through my head.

I had just blown the whole operation. I had maimed a senior Russian diplomat. Certainly, he would think I was trying to kill him. It was all being recorded. Would Oleg be convinced he should never do business with the likes of me again?

For three nerve-wracking years, I spied on America for the Russians, trading thumb drives of sensitive technical data for envelopes of cash, selling out my own beloved country across noisy restaurant tables and in quiet parking lots.

Or so the Russians believed.

In fact, I was a secret double agent working closely with the FBI. The Cold War wasn’t really over. It had just gone high-tech.

I had no previous experience as a counterespionage operative. Everything I knew about undercover work I’d learned from books, movies, school assignments, and Magnum P.I. episodes. Ronin, Spy Game, anything with Bond or Bourne in the title — I devoured that stuff.

I was in my late twenties by then, a bright but aimless New York University graduate, working in a family business with my immigrant parents, trying to figure out what to do with my life. I had a nice apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a young wife freshly out of grad school, and a tendency to spend way too much time in front of computer screens. I’d read a bunch of books about the Cold War and the Soviet Union, and I’d seen almost every war movie ever made.

But I didn’t speak Russian. I never liked borscht. And the closest I’d gotten to Moscow or St. Petersburg was a medium-priced bottle of Stolichnaya from International Wine & Spirits on Broadway and 113th Street. I certainly didn’t fit anyone’s stereotype of a smooth double agent.

Jamali, Naveed Jamali? Don’t make me laugh!

And yet there I was, at the center of a long-running counterespionage operation that I cooked up mostly on my own (thanks to an unusual family connection), then convinced the FBI and the Russians to go along. It was proactive, not reactive—and I was the active one. Looking back, I can hardly believe I pulled it off. How I did it, why it worked, and what I learned about my country, my family, and myself—that’s a story I want to tell.

By the time we were finished, we had cast a bright light on an active espionage campaign operating out of the Russian Mission to the United Nations in New York. We had suckered an experienced Russian military-intelligence officer into trusting a young American amateur, embarrassing him and his nation. We had earned a solid American win in the escalating hostilities between Moscow and Washington. And we had helped to disprove, for those who had any doubt, the supposedly benign intentions of Russia’s post–Cold War leaders, Vladimir Putin especially, who kept telling America how much they wanted to be our partners and our friends.

I apologized profusely to Oleg that day in the storage garage. “Oh my God,” I said when he finally looked up. “I’m so sorry!”

He seemed dazed but alert. “Are you all right?” I asked, putting my hand on his shoulder.

“All right,” he said. “I have a very hard head.” Then he flashed a faint smile. “A hard head,” he repeated.

It was a lame joke, in Russian or in English, but a welcome one. I was relieved that Oleg was conscious enough to deliver it. I knew right then that he and I had crossed a crucial line. Despite my squealing radar detector, my clumsy trunk slam, and my amateur’s nerves, Oleg wanted me as much as much as I wanted him. Even more so. By the time we left the warehouse, I had an envelope of Oleg’s cash inside my jacket pocket. I’d fed him a story he could validate from the outside. I had solidified his personal confidence.

The experienced Russian military man was convinced he could trust the young American amateur. He would not turn back. He did not want to. He was persuaded that I was for real. Oleg wasn’t letting anything, including a trunk lid to his hard skull, divert the two of us from where we were headed next.

Naveed Jamali spent three years successfully working as a double agent for the FBI against the GRU (Russian military intelligence). His story is the subject of his book “How to Catch a Russian Spy” and is going to be a major motion picture with 20th Century Fox. Naveed is an information dominance warfare and intelligence officer in the United States Navy Reserves, attached to the Office of Naval Intelligence. He is a recognized expert and consultant in the area of counter-intelligence and insider threat. He has no intention of traveling to Russia any time soon.

From HOW TO CATCH A RUSSIAN SPY by Naveed Jamali and Ellis Henican. Copyright c 2015 by Naveed Jamali. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.


NYFF: Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson Talk Indulgence, Trash, Poppers, and Celine Dion

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NYFF: Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson Talk Indulgence, Trash, Poppers, and Celine Dion

“We wanted viewers to feel like they were washed up, panting on another shore somewhere having just had a brush with drowning in a tempest of narrative,” is how Canadian director Guy Maddin described his latest feature (co-directed with Evan Johnson), The Forbidden Room, which played this year’s New York Film Festival. And indeed, Maddin’s 11th feature is exhausting. Essentially an anthology film with a Russian nesting-doll structure, The Forbidden Room sprouts narratives out of narratives, flowing from one seeming tangent to the next with Maddin’s familiar silent-movie aesthetic (the narratives were generally based on titles and synopses “lost” movies often dating back to the ‘20s). A crew in a submarine that’s running out of oxygen attempts to extend their collective lives using the air pockets in flapjacks. A lumberjack attempts to rescue a woman from a cave-dwelling tribe called the Red Wolves. A man’s ghost attempts to teach his son how to trick his mother into believing that the man never died. There is a vampire banana, a virgin sacrifice, a character known as “Squid Thief.” It blends together deliriously in transitions that emulate the decay and melting of celluloid.

“Fever dream” and “phantasmagoria” are the words that come up again and again to describe Maddin’s work, particularly this film. I talked to Maddin and Johnson earlier this week, as they were in New York for the festival. Their film may seem arcane, but found the two of them to be friendly and funny. A lightly edited and condensed transcript of our chat is below.

Gawker: Just to make sure I have the conceit straight, the stories within this movie are based on lost silent movies?

Guy Maddin: Not all of them are silent, technically. The narrative material, the provenance of it is, in one form or another, based on or inspired by lost movie titles.

Titles.

Maddin: Not just titles, but the plot lines. Sometimes, the title was all we had the way a bloodhound only has a scented rag to go by. Or maybe a little bit about the traditions of storytelling that director might draw on or that country might be more likely to produce. But they weren’t always silent movies. There were a bunch of Cambodian movies lost in the ‘70s when the Khmer Rouge destroyed them and murdered their directors. There was a lost TV network here in America, the DuMont, which really intrigued me because a lot of really cool TV shows went lost. Cathode ray narrative intrigued us for a while. None of that made it into The Forbidden Room, but made it onto our to-do list for this companion piece website involving making contact with lost material.

We expanded our definition of “lost” to include unrealized projects. They were not only not silent, they were not made. They were lost if you consider what caused them to be lost: political marginalization or red scare. There’s this Edward Chodorov guy who planned to make The Lynching of Elizabeth Taylor, but he never got it made because he was blacklisted. There were all sorts of films that weren’t made by Oscar Micheaux and other African American filmmakers. Even though they did make some films, they barely got made because he was so marginalized. There was James Young Deer, who made films identifying himself as a Native American filmmaker but there are theories that he was African American and found it just slightly less oppressive to make them as a Native American. Some of his films are lost and others just weren’t made because of who he was. And then there are untold stories by women, etc.

There are so many reasons don’t get made or if they do get made, it’s a result of artistically detrimental compromises. Look at Stonewall...

Maddin: That’s a form of loss as well.

But I don’t see compromise when I watch your movies.

Maddin: (Laughs) There’s not a whole lot of compromise there. But we’re excited by losses that other wussier directors have had to incur in the name of compromise. For instance, Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver even has a loss. To get its [R rating], he had to remove a number of color saturation units from the blood red just to wiggle it past and to enable a profitable number of people to watch the movie. So we had hoped to take those—I don’t even know the units of saturation of color, widgets we’ll call them—the 3.5 widgets of red saturation he had to remove from Taxi Driver to make it available to the general public. We were hoping to take that loss. We needed to haunt our picture with the color red. So thank you, Marty, and good luck with your lawyers on getting those red widgets back.

How is it that you are unwilling to compromise in an industry that so many people are? Is it merely a matter of operating with the understanding that you’re not making blockbusters?

Maddin: That helps. There’s no pressure from above to compromise, but also I’m kind of incapable of it. I don’t mean I’m too stubborn or full of integrity, but I don’t know what use a compromise would be. I don’t think it would make one more person come to our movie.

Evan Johnson: You don’t have a starting point to impose compromise on. People don’t look at your films and go, “We could really make this work in the open market if only he made this tweak.” It’s not quite that simple.

Maddin: So really, I’m lucky. I like to think that [Luis] Buñuel was in the same position, just to flatter myself with the company. At the end of his career, in My Last Sigh, his autobiography that he wrote right after he retired from filmmaking, he said that he was able to say that he never included or excluded a single shot in his entire career against his will. It was maybe because his films had their market and niche already so he didn’t have to. No one ever asked him to, probably. And that’s kind of the way it’s been for us, too.

Was it always that way? At what point do you stop worrying about mass appeal or expanding your audience?

Maddin: My first feature [Tales from the Gimli Hospital] came out in 1988, and I really thought, “Well, I gotta start making genre pictures. Maybe that’ll reach more people.” My first feature didn’t have any props in it, it was just shadows, so I thought, “Maybe by putting in sets, I’ll reach more people.” I was thinking of genres that were really popular in the ‘20s or ‘30s: “I’ll make an amnesia World War I movie. This’ll be popular.” And I made a way more opaque and unwelcoming movie by doing that [Archangel, 1990]. My next movie was a two-strip Technicolor bergfilme [Careful, 1992], a mountain melodrama, and I thought, “People won’t know what hit ‘em when the zeitgeist gets a load of this.”

And then I was really stymied for a while in the ‘90s. I realized I had taught myself a kind of filmmaking that was making progress—I was reaching more people in the film festival world, but the film festival world and the commercial theater world in those days, they were two different planets—so I was building myself a little tower on Mars while the film industry was building its towers on Earth. They weren’t ever going to even notice each other. I briefly went to Hollywood in 1993 and had meetings and got scripts to read. Claudia Lewis at Fox Searchlight was really nice to me and sent me a bunch of scripts. Every time I read one, I could see those things being made into movies, and some of them were by other people, but each time I read one I just wanted to hide deeper in the shadows under my bed. It was hard to read in the darkness under my bed. My naps were getting longer. Weeks long. I got very depressed.

I didn’t get excited about filmmaking again until the turn of the century when I started shooting with Super 8 instead of 35 mm. Now we’ve come here by doing an end-around through Super 8 and through whatever it is Evan and I are doing now.

I also started making movies that felt like basement-band equivalents of films. I just thought, “Well, I like basement bands and some of them became really famous and popular. I’m a basement band filmmaker.” But I found that people who like basement bands still like Steven Spielberg movies. It just takes the film world another decade or two to catch up to an ethos that musicians can access immediately. In a way, I thought we’d just wait it out and maybe the world would catch up with us.

How much did you think about audience while making The Forbidden Room?

Johnson: Working with Guy, everything had a kind of strange distance for me because he has a reputation and a history and has made a lot of films. I was doing this with him and had to decide if I was going to try to elbow him out of the way or if I should just be enhancing his Guy Maddin-ness. So there always always a meta level at which I was thinking. I gave up on that eventually and we were just friends and collaborators. It’s simpler that way. We thought about the audience all the time. We thought we were making a pretty clear (snickers) story for them.

Maddin: We wanted to give them a chance to follow the story.

A chance.

Johnson: A chance.

It’s a difficult movie.

Johnson: OK.

Maddin: But we gave them the best chance we were capable of giving them. We tried. We tried hard.

Johnson: We knew it was going to be structurally complex to follow. The majority of audience members are probably not even aware that it has a structure. Things happen in a definite order. Stories start and stories end in a very particular way. But it probably feels to a lot of people like a big mash of randomness. But it’s extremely fussily made. Whether that comes across I’m not sure.

The structure I got. It was mostly within the stories...

Johnson: That things get unclear and confusing. You bet.

Maddin: And yet some people say the opposite.

Yeah, I got the nesting-doll structure, the tangent within a tangent within a tangent...

Maddin: You’re cool with that.

I’m cool with everything. I want nothing but for you guys to do what you want to do...

Maddin: We didn’t even want to do it, really. We grudgingly did it.

Johnson: There’s a certain built-in shame to the process of being self-indulgent.

Maddin: We were always there to preemptively deflect charges of being wankers. So the movie comes with a sort of post-masturbatory, gloopy guilt.

Johnson: You know when you’re a child and your body produces fluids and things? I remember pooing once as a kid and being really proud of the size of it, but then people were disgusted by what I was saying, as you might be now.

More like fascinated.

Johnson: There was a mixture of pride and shame at having made something. And that is the essence we’re tapping into. I think the movie, on many levels, is tapping into that combo of pride and shame.

Maddin: And it’s a huge pride. You have to flush a number of times to get this project down.

The line between communication and indulgence is always fascinating to me. But also, how do you differentiate between working within a style and repeating yourself?

Maddin: Yeah. I don’t want to repeat myself, but relative to other filmmakers, I’ve been doing the same thing every time out. I think if you’re more generous in appraising what I’ve been doing from the beginning, and especially with this one, there’s more than an evolution. The provenance of this project is lost films, old timey movies, but we were really excited to be working in digital, which in many ways leaves everything else behind. Before I was all about film emulsions but then there’s a nod to film emulsions and how they decay and how they buckle and dry and turn into goo and vinegar. But we accomplished that digitally. The internet interactive project that came first and will stand when it’s launched in the new year as a companion piece for it, plants us firmly with one foot in the emulsions of the analog era and the pixels of the digital era. So I feel like we have left that stuff behind and have made one big step. It’s the second last step and the next step is to be fully digital.

Do you have any misgivings about going digital?

Maddin: None. The history of art is people moving forward, every now and then doing a shoulder check, acknowledging what’s in the past and moving forward. I don’t want to be one of those guys riding around on a penny farthing in plus fours and a boater. I’m a baby boomer, but I’m working actively with, I hope, many movies in my future. Gotta deal with what year it is.

It does seem like this movie in particular is just stuffed with ideas. That’s part of what makes it difficult. It’s overwhelming. Is it a metaphor for what’s in your head?

Johnson: That it is. (To Guy:) As someone who’s worked with you, but apart from you for a while, I always say the major thing you’ve taught me is that if you’re free to discard ideas they’ll be more free to arrive. So when we have an idea that isn’t working, believe it or not, we wouldn’t use it.

Maddin: It seems like we threw it in.

Johnson: It seems like we threw everything in. But there were many thousands more discarded. But one of the things you taught me is if you’re not precious about them, that’s when they’ll keep coming. I noticed working with you that they just kept coming in a barrage and that’s how the movie feels.

Maddin: And in many ways, just the way this project came to define itself, too-muchness was an important part of it. At a certain point when we had to decide how long the movie would be—it’s just under two hours long—we could have easily made it a snappy 70 minutes and it probably would have felt like 100. It was tricky.

Normally you make a movie as tight as possible, and I’ve never been very good at that. But here, we made many passes, and I even watched it at Sundance at a certain length and tightened it up even more. We took 14 minutes out of it or something like that. We still were careful. Instead of going with “tightest is best,” we wanted viewers to feel like they were washed up, panting on another shore somewhere having just had a brush with drowning in a tempest of narrative. So it was tricky having the right amount of too-muchness.

I know what you say about melodrama being life uninhibited as opposed to the common conception of it being life exaggerated comes up a lot when you’re interviewed. [Note: For a longer explanation of this theory, read this.] I actually discovered it through Carl Wilson’s book Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. Are you familiar with that?

Maddin: No, please tell. I’m getting goosebumps.

He applies your idea to her output. Do you think that’s accurate—does she, through her work, inhabit the uninhibited life you talk about, and if so, is she your peer?

Maddin: Man, I feel like I’ve just been handed a golden opportunity to define myself once and for all. [Laughs] I don’t think about her much, but I have thought about her a bit lately, because some people really close to me have astonished me by coming out as not just secret fans of Celine Dion but willing to hold a parade in celebration of Celine Dion. I have to revisit her perhaps hold up a funhouse mirror to myself and hope to find her there.

Johnson: There are some good YouTube behind the scenes of her concerts, a day-in-the-life Celine things that are magnificent introductions to why she’s so great, I think.

[Note: Oh, like these?]

Maddin: Well I’m on board. I can tell we’re circling around each other. I’m circling around her. She’s not paying attention to me, but I feel like I’m circling around her and pretty soon I’m gonna latch onto her soul and spend the rest of my sorry-ass life defining myself in her terms somehow. So, in other words, yes.

Melodrama, as you know, is looked down upon, that’s the whole point in talking about it like this—to challenge people’s understanding of what is widely considered a lower form. I don’t know if you care about a high/low culture divide, but one could call your movies highbrow melodramas, at least in terms of their audience impact at the very least.

Maddin: I don’t make much distinction. The goosebump-ometer is just as great for Ed Wood or Paul Morrissey movies or George Kuchar films as it is for Max Ophüls...sometimes. And then, as a matter of fact, if it was a tie, the tiebreaker goes to the trash. To me, it’s just more fun. The Earrings of Madame de... is a masterpiece, but it’s just too...the taste is too good.

But I firmly believe that not only is this seemingly unredeemable melodrama sometimes truly great, and the stuff that’s in it is as great as anything in the canonically great movies, but that most people fail to recognize that those great movies are melodramatic as well. They just aren’t seeing it because it’s been gussied up with surface class. It’s just as melodramatic as a reality show sometimes. It’s just all the same machine parts working the same way, it’s just there may be more gaudy bells and whistles on some melodramas than on others. That’s all. I firmly believe that, so I don’t make distinctions in melodrama between high and low. Some melodrama doesn’t click with me. Sometimes even though it’s tawdry, it just doesn’t click with me. It helps if I can find myself in it somehow.

Where does camp fit in? Does that word describe accurately your movies at all?

Maddin: It’s certainly been applied, but I don’t think... I’ve been called at times the straightest queer filmmaker around or the queerest straight filmmaker around...

You also make tons of gay references in interviews. I wasn’t sure that you were straight actually. To Film Comment, you talked about poppers.

Maddin: Well, you know, all the poppers I’ve ingested have been on the dance floors of gay clubs. Where else are you gonna get poppers, for crying out loud? That’s where I get my poppers. It’s just a practical thing. It has nothing to do with my sexuality.

Do you care about contemporary movies?

Maddin: A lot. I try to get out, have a big bag of popcorn and some diet soda on opening night. This isn’t quite contemporary because it’s one Mission Impossible ago in the franchise, but Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol is my favorite movie of the 21st century. I sat next to its director at Telluride last year and I said, “Hi, my name’s Guy,” and he said, “My name’s Brad,” but I didn’t recognize him. He even said, “My name’s Brad Bird,” but I thought he said, “Bradberd.” I thought it was the full name of “Brad.” I felt silly because I couldn’t lengthen “Guy” into anything. We sat there making small talk for 40 minutes when he was the director of my favorite movie of the 21st century, a movie I imagined watching with Luis Buñuel in the empty seat beside me through its entire duration. He and I were just high-fiving each other.

You think Buñuel would have been into it?

Maddin: For sure. He was! We were literally smoothing each other’s gooseflesh down. And especially these new filmmakers that are really exciting now, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Miguel Gomes. And Brad Bird. Love them. And Christopher Nolan. We’re remaking each other’s movies.

Johnson: He’s not aware of you.

Maddin: He’s not aware of me. Yet.

Gawker will be covering this year’s New York Film Festival with dispatches in the form of quick reviews and interviews throughout the festival’s October 11 conclusion.

Not a Single HP Employee Reported Donating to Carly Fiorina's Campaign

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Not a Single HP Employee Reported Donating to Carly Fiorina's Campaign

Given her lack of any real political experience, former candidate for senator of California and current republican candidate for president Carly Fiorina has been touting (what she claims to be) her revered and profitable tenure as former HP CEO as a sign of what she could do for the nation if given the chance. Which is why it’s too bad that, of the 302,000 current HP employees, not a single one has donated a reportable amount to Carly Fiorina’s campaign.

As The Daily Beast discovered, the recent FEC filings (which list all candidate contributions over $200) show a noticeable lack of any general employee contribution. From The Daily Beast:

HP’s corporate leadership also doesn’t seem keen on the idea of Fiorina in the White House. Among the 12-member board of directors, just one, Ann Livermore, has given a donation above that threshold.

Also missing from the donor list are current CEO (and former GOP gubernatorial candidate) Meg Whitman, any members of the senior leadership team, and all but one member of the HP Board during Fiorina’s tenure there from 1999 to 2005. Tom Perkins, a venture capitalist and former board member who voted to fire Fiorina in 2005, has since had a change of heart and donated $25,000 to CARLY for America, the super PAC supporting her.

This certainly seems odd, considering Fiorina claimed at the most recent GOP debate that during her tenure as HP CEO, “We doubled the size of the company, we quadrupled its top-line growth rate, we quadrupled its cash flow, we tripled its rate of innovation.” But as Donald Trump (mostly correctly!) pointed out, these are the things that happen when you acquire a very large competitor—as HP did with Compaq under Fiorina’s leadership. Dell CEO Michael Dell has referred to this as “the dumbest deal of the decade.”

It’s been long understood that Fiorina was an absolutely awful manager who was widely despised (understandable after firing nearly 30,000 employees) by the company from which she was eventually fired in 2005 (then and only then, did the company start to increase in value). Which is likely why HP’s PAC donated thousands to Fiorina’s opponent in her run for Senator back in 2010.

The Daily Beast spoke to a former HP employee, who explained that, “My thoughts are no employee would donate to her campaign, ever,” he said. “She is a terrible leader, really, really bad. As bad as they come.”

Well, at least she always has her Planned Parenthood fan fiction to fall back on.


Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com. Image via Getty.

There's No Evidence That Hillary Clinton Was "Targeted" by Russian Hackers, She Just Got Spam

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There's No Evidence That Hillary Clinton Was "Targeted" by Russian Hackers, She Just Got Spam

A new report from the Associated Press suggests Russian hackers deliberately attempted to infiltrate Hillary Clinton’s private email server, realizing the worst fears that critics of the server have held for months. But the story presents no evidence that any human being, Russian or otherwise, ever deliberately and knowingly attempted to hack into Clinton’s account. She just got spam, like all of us do.

The AP’s headline reads “Russia-linked hackers tried to access Clinton email.”

Russia-linked hackers tried at least five times to pry into Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private email account while she was US secretary of state, emails released Wednesday show.

As the news trickled down to other outlets, it became even more alarming: Politico said “Hackers targeted Hillary Clinton’s email account,” while NBC News blared “Hackers Tried to Access Clinton’s Private Email at Least 5 Times.” This suggests that a scheming team of evil hackers based in Russia knew of the existence of a private Clinton email account, and then sought to target Clinton using “hacking techniques,” however the popular imagination now conceives of that. This wasn’t a drive-by email phishing, the stories suggest, but a premeditated plot to hack the secretary of state.

But there’s absolutely zero evidence that such a plot existed. The AP story—and it should be noted that the AP has done some groundbreaking and excellent reporting on the Clinton email beat—is based on a series of spam emails from the inbox of Clinton’s off-the-books account released yesterday by the State Department. The emails posed as traffic violation alerts from the City of New York, and directed Clinton to click on a link to pay a speeding tickets—the idea being that recipients irritated at the false accusation would click on the link to investigate, launching a malware package that would surreptitiously infect their computer.

There's No Evidence That Hillary Clinton Was "Targeted" by Russian Hackers, She Just Got Spam

In 2011, people all over the planet were getting precisely the same malware spam bundle (identified by Sophos as Mal/ChepVil-A/Troj/Invo-Zip), prompting MSNBC and others to warn users about the phishing scam.

Despite the geographical specificity of the scam, whoever is behind it is spreading it far and wide; Sophos’ Facebook page contains comments from people in California, Thailand, Scotland, England and Australia who’ve received the phony ticket email.

“Got the email today,” wrote Iain Wilson. “Since I live in Asia and have not been in NY in 18 years I laughed, assumed viral and deleted.”

Given how vastly the phishing attack had ppropagated it’s hard to conclude that the emails in Clinton’s inbox were the work of anyone targeting the Clintons (let alone someone who even knew Clinton’s private server existed). There’s no evidence that Russian hackers tried to do anything—emails like this are blasted out to email addresses through completely automated means. Once a computer is infected, the malware scrapes its address book and blasts a new version of itself out to everyone one it. The evidence does suggest that someone with Clinton’s private email address was compromised, but not that the people who wrote the ticket-scam malware had any idea that Clinton was on the receiving end. You can’t try to target something when you don’t even know the target exists.

And besides, if Clinton’s email truly was in the crosshairs of a nefarious foreign actor, wouldn’t they try a phishing rouse that hadn’t become so played out that MSNBC was quoting Joe Blow off the street about seeing it? Or one that wasn’t based on a traffic ticket, something that Clinton—who hasn’t driven a car since 1996—would be at zero risk of getting?

None of which disputes the contention that Clinton’s email set-up was wildly insecure. But the AP’s framing—RUSSIANS TARGETED HILLARY—is the sort of story that Clinton’s defenders can handily use to make her critics seem like wild-eyed conspiracists. What, it’s illegal to get spam now?

The AP’s eagerness to sell the email as a hot scoop led to this tweet from the news organization’s Twitter account, which mistakenly presents a wholly different story, for which there also is no evidence:

The phishing emails were designed to hack the device that Clinton opened her emails on, not the private server that directed the emails to that account.

When I emailed AP investigations editor Ted Bridis about the story, he directed me to an FAQ sent out by the AP, which starts to back away from the overzealous headline:

WERE THE HACKERS FROM RUSSIA?

It’s easy for hackers to disguise their origins. Security researchers determined that some of the malicious software sent to Clinton in 2011 communicated with rogue servers in Russia, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Russian hackers were behind the plot. The rogue servers appear to be no longer operating. The hackers responsible were never identified or captured.

WAS CLINTON HERSELF TARGETED BY THE HACKERS?

So many Internet users were receiving the same speeding-ticket ruse that New York State police and others began openly warning about the ploy as early as June 2011, two months before Clinton received the messages. But it’s still a significant mystery how the hackers knew to send emails to Clinton’s private server address she used for State Department business, since in 2011 it was still a secret email address to most of the world. Roughly two years later, the email account belonging to an informal adviser to Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, was hacked by a Romanian, Marcel-Lehel “Guccifer” Lazar, who is serving a seven-year prison sentence. Emails released from that hack in 2013 included the first public references to Clinton’s private email address.

Emphasis added. Clinton’s account was a secret to “most of the world,” but certainly not all of it. For this malware to reach HDR22@clintonemail.com, all it would take is a single email account that had sent or received an email from that name, and it’d be scraped and spammed alongside all the others. A June 2011 email between State employees shows just how many were using private email accounts for Department business—any single one of those could’ve been a point of failure:

There's No Evidence That Hillary Clinton Was "Targeted" by Russian Hackers, She Just Got Spam

In the same thread, longtime Clintonian counsel Cheryl Mills said she already had been the victim of an attempted breach:

There's No Evidence That Hillary Clinton Was "Targeted" by Russian Hackers, She Just Got Spam

Maybe she’d been a calculated target of Putin’s SVR RF cyber marauders. Or maybe she clicked on a fake email about a fake speeding ticket.

Photo: Getty


Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
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PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7

Drunk Navy Guy Didn't Really Use a Raccoon to Trick His Car's Breathalyzer

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Drunk Navy Guy Didn't Really Use a Raccoon to Trick His Car's Breathalyzer

Idiots everywhere were taken in over the weekend by the irresistible story of a Navy petty officer who was too drunk to turn off the anti-DUI system on his car, so he grabbed a raccoon from a nearby park and squeezed some of its tiny, feral breath into the breathalyzer. The car started, according to the incident report, and the raccoon, rendered unconscious by the Navy man’s grip, lay on the vehicle’s floor. Of course the raccoon woke up, and of course it attacked the drunken driver, causing him to careen into a fence and end up in an in-ground swimming pool.

Drunk Navy Guy Didn't Really Use a Raccoon to Trick His Car's Breathalyzer

The unbelievable tale seems to have begun on Imgur and Reddit, and spread further after being picked up by a local CBS website and tweeted by the U.K.’s Telegraph. It gathered steam mostly thanks to its formatting: It’s written like an official incident report from Camp Pendleton in San Diego, complete with some acronym soup like “SITREP” and “POV” (for privately-owned vehicle).

But as much as I wish it were true, a public affairs officer from base says it’s totally bogus.

“I called police records, and while they were highly entertained, they confirmed [the story] is absolutely a hoax,” 1st. Lt. Savannah Frank told the San Diego Union-Tribune.

One clue was the incident number on the post, which, Frank told the Union-Tribune, doesn’t match the numbering system actually used on the base. Records officials at Pendleton checked anyway, just to be sure, and couldn’t find any record of a raccoon being used to start a vehicle.

But that doesn’t mean no such record will ever exist. You know some dumbass is going to try this, just to see if it’s possible.

CBS has since updated its story to acknowledge the hoax. The Telegraph deleted its tweet.

[h/t San Diego Union-Tribune, Photo: Joshua Pitcock/Flickr]

Artist Murdered While Painting Mural for Peace

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Artist Murdered While Painting Mural for Peace

Police say a California artist was completing a public art project intended to fight violence in his community when he was murdered mid-painting Tuesday.

Antonio Ramos, 27, was part of a nonprofit artist’s collective working on installing murals under underpasses in West Oakland, a neighborhood plagued by “drugs, poverty and homicides,” according to the Oakland Tribune.

It was underneath one of these underpasses that a seemingly random encounter ended in gunshots. Via the Tribune:

Ramos, of Emeryville, reportedly had an argument with a man who was not part of the group. As their disagreement escalated, the gunman shot the muralist and ran away, police said. Ramos was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead, police said.

Police reportedly discovered Ramos, who had been shot multiple times, after hearing a report of gunshots in the area. The gunman is still reportedly at large.

A group of schoolchildren were reportedly supposed to join the artists in painting the murals Wednesday; the event has since been canceled.

“I’m just here just looking at it and realizing this is the last place I saw him,” a childhood friend of Ramos tells the San Fransisco Chronicle. “How do you do something positive and still get shot for it?”


Image via Facebook. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

Reporters Are Rude During Tragedies Because They're Reporting

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Reporters Are Rude During Tragedies Because They're Reporting

Imagine this: a burst of tweets show a bus explosion on the interstate, sending up a tremendous mushroom cloud, visible from miles away. How many people are hurt? Or dead? What caused the explosion? No one knows, because all the reporters decided to give the victims and bystanders space, and respected everyone’s need to process the trauma before answering questions about it.

For as long as bad shit has happened, people have attempted to speak to the people who saw the bad shit in order to figure out how bad the shit is—today that’s called reporting, and it’s conducted by a shrinking number of print media writers, a large number of people in television, and a growing number of internet busybodies. Their job titles are different, but their shared purpose remains the same: to relay information about the world we inhabit during a time of crisis and confusion, when information is scant and bystanders might offer the best (or only) chance of piecing together the truth.

In journalism this is generally called door-knocking because it sometimes entails literally knocking on the door of a victim or eyewitness. Reporters interjecting themselves into the lives of grieving loved ones have written Pulitzer-winner stories. But door-knocking, always a source of anxiety for both reporters and subjects, has somehow come to sound more respectable than its technologically assisted alternatives, like cold-calling (or tweeting at) victims and the victim-adjacent.

That’s nonsense. Twitter is both public and a useful reporting tool, and contacting potential sources is a crucial part of news-gathering. To be a reporter is to be an often annoying, inconsiderate person who sticks his or herself where he or she don’t belong and bothers people. That’s how it’s always been. That’s how it’s supposed to be! If you’re making people feel uncomfortable it means you’re earning your paycheck.

http://gawker.com/this-is-a-good...

So what’s changed? Twitter, and brainless mob morality.

Today, there was a shooting at a college in Oregon. Almost immediately after news of that shooting got out, local and national news-gatherers began contacting students who had reported themselves, via Twitter, on the scene:

Reporters Are Rude During Tragedies Because They're Reporting

This has been met by much handwringing, eye-rolling, and excessively performative displays of contempt:

Yes, Mark Lotto, that is reporting! The implicit counter-argument here is that trying to contact someone in the midst of a tragedy is... what? Rude? An interruption? A disregard for the safety of someone who is apparently not in too much danger to start tweeting?

There’s nothing new about making contact with the people best suited to share information about something happening in the world. I know it feels very good to scold someone, better than nearly anything else in our deadened modern lives, but it’s incorrect that this is somehow bad journalism. In fact, it’s the building block of fantastic journalism. Was it any less rude and insensitive when the New York Times began calling the family members of the victims of 9/11, days after the attack, when the site was still smoking and no one even knew the complete death toll? Maybe, but there was no Twitter on which to complain about it.


Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7

More Than a Foot of Rain Is Possible on the East Coast With or Without Hurricane Joaquin

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More Than a Foot of Rain Is Possible on the East Coast With or Without Hurricane Joaquin

While we’ve stressed over the eventual track of powerful Hurricane Joaquin over the next few days, a concerning number of people may not be aware that a significant—potentially devastating—flash flood event will take place with or without the hurricane coming close to land. Many spots could see more than a foot of rain this weekend.

Biblical Rainfall

More Than a Foot of Rain Is Possible on the East Coast With or Without Hurricane Joaquin

The driving force for all of the big weather we’ll see over the next couple of days is that sharp trough in the jet stream that’s digging across the eastern United States this afternoon. The trough will grow even sharper by tomorrow, with an upper-level low (and eventually a low pressure system at the surface) wringing out a deep slug of tropical moisture in the atmosphere over the southeast.

The result will be rain, and lots of it. We could be staring down an event that will shatter many all-time rainfall records, bringing with it the potential for a significant flooding event over a wide stretch of real estate.

More Than a Foot of Rain Is Possible on the East Coast With or Without Hurricane Joaquin

The Weather Prediction Center’s latest forecast shows a huge area of ten or more inches of rain across South Carolina and small parts of Georgia and North Carolina, with a bullseye of 15 or more inches possible in parts of western and central South Carolina, including Greenville. Radiating out from there is a widespread area of five or more inches of rain.

The heaviest rain will begin tonight and could last through Monday night.

Remember that the rainfall totals above do not take into account the potential for Hurricane Joaquin to make landfall. This is rain on its own, caused by a separate event that will influence the track the hurricane takes. If the hurricane does veer west and make landfall, it will turn an already-bad flooding event into an absolute disaster.

It’s important to note that the rainfall predictions from the WPC are generalizations—actual rainfall totals will be much more localized than this, with spots caught under the heaviest showers and thunderstorms potentially seeing much higher totals, while places that manage to escape a constant train of precip seeing rainfall totals that wind up under what’s currently forecast.

Hurricane Joaquin

More Than a Foot of Rain Is Possible on the East Coast With or Without Hurricane Joaquin

Joaquin continues to lash the Bahamas as a major hurricane this afternoon as it very slowly moves toward the southwest at 6 MPH. As of 5:00 PM EDT, the storm is now a category four with 130 MPH winds, and it’s expected to maintain this intensity (or strengthen just a little bit) over the next day before it starts to weaken on Saturday.

While we’re heavily focused on what could happen here in the United States, this is an extremely bad situation in the Bahamas. The hurricane is moving just slow enough that several islands have experienced hours upon hours of hurricane force winds, torrential rain, and a significant storm surge. Many structures on the islands are built for hurricanes, though, so hopefully the folks there are safe and will come out of the storm without much of a toll on humans or property.

Normally, this is where I would generate a pretty map showing the National Hurricane Center’s cone of uncertainty along with the forecast points and watches/warnings in effect. I’m not going to do that this time around. Hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy posted a good article at the Capital Weather Gang explaining the major shortcomings of the cone of uncertainty in a situation like this.

The cone of uncertainty shows you the average historical track error in the NHC’s forecasts for previous storms. As you get farther out in time, their average margin of error increases by several dozen miles. By the end of the forecast period—five days—the average track error over the past five years has been something like 250-260 miles. It’s a static cone that doesn’t take into account large model spread like we’re seeing right now.

The current NHC forecast—you know, the one pointing Joaquin toward the Northeast—is a compromise forecast. It’s splitting the difference between models that send Joaquin into the East Coast and models that send Joaquin out to sea. I’m willing to say it’s unlikely—not impossible, but unlikely—that Joaquin will split the difference and head toward Long Island.

Here’s the discussion straight from the NHC explaining why they issued the forecast they did at 11:00 AM:

This pattern evolution should cause Joaquin to turn northwestward in 24 hours or so and then turn northward. After 36 hours, the guidance remains very divergent. The Canadian, GFDL, HWRF, and NAVGEM models forecast Joaquin to turn northwestward and make landfall over the Carolinas and mid-Atlantic States. The ECMWF continues to forecast a slower northeastward motion taking Joaquin near Bermuda and out to sea. The UKMET and GFS are in between these extremes showing a generally northward motion. Given the spread and the possibility that the 1200 UTC guidance could show additional changes, the forecast track after 36 hours is nudged only slightly to the east at this time. The new track lies to the east of the landfalling models, but to the west of the GFS, UKMET, ECMWF, and the various consensus models. Further adjustments to the track may be needed later today depending on how the models do (or do not) change.

Given the fact that it’s a compromise that splits the difference between hard left and hard right, I’m going to skip posting it this time around. The forecast map is over at the National Hurricane Center’s website if you want to take a look at it. Hopefully things will be clearer at the 5:00 PM or 11:00 PM EDT advisories.

Long Live the Euro

They’re popping bottles in England today as the European model seems poised to have landed a decisive win in the battle of the computer algorithms. Hurricane Joaquin is encountering a complicated weather pattern in which one small change could have a dramatic impact on the final outcome. For the past few days, we’ve lurched from one model run to the next in an attempt to nail down Hurricane Joaquin’s ultimate track; most models said it would veer west into the United States, while the European model held steady for days in insisting that the storm would head out to sea.

More Than a Foot of Rain Is Possible on the East Coast With or Without Hurricane Joaquin

Thankfully, the GFS (American) model has swung around to the Euro’s point of view, sending Joaquin parallel to the East Coast before hanging a right near Atlantic Canada and heading out into the open ocean. This is not a done deal, however. The above graphic is a spaghetti model showing the different tracks Joaquin’s eye takes according to different models. The resulting tracks look like spaghetti—closer lines indicate greater consensus than lines that are spread out.

Even though the GFS and Euro now show an offshore solution for Joaquin, there are some models that still show Joaquin making landfall on the East Coast. You can’t let your guard down yet—anyone from Charleston to Boston needs to watch this storm like a hawk. If this storm does make landfall, it will turn an already-dangerous flooding situation into a disaster.

Prepare Anyway

The list below is the same as the one I wrote for yesterday’s post about Joaquin, with an added point about pets. It’s important information, not only to prepare for the hurricane, but to also prepare for the potential for extensive inland flooding from the big rainfall event that will precede any potential effects of the hurricane.

  • With already-saturated ground, it won’t take much wind to knock down trees and power lines. If your municipality’s water pumping station loses power and they don’t have a backup in place, you lose your running water.
  • Make sure you have enough non-perishable food and bottled water to last everyone in your household a week or longer. Canned food like ravioli, peanut butter and jelly, bread, durable fruit (for example, fresh, whole apples hold up well), stuff like that.
  • Don’t forget about food and supplies for your pets.
  • Just before the worst of the storm, fill up your bathtubs and sinks with water. You’ll need this water to pour in your toilet tank to flush if water service goes out.
  • If the power goes out, you’ll need plenty of batteries to power flashlights and radios. Candles work for lighting, too, but you need to watch them like a hawk. The only thing worse than a bad storm is your house burning down during a bad storm.
  • Think about your cell phones—portable chargers or car chargers are a must. Make sure you have another way to communicate (and old flip phone or landline) in case something happens to your cell phone. If you have an old cell phone lying around, they can still dial 911 even if it’s not connected to a paid service anymore.
  • Keep your car as full of gas as possible and make sure the battery isn’t on its last gasps. If your power goes out, your car will serve as your giant, expensive phone charger, if nothing else.
  • Keep some cash on hand. If the power, telephone, and/or internet go down, you won’t be able to use debit or credit cards.
  • Make sure you have prescription medicine to last you a week or longer.
    Prepare a first aid kit complete with stuff like bandages, peroxide, antibacterial cream, pain medication, and stuff to calm down an upset stomach.
  • Make sure you have enough personal hygiene products—stuff like toilet paper, deodorant, pads and tampons, toothpaste, and all that. Don’t forget hand sanitizer and baby wipes in case the water goes out. Keeping your hands clean could prevent a nasty illness.
  • Photograph and document valuable belongings in case they’re damaged or lost during the storm. It’ll help for insurance purposes, if not just to look back and remember them one day.Keep important documents (social security cards, birth/death/marriage/divorce/immigration/deed papers, diplomas, business documents you’re hiding from the government, etc.) in a watertight, safe location. Put them in one waterproof container after the other if possible.

Flood Safety

With the amount of rain expected to fall over areas where the ground is already saturated, even areas that don’t normally flood could see significant problems with so much precipitation on the way.

If you live in a flood zone, you more than likely already know what to do. If you go under a flood or flash flood warning, get to higher ground as soon as possible. If it’s too late, get as high in your home as possible and let emergency crews know where you are so they can come rescue you during/after the event.

Make a mental map and think of all the routes you take on a normal day. Check around to see if those roads flood when it rains heavily—make sure you have a couple of routes to get to work/school and back home if one or more of your routes is flooded out. If at all possible, stay home during the heaviest rain.

The number one reason people die in floods in the United States is because they tried to drive across a flooded roadway, underestimating the depth of the water only to drown before help could arrive. It doesn’t take much water to lift a vehicle and carry it downstream—only a foot in most cases. Even large vehicles like pickup trucks can stall out and/or get hurled downstream.

It sounds like common sense—it is!—but do not drive through a flooded roadway. Every year, thousands of people do it, and many of them get stuck and force rescue crews to risk their lives to swim out there and rescue them or recover their bodies. There is nothing on the other side of a flood that’s worth risking your life and the lives of those who have to rescue you.

Full forecasts from the National Hurricane Center are issued at 5:00 and 11:00 AM/PM, with position and wind updates every three hours in between. Local National Weather Service offices are responsible for issuing flash flood watches/warnings, as well as rainfall forecasts for individual locations.

[Satellite Loop: NASA and NOAA | Jet Stream: Tropical Tidbits | Spaghetti Model: WeatherBELL | Rainfall Map: author | I updated this post at 4:52 PM to embed a new map showing updated rainfall predictions from the WPC.]


Email: dennis.mersereau@gawker.com | Twitter: @wxdam

My new book, The Extreme Weather Survival Manual, comes out next Tuesday! You can pre-order it now from Amazon.


500 Days of Kristin, Day 249: Dinner Last Week

True Stories of Violent Cops From a New Report on NYPD Use of Force

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True Stories of Violent Cops From a New Report on NYPD Use of Force

A man pushed to the ground by a police officer because he was locked out of his apartment. A cop who punched someone in the face for riding his bike on the sidewalk, and another who pulled his gun on a man for filming him. These are a few of the horror stories contained within a new report on NYPD use of force.

Today, the NYPD Inspector General’s office—an independent agency tasked with investigating and auditing the NYPD’s operations—released a report on the department’s use of force between 2010 and 2014. Its conclusions, based on a study of 179 instances, are at times sadly unsurprising (black people are grossly overrepresented as the victims of excessive force); and other times more novel (newer officers tended to use force more readily than more experienced cops). Broadly, it suggests that the department’s policies on using violence are vague and often unenforced—a revelation NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton preempted this morning by announcing that he plans to quickly implement some of the reforms for which the inspector general advocates.

http://gawker.com/nypd-to-ask-of...

More persuasive than the statistics is a series of five vignettes that document particularly egregious cases of police force. The report frames these as instances in which cops failed to deescalate tense situations before they became violent; just as often, however, the officers are the instigators of the violence themselves. Several of the perpetrators were not punished even after investigations ruled against them.

The stories, sourced from complaints to the NYPD’s Civilian Complaint Review Board that were substantiated by evidence, are reproduced below.

The apartment lock-out

At approximately 2:40 a.m. in Manhattan, a 45‐year‐old male complainant walked out of his apartment to take out the trash and locked himself out of the building.

In the video footage of the encounter, the man can be seen speaking to two officers as he attempts to explain his predicament. The subject officer walks away toward the entrance of the apartment building as the complainant continues speaking with the second officer. The man is visibly frustrated by the situation and is waving his hands around as he speaks.

According to the CCRB investigative report, the subject officer stated that he smelled alcohol on the complainant’s breath and did not believe that he was a resident of the building. When the officers asked the man for identification, he replied that he did not have it. The man further stated that he had locked himself out of his apartment. The subject officer told the complainant that he could not enter the building and that he had to leave because he did not have identification. The subject officer told CCRB that he then asked the complainant to leave three times, and that each time the man responded that he lived in the building.

The video shows the complainant and the subject officer in a heated conversation when the subject officer begins yelling and pointing his finger in the man’s face. The subject officer then aggressively pushes the complainant to the ground. The subject officer walks over to the complainant while he is lying on the ground and continues to yell and point his finger at him.

The second officer failed to intervene when the subject officer initially lost his temper and stood several feet away with his hands in his pockets. The second officer remained passive and did nothing to intervene or take control of the situation, even once the complainant was on the ground and the subject officer continued to yell at him.

CCRB substantiated the force allegation against the subject officer and he ultimately received a Command Discipline.

The 15-year-old

At approximately 12:50 a.m. in Manhattan, a 15‐year‐old male complainant was walking on the sidewalk when he was approached by two officers.

In the audio recording of the encounter, the subject officer initially appears to be the only person speaking to the boy. Moments later, however, a second officer also engages the complainant. The boy protests having been stopped and mentions that the stop was his second in just two blocks.

According to the CCRB investigative report, the subject officer searched the complainant. When the boy objected that there was no cause for the stop, the subject officer asked him to stop using derogatory language and informed him that if he did not comply, he would be arrested.

The audio indicates that the complainant and the subject officer are engaged in a heated conversation during which the subject officer is taking exception to the boy protesting the rationale for the stop. Each time the complainant speaks, it appears to intensify the ensuing verbal responses of both officers. A scuffle ensues between the subject officer and the boy which results in the subject officer pushing him repeatedly.

CCRB substantiated the force allegation against the subject officer, but he ultimately received no discipline.

The bicycle punch-out

At approximately 9:00 p.m. in Queens, a 26‐year‐old male complainant was riding his bicycle on the sidewalk when he was approached by four officers.

In the video footage of the encounter, the subject officer initially appears to be the only person speaking to the complainant. The complainant is visibly angry, waving his hands about and moving around the sidewalk with the three other officers flanking him.

According to the CCRB investigative report, the subject officer had asked the man for identification. The complainant said he did not have it. The subject officer then asked him to provide his name, and when the man refused to do so, the subject officer informed him that he would be arrested if he did not comply.

The video shows the complainant and the subject officer in a heated conversation when the subject officer punches the man in the face four times. The subject officer then bends down and pulls out the complainant’s legs from beneath him, causing him to fall backwards onto the sidewalk. The subject officer then delivers another two punches to the man while he is on the ground.

Throughout the entire encounter, one of the four officers has been standing to the side observing the interaction. This officer does not intervene after the first, second, third, or fourth strike to the complainant’s face, and he does not even move. The officer stands passively, a few feet away, with his thumbs hooked in his belt. Only once the man is on the ground and has been struck a fifth and sixth time does that officer approach, place one hand on the subject officer’s back, and appear to intervene halfheartedly.

CCRB substantiated the force allegation against the subject officer. The other officers’ force allegations were exonerated by CCRB. At the time of the writing of this Report, no disciplinary decision has been reached in this case, despite the matter being in the NYPD disciplinary process for the past seven months.

The racist gunslinger

At approximately 11:00 p.m. in the Bronx, a male complainant was standing within a few feet of three officers and two other men, recording their interaction on his cell phone.

In the video footage of the encounter, the subject officer appears to be assisting two other officers in restraining two combative men in front of the entrance to a building.

According to the CCRB investigative report, the subject officer stopped the men because he suspected they were drinking alcohol in public. When the subject officer approached, he asked the men what they were doing and where they lived. The subject officer then asked them to provide identification, and when they refused to do so, the three officers began to place the men in handcuffs.

The video shows the complainant approaching the officers as they are attempting to place the two other men in handcuffs. The complainant is holding his cell phone with two hands in an attempt to record the interaction between the officers and the men. When the subject officer realizes that the complainant is standing nearby, the subject officer violently swings his right arm towards the complainant’s cell phone, then draws and points his firearm at the complainant and uses profanity and racial epithets while aggressively commanding the complainant to put away the phone.

CCRB substantiated the force allegation against the subject officer. No other force allegations were made against the other officers. Discipline was not imposed in this case because the statute of limitation expired before CCRB forwarded the case to NYPD for disciplinary disposition.

The off-duty cop

At approximately 10:30 p.m. in Queens, a male complainant was standing outside a shopping center with a second male complainant and another man when the first complainant interacted with an off‐duty officer who was entering the premises.

In the video footage of the encounter, the first complainant is seen standing outside the shopping center when the off‐duty subject officer approaches and appears to lightly shove his way through the path of the complainants and the other man. As the officer enters the shopping center, the first complainant can be seen standing outside making a hand gesture with his arms stretched out at his sides to reflect that he was upset by the subject officer’s shove. A clear exchange of words ensues between the first complainant and the subject officer. As the exchange continues, the subject officer can be seen turning around and walking back towards the door of the shopping center to confront the first complainant. While doing so, the subject officer lifts his shirt to reveal his shield and service weapon and unclips an object from the waistband of his shorts. When the subject officer approaches the first complainant, he pushes the first complainant with two hands, causing him to move several feet back. Additionally, the subject officer strikes the second complainant with the object in his right hand. The subject officer is then seen walking away from the men and re‐enters the shopping center.

According to the CCRB investigative report, the subject officer believed that the men standing in front of the shopping center appeared suspicious and were blocking the entrance. The subject officer denied pushing the first complainant and told CCRB that as he attempted to enter, the first complainant advanced in his direction. As a result, the subject officer stretched his arms out to keep him at a distance.

CCRB substantiated the two force allegations against the subject officer. At the time of the writing of this Report, no disciplinary decision has been reached in this case despite the matter being in the NYPD disciplinary process for the past 20 months.


Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Feds Investigating 4chan Thread After Mass Shooting at Oregon Community College

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Feds Investigating 4chan Thread After Mass Shooting at Oregon Community College

According to the New York Times, federal law enforcement officials said they were investigating a thread posted yesterday on /r9k/, a board on 4chan, in which a user warned, “Don’t go to school tomorrow if you are in the northwest.”

http://gawker.com/there-are-repo...

An archived version of the thread is visible here.

The board is currently roiling with speculation about the user’s identity—and the shooter’s as well. At one point on Thursday, Liberty News (?) reports, the board identified the shooter as one Toby Reynolds, a.k.a. “Egg Man.”

On Twitter, however, NBC News reporter Tom Winter said that Reynolds had spoken to NBC. The shooter in Oregon was shot by police after killing 13 and injuring at least 7 more at Umpqua Community College.


Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Inmates Name Violent "Captain America" Officer In Abuse Scandal

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Inmates Name Violent "Captain America" Officer In Abuse Scandal

Amid the sordid details of this August New York Times story of a “campaign of retribution” against inmates after the escape of two prisoners from Clinton Correctional Facility was an evocative description of one particular perpetrator:

Victor Aponte, who worked in the prison tailor shop where Mr. Matt also had a job, said a guard with an American flag tattoo, known at the prison as Captain America, tied a plastic bag around Mr. Aponte’s neck in an interrogation and tightened it until he passed out.

Today, nearly two months later, the Times is reporting the identity of this flag-enthusiast guard. He is identified as Chad Stickney, reportedly a gang intelligence officer and one-time chief steward of a corrections officer union, who has a bit of a history of bad behavior. Specifically, he’s been sued three times for assault or harassment.

Let the Times tell it:

One of the lawsuits was terminated after the inmate who filed it died. Two others are still active, including a suit filed in September by Terry Daum, an inmate who claimed that Officer Stickney punched him several times in the head and grabbed his genitals during a search. The lawsuit also said “Stickney utilized his hand to aggressively rub plaintiff’s rectum like a credit card swipe and then attempted to jam his fingertips into plaintiff’s rectum.”

Inmates reportedly felt compelled to aid the Times investigation due to the glacial pace and apparent lack of progress in the corrections agency’s own investigation. And while that investigation lags, instances of retribution continue: inmates who spoke to the Times for the August report told of being placed on 23-hour lockdown for fabricated infractions, or for no stated reason whatsoever.

Asked about reports of prisoner abuse at the hands of corrections officers, Governor Cuomo explained things thusly: “It is a very, very difficult job. They have to make sure they get a certain amount of respect in the job, otherwise they get hurt.”

[New York Times]

Photo via AP

10 Dead After Mass Shooting at Oregon Community College

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10 Dead After Mass Shooting at Oregon Community College

At least ten people are reportedly dead after a gunman opened fire this morning at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. At least seven were injured.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the shooter is in custody. The shooting reportedly took place just after 10:40 am local time in Snyder Hall, the campus cafeteria, and near the school’s entrance.

Update 11:30 pm:

Update 10:00 pm: According to an FBI spokesperson, the shooter was among the 10 dead, the AP reports.

Update 8:00 pm: Sheriff Hanlin has given another press conference, in which he revised the casualty count: 10 people have been killed, and 7 people were injured (not 20, as previously reported). Three people were wounded critically.

Update 7:20 pm: Via CNN’s Brian Stelter, here is audio from the police response to the shooting.

Update 6:35 pm: President Obama addresses the nation in one of his strongest speeches he’s given after a mass shooting to date “This is a political choice that we make. To allow this to happen every few months in America. We collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction,” he says. “Each time this happens I’m going to bring this up. Each time this happens I am going to say we can actually do something about it. But we’re going to have to change our laws… I hope and pray I don’t have to come out again during my time as president to offer my condolences.”

UPDATE 6:19 pm: ABC News, citing local officials, reports that the gunman was a student at Umpqua.

UPDATE 5:08 pm: CNN reports that four guns were recovered from the scene. All four are believed to have belonged to the gunman.

UPDATE 4:45 pm: At a press conference, Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin told reporters that the gunman was killed during a shootout with law enforcement officers. Hanline didn’t confirm the shooter’s identity or the number of victims.

Gov. Kate Brown later told reporters that the shooter was a 20-year-old male.

UPDATE 4:35 pm: NRToday spoke to several witnesses, one of whom said the shooting was apparently motivated:

Kortney Moore, 18, from Rogue River, was in her Writing 115 class in Snyder Hall when one shot came through a window. She saw her teacher get shot in the head. The shooter was inside at that point, and he told people to get on the ground. The shooter was asking people to stand up and state their religion and then started firing away, Moore said. Moore was lying there with people who had been shot.

...

Brady Winder, 23, of Portland, said he was in the room next door when he heard a loud thud that didn’t sound like a gunshot. He then heard a percussion of gunshots and the students all fled out the front door.

They left “like ants, people screaming, “Get out!” Winder said.

He saw a girl swim across the creek while fleeing.

UPDATE 4:21 pm: Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum told MSNBC that 13 people were killed in the shooting and that the gunman is dead.

UPDATE 3:56 pm: NBC News is reporting that the death toll from the shooting is now 13. According to CNN, the shooter is a male in his late 20s.

UPDATE 3:43 pm: Chelsea Gorrow at The Register-Guard spoke to a witness who said the gunman was a male who acted alone.

The same witness told Gorrow that police shot the gunman.

UPDATE 3:01 pm: KATU reports ten people are confirmed dead. Mercy Medical in Roseburg is reportedly treating six people, with more expected. Meanwhile, students and faculty at Umpqua are being evacuated from the campus.

UPDATE 2:37 pm: KATU and KVAL, citing Oregon State police, now report that between seven and 10 people were killed, not 15 as originally reported.

Below are tweets purportedly from a Umpqua student:

UPDATE 2:30 pm: KATU is reporting that 15 people were killed.

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Reports: Oregon Community College Shooter Identified as Chris Harper Mercer

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Reports: Oregon Community College Shooter Identified as Chris Harper Mercer

The gunman who killed 10 people at Umpqua Community College, in Roseburg, Oregon, today has been identified as 26-year-old Chris Harper Mercer, CBS News reports, citing law enforcement sources.

NBC News is reporting the same name, and clarifies further that Mercer is not a student. “He appears to be an angry young man who was very filled with hate,” one law enforcement official told the New York Times. Officials said Mercer lived in the Roseburg area.

On a dating website, a man who CBS identifies as Mercer describes himself as “Not Religious, but Spiritual.”

In one post from a blog kept on a torrent-uploading website, a user who would seem to be Mercer meditates on the actions of Vester Flanagan, the deranged man who filmed himself fatally shooting two former co-workers this summer:

I have noticed that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are. A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems the more people you kill, the more your’re in the limelight.

The most recent torrent uploaded by the account (username “lithium_love,” which is associated with an email address Mercer is known to have used) is a documentary about the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting.


Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

At Least 10 Reported Killed, Including Five Americans, In C-130 Crash

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At Least 10 Reported Killed, Including Five Americans, In C-130 Crash

Multiple outlets are reporting as many as 12 fatalities, including five American service members, in a C-130 crash during liftoff at Jalalabad Airport in Afghanistan.

From a CBS News report:

Five of the dead were U.S. service members that were the crew of the aircraft, five were civilian contractors who were passengers, and two were local Afghan civilians who were killed on the ground, the military official said.

The civilian contractors were working with “Resolute Support,” the NATO-led mission to train and advise Afghan security forces. It follows the military mission in Afghanistan after combat operations ended at the end of 2014.

An anonymous U.S. defense official spoke with the Associated Press and confirmed 12 deaths in the crash.

The transport plane went down shortly after midnight local time. Reports indicate no hostile activity was observed or reported in the area of the airport at the time of the crash, and no cause has otherwise been determined.

[CBS News] [Reuters] [AP]

Photo via VanderWolf Images / Shutterstock.com


15 Million T-Mobile Customer Records Compromised In Experian Hack

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15 Million T-Mobile Customer Records Compromised In Experian Hack

Hold onto your butts, T-Mobile customers: 15 million of you just had your records gobbled up in a hack of credit giant Experian.

In a letter to customers posted today on the T-Mobile website, CEO John J. Legere spells out the gruesome details:

These records include information such as name, address and birthdate as well as encrypted fields with Social Security number and ID number (such as driver’s license or passport number), and additional information used in T-Mobile’s own credit assessment. Experian has determined that this encryption may have been compromised.

The breach includes the records of any applicants requiring credit checks for service or device financing from September 2013 through September 16, 2015.

Experian is careful to note that this breach did not compromise their vast consumer credit database, where credit records are compiled for virtually all Americans. Whew. Experian has now managed to keep the mother lode* safe through two recent massive data breaches—back in 2013 a 24-year-old Vietnamese national was indicted in New Hampshire for accessing and selling hundreds of thousands of sensitive customer records from Experian databases, for the purposes of identity theft.

Also:

Consumers should note that under no circumstances will Experian or T-Mobile call you or send you a message and ask for your personal information in connection with this incident.

T-Mobile and Experian do offer a few helpful tools and suggestions for those affected, including not one but two fairly comprehensive FAQ sites, and links to a free identity protection and resolution service. The Experian FAQ is very clear that the nature of the compromised data does present an increased risk for identity theft, so probably you should get cracking on protecting yourself from the fallout of this thing.

[T-Mobile]

Photo via Northfoto / Shutterstock.com

Report: Shooting In Tampa Area Leaves Three Dead, One Injured

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Report: Shooting In Tampa Area Leaves Three Dead, One Injured

A local FOX affiliate is reporting that Levy County Sheriff’s deputies responded to a domestic disturbance just after 6 p.m. tonight in Inglis, Florida, and found the bodies of two victims and that of the shooter himself, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A third victim was transported to an area hospital with serious injuries. Neither the victims nor the shooter have been identified by authorities.

[FOX 13]

Photo via Shutterstock

Get A Load Of Ben Carson, Going All The Way In On American Muslims

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Get A Load Of Ben Carson, Going All The Way In On American Muslims

Panderin’-ass Ben Carson seems to have found the niche any not-remotely-serious-and-therefore-totally-plausible Republican candidate needs in these ridiculous times, and his, apparently, is Bold Antagonizer Of Muslims. Look at him go!

After enjoying a polling and fundraising bump following his reckless assertion that America should never have a Muslim president—never!—Carson today came back with flying elbow drops on this festering horse corpse, starting a petition calling on the IRS to punish the Council on American-Islamic Relations, apparently for the heinous crime of daring to talk back while being Muslim.

A recap: after Carson’s appearance on “Meet the Press” in which he described Islam as inconsistent with the Constitution, Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations issued the following response: “You cannot hold these kinds of views and at the same time say you will represent all Americans, of all faiths and backgrounds.” Seems reasonable enough!

According to Carson, via this statement the organization has “brazenly violated IRS rules” and the agency should “properly do its job and punish the real violators of America’s laws and regulations.”

Hooper’s response to this petition:

“We find it interesting that Dr. Carson seeks to use a federal government agency to silence his critics and wonder if that tactic would be used to suppress First Amendment freedoms should he become president.”

Is that what Carson’s doing, though? Or is it instead that the only wind in his sails is his apparent willingness to stoke anti-Muslim sentiments among lunatic conservatives? Hmmmm.

[AP]

Photo via AP

The Vatican Clarifies: The Pope's Meeting With Kim Davis Was More of a Pity Thing

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The Vatican Clarifies: The Pope's Meeting With Kim Davis Was More of a Pity Thing

After several days of unflattering discussion about the Cool Pope’s date with arguably the least cool woman in America, the Vatican has finally stepped forward to try to salvage his reputation: yes, he did meet with her, but it was more of a pity thing and not, say, a papal endorsement of her backwards views.

http://gawker.com/kim-davis-lawy...

The carefully-worded statement issued by the Vatican Friday walks back the notion that the Pope met with Davis to offer support for her frankly illegal actions. Elaborating on the details of the “brief” meeting, the Vatican pointedly clarifies that the Pope only granted a “real audience” to a former student who is definitely not Kim Davis.

The Vatican also seems to suggest Kim’s so-called audience—which her lawyer immediately leaked to the press—was not requested by the pope and that he only blessed her out of the kindness of his heart.

The brief meeting between Mrs. Kim Davis and Pope Francis at the Apostolic Nunciature in Washington, DC has continued to provoke comments and discussion. In order to contribute to an objective understanding of what transpired I am able to clarify the following points:

Pope Francis met with several dozen persons who had been invited by the Nunciature to greet him as he prepared to leave Washington for New York City. Such brief greetings occur on all papal visits and are due to the Pope’s characteristic kindness and availability. The only real audience granted by the Pope at the Nunciature was with one of his former students and his family.

The Pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects.

“His meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects.”

Does Kim Davis—a small-town county clerk who denied gays their basic human rights, got famous, and got to shake hands with the pope—care? I’m guessing nah.

http://gawker.com/kim-davis-i-wo...


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

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