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materialsworld · 5 years

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Materials World’s top feature of 2019

As 2019 is drawing to a close, the Materials World team wanted to highlight a couple of stories to end the year on a high note. On Wednesday we shared the news story that got the most clicks on our website in 2019. Today, we are sharing the top feature. We hope you enjoy and Merry Christmas from the editorial team.

15 UNDER 30

By: Idha Valeur

IOM3 is looking to the future and celebrating young talent and ambition. Idha Valeur talks to the ones to watch in STEM.

Kyle Saltmarsh Age: 27 Job: Robotics Engineer at Woodside Energy. Education: PhD Engineering in Submarine Vibration and Acoustics, BSc in Physics and Applied Mathematics, BME (Honours). Current project: Deployment of robotic technology onto Woodside’s oil and gas plant for surveillance, and performing tasks through robot manipulation. Achievements: Best honours thesis, several hackathon wins, top IBM 2018 graduate in Australia/New Zealand, 2018 Young Persons’ World Lecture Competition Winner, world’s largest bungee jumper, blogger and hosting a podcast to inspire people in technology. Ultimate goal: To positively impact the world through the power of technology.

Kyle Saltmarsh Image credit: Brent Campbell

Jennie Palmer Age: 26 Job: Research Engineer. Education: Undertaking an EngD in Structural Metals for Gas Turbine Applications, BEng in Aerospace Engineering, with a year in industry, Swansea University. Current project: I am researching the development of bespoke test facilities and fundamental understanding of thermo-mechanical fatigue crack growth behaviour in titanium alloys. Achievements: Graduating with a BEng in Aerospace Engineering with First-Class Honours, presenting my research at national and international conferences, having research published in an internationally recognised journal and a Green Belt Certificate in Lean Six Sigma. Ultimate goal: To become a well-established, technical expert in my engineering field.

Jennie Palmer Image credit: Jemima Bond

Ilija Rašović Age: 27 Job: Lecturer at University of Birmingham Education: MEng in Materials Science at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. DPhil in Materials at St Cross College, Oxford. Current project: The use of fullerenes — nanometre-sized balls of carbon — in biomedical applications. One of the methods I have devised, to make them soluble in water, helps in the formation of large self-assembled structures that hold great promise as multi-modal drug delivery vehicles. Achievements: The IOM3 international Literature Review Prize in 2016. Final of the IOM3 Young Persons’ World Lecture Competition in 2017. I joined the P1 Graphene Solutions as an advanced materials engineer and became a lecturer at the University of Birmingham. In 2019, I joined IOM3’s Younger Members’ Committee. Ultimate goal: To make a contribution to the wide deployment of transformative nanomedicine in a clinical setting within my lifetime. My broader vision is to continue to champion materials science and make more accessible the obfuscated world of academic research.

Ilija Rašović

Amanda Field Age: 25 Job: Development Engineer. Education: BEng Materials Science and Technology, University of Birmingham. Current project: Trying to finish my PhD on additive manufacturing of tungsten for nuclear fusion reactors. It’s challenging but worthwhile because the success of nuclear fusion would go a long way to solving the energy crisis. I’m working in additive manufacturing. Achievements: I have presented my work at international conferences. I was involved with an experimental parabolic flight campaign for the European Space Agency where we used a demonstrator device to 3D print metal in zero gravity. I came second in the IOM3 Young Persons Lecture Competition. Ultimate Goal: To keep working in additive manufacturing. I’d like to stay in R&D as you get such variety in your role and you have the potential to make significant improvements to a product or a technology, or design new ones yourself.

Amanda Field Image credit: Luke Carter

Jack Saunders Age: 25 Job: PhD Student in Materials Chemistry. Education: MChem with a year in industry, University of Manchester. Undertaking a PhD in Materials Chemistry, University of Manchester, in collaboration with AkzoNobel. Current project: To analyse the impact of different polymers on the corrosion protection afforded by emulsion paints. I aim to achieve this by synthesising and testing polymer’s corrosion performance. This is to better understand how polymer chemistry can affect the corrosion protection offered by the dried paint. Achievements: A First Class Master’s degree in chemistry. My PhD at the School of Materials at The University of Manchester. Awarded the President’s Doctoral Scholar Award. Presented my work at conferences such as the RSC’s MacroGroup YRM, Dublin, 2018. Won the regional Young Persons’ Lecture Competition this year. Ultimate goal: To develop my research and management skills in order to have my own research group in the field of polymer chemistry and colloid science.

Jack Saunders Image credit: University of Manchester Megan McGregor Age: 25 Job: PhD Candidate at the Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy, University of Cambridge. Education: MSci in Natural Sciences, University of Cambridge, specialising in Materials Science. Current project: A PhD project investigating a new intermetallic alloy for commercial gas turbine engines. Specifically, trying to develop a novel coating material required to attach abrasives onto the end of rotating turbine blades, in pursuit of a more efficient sealing system. Achievements: I enjoy teaching in the department, and was recently awarded the Departmental Demonstrator Prize. I talked at the Cambridge Science Festival and the inaugural Cambridge Soapbox Science event. I will be representing the South Eastern Region in the final of the IOM3 Young Persons’ Lecture Competition this year, selected for an RCUK Public Policy Internship at the Government Office for Science in 2018, where I got to contribute to government policy. Ultimate goal: To see the material I am working on make it into a commercial gas turbine engine. I want to take my expertise in this area into industry, and be able to contribute to the development of the hybrid-electric aircraft sector.

Megan McGregor Image credit: Andrew Jeskins

Abigail Georgia Robinson Age: 22 Job: Geology student. Education: MGeol in Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of St Andrews, graduating in 2020. Current project: I will co-lead an expedition to the Lofdal Complex, Namibia, which hosts a suite of carbonatitic and silicic igneous rocks, some of which are enriched in heavy rare earth elements. I aim to integrate geological field data with geochemical and isotopic datasets to model the petrogenesis of the scientifically interesting igneous rocks. Achievements: I was awarded the prestigious Laidlaw Scholarship in Research and Leadership in 2018. This supported my field campaign in Armenia, to investigate the interplay between climate change, hydrology and medieval irrigation systems. I did a research placement at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre where I learned to code in Python and used this to statistically investigate the geographical origin of lunar meteorites across the lunar surface. This work was included in Dr Marissa Tremblay’s published abstract and presentation at the 2019 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, USA. Ultimate goal: I plan to embark on a PhD on the tectonically imposed planet-wide cycling of the volatile elements. I plan to be an active communicator promoting an understanding of geoscience and the global scale problems that we, the geoscientists, can work to solve.

Abigail Robinson Image credit: Evan Margerum

Federica Rosaria Lisa Age: 24 Job: Technical Graduate at British Steel. Education: MChem Chemistry with Forensic Science with a year in industry, University of Leicester. Current project: A variety of research and development projects – one on understanding and reducing the factors that influence power and electrode consumption at the ladle arc furnaces in the secondary steelmaking process. Achievements: Graduated with a First Class Honours and secured a 12-month industrial placement and a place on a graduate programme. I succeeded in my secondary school exams after moving to a new continent and starting International School. Ultimate goal: To work for a sustainable discovery/development that will improve lives and I would like to lead a company. I would also like to promote the importance of education, support developing countries in the construction of more schools and strengthen the educational system.

Frederica Lisa Image credit: Johnny Gallagher Daniel Everington Age: 26 Job: Materials Technologist – Surface Engineering. Education: MEng Aerospace Engineering with a year in industry, University of Sheffield. Current project: Surface engineering at Rolls-Royce. I’m involved with different projects across the engine, including compressor sealing systems, hot end environmental protection and anti-seize coatings. Achievements: Developed a novel method to flow test ceramic filters used in the investment casting process. The technique contributed to a 3% improvement in casting yield and the reduced variation helps lower the amount of metal. Patents may be filed on the work. Ultimate goal: I’d like to work with academia to co-develop novel coatings/surface treatments. I enjoy the challenges that come with working on new technology as the answers can’t simply be found in a textbook.

Daniel Everington Image credit: Alistair Coast-Smith

Louise Gale Age: 28 Job: Materials Engineer at Rolls-Royce Plc. Education: MSci & MA in Natural Sciences, specialising in Materials Science, University of Cambridge. Current project: The development of ceramic matrix composites for introduction into aerospace gas turbine engines. My responsibilities include running mechanical testing programmes, supervising work at our university partners as well as the analysis and fractography of tested samples to elucidate damage mechanisms. Achievements: Completing the Rolls-Royce Graduate Scheme, including obtaining funding for an international placement in the Materials Testing Department in Berlin. I became Technical Lead of a £2.5mln project which was part of a government-funded programme to develop SiC/SiC ceramic matrix composites. I developed the £7mln, three-year materials development component to the follow on project that was approved in late 2017. Ultimate goal: To become an expert on ceramic and composite materials systems.

Louise Gale Image credit: Stephen Gale

James Grant Age: 24 Job: EngD student with TATA Steel and M2A, Materials and Manufacturing Academy. Education: School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University, College of Engineering, Swansea University. Current project: Development of novel coating solutions for the improvement of pre/post heat treatment of carbon steel conveyance tubes. My project aims to reduce high-temperature oxidation caused by the normalising process. Achievements: I developed a novel anodisation system for fabricating alumina masks in the molecular beam epitaxy application. In addition to this, my placement with Merck successfully optimised electrophoretic fluids to further enhance the E-ink display technology. I’ve been competing in the 2019 IOM3 Young Persons Lecture Competition. Having won the SWMA heat and the South West Regional, presenting at the national final in May. Ultimate goal: To educate and encourage the next generation of students to take up STEM subjects. I hope I can engage and excite a younger audience about materials science and demonstrate the opportunities available in engineering.

James Grant Image credit: James Grant

Vidya Chamundeswari Narasimhan Age: 28 years Job: Post-doctoral Research Fellow Department of Materials Science and Engineering, NTU. Education: PhD in Materials Engineering. Current project: Developing responsive nasogastric tubes for the elderly and using nature-derived biopolymers for biomedical applications. Achievements: Young Scientist Award conferred by VIWA in India, Title Winner of the IOM3 Young Persons’ World Lecture Competition 2017, Women in Engineering Travel Grant in 2018, Chair of the Young Scientists Forum at the European Materials Research Society conference in Poland 2018. Ultimate goal: To lead and manage a diverse team, foster interdisciplinary collaboration and offer R&D support for cutting edge research in the healthcare sector. I also want to contribute significantly towards mentoring the next generation of young girls towards pursuing exciting careers in STEM fields.

Vidya Chamundeswari Image credit: Dr Rohit Satish Frederick Cooper Age: 28 Job: Research Engineer and PhD student. Education: BEng with Honours, Swansea University. Current project: Microstructural and mechanical characterisation of flow formed F1E – a novel, maraging steel. Achievements: Used flow form to develop materials for detailed metallographic, micro-textural, and mechanical assessment. I run two small businesses, have an Associate Diploma from the National College of Music, and an Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy and was appointed as a Yeoman of the Worshipful Company of Tin Plate Workers. Ultimate goal: To complete my current project and transfer a comprehensive mechanical property database detailing static and fatigue performance to a major engineering sponsor – to enable novel component manufacture. Further, I would like to use my experience to develop a career in public engagement or education.

Frederick Cooper Image credit: Lauren Ednie Photography

Robert Hoye Age: 28 Job: Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow. Education: PhD, Cambridge University, BE(Hons). Current project: I am looking at two areas that could accelerate the scale of photovoltaics. This makes an attractive technology for producing clean energy, especially in remote regions. Achievements: Developed a recombination contact to couple a metal-halide perovskite top-cell with an n-type silicon bottom cell, which lead to new design rules to identify promising classes of materials that could tolerate defects, and an all-inorganic device structure that led to 80% external quantum efficiency in solar cells. This went on display in the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden, Germany. 2018 Young Engineer of the Year Award by the Royal Academy of Engineering, which also awarded me £500,000 to start an independent group at the University of Cambridge. European Forbes 30 under 30 list. Ultimate goal: To create new classes of defect-tolerant semiconductors that can be used as low-cost and efficient top-cells in tandem with silicon.

Robert Hoye Image credit: Zoe Chung

Matthew Wadge Age: 24 Job: PhD Researcher. Education: BSc(Hons) Biomedical Materials Science & PhD (ongoing), University Of Nottingham. Current project: Exploring novel formation and ion-exchange reactions of titanate surfaces for biomedical applications. Achievements: Achieved eight awards during my undergraduate degree including the Best Student Prize, Best Project Prize, and The Armourers and Brasiers’ Best Student Prize for achieving the highest project mark within the faculty. I have since won the Armourers and Brasiers’/TWI Best BSc/BEng Student of the Year Award, Best Oral Presentation Prize from the UK Society for Biomaterials Conference in 2018. Published my first journal paper during the first year of my PhD. I am one of the Nottingham coordinators for this year’s Pint of Science festival. Ultimate goal: To try and improve a patient’s quality of life, from improving fixation of hip stems for improved longevity, through to antibacterial surfaces for minimising infections. I aim to continue on into academia post PhD to share my experiences, and hopefully train the next generation of bioengineers and biomaterial scientists.

Matthew Wadge Image credit: Matthew James

#engineering #materials science #innovation #15 under 30 #top #science #STEM #research #young #professionals #iom3

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 years

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Pluralistic: 17 Mar 2020 (Punch Brothers and Masque of the Red Death, 2020 Census (ACT NOW!), Disaster Socialism, Scalzi's canceled tour, my Twitter account was (briefly) nuked, writing advice, Our Plague Year, Inception-level patent troll covid fuckery, tips for parenting kids stuck at home, Brave files GDPR complaint against Google)

Today's links

The Masque of the Red Death and Punch Brothers Punch: My latest podcast is Poe/Twain bathos crossover.

Fill in your census online: Otherwise you and people you care about literally won't count.

Naomi Klein: this disaster has no room for disaster capitalism: It's our moment to seize.

Scalzi's canceled bookstore: Support your local indie bookseller, especially now.

My Twitter account was suspended: I got in trouble for putting trolls on a list called "Colossal Assholes."

Talking digital writing careers with the Writing Excuses podcast: Covering a lot of ground in 15 minutes.

A new anxiety podcast from Nightvale's Joseph Fink: Proud to be in the debut episode.

Patent trolls try to shut down covid testing: Monkey-selfies, Theranos, Softbank – it's a garbage matrioshke!

How to live with your kids: "Working and Learning from Home with Young Children."

Brave files GDPR complaint against Google: Sharing data between Google services is a no-no.

This day in history: 2005, 2015, 2019

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

The Masque of the Red Death and Punch Brothers Punch (permalink)

My last podcast featured the Macmillan audiobook of my novella "The Masque of the Red Death."

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/13/the-masque-of-the-red-death/

For this week's podcast, I decided to read Poe's original 1842 story, "The Masque of the Red Death. It's some next-level gothic stuff. Neil Gaiman is right: Poe must be read aloud!

https://www.poemuseum.org/the-masque-of-the-red-death

As a chaser, I close this week's podcast with a reading of Twain's classic, gothic, comedic "Literary Nightmare," better known as "Punch, Brothers, Punch," easily the best story ever written about an earworm.

Warning: earworms.

https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story/punch-brothers-punch

The two pieces work incredibly well together, making a bathetic cocktail!

Here's where to get the podcast:

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/16/the-masque-of-the-red-death-and-punch-brothers-punch/

Direct MP3 link:

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_333/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_333_-_The_Masque_of_the_Red_Death_Punch_Brothers_Punch.mp3

Here's the RSS for my podcasts:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

Fill in your census online (permalink)

Guess what's happening on April 1, whether or not the nation is on virus lockdown? The 2020 edition of the decennial census, arguably the most consequential administrative task in the US government.

https://my2020census.gov/

You don't have to wait until April 1. Here's that URL again. Whether or not you've gotten a census card with a code, you can and should fill it in.

https://my2020census.gov/

From danah boyd: "Everyone who lives in the US (regardless of nationality or visa status) is required to fill this out. Children under 5 are often forgotten. Same with long-term house guests. Immigrants, black men, and indigenous communities are often undercounted too. If you want to make sure that your community gets its fair share of funding and political power, make sure to get everyone in your community to fill this out. The more people missing, the more you lose out."

If digital isn't your thing, call:

English 844-330-2020 Español 844-468-2020 普通话 844-391-2020 粤语 844-398-2020 tiếng Việt 844-461-2020 한국어 844-392-2020 pусский 844-417-2020 العربية:844-416-2020 Tagalog 844-478-2020 Polish 844-479-2020 Français 844-494-2020 Kreyòl Ayisyen 844-477-2020 Português 844-474-2020 日本語 844-460-2020

If you're reading this, you're on a device that can be used to fill it out.

Naomi Klein: this disaster has no room for disaster capitalism (permalink)

In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein coined "disaster capitalism" to describe how, during a crisis, "ideas lying around" about how to enrich the few and take away our rights come to the fore.

In this short doc, she applies the theory to coronavirus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niwNTI9Nqd8

The shock doctrine is well underway: privatizing social security, closing borders, maybe canceling elections.

But as Klein points out, disasters don't always precipitate oligarchy. The Great Depression catalyzed the New Deal and transformative change.

This is moment to seize. We have "ideas lying around" that are better than exploitation and oligarchy: ideas like a $15 minimum wage, an inclusive government, evidence-based policy free from corporate influence, Medicare for All, and, most of all, the Green New Deal.

Scalzi's canceled bookstore (permalink)

John Scalzi has had to cancel his tour for for The Last Emperox, a book in The Collapsing Empire series. It was the right call for him (and Tor Books to make).

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2020/03/16/important-news-about-the-last-emperox-tour/

Even though it was the right call, it comes at a cost – to John, to Tor, and, especially, to the indie bookstores that rely on author events to keep the lights on. That's why John has urged his readers to "Keep your pre-order at your local bookstore, or make that pre-order at your local bookstore. Your local bookstore needs you right now."

He also suggests that you consider ordering a signed limited edition hardcover from Subterranean:

https://subterraneanpress.com/last-emperox

And John will be going into his local indie to sign books for mail order for so long as it's permitted:

http://www.jayandmarysbooks.com/

Indie booksellers aren't the most endangered or hardest-hit among those who will be devastated by the virus, by official incompetence and indifference, and by monopolism and corruption, but they will still be VERY endangered and VERY hard-hit. They need your support.

My Twitter account was suspended (permalink)

My Twitter account is back!

Here's what happened:

I woke up yesterday morning and discovered that my account was locked. There was no explanation, either in the app, the site or my email for this. I contacted everyone I knew at Twitter, and everyone who knew anyone at Twitter. At 830AM Pacific – about 5h after the suspension – I got an email from support – saying I'd been suspended for having a list to which I add trolls called "colossal assholes."

I'm not sure that this qualifies as a ToS violation (I gave up reporting trolls who called me much worse, because Twitter inevitably replied that these epithets were not prohibited), but it's super-weird that they suspended me without warning or explanation. Also weird: I could not rename the list while suspended, only delete it (I tried to rename it "thoroughly unpleasant individuals").

Weirder: "Colossal assholes" got me suspended, but not its companion list, "Toe-faced shitweasels"

Thanks to everyone who contacted Twitter on my behalf, and for the Twitter folks who lit a fire to get that suspension explanation email sent my way.

All of my followers were deleted. Twitter tells me they'll reappear over 24h or so, but more than 100k are still missing. If you're interested in seeing my future tweets, please double-check that you're subscribed.

Also, in response to Twitter's sensitivity about "colossal assholes" as a listname, I've renamed and expanded my lists.

Potent emetics

Tissue-thin bad faith

Foolish timewasters

Beneath contempt

Odious nonsense-spewers

Confederate gravy-eaters

Toe-faced stenchweasels

Hilariously inept lackwits

Probably bots

Thick as two short planks

Raving conspiracists

Sociopath climate deniers

Dim bulb centrists

Inept MAGA trolls

Red scare bedwetters

Talking digital writing careers with the Writing Excuses podcast (permalink)

Back when cruise ships were a thing, I went out on the Writing Excuses Cruise as an instructor with Mary Robinette Kowal and friends. While there, we recorded an episode of the Writing Excuses podcast.

https://podplayer.net/?id=99014840

In a mere 25 minutes, we pack in a lot of material: how to break into the field, what a publisher's job is, how "digital is different," self-promotion, not being an unlikable weirdo when you're self-promoting, technology's role in shaping artistic success, and more.

Here's an MP3:

https://writingexcuses.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/WX15_11_digital_is_different.mp3

And here's the RSS to subscribe to the podcast:

https://writingexcuses.com/feed/podcast/

A new anxiety podcast from Nightvale's Joseph Fink (permalink)

Our Plague Year is a new podcast from Joseph Fink of Welcome to Nightvale fame. It features short spoken-word essays about this extraordinary, scary, uncertain time.

https://ourplagueyear.libsyn.com/

The debut installment just went live and I was proud to contribute a piece to it, "Don't Look for the Helpers," which PM Press will be publishing in text form shortly.

https://ourplagueyear.libsyn.com/the-lesson-of-a-plague

Also in this episode: "Social Distances" by Nisi Shawl.

MP3 here:

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/ourplagueyear/The_Lesson_of_a_Plague.mp3

Patent trolls try to shut down covid testing (permalink)

It's nearly impossible to sum up all the terrible in this story about a patent troll who is attacking America's ability to make and distribute coronovirus test-kits.

Labrador Diagnostics LLC is a patent troll (💩) that bought two of Theranos's patents (💩💩). They're a shell company spun up by Fortress Investment Group, Softbank's (💩💩💩) giant patent troll (💩💩💩💩). They're suing Biofire, a company that actually makes things (as opposed to Labrador, which only makes lawsuits). Which things are Biofire making? Covid-19 tests (💩💩💩💩💩).

They're represented by Irell & Manella, a lawfirm that previously claimed to represent a monkey. No, really. (💩💩💩💩💩💩)

It's inception-level terrible, a grifty shit burrito encased in a shit-flour tortilla, wrapped in a layer of shit-foil, and served in a go-bag of shitty, shitty, shit.

This is the kind of shit-matrioshke that could wipe out our species.

How to live with your kids (permalink)

I'm really impressed with Erin Kissane's "Working and Learning from Home with Young Children" – an important sanity check for anyone ramping up a new way of relating to our kids.

http://incisive.nu/2020/working-and-learning-from-home/

"Don't be Captain Homeschool on day one" is definitely a lesson we've already learned the hard way, and I'm excited to try out its antidote, "Rhythms > schedules":

"A simple rhythm is resilient, so when something goes sideways, recovery is much simpler."

Also impressed by the accompanying "rhythm chart" (something something "rhythm method" something something "parenting").

"Hold a morning household meeting" is something we're definitely doing, albeit awkwardly because we're taking advantage of the school break to let our kid do the sleeping in she never gets to do otherwise, so we're already up and about by the time she's ready for this.

Also impressed by the recco for the Raising Free People podcast, for unschoolers, free schoolers, Adlerians and democratic parents.

https://www.raisingfreepeople.com/podcast/

Brave files GDPR complaint against Google (permalink)

It's long been obvious that US Big Tech companies are unserious about their GDPR compliance, taking cosmetic, pro-forma measures that don't really engage with the substance of the rules (those rules demand nothing less than a top-to-bottom industry restructure).

EU regulators have been slow to punish them for this, but the GDRP affords standing to many private actors to demand action for noncompliance, which is how it is that Brave has filed GDPR action against Google.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/brave-browser-delivers-on-promise-files-gdpr-complaint-against-google

The complaint's substance is that Google is collecting data through its many products, divisions and services and merging that data on the back-end, which the GDPR expressly prohibits without meaningful, opt-in consent (and you can't deny service those who don't consent).

Brave published a study that analyzed Google's communications with users, partners, regulators and customers and showed that these are effectively an admission of the kind of "data-tying" that the GDPR bans.

https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Inside-the-Black-Box.pdf

I continue to use Brave and Firefox as my daily-driver browsers; I'm impressed with the quality of both, and how much better they make the web.

This action by Brave might trigger the kind of reckoning that the GDPR was meant to provoke — at long last.

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago ETECH Notes: Life Hacks Live! (Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann) https://craphound.com/etech2005-lifehacks.txt

#15yrago Sterling and Steffen's SXSW keynote https://web.archive.org/web/20050318074350/http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/002353.html

#5yrsago The Glorkian Warrior Eats Adventure Pie https://boingboing.net/2015/03/17/the-glorkian-warrior-eats-adve.html

#1yrago China's "pawn shops" have loaned $43B, mostly secured by real-estate https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-12/china-is-said-to-scrutinize-43-billion-pawn-shop-lending-boom

#1yrago Chinese enthusiasts are serving global Thinkpad fans by making modern motherboards that fit in classic chassis from the Golden Age of the Thinkpad https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thinkpad-x210/

#1yrago Majority of London's newly built luxury flats are unsold, raising the spectre of "posh ghost towers" https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/26/ghost-towers-half-of-new-build-luxury-london-flats-fail-to-sell

#1yrago Myspace lost all the music its users uploaded between 2003 and 2015 https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/7uiv8b/myspace_player_wont_play_songs_and_i_want_to/

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Kottke (https://kottke.org), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org).

Currently writing: I've just finished rewrites on a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I've also just completed "Baby Twitter," a piece of design fiction also set in The Lost Cause's prehistory, for a British think-tank. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel next.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: The Masque of the Red Death and Punch Brothers Punch https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/16/the-masque-of-the-red-death-and-punch-brothers-punch/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

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adrianodiprato · 4 years

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+ “Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference.” Dame Jane Goodall DBE | English Primatologist and Anthropologist

Educational Spring | Wellness by Design®

Yesterday a friend sent me a message about an encounter they had with one of my ex-students at a recent dinner party. This ex-student mentioned the impact that I had on a number of his friends, his words were “you have no idea how many he stopped from suiciding just for being there and being him”. I’m not sharing this message to brag, I am sharing this insight into the true value of teachers and learning communities that operate from a human-centred learning ecosystem design. People need people. Every individual matters.

This got me thinking about what really matters. It amplified for me that the real pandemic of our industrial model of schooling is the growth in mental illness amongst young people. Additionally, COVID-19 sharply illustrated the truth of inequity in our system, especially with reference to the digital divide. According to Pasi Sahlberg from the Gonski Institute for Education, the pandemic has unearthed this unpleasant truth, "The education system has unequal structures that have become visible now through this remote online learning period."

So, what if we placed wellness at the centre of our society? What if we made it central to the objectives of learning? What is the interconnected relationship between character, competency and wellness within a whole education? What might be the global context for this?

The World Economic Forum has explored whether gross domestic product is still a relevant measure of a population’s wellbeing for many years. Looking at what alternatives could offer as mega trends such as climate change, demographic shifts, rapid urbanisation, moves in economic power, resource scarcity and swift advancements in technology innovations reshape our world.

In an interview with the BBC Radio 4 in May 2019, Lord Richard Layard, a Program Director at the London School of Economics and the Vice Chair of the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics, advocated that wellbeing should replace growth as main aim of UK spending. His group drafted a wellbeing report for the UK government, setting out proposals including a bigger budget for mental health, a strategy to improve the wellbeing of children in schools, and more spending on further education for people who don’t go to university.

Australia also performs very well in many measures of wellbeing relative to most other countries in the OECD Better Life Index. Australia ranks at the top in civic engagement and above the average in income and wealth, environmental quality, health status, housing, jobs and earnings, education and skills, subjective well-being, social connections and personal security. Having said that, mental illness remains a serious issue. One in five (20%) Australians aged 16-85 experience a mental illness in any year. Data from the 2014 Mission Australia’s Youth Survey showed that around one in five (21.2%) of young people (15-19 years old) met the criteria for a probable serious mental illness.

Learning Creates Australia recently highlighted the current measures of success and achievement in schooling are causing barriers to excellence rather than leading to excellence in learning outcomes as highlighted below:

New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern wants to transform its politics to focus on empathy, kindness and wellbeing. After talking about “doing things differently” with a “well-being budget” at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in January 2019, Jacinda Ardern’s New Zealand government in May of the same year unveiled its plans to make that strategy a reality.

This move toward a greater commitment toward the health and wellness of communities is not limited to New Zealand. The United Arab Emirates has a Minister of State for Happiness and a National Programme for Happiness and Positivity. It has an agenda that is based on three pillars: inclusion of happiness in the policies, programmes and services of all government bodies and at work, promotion of positivity and happiness as a lifestyle, and development of benchmarks and tools to measure happiness.

Gross National Happiness (GNH) is a philosophy that guides the government of Bhutan. It includes an index which is used to measure the collective happiness and wellbeing of a population. Bhutan measures this collective happiness and wellbeing via a Gross National Happiness index over nine domains as illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Bhutan Gross National Happiness Index

Dream a Dream is a not-for-profit organisation in Delhi, India positively impacting on the lives of young people from vulnerable backgrounds to overcome adversity and flourish in a fast-changing world. One key aspect of their work is the development and implementation of a Happiness Curriculum. The curriculum aims to equip students with skills so that they can better deal with anxiety and stress while thinking critically.

The 45-minute class starts with a meditation session, after which students read and listen to one another’s stories. In addition to textbooks, street plays and yoga serve as teaching tools. The curriculum has been implemented in at least 1,024 Delhi government-run schools, affecting more than 1 million students to date. “In a year and a half, we have already started observing minor but beautiful, positive changes in the relationship of the child and the teacher,” Vishal Talreja Co-founder says. “We have children coming forward and saying, ‘I look forward to coming to school.’”

The Dream a Dream Happiness Curriculum is becoming a model that other governments are promising to replicate in their countries’ classrooms. Countries such as Colombia, UAE, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.

It is increasingly becoming clear that the main goal of governments is the overall wellbeing of its citizens. Their resources need to be more wisely spent based on what really matters most for the entire human experience. This also presents a real challenge for the entire education sector and makes a strong case for the moral imperative to curate a human-centred Wellness by Design® learning ecosystem.

Will Richardson, Co-Founder of The Big Questions Institute believes “in school, we seem to think learning happens only when it’s age-grouped and graded, or when it’s chunked into time blocks and subjects and meets some predetermined outcomes. Students have “learned” it seems only when they have consumed a mandated bucket of information or content and been tested to make sure they consumed it adequately.”

We have got to stop the testing hamster wheel that burns out children. We cannot and will not continue to be terrorised by the dreaded ATAR, an overbearing student ranking system that ends the careers of school leaders and teachers and drives up anxiety levels in young people. Figure 2 highlights that 64% of those living in inner regional areas and only 40% for those living in very remote regions complete Year 12. Of course, there are other factors impacting on these statics of those in disadvantaged areas, nonetheless the numbers are damming of our current infatuation with an out-dated, one-size fits all industrial model of schooling.

Figure 2: Geographical impact on education attainment rates1

Daniel Koretz, one of the America’s foremost experts on educational testing, argues in The Testing Charade that the whole idea of test-based accountability has failed—it has increasingly become an end in itself, harming students and corrupting the very ideals of teaching. Pressure to raise NAPLAN and ATAR scores dominates much of Australia’s education today. More often than not standardised tests shape what is taught and influence what we value as assessment. In many schools, we seem to think learning happens when it doesn’t look like real life. During the pandemic with the transition online, we’ve been reminded of those things that we value most: relationships, community, the curiosity of young people, and the power of real, authentic self-determined learning.

Please do not interpret my shift in emphasis as denouncing the value of literacy or numeracy data. Not at all. Of course, they have a place in supporting student growth, not just definitions of achievement. Nonetheless quantification measures like NAPLAN and the ATAR have assumed an importance beyond their ability to truly judge and paint the whole picture of each individual.

By its very nature, a crisis turns everything on its head. So now that everything has changed, why not take the opportunity to guide the development of a new culture? Director and Founder of Leading Thinking International, Kathleen Donohoe in a recent post titled Is educational policy constraining a renaissance in education? stated, “Age old traditions such as school times, compulsory hours, the definition of attendance, recognition, reporting and feedback on learning and the definition of student engagement are following the fate of blackboards and chalk, requiring the reimagination of policy, process and procurement.”

We’ve been paralysed in schooling for far too long, educating by living in the world without truly feeling. Now, acutely, we feel that need for an evolution and move toward the next normal. As we grow out of the pandemic, we need to recognise that this is our Educational Spring. It could happen, but it might not. There will be enormous pressure to forget this educational spring moment and go back to the old ways of experiencing schooling life. History is happening right now.

A clear feature of all the models we shared in our Continuous Learning Toolkit | Volume II – Leading Through Crisis has been an explicit focus on wellness. While some have viewed the use of technology as a distraction, the application of technology during COVID-19 has been an opportunity to prioritise wellness into all aspects of planning and scheduling. This new normal of schooling is based on a shared understanding of the significance of the interdependence of learning and wellness as we support each young person to flourish in this new world environment. It requires us to map the connectedness of a whole education for character, competency and wellness. It brings into sharp focus self-direction, self-determination and self-regulation as critical dimensions in fostering the development of resilient, resourceful and independent learners equipped with the adaptive expertise and self-efficacy to thrive in their world. Let us all build back better, with Wellness by Design®.

To prepare today’s learners to thrive in this new world environment, a whole new Wellness by Design® framework is needed. At the centre of this framework must be an explicit purpose-driven social contract based on the reality that all young people are home to a life, and that individual and collective wellness encompass all dimensions of life within any community.

For learning communities, a positive sense of individual wellness supports a base for rich learning growth and achievement, that enables all learners to thrive throughout their time at school and beyond. Wellness and the full flourishing of the individual cannot be separated from learning. Post COVID-19 we have the powerful potential to positively disrupt education forever, and the key is a genuinely human-centred reimagining. Therefore, it is imperative that any continuous learning competency framework for all school communities, needs to develop a learning ecosystem model that Equips the Learner, Empowers the Learner and Enables the Learner, positioning wellness at the heart of school life.

A focus on wellness is imperative now more than ever before - and I’m not talking about a visit to a day spa or a regular massage (although self-pampering is always welcomed). Wellness by Design® refers to a sense of wholeness and connection that entails personal growth, character and competency, healing from the residual of one’s past, and integration of self-worth and agency.

Maintaining personal wellness often requires commitment and significant effort. Through acknowledging our whole selves, not just the parts we think are amazing, but our blind spots, we become better equipped to connect with the other, which further opens up ways of our social, cultural and spiritual awareness.

So, in the context of schooling, how do we truly meet this moment? It is time to shift the emphasis, the investment from the seduction of just academic prowess and league tables achievement. It is time for learning communities to amplify the central position of Wellness by Design® as we support each young person to move from resilience to the power of resourcefulness of self-efficacy, personal aspiration, adaptive expertise, agency and advocacy.

We need to consider the role of personal goals, challenging assumptions, cognitive flexibility, courage over fear, emotional regulation and self-determination in supporting young people to flourish for their future. All fostered in a school ecosystem that values high (wellness) support as much as high (academic) expectations. A school that explicitly cultivates relationships that give each young person a profound sense of psychological safety, where they are known, valued and loved, through an authentic feeling that someone has their back and always in their corner. After all, we all need a champion.

It may seem counter-intuitive to put wellness at the centre and allow it to permeate throughout the whole of learning instead of confining it to a box of its own, and attending to it as an afterthought, but if we are not well, then how are we to thrive? How are we to make progress? How are we to succeed?

It’s time for us to create Wellness by Design®

References

Koretz, D. (2017). The Testing Charade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Seligman, M. (2011). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. New York: Free Press.

Southwick, S. M., & Charney, D. S. (2018). Resilience: The science of mastering life’s greatest challenges. 2nd edition. New York: Cambridge University Press.

1 Commonwealth of Australia. Commonwealth Government (2019). National regional rural and remote tertiary education strategy: final report. Page 13. Year 12 rates are for people aged 19. Tertiary qualifications are for people aged 25-34 years. Remote includes Remote and Very Remote Categories. Any tertiary education qualification includes VET in Schools. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (2016) Census of Population and Housing.

15 Financial Review, May 29, 2018.

16 Mission Australia (2017). Youth Mental Health Report: Youth Survey 2012-2016. Page 12.

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wonwoosthetic · 6 years

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The Start Of A Comic Con Love Story || Jake Gyllenhaal

MASTERLIST is in my bio :)

This request has been in my ask box for quite a while, sorry it took me a while. I hope you enjoy it! :) <3

Request: Hey. Can you write one with Jake Gyllenhaal? Where the reader is a young novelist in her late twenties and they meet at comic con where she's there to promote her fantasy novel and he's there as part of the spiderman panel. Can you make it like Tom Holland sees her first and tries to flirt but fails to catch her attention and goes to seek Jake's help but when Jake sees her instead of helping out Tom he snags her for himself? If not to cheesy something like love at first sight...

Characters: Jake Gyllenhaal, Reader, Tom Holland, Jacob Batalon

Warnings: none

The Start Of A Comic Con Love Story

"Thank you, bye", you said goodbye kindly, with a big smile on your face, to one of the many fans that had been waiting in line to get a picture with you and an autograph. There you were, sitting behind a table excitedly and nervous as heck as you saw the mass of people that were still waiting patiently. You had been signing books and taking pictures for over an hour and the line didn't seem to get any shorter - this wasn't something you ever thought would happen.

--- Throwback ---

"I'm sorry but no." "No one will read something like this." "This is... no, sorry." "Not with me." "I don't think anyone will give you a contract." "You won't find any publishing company that'll publish this." Those were comments and statements you had heard ever since you started looking for a company to publish your recently finished book. It had taken you almost a year and although you couldn't be any prouder, hope was starting to leave you. No one wanted to publish your book, calling it a foolish story, ridiculous and even unreadable or painful to read. Putting all of that work into it seemed to had been useless and a waste of time.

Sitting in your tiny New York Apartment which you were paying for way too much, tears started forming in your eyes and threatened to leave them. You were going to have to leave your beloved home if you wouldn't be able to find any publishing company willing to help you out. Your tiny TV was showing a documentary about J.K. Rowling, one of your heroes and role models. She was talking about how no one wanted to publish Harry Potter and her entire life seemed to have fallen apart. You wanted to stay positive, you really did, but reality hit you - you were never going to have the luck this amazingly talented woman had had. You weren't talented, enough people had told you that.

A 'ding' noise from your phone brought you back into the present time. Turning your head to the left, your phone was on the floor next to you, the screen lit up - an email. You took it into your hand and looked at the sender - Joanne Rowling. You choked on your spit. Immediately, you unlocked your phone and pressed the Mail button. The internet letter read as followed:

Dear (Y/F/N) (Y/L/N), I heard about your story. Two days ago a publicist from Penguin got into contact with me and told me about your book, sadly they weren't able to sign you but I read about your book idea and I LOVE IT! I know exactly what you're currently going through and it's daunting, I understand but I don't want you to give up. Back when I was a struggling, but most importantly, an aspiring writer, no one was there to help me. After a lot of ups and downs, I finally got the help I needed - I want to be that person for you. Here I am writing you this email, offering to help you. I'm inviting you to London next weekend, I hope you're free, from the 8th of March till the 11th. The plane ticket is attached as well as your hotel information. I hope you accept my offer! I'm looking forward to an answer and am excited to meet you!

With lots of love, Joanne

-----------------

Person after person. Two hours went by. Three hours. It slowly came to the fourth when the security man behind you leaned down and to tell you, "We're gonna close the penal for twenty minutes, you can go behind the curtain, cool down and then come back again, alright?"

You looked up with a thankful look and a smile on your face, nodded and stood up after seeing the barrier being put up to prevent the fans from going any further. Quickly making your way "backstage", you got hand over a bottle of water which you gulped down faster than you probably should have. After taking a seat on the couch placed on the side, you realized that twenty minutes was a long enough time to walk around and explore the magic that is Comic-Con since you had been a fan of too many fandoms that got represented there. You looked around the room, finally catching the eye of your manager. You stood up and started walking up to her. Before even reaching her, you already started talking, "Melissa, can I walk around for a bit. I won't be gone for too long, I just want to have a quick look around." "No, you can't just walk away-", "But I'll be back on time", you argued back, which won her over. With a grunt, she grabbed your arm and, pretty much, pushed you out of the room which had curtains as walls. "I'm so gonna regret this but you're not going anywhere alone here, you'll get lost or attacked or-", you cut her off, "Woah, woah, woah, calm down", chuckling, "attacked? I'll be alright, don't worry." "No, you wouldn't be, trust me." And you believed her.

You saw what happened to the Marvel stars that entered the building only seconds after you, obviously, they were a lot more famous than you but to your surprise, the reaction of the people waiting wasn't a lot different than the reaction you received. The two of you were walking at a very quick pace to god knows where, so you stopped in your tracks, taking her surprise, "Alright, stop for a second. I want to go to the Spiderman panel, where's that?" "No", Melissa shook her head. "Yes", you talked back. "No", "Yes", "I said, no", "Why not?", you whined like a little kid would to their mother. "BECAUSE I know what those panels are like. Their fans are crazy and we don't have enough time." You rolled your eyes at her comment and started dragging her into a different direction where you knew the panel would be since you... well... yes, you looked it up. Your heart felt like it was starting to beat in your throat, you completely ignored the comments coming from the woman who you had been linking arms with. The nervousness raised rapidly as you thought of the fact that you were about to see the actors of one of your favourite movies of all time. Together, with a lot of nagging, you reached the doors of the hall, which, to your surprise, were open and people were leaving the room. "Wait, what? Nooo", you whined once more that day, realizing you had just missed the one panel you were most excited about. Melissa noticed your frustration, rolled her eyes, and dragged you to a side door which got protected by a rather large man in a security outfit. She showed him her badge that was hanging from the key chain around her neck and he let you in immediately.

All of a sudden, you were in a big, way bigger than yours, backstage area where people were running around in a rush, trying to get through as quickly as possible. Melissa placed the two of you on the side of the room, "Stay here, I'm gonna go and ask something real quick, alright? Be right back!", she shouted as he already made her way to whoever she wanted to talk to. You rolled your eyes at her motherly behaviour since you were old enough to take care of yourself. After standing and looking around for a bit, you noticed a presence next to you. Turning to your right, you came to sight with the one and only Spiderman himself, Tom Holland. "Hey, you're (Y/N) (Y/L/N), right?", he asked with his hands in his jeans pockets. "Yeah, oh my god, you actually know who I am", you were shocked. "Of course, I love your book series!" "Oh wow, thank you. Thank you so much." He quickly got his right hand out of his pocket and went to shake yours, "I'm Tom", to which you chuckled, "I know, I'm a big fan", you shook his hand. You could tell he was nervous which you found incredibly cute. He, in general, was extremely cute, not your type, but very cute. You started having a chat but he quickly came to the realization that you seemed to always drift away.

"Alright, well, it was great to meet you, I just... I have to get going, I'm sorry", he excused himself from the chat, to which you answered, "Oh no, that's totally fine, don't worry", you shook hands once more, "it was great to meet you too and good luck with the new Spiderman!", you knew he didn't need the luck, still, it was a nice thing to say.

--- 3rd Person ---

Well, that chat didn't go as planned, Tom thought as he made his way back to his co-star Jacob who got then accompanied by Jake Gyllenhaal. As soon as he reached the two men, the Philippian turned towards his friend excitedly, "AND? How did it go?" Tom shrugged, "She's just a lovely as I thought she'd be but the conversation didn't go where I wanted it to." "Aw, sorry man", he patted the Spiderman actor on the shoulder - Jake right next to the two had absolutely no clue what was going on whatsoever. "What happened?", he wondered. "There's that authour Tom really likes and he wanted to talk to her and...", Jacob started gesturing around with his hands, "you know... maybe ask her out... or something. Hey, maybe you could help him." The older actor raised his eyebrows "Oooh, and who is that author?" Trying to be as subtle as possible, Tom pointed to her direction. Jake's eyes immediately found the silhouette leaning on the wall, looking like she was waiting for something or probably someone. All he could see was her hair just sitting perfectly, how she somewhat looked slightly nervous making her appear even more adorable. Even from that distance, he could see her eyes shimmering and shining as she was looking around the room, taking in everything that came to her sight - and suddenly the two of them locked eyes. It was quick... but powerful.

"Oh, I think someone has found her", Jacob joked, trying the cheer Tom up which didn't really help but still made him crack a grin. "Sorry boys, but I gotta go", and with that, he left, and started making his way towards the woman by the wall, earing a, "Hey! I thought you'd help me!", from Tom, which got slightly overheard by his co-star due to all of the other people talking rather loudly.

--- 2nd Person ---

You were still waiting for your manager to come back and maybe show you around - although you had earned yourself quite a status, the anxiety of walking around somewhere on your own in a space that you don't know, hadn't gone away yet. Somebody clearing their throat next to you made you turn your head to the spot where Tom stood not even three minutes ago. Looking up, you found out that it actually was Jake Gyllenhaal, whom you had actually locked eyes with before but quickly turned away, trying to avoid the awkwardness. But there you suddenly were, next to each other.

"Hey, sorry for just jumping at you... I'm Jake", he, too, reached out his right hand, seemed a lot more confident though. You chuckled, "Oh, hi, I'm (Y/N). Not to sound creepy... but I know who you are." The two of you shook hands and yours went right back behind your back. "Right", he laughed, "you don't sound creepy, don't worry." "Good, good", you joined in with laughing. "Right, ehm... I just", he took a deep breath, "I just saw you from across the room and... this is going to sound very cheesy", his expression made you raise your eyebrows, "but I saw you and I just have to take you out to dinner, I thought", a loud laughter escaped your mouth, making him smile as well, "I know, I know, but honestly, I don't think I could have forgiven myself if I hadn't even tried asking you."

You could start your cheeks starting to turn a reddish colour and suddenly you were feeling a lot hotter than before, "Well... I-I feel very honoured to be asked that, thank you." A boyish grin started spreading on his lips, "No need to thank me, I'll be the one to say that if your answer happens to be yes." You noticed his cheekiness and decided to play along, not knowing where the confidence came from, "To what question?", you asked with a wide grin. "(Y/N), would you be so lovely and go out for dinner with me?" "Absolutely, yes." Two wide smiling people were now looking at each other, neither knowing how not even talking to the other person for five minutes could already make them feel like this.

"Alright", he swiped off the imaginary sweat from his forehead with a sigh, "now that that's covered, would it be rude to ask for your number?" "No, it wouldn't", with a smile you took the extended phone in front of you and started tipping in your number when you felt another presence on the other side of you. As soon as you looked up, Melissa was standing there waiting for you to be done with a knowing look a cheeky grin. You handed the phone back, "Well, it was very nice to meet you, Jake. I have to go but thank you and... text me", with a smile you left him. Your manager immediately linked arms with you, "Tell me, EVERYTHING", making you giggle. As she started rambling about you and the male actor, the two of you walked through the open door, she first then you, you turned around once more and found the blue eyes man looking at you leaving. He turned around to his fellow actors with his arms wide open, "Guess who's got a date?"

-----------------------------------------

I’m not too sure if this turned out as great as I would have wanted it, but I hope you like it! :)

I could definitely imagine a second part for this, please let me know what you think!

Thank you for reading and I hope you have a great day/night :) <3

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reading-writing-revolution · 5 years

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Just not #DonaldTrump...

December 26, 2019 (Thursday) - Heather Cox Richardson

Today began and ended with Trump melting down. This morning, after a silence during the holidays, he came out swinging at the Democrats generally, and at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi specifically. Then this evening, apparently against the advice of his lawyer, he retweeted a story that named someone claimed to be the whistleblower, a person who currently has a security detail for protection, not in a foreign war zone, but in our own nation’s capital.

It seems clear that Trump cannot bear that Pelosi—whom he is calling “Crazy Nancy”-- is not rushing to send the articles of impeachment over to the Senate for a trial… a trial that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already promised will exonerate Trump. It is worth noting that it has been only a week since the House passed the articles of impeachment, and we have had major religious holidays in that time, and yet Trump is obviously angry and desperate for movement on impeachment. But he’s got to wait even longer. The House will not be in session again until January 7—twelve days from now—and the Senate calendar for January is still in flux.

In other impeachment news, you will recall that Noah Feldman, the Harvard Law Professor who testified before the House Judiciary Committee in favor of impeachment, wrote an op-ed last week saying that Trump was not officially impeached until the House sent the articles of impeachment over to the Senate. Trump jumped on this idea, and has been saying that he is not really impeached. Today one of the other law professors who testified, George Washington University’s Jonathan Turley, who was called by the Republicans and was opposed to impeachment, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post entitled “I testified against Trump’s impeachment. But let’s not pretend it didn’t happen.” The title pretty much sums it up. As Turley concluded: “The House speaks in its own voice and in its own time. It did so on Dec. 18, 2019.”

For all the drama of these two stories, I have been more interested in what feels to me like a changing trend: it appears that media is finally recognizing that it cannot simply report “both sides” of the news as if they are equally valid when one side is lying. On the evening of December 24, Rolling Stone magazine published a short interview with Chuck Todd, an NBC journalist who moderates Meet the Press and who is the Political Director for NBC NEWS. On December 29, Meet the Press is doing a show on disinformation and how it is weaponized, and this interview was a teaser.

It's really important to understand that “misinformation” and “disinformation” are different things. “Misinformation” is bad information caused by errors-- someone makes a mistake. “Disinformation,” though, is deliberately false information intended to manipulate public opinion. Another word for disinformation is propaganda.

In the interview, Todd laments that he has been “absurdly naïve.” Right up until he had Senator Cruz on his show recently and Cruz echoed Russian propaganda, Todd apparently believed that the Republicans were acting in good faith when they talked to the media. Todd says he was “stunned” by Cruz’s embrace of Russian disinformation, especially since he was the third senator to do exactly that on the show. Cruz had asked to come on, and Todd thought that since Cruz had always been a Russia hawk, he wanted to set the record straight. When, instead, he followed the party line, Todd finally got it: Trump Republicans are using the media to spread propaganda.

Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, responded to this revelation by pointing out that it was on Todd’s own show in January 2017 that Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway launched the concept of the administrations lies simply being based on “alternative facts.” But, Rosen writes, media leaders nonetheless treated officials’ lies as hyperbole, just Trump and his spokespeople being ridiculous.

The upshot is that, three years later, Trump’s base is divorced from reality, while other Americans are so tired from incessant gas lighting we have lost faith that we can still perceive reality. This is why gaslighting is effective propaganda: having lost confidence in their own perceptions, people are so eager for peace they are willing to accept a strong leader who will promise to create stability.

I’m with Rosen on this. There is no excuse for such “naivete” on Todd’s part. He’s the Political Director for NBC News, after all, and should have had a better handle on the well-known methods at play here.

Even more, it has been very clear that today’s Republican Party has risen to power by rejecting facts and creating its own reality. After World War Two, Republicans and Democrats both shared a belief that the government had a role to play in regulating the economy, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure. Indeed, that belief about government was so widely embraced it became known as the “liberal consensus.”

In 1951, William F. Buckley, Jr., fresh out of college, wrote a book attacking that consensus by attacking fact-based argument. In God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” Buckley said that trying to reach the truth by constructing arguments out of facts—the premise of the Enlightenment-- was a worse superstition than the Dark Age traditions the Enlightenment tried to root out. When presented with fact-based arguments, voters kept choosing the liberal consensus. So far as Buckley was concerned, that consensus flew in the face of God’s laws. So, Buckley concluded, it was imperative to stop arguing based on facts, and simply promote a “Conservative” view of the world by whatever means necessary.

The construction of a narrative undercutting the popular liberal consensus took the modern Republican Party further and further away from a fact-based reality, until by 2002, journalist Ron Suskind had this extraordinary exchange with one of President George W. Bush’s aides.

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles…. He cut me off. 'That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. '…When we act, we create our own reality…. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”

Ten years later, in 2012, Thomas E. Mann from the left-leaning Brookings Institution and Norm Ornstein from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute warned that it was imperative to stop saying “both sides do it,” because the parties were not equally polarized. “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics,” they wrote. “It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

We now have a president who has made more than 15,000 false or misleading claims in fewer than three years in office, and it has become increasingly clear recently that those lies echo Russian propaganda. Senior officials repeat his claims to the media, creating their own reality.

It is my sense that Todd’s revelation is a sign that media figures are starting to see how they are being used to advance disinformation. There has been discussion emerging of how to report the news without providing a platform for lies. If it takes hold, there will be an important shift in media coverage of the administration and congressional supporters in the new year."

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rabbithole86 · 5 years

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WHAT TAYLOR SWIFT'S ALLYSHIP MEANS TO HER FANS — AND THE LGBTQ+ FANDOM

By Carson Mlnarik xxxx

I learned about the gospel of Taylor Swift through my mom, whose car stereo was permanently tuned to country radio. Her first single, “Tim McGraw,” sparked something in me, and I was immediately obsessed — to the point where my family was calling Taylor “Carson’s girlfriend” within weeks. I was 11 years old; it would be six years before I told anyone that I was gay. And it would take even longer — and for Taylor herself to proclaim, “You can want who you want / Boys and boys and girls and girls” — for my family to learn that I didn’t want to date Taylor Swift, I wanted to be like Taylor Swift.

As I became more accepting of my sexuality, it helped that Taylor was growing into an LGBTQ+ ally. And as the years went by, her music, frankly, got gayer.

When she debuted in 2006, Taylor was my middle school confessional queen. She always knew what it was like to be an outsider at the lunch table (“The Outside”) or to dramatically pine after someone who wasn’t into you (“Teardrops on My Guitar”). And while anthems like “Fearless” and “Speak Now” encouraged listeners to live their truths, I was only beginning to realize my truths: namely, that the fixation on male friendships that took up 113 percent of my brain was most definitely a manifestation of some same-sex attraction. I took note, but stayed closeted, especially given that I was navigating my own identity in conservative Arizona.

The fact that Taylor got her start in country music is not lost on me, either; the genre’s current focus on Christian faith, heteronormative imagery, and popularity in states that often vote red (no relation to the album) have garnered it a reputation as the “Republican genre.” You’d be hard-pressed to find mainstream country music by out LGBTQ+ artists, and, until recently, little solidarity with the community by its biggest stars. Thanks to open allyship from artists like Kacey Musgraves and Luke Bryan, that’s changing, but for the most part, they’re still the exception.

Taylor was always an icon in my eyes but it wasn’t until she went pop that her allyship seemed to take form. While “icon” status is a term some people seem to apply like chapstick, “ally” involves putting in a certain kind of work. Taylor had never come out against the community but was an unlikely ally nonetheless, especially considering she came from country and scrubbed a potentially homophobic line from her discography early on. Her first solidly pop entry, however, found her empoweredenough to shout out the community and even arguably earned her gay Twitter’s respect. The Reputation era found her taking on a more active ally role: it was then, ahead of the 2018 midterms, that she finally stated her pro-gay rights stance, encouraged fans to vote, gave a Pride Month speech on tour, and made pro-LGBTQ donations.

“I’ve always seen her as someone who’s really accepting of everyone,” Gia, a fan who identifies as bisexual and lives in Scotland, told MTV News. But even she has noticed an uptick in active and affirmative allyship, from both Taylor and her fans.

In the LGBTQ+ community, having an “active ally” — a friend, co-worker, or acquaintance who not only believes in equality but does so visibly with empathy, patience, and recognition of privilege — can make a huge difference. Allies not only promote acceptance in the greater community but can also be sources of information and help. In schools with gay-straight alliances, 91 percent of LGBTQ+ students in the club felt supported enough to further advocate for other social or political issues, andworkplaces that have openly supportive senior staff or a company culture of acceptance help employees feel more comfortable in being professionally out.

“Within the last year, I’ve seen a lot more pride [within the Taylor fandom], especially when I attended the Rep Tour and saw other [people] with pride flags,” Gia added.

Gia said she truly realized the extent of LGBTQ+-identifying individuals in the fandom after seeing hashtags like #LGBTQSwifties and #GayForTay. Stan Twitter and Tumblr bios boast rainbow emojis and pride flags, which aren’t necessarily decisions that Taylor had any part in making, but still affirm that there isn’t just space in the fandom for LGBTQ+ fans — we’re welcome here, too.

Jeremy, a Twitter user who identifies as bisexual, has been a fan of Taylor’s since 2006. While he is “definitely happy that she has been more explicit with her stances,” he says her message of “self-love and [embracing] that self loudly and passionately” has always been a source of comfort for him.

“She always inspires us to be proud of who we are, and to ignore those who tell us to be different,” he told MTV News.

For me, that pride took a while to establish, and even longer to give voice to. Still, Taylor was there for me every step of the way: In my junior year of high school, she released a mixed-genre foray into pop that gave us bops like “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” “22,” and “I Knew You Were Trouble,” and I didn’t just enjoy the Redalbum, I felt it. The emotional LP provided inspiration as I became student body president and big man on campus, but kept my sexuality a complete secret. It would become a source of comfort after I came out to close friends and family but lacked the confidence to do so on a larger scale. It would even become a guide to love and heartbreak after I got — and then broke up with — my first boyfriend.

He left me with bitter parting words: "I’ll never be able to listen to another Taylor Swift song without thinking of you.” I may get that inscribed on my tombstone.

As I started my freshman year of college, I was tired of feeling splintered about my identity. I started introducing myself as gay and going out on dates with guys, with the newly-released 1989 as my companion. While Taylor’s pop departure alienated some people, I found lyrics like, “I got this music in my mind / sayin’ it’s gonna be alright,” take on new weight in the midst of finding myself. If Taylor could start anew, so could I. Besides, what gay doesn’t love a good bop?

We make connections to music based on what we’re experiencing when we’re listening for the first time. Even if it’s beyond what the songwriter intended, their work can often become shorthand for certain times, places, and feelings — it’s chemical. It’s a phenomenon Taylor has even penned about, and while her lyrics, for the most part, describe heterosexual relationships, they do so in such a raw and confessional manner that it never mattered to me. Whether she was calling a boy out by name on her albums or scorning her bullies at the Grammys, there was an echoing theme of never hiding your feelings.

And through her vulnerability and openness, the singer has nurtured a fandom of people like myself who not only unite to feel seen and validated by her music but see and validate each other.

For Grace, who lives in Tennessee and has had a stan account since 2017, having a network of allies and openly LGBTQ+ people in the Taylor fandom has helped her in her own self-acceptance.

“I think a big part of it was just seeing how open other people were about their own sexuality and everyone was super supportive and loving towards them,” she said. “It’s not something that I had ever really seen much of before and it made me feel comfortable enough to accept myself and be open about it. I’m not sure I would be as secure in myself as I am now without it.”

When Taylor donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project to fight against the state’s “Slate of Hate” legislation, Grace felt directly moved. “I cried at the fact that someone I have admired for so many years of my life was fighting for me directly,” she said.

Arthur, a bisexual trans man from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, said he grew up seeing a lot of “bigoted people in the fandom,” but since Taylor has become a more active ally, he has seen a huge shift. An activist since age 14, he started following Taylor around 2012 in her Red era and knew when she eventually spoke up, things would start to change.

“LGBTQ fans are gaining space, as [are] fans of color, which is so great to see,” he said. “Taylor being more politically engaged helped [make] this change happen.”

Taylor has not only made her stance clear but continues to affirm it. She kicked off Pride Month this year by creating a petition for the Senate to pass the Equality Act, a sweeping policy that would protect LGBTQ people against sexuality-based discrimination. She also shared a letter she wrote to her state senator urging them to pass the bill and encouraged fans to do the same.

“While we have so much to celebrate, we also have a great distance to go before everyone in this country is truly treated equally,” she tweeted.

Taylor is hardly the first pop star to encourage their fans to get political. But as discussions arise around Pride becoming branded and straight people co-opt events, she’s proving to be a pretty good model of what it means to be an active ally in this political climate.

That’s not to say we’re there yet. We’ve still got a long way to go, and Taylor’s even acknowledged it. But as a former purveyor of yee-haw music and a current pop queen, she’s doing what she’s always done best for many of her gay fans: helping us feel seen and heard.

#taylor swift #gaylor swift #mtv #pride month #pride

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noona-la-la-la · 5 years

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Noona, do you have any bad interview experience to share? I went to an interview today. Once I entered the room, before I sat down the interviewer already asked me to start introducing myself & that she’s busy so I need to make this quick 😐 guess what I actually waited 30 mins because the previous interviews overran The whole time she was keeping a straight face and talking in monotone, also does not show interests in my work (I’m a graphic designer) 1/2

She asked why did I quit my last job so I explained that because there wasn’t a career path and she immediately goes “Same here!” I explained to her that I’m well aware of it but I’m interested in working for a museum. At the end, she showed me 5 exhibition leaflets they’ve done in the past and asked me what I like about them. Tbh I started criticizing the designs in my head the minute I started looking at them (because of my designer instinct lol)

All I could think about was things I didn’t like about the designs When she saw me quickly flipped through all 5 leaflets, she literally says - are you done? Are you ready to talk about it? (in a rude manner) I was like - hmm am I supposed to talk about what I like? And she says I can also say things that I didn’t like LOL so I started criticizing about one of the leaflets, I listed a few points and she suddenly goes - Then what do you like about them!? 🤡

After the interview,I looked up her name on google I found out she’s a senior designer so I assume she approved those leaflet designs even if it may not be designed by her She might be pissed that I’m criticizing her works 😂 I feel so dumb cause she simply looks like an old housewife to me I thought she’s some supervisor who doesn’t know design at all LOL Im always being honest at interviews and sometimes it’s hard to filter what I say when I’m unprepared😅 I need help

1. That company doesn’t deserve you (or anyone else) if they are going to treat the people who interview with them that poorly. Interviews are a two way street -- meaning while they are interviewing you to see if you fit, you should also be interviewing them to make sure this is a place you would really want to work. Would you really want a woman who was so inconsiderate to a job candidate to become your boss?

2. Pretty much everyone has blown an interview at some point or another. It happens and being unprepared for the question is one of the main reasons people give less than stellar answers. That’s okay. So consider this practice and think about what might have been a better way to answer that question. Next time someone asks you something similar, you’ll be prepared.

As for my own bad interview stories? Oh, man, I have MANY stories I could tell. Also, I’ve often thought that if I ever wrote a book for money - it would be about interviewing. I have tremendous experience in this area.

To keep it manageable - I’ll put the rest of my thoughts under the cut.

How about the time I interviewed for a job and the recruiter was describing some of the new business practices and technologies they were adopting and I said, “I think it’s great that Company A is embracing these new, progressive approaches to business problems. So many of the companies I’ve interviewed with rely on old-fashioned approaches because they are comfortable with the status quo.” AND SHE FLIPPED OUT ON ME! She said things like “What’s wrong with being old-fashioned? This company was based on old fashioned principals like hard work and loyalty. Our founder believed in doing things the old fashioned way!”

Or the time I went in for an interview with Company B, met with a couple people, was there for almost 90 minutes and then they excused themselves. They left me alone in the interview room when all of a sudden some other guy comes in and says he is the Director of Sales and that the previous interviewers thought he should talk to me because of my background. Apparently they thought that I might be a good fit for a job on his team ( a job that I didn’t apply for) . So this guy proceeds to start interviewing me for a completely different role and I don’t even understand what it is. No one is even bothering to ask me if I’m interested in doing sales (I’m not, FYI) and I’m completely unprepared. He and I spoke for maybe another 40 minutes when the original interviewer/hiring manager comes into the room and asks to speak to the Sales Director. They excuse themselves and go out into the hallway to talk AND I CAN HEAR THEM. The original hiring manager asks the Sales Director why he’s wasting his time talking to me because the original interviewers already decided that they don’t like me and don’t want to hire me. So the Sales Director pops back into the room to grab his notebook and says to be that an “emergency” came up and he has to go. So I’m alone again, for maybe 10 minutes when the receptionist opens the door, pops her head in to say the hiring manager to her to tell me “That you can leave now” and then she pops back out and is gone. I gather my stuff and walk out of the interview room. It’s like 6:30pm on a Friday, the building is now empty, it’s a huge office building and everything looks the same and I’m completely lost because it was a number of twists and turns when they brought me to the interview room and I end up wandering around this empty office for a while until I stumble upon the lobby. The receptionist is already gone and a security guard had to unlock the door to let me out.

Or how about the time that I interviewed with Company C and the interviewer asked me a question about the most creative way I’ve ever solved a specific type of business problem. She really emphasized the “creative” part of the question, so I knew she wanted something way out of the box. Unfortunately, I wasn’t really prepared for that, so I started to tell her the first thing that came to my mind... and it was a doozy! I start telling her this story which includes hiring a bunch of strippers and half way through telling her this completely inappropriate story, I realize that I don’t know how to end it because in real life things did not turn out well and included people transporting controlled substances across state lines, some minor theft, and a few people arrested for prostitution. The moral of the story was that not all creative ideas are good ideas. Not exactly what the hiring manager was looking for and needless to say, I didn’t get the job.

So these were all terrible experiences - some my fault, some there fault. I’ve got dozens more examples of interviews gone bad. It happens to everyone.

But these were also good learning experiences. Every time an interview goes badly, I walk away a little more knowledgeable and a little more competent at interviewing. I just recently told a relative of mine who is looking for a new job that he should apply for a few jobs that he doesn’t really want just for the interviewing practice. Because if you haven’t done interviews in a while, you can assume that the first few might be a bit awkward as you work out how to present yourself and your experience in the best way. So it’s better to do a few interviews with companies where you won’t care if they don’t hire you - just to get the practice in. You don’t want to turn yourself inside out to try to fit what you think a company wants, you still need to be your natural self. But there are ways for all of us to make our natural selves come across as the more professional and business savvy version of who we are. But that comes with practice -- and lord knows, I’ve been in the business world for what feels like 10 million years now and I’m still learning how to be the better and more professional version of me every day.

Also, if you’ve read this far... I have an epilogue on those three bad interviews:

Company A turned out to be too old fashioned after all. Their business changes didn’t really take effect the way they wanted them to and now it’s become such a miserable place to work, they are losing talent rapidly. How do I know? I have hired multiple people from that buisness - they are very talented and all tell me the same horror stories of what it was like to work there. So thank god I didn’t get that job.

Company B went bankrupt. The original hiring manager, who treated me so unprofessionally eventually went on to be a vice president at a service company who is a vendor to the place I work now. She was terrible at her job and we just fired her and her company from ever doing business with my current employer ever again.

And company C? I didn’t get job after telling them my awful stripper story. However, a few years later, I applied for a job with them again... and they are my current employer. They work me like a dog, but I’m generally happy with my workplace and my coworkers, I’ve been promoted once already and I’m well compensated and treated with respect.

The moral of this story... karma is a bitch and not every lost opportunity is lost forever.

Good luck with your job search!

#advice and opinions #job advice #interview advice #omg this is long!#blah blah blah #Anonymous

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ts1989fanatic · 5 years

Text

'SHE ALWAYS INSPIRES US TO BE PROUD OF WHO WE ARE, AND TO IGNORE THOSE WHO TELL US TO BE DIFFERENT'

MTV NEWS STAFF

2h ago

By Carson Mlnarik

As I became more accepting of my sexuality, it helped that Taylor was growing into an LGBTQ+ ally. And as the years went by, her music, frankly, got gayer.

Taylor was always an icon in my eyes but it wasn’t until she went pop that her allyship seemed to take form. While “icon” status is a term some people seem to apply like chapstick, “ally” involves putting in a certain kind of work. Taylor had never come out against the community but was an unlikely ally nonetheless, especially considering she came from country and scrubbed a potentially homophobic line from her discography early on. Her first solidly pop entry, however, found her empowered enough to shout out the community and even arguably earned her gay Twitter’s respect. The Reputation era found her taking on a more active ally role: it was then, ahead of the 2018 midterms, that she finally stated her pro-gay rights stance, encouraged fans to vote, gave a Pride Month speech on tour, and made pro-LGBTQ donations.

In the LGBTQ+ community, having an “active ally” — a friend, co-worker, or acquaintance who not only believes in equality but does so visibly with empathy, patience, and recognition of privilege — can make a huge difference. Allies not only promote acceptance in the greater community but can also be sources of information and help. In schools with gay-straight alliances, 91 percent of LGBTQ+ students in the club felt supported enough to further advocate for other social or political issues, and workplaces that have openly supportive senior staff or a company culture of acceptance help employees feel more comfortable in being professionally out.

“Within the last year, I’ve seen a lot more pride [within the Taylor fandom], especially when I attended the Rep Tour and saw other [people] with pride flags,” Gia added.

“She always inspires us to be proud of who we are, and to ignore those who tell us to be different,” he told MTV News.

For me, that pride took a while to establish, and even longer to give voice to. Still, Taylor was there for me every step of the way: In my junior year of high school, she released a mixed-genre foray into pop that gave us bops like “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” “22,” and “I Knew You Were Trouble,” and I didn’t just enjoy the Red album, I felt it. The emotional LP provided inspiration as I became student body president and big man on campus, but kept my sexuality a complete secret. It would become a source of comfort after I came out to close friends and family but lacked the confidence to do so on a larger scale. It would even become a guide to love and heartbreak after I got — and then broke up with — my first boyfriend.

He left me with bitter parting words: "I’ll never be able to listen to another Taylor Swift song without thinking of you.” I may get that inscribed on my tombstone.

And through her vulnerability and openness, the singer has nurtured a fandom of people like myself who not only unite to feel seen and validated by her music but see and validate each other.

For Grace, who lives in Tennessee and has had a stan account since 2017, having a network of allies and openly LGBTQ+ people in the Taylor fandom has helped her in her own self-acceptance.

“LGBTQ fans are gaining space, as [are] fans of color, which is so great to see,” he said. “Taylor being more politically engaged helped [make] this change happen.”

“While we have so much to celebrate, we also have a great distance to go before everyone in this country is truly treated equally,” she tweeted.

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soybeeftacos · 6 years

Text

The Problem With CoreXP

So, I played in the Core Experience tournament that NISEI threw over the weekend. It was... interesting. I went 5-5 on the day; I swept the first round, got swept the second, split the third, swept the fourth, got swept the fifth. How’s that for a variety of results? Overall, 5-5 was a fine enough performance for me by my standards, but it was unfortunately quite an unenjoyable experience regardless of the results.

I had initially thought that a “single core” experience in this format — with the interesting System Core 2019 lists — would provide some degree of variety. Unfortunately, it certainly didn’t seem like that was the case during the tournament. Yesterday, I faced four Replicating Perfections and one Making News, as well as three Leelas and two Gabriel Santiagos. On Sunday at least, HB and NBN were hardly to be found, and Anarch wasn’t particularly successful either. I gather there was some success by a few of the Weylands (Blue Sun mainly) and also some marginal success by a couple of Kit players, but that’s just not a varied enough experience for me, I suppose. I was on Replicating Perfection and Leela myself (yes, I’m part of the problem!), but single core formats are pretty easy to solve pretty quickly, after all, so I was following the herd.

The big issue for me was the role of Paper Trail. I’d discussed this card in a previous post as one that I was particularly excited to see in the System Core 2019 list, as it was (1) more interesting than Private Security Force and (2) had potentially-fun interactions with Kati Jones, Professional Contacts, Bank Job, Armitage Codebusting, Scrubber, etc. For a format that leaned into Connections and Jobs for Runners, having an agenda that Corps could use to battle this seemed like such a great idea!

Except it was totally not fun for me at all.

Every game turned into one that hung on whether or not Paper Trail was scored early, scored late, or was taken out of the game before it got scored. The scoring of a Paper Trail was either a huge scoring window opener (six credits at least), or was a Runner economy destroying board wipe. In every game that Paper Trail was scored — both when I was Running or Corping — the card led to bad feels. Bad feels when I was Corping because, frankly, it’s not all that joyous to destroy an opponent’s econ in one fell swoop, it just feels mean. Bad feels when I was running because, shockingly, one can’t really come back from most Paper Trail scores with only two Kati Jones in SC2019. Kati is essential in Core Experience, Paper Trail is required of all Corps in Core Experience, and so this interaction which might have seemed fun and interesting at first, became tiresome and overdone when played in a tournament.

So, what is there to do about Core Experience? As a format, it’s probably already solved, and it’s also clearly been limited by these neutral agendas. You can’t make a Corp without Paper Trail, so your gameplan has to rely on seeing it or doing something with it, at least to a small degree. That’s a definite improvement over the often-blank Private Security Force, but now Paper Trail seems to have been designed around too much. NISEI’s honestly wonderful idea was to vary the Core every year, but its big problem is that it’s currently stuck to some of the limited agenda choices that plagued all of the FFG cores. As with many things NISEI has chosen to do in its first year (including Organized Play models and approaches), NISEI has stuck to what FFG did before it as a starting point.

I get the idea and am somewhat sympathetic. You want to keep the game familiar for older players, and rock the boat as little as possible at the beginning of your management of this game. You also want to just be able to tell a new player to combine all your agendas with the neutral agendas, and, voila, they don’t have to worry their heads by making any agenda decisions. But without making deck design decisions, Core Experience as a format feels both too predictable and too reliant on variance at the same time. One can’t add that third NIsei Mk II or, god forbid, a third Priority Requisition because of the hard 2x included in SC2019, and so you know exactly what to expect of the Corp’s agenda suite. As a Runner, you know exactly what to expect, and as a Corp you can’t create more consistent decks.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t room for some creative experimentation in Core XP and that perhaps we haven’t solved everything yet (I love that Jonas Wilson was playing around with Notoriety in Leela, even if it might not have been great). But it is to say that this “single core” format will need some tweaks to keep folks coming back to it. While the tournament was very well run and organized, it didn’t feel like this had enough fun variability or flexibility to sustain a format. I can’t imagine playing Core Experience as a format again without more degrees of freedom in deck design.

With the Core sets being revised once a year (presumably, based on the name), my hope is that a larger, broader set of testers will help to not just revise the card set for SC2020, but will help to redesign the format a bit more. Give us more options for neutral 4/2s (Show of Force could be fun?) — or even alternate 5/3s (the Fragments). Why not give us a bunch more 1x cards for extra spice and flavor? Giving us additional parameters to design decks around should be the priorty because, let’s be honest, telling new players to shuffle in all the faction and neutral agendas together isn’t going to be a big concern because, uh, there aren’t new players. Core Experience should be designed for those of us who are experienced and want a new format to play with, and not in order to try to keep things simple for new players that frankly don’t exist.

....

Oh, and one more thing. As you might remember, I was very excited to be a part of NISEI and announced that a few months back. You might have noticed that I haven’t used “we” or “us” in this or any other posts recently because I’ve been on the outs with that group for a while.

After I started writing this up last night, I found out that I was finally kicked out of NISEI — booted from NISEI’s internal Slack and now from their Trello and even their playtester forums. The reason given to me by “RealityCheque” was because I was “bad mouthing [NISEI] on Twitter,” which I suppose I was to some extent, depending on your definition of “bad mouthing.” Follow this thread, and I’ll let you judge for yourself how “bad mouthy” it was.

In general, I think it’s a good idea for everyone involved in this game to have respectful and constructive criticism around the game, and I thought I was doing that here. Like in this blog post, I questioned whether or not the Core Experience Paper Trail interaction had really been tested sufficiently. That was apparently the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as my NISEI club membership goes, and I’m honestly a little surprised at that. I mean, many people have said and thought much worse about NISEI than echoing someone else’s criticism about how well a set was tested, but that was the reason provided to me.

These things happen in fan-run projects all the time. Like I said, I’ve been expecting a boot from them for a while after I had internal conflicts with a few of the members of that organization and, as a consequence, had chosen to step away from the project beyond writing a few pieces of promotional copy. I really don’t care if I’m a part of NISEI any longer, as I contributed very little to the group and didn’t find myself in line with many of their approaches to collaborative work.

I’m more worried about NISEI’s approach to public criticism by its members and the way it (or maybe just a few individuals) view the activities of NISEI members outside the comfy confines of their private Slack. NISEI is a wonderful and ambitious venture, and one that is still getting its footing. I’d like to hope that, in the future, they’ll be better equipped to understand the ups and downs folks have with their products, including those of us ostensibly on the “inside” of the project. There should ideally be a better process to tease apart the criticisms that are intended to damage them from the ones that are about active discussions of what works well and what doesn’t in the game. We’re all still players who care about the game and often want to talk with others online about it. And if NISEI volunteers can’t feel like they can validate or echo others’ criticisms of the NISEI game without facing punitive measures like this, then I just don’t know how they’ll continue to attract anyone but those who already agree with their existing perspective on the game.

I wish them well. I’ve got a NISEI Store Championship kit on the way to me and I will probably still actually run it, though I’m unsure of that at the moment. I’m hopeful that the future of NISEI as it evolves will iron all out the kinks in their process, create some new and exciting variability in the game, and give us more reasons to play. Even if I’m not enjoying their current game, there’s always tomorrow.

#netrunner #byenisei #corexp #papertrailsux

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wazafam · 4 years

Link

The hit reality show Temptation Island has been the downfall of many couples. The island is not to be played with, as even the most secure couples are sure to be tested along the way. There have been singles who went on the show with a mission to get a partner. Although Toneata and Morgan succeeded in their quests, their relationships did not last long outside of the villa.

Temptation Island is a treacherous dating show that has sparked the end of relationships. For this reason, only the brave should venture onto the shores of Temptation Island. Even the very few couples who were able to make it work after the show experienced a lot of turbulence along the way. For example, Javen Butler and Shari Ligons found their way back to each other after the show. Their rekindled romance wasn't without its issues, as they did struggle for a while. Now, they seem to be making it work. Despite this success story, Temptation Island is the hill that many couples die on, metaphorically speaking. Even former participant Morgan Lolar said couples do the show because someone wants to cheat.

Related: Temptation Island: Kendal Is Worse Than David & Evan For These Reasons

Ashley and Rick had been together for almost four years when they appeared on the show. Ashley had trust issues as Rick had been unfaithful in the past, and he wanted to prove to Ashley that he had changed. When Rick insinuated that they had no rules during their time apart, Ashley took that as an insult. She assumed he would revert to his old ways.

Because she feared being hurt by him again, she slept with one of the singles on the first night. This was a blow to Rick, but they left the island together. They broke up shortly after and confirmed this on the reunion show. Rick re-confirmed his single status via a post on his Twitter account, saying "For everyone wondering, I'm single."

Ashley is now pursuing a career in television and is even part of Temptation Island production, but she's working behind the scenes, as part of the casting crew. She is currently single and mingling. Rick also appears to be single and modeling for Foot Locker, Nike, and other brands. Despite not being together, they have the same goals in mind, and they're both focusing on building their careers.

When it comes to this relationship, it seems like Casey dug his grave when he said he could break up with Ashley and he would not care. This did not sit well with her. She promptly began moving on. Casey made it seem as though he had her wrapped around his finger, but she proved him wrong. Ashley and Casey broke up at the final bonfire after Casey attempted to propose. Ashley said no and left him in a crumpled heap. She reunited with Ben but her relationship with Ben did not last, as he claimed she slept with Casey. She says it was just a kiss. Casey did not attend the reunion show. Now, it seems like Ashley is single and focused on loving herself. Casey is now an OnlyFans creator who provides exclusive content and updates. He is focused on his fitness.

Related: Temptation Island Season 3 Schedule (What Time & Where New Episodes Air)

Season 2 saw the girls step out more than the guys. Esonica was the third girl to make a strong connection with single Kareem, and this led her to cheat on Gavin. Viewers believe that Gavin would have done more if there had been a girl interested in him. Despite Gavin wanting to continue their relationship, Esonica made the decision to end it.

The pair decided to walk away from their relationship at the final bonfire and she left with Kareem. Kareem and Esonica dated briefly after the show. They continued to follow each other on social media but ultimately did not work out as a couple. Gavin pursued a career in acting. He even landed a few roles in movies.

Gavin dabbled in influencing for a hot second, as he promoted the standard weight loss gummies on his Instagram. All in all, he appears to be happy and single. He was recently in Australia. Esonica started a beauty company and is the CEO, and her company is called Forever Royal Cosmetics.

Related: Temptation Island: When & Where Season Three Was Filmed

There was an infamous threesome that viewers talked about for ages. David managed to convince two singles to have a threesome with him and fans were shocked. Never had they seen such a blatant disregard for a relationship. David did not even pick one of the two girls he had a threesome with. Instead, he chose another girl, Toneata. He left the island with her but that did not last long, as she claimed David had been cheating on her.

David and Kate then got back together and released a now-deleted statement on Instagram, via Us Weekly. It said, “After letting you into a small glimpse of my life in an unrealistic and inorganic environment on Temptation Island, I've decided I owe no one answers as to decisions that I've made AFTER cameras stopped rolling.” It is not surprising that they broke up quickly after this statement was released.

Kate is now with a new man. His name is Anand Sukhadia. Kate posted a picture of the two of them on her Instagram in December 2020 around Christmas time. It was captioned, "Grateful for the love & light of 2020." The pair seem to still be together, and it is great to see Kate so happy and in love. David’s relationship status is unclear, but if his behavior on Temptation Island is anything to go by, maybe he needs to be single and find himself.

Next: 90 Day Fiance: The Franchise's Biggest Mama's Boys Of All Time, Ranked

Source: Us Weekly

Temptation Island Season 2: The Casts' Dating & Relationship Status After Show [full feature] from https://ift.tt/3l8Xl6b

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sleemo · 7 years

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TIME Magazine: A Star of His Own Making

In person, John Boyega carries himself with an assuredness that could be mistaken for self-importance. He’s one of those actors who look as tall and sturdy in real life as they do onscreen. He fills whatever room he happens to be in with inviting, boisterous chatter, thanks, no doubt, to years of voice training on the English stage. And he’s dead certain he’s going to be a big, big movie star.

I first meet Boyega in a cramped hallway at ABC Studios in Manhattan in July. We barely manage a hurried handshake as he proceeds in Aaron Sorkin–like strides toward a nearby stage. His publicist and his sister—who also acts as his assistant and is Googling where they can find British pub food in New York—are drafting in his wake. I watch off set as Boyega sits down with the hosts of Live With Kelly and Ryan, his first of three interviews for the day. Each sit-down requires the same thing of the 25-year-old Brit: promoting his latest film, Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, about the city’s 1967 riots, and expounding on the state of race relations in neat, 30-second sound bites. Naturally, interviewers also want to ask about his other new movie, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, coming out in December.

If the challenge of figuring out how to discuss Black Lives Matter and lightsabers in the same breath weighs on him, Boyega doesn’t show it. “I see what I do in part as creating change through art,” he tells me. “Sometimes that responsibility can feel like a burden, but it’s not. It pushes you to find your purpose in the world.”

Most people know Boyega as Finn, the Stormtrooper who defects to the Rebels and helps an aspiring Jedi (Daisy Ridley) in 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Boyega is confident that he can sidestep the quagmire of franchise fame that has kept some actors from ever eclipsing their first blockbuster roles. So when I finally sit down with him for lunch, I begin by asking if he’d rather follow the Denzel Washington/Harrison Ford path to stardom—bringing the same charming swagger to every role—or if he’d prefer to go the Judi Dench/Idris Elba route of disappearing into parts. He grins at me and says, “I think to be a real star, you have to do both. I’m going to do both.”

Which might seem presumptuous if Boyega hadn’t been consistently checking off items on his superstardom to-do list. Since his breakout role two years ago, he has produced and starred in another franchise film, the upcoming Pacific Rim: Uprising (become a producer: check), played opposite Tom Hanks in the poorly reviewed The Circle (inevitable flop: check), returned to London to play a soldier with PTSD at the Old Vic (reaffirm acting chops onstage: check) and, with Detroit, become the face of an Academy Award winner’s latest gritty film (make an Oscar bid: check). And he’s working on writing and producing his own movies in hopes of leading a generation of artists who bring more diverse stories to the screen.

So, yes, John Boyega will be a big, big movie star. And he plans to get there his own way.

Boyega, the son of Nigerian parents, grew up in the working-class South London neighborhood of Peckham and began enrolling in youth theater programs when he was 9. As a teen, he was cast in a movie filming near his neighborhood, Attack the Block. The comedic horror film centers on a gang of teenagers who must defend their public-housing project from an extraterrestrial invasion. Soon after it premiered, Boyega began trying to land American movie roles, culminating in a series of grueling, secret Star Wars auditions for director J.J. Abrams, who had been a fan of his first film.

The day he found out he got the part, Boyega says, he went home to tell his parents. He bowed to them in a traditional Nigerian sign of respect to show his gratitude for the sacrifices they had made. His parents—his mother works with the disabled, while his father is a Pentecostal preacher—immigrated to England before Boyega was born. “I grew up with my dad telling me that you’re currently around church people, but soon you’re going to be in a world where people don’t believe the same things you believe in. People are going to laugh at the stuff you believe or are going to treat you a certain way,” Boyega recalls. “And just to try as much as you can to be loving to all people.”

Boyega’s casting in Star Wars put that advice to the test. The beginning of the film’s first trailer, released in 2014, showed the actor in Stormtrooper garb minus the helmet. Within minutes, he was deluged with messages on Twitter objecting to the idea of a black man at the center of a Star Wars saga. And Boyega continues to endure occasional harassment on social media. “It’s blatant racism,” he says. “I embrace all people, but I do not embrace racists. I despise racists. Do they know how dumb it is to waste brain cells on taking issue with the amount of melanin in someone’s skin?” He argues that everyone just wants to see themselves represented onscreen and that it’s time for more diverse heroes at the movies.

He pauses and then tells me, “I really want you to include this: 99% of the response was positive. Good doesn’t get credit sometimes because it’s overshadowed by the bad. People tried to boycott the movie, and we made something like a billion dollars in 12 days. That represents every person who bought a ticket. So much for your boycott.”

Disney is hoping the next Star Wars, subtitled The Last Jedi, will draw an even bigger audience when it premieres on Dec. 15. Boyega’s innocent Finn offered much of the comic relief in The Force Awakens, but the actor says the movie and his character’s story get much darker in the sequel. Finn wakes from a coma and is paired off with a new character, Rose (Kelly Marie Tran), as they embark on a dangerous mission with the droid BB-8 in tow. Rose, a lowly engineer who yearns to fight for the Resistance, believes that Finn is a war hero. “Finn’s not so sure that he’s a hero or that he really even believes in the Resistance or anything at all,” says Boyega. “So he’s off with Rose, who is a true believer, and he has to figure out whose side he’s on and navigate these conflicting emotions.”

Finn’s onscreen banter—with Rey, with Han Solo, even with BB-8—made the character a fan favorite. As a result, Boyega says he found himself with an unexpected platform. He’s used it to defend his fellow actors and challenge the entertainment industry. He spoke for Ridley when she left Instagram after an anti-gun-violence post resulted in harassment. He called out HBO’s Game of Thrones for its lack of diversity. And he defended Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya, whom he knows from the London theater circuit, when Samuel L. Jackson said an African-American actor, rather than a black English actor, should have played the lead role in the movie about American racism. “It just makes no sense for Brits and Americans to fight with each other like that,” says Boyega. “When you’re black and in a position of influence, you have a responsibility to speak out. When you’re an actor, you have a responsibility to speak out through your work.”

Detroit is an example of the latter. It is an affecting, if complicated, film. Bigelow filmed it as if she were running with a camera through a war zone. But unlike her other recent movies (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty), the battleground is a Midwestern metropolis. Boyega plays a security guard who tries to act as a liaison between white cops and black civilians amid unfolding violence at the Algiers Motel. His attempts to protect the innocent eventually make him a scapegoat for the police. “It was an even bigger opportunity than Star Wars to show what I can do,” he says. “You don’t want people going to a movie as serious as this and saying, ‘Hey, why is Finn being interrogated by the police?’”

Boyega’s performance has put him in the conversation for an Oscar. That’s a particularly important item on the superstar checklist and requires a rigorous press tour. If you ask Boyega who his role models are on that score, he’ll talk about his Star Wars co-star Ford. But when it comes to influences, Boyega is more likely to cite his peers. He brings up Issa Rae, the creator and star of HBO’s Insecure. “That’s something I hope to achieve someday, to write and develop my own original project,” he says, adding that he has always written but didn’t really understand how to tackle a screenplay until Spike Lee gave him a copy of his Do the Right Thing script, which included notes scrawled in the margins.

Boyega says he’s excited that several actors he knew from the London theater world are beginning to break into Hollywood too: Malachi Kirby was Kunta Kinte in the recent Roots remake for History, and Letitia Wright will play a warrior in the 2018 Marvel superhero movie Black Panther. “It kind of reminds me of that picture of Tupac and Jada Pinkett in high school. Everybody’s gone off now to have their moments,” says Boyega. “I think our generation, we don’t want to wait around only to be given the same stereotyped roles again and again. We want to decide our own fate.”

#interview #cast #john boyega #time magazine #finn #star wars #detroit #pacific rim

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neptunecreek · 4 years

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Podcast Episode: The Secret Court Approving Secret Surveillance

Episode 001 of EFF’s How to Fix the Internet

Julian Sanchez joins EFF hosts Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien as they delve into the problems with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, also known as the FISC or the FISA Court. Sanchez explains how the FISA Court signs off on surveillance of huge swaths of our digital lives, and how the format and structure of the FISA Court is inherently flawed.

In this episode, you’ll learn about:

How the FISA Court impacts your digital privacy.

The makeup of the FISA Court and how judges are chosen;

How almost all of the key decisions about the legality of America's mass Internet spying projects have been made by the FISC;

How the current system promotes ideological hegemony within the FISA court;

How the FISC’s endless-secrecy-by-default system insulates it from the ecosystem of jurisprudence that could act as a guardrail against poor decisions as well as accountability for them;

How the FISC’s remit has ballooned from approving individual surveillance orders to signing off on broad programmatic types of surveillance;

Why we need a stronger amicus role in the FISC, and especially a bigger role for technical experts to advise the court;

Specific reforms that could be enacted to address these systemic issues and ensure a more fair review of surveillance systems.

Julian is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and studies issues at the intersection of technology, privacy, and civil liberties, with a particular focus on national security and intelligence surveillance. Before joining Cato, Julian served as the Washington editor for the technology news site Ars Technica, where he covered surveillance, intellectual property, and telecom policy. He has also worked as a writer for The Economist’s blog Democracy in America and as an editor for Reason magazine, where he remains a contributing editor. Sanchez has written on privacy and technology for a wide array of national publications, ranging from the National Review to The Nation, and is a founding editor of the policy blog Just Security. He studied philosophy and political science at New York University. Find him on Twitter at @Normative.

Below, you’ll find legal resources – including links to important cases, books, and briefs discussed in the podcast – as well a full transcript of the audio.

Please subscribe to How to Fix the Internet using Stitcher, TuneIn, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your podcast player of choice. You can also find this episode on the Internet Archive. If you have any feedback on this episode, please email [email protected]

Resources

NSA & FBI

Stellar wind

NSA Collected US Email Records in Bulk for More than Two Years Under Obama (The Guardian)

NSA's Stellar Wind Program Was Almost Completely Useless, Hidden From FISA Court by NSA and FBI (Techdirt)

FAQ on NSA surveillance, including FAQs about EFF’s litigation to stop the mass surveillance (EFF)

Pen trap and trace authority and wiretap authority and other electronic surveillance, including Title 3 (relevant to wiretaps)

Crossfire Hurricane

Crossfire Hurricane (Wikipedia)

Read the Inspector General's Report on the Russia Investigation (New York Times)

Carter Page: Justice Department Says Facts Did Not Justify Continued Wiretap of Trump Aide (New York Times)

Court Cases

Smith v Maryland (Wikipedia)

Smith v Maryland Turns 35, But Its Health is Declining (EFF)

US v. Miller (Wikipedia)

U.S. v. Maolin Ninth Circuit Opinion (ACLU)

United States v. Maolin case page and brief (Brennan Center)

United States v. Maolin case page (EPIC)

Jewel v. NSA case page (EFF)

About Federal Judges - Article III Judges (US Courts)

Section 215 & FISA

What You Need to Know about the FISA Court- and How it Needs to Change (EFF)

FISA Court Docket

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

Reform or Expire (Section 215 of the Patriot Act) (EFF)

Enhancing Civil Liberties Protections in Surveillance Law (2015 USA Freedom Act and the introduction of amici) (Brennan Center)

Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) (Wikipedia)

The Classified Information Procedures Act: What It Means and How It's Applied (Lawfare)

Books

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace 2.0 by Lawrence Lessig

National Security Investigations and Prosecutions by Douglas Wilson and David Kris

Transcript of Episode 001: The Secret Court Approving Secret Surveillance

Danny O'Brien: Welcome to How to Fix the Internet with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a podcast that explores some of the biggest problems with face online right now. Problems whose source and solution is often buried in the obscure twists of technological development, societal change, and subtle details of Internet law.

Cindy Cohn: Hi everyone, I'm Cindy Cohn, the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and I'm also a lawyer.

Danny O'Brien: And I'm Danny O'Brien, and they let me work at EFF too—even though I'm not a lawyer. Welcome to How to Fix the Internet, a podcast that explores some of the more pressing problems facing the net today and then solves them. You're welcome, Internet.

Cindy Cohn: It's easy to see everything that's wrong with the Internet and the policies that govern it. It's a lot harder to start naming the solutions to those problems, and even harder sometimes to imagine what the world would look like if we got it right. But frankly, that's the most important thing. We can only build a better Internet if we can envision it.

Danny O'Brien: So with an ambitious name like 'How to Fix the Internet', you might think we're going to tackle just about everything. But we're not, and we're doing that on purpose. Instead, we've chosen to go deep on just a few specific issues in this podcast.

Cindy Cohn: And sometimes we know the right answer—we're EFF after all. But other times, we don't. And like all complex things, the right answer might be a mix of different ideas or there may be many solutions that could work or many roads to get us there. There is also some bad ideas some times and we have to watch for the blow back from those. But what we hope to create here is a place where experts can both tell us what's wrong, but give us hope in their view of what it's going to look like if we get it right.

Danny O'Brien: I do feel that some parts of the digital world are a little bit more obviously broken than others. Mass surveillance seems like one of those really blatant flaws at EFF we've spent years fighting pervasive US government surveillance online and our biggest fights have been in what seem to us the most obvious place to fight it, which is in the public US courts. But there is one court where our lawyers will likely never get a chance to stand up and argue their case. Even though it's got surveillance in its name.

Cindy Cohn: Our topic today is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is also called the FISC or the FISA Court. The judges who sit on this court are hand picked by the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, that's currently Justice Roberts. The FISA Court meets in secret and has a limited public docket and until recently it had almost no public records of its decisions. In fact, the very first case on the FISC docket was an EFF transparency case that ended up getting referred to the FISC. But this where almost all of the key decisions about the legality about America's mass Internet spying projects have been made and what that means is pretty much everybody in the United States is affected by the secret court's decisions despite having no influence over it and no input into it and no way to hold the court accountable if it gets things wrong.

Danny O'Brien: Joining us now to discuss just what an anomaly an American and global injustice the secret FISA Court is, and how we could do better is Julian Sanchez, the Cato Institute's specialist in surveillance legal policy. Before joining Cato, Julian served as the Washington editor for Ars Technica where he covered surveillance, intellectual property and telecom policy. He has also worked as a writer for the Economist blog, Democracy in America and is an editor for Reason Magazine where he remains a contributing editor. He's also on Twitter as Normative and that's one of my favorite follow there.

Danny O'Brien: Julian, welcome to the podcast. We are so happy to have you hear today.

Julian Sanchez: Thanks for having me on.

Cindy Cohn: Julian, you have been incredibly passionate about reining in mass surveillance for as long as almost anyone, perhaps even me. Where does that passion come from for you?

Julian Sanchez: I don't know if I have an origin story. I was bitten by a radioactive J. Edgar Hoover or something, but as an adolescent I was in a way much more technical than I am now. I ran a dial-up BBS when that was still a thing before everyone was on the Internet and I remember watching people dial in and I think it was something people sensed was a private activity as they were writing messages to each other and tooling around looking for things to download. Sometimes I would just be sitting there watching them and thinking, gosh, the person who operates the platform really has visibility on a lot of things that we don't instinctively think of as observed. Probably just as a result of being online, for some values of online from a pretty young age, I was interested in a lot of the puzzles of how you apply rules that we expect to govern our conduct in the physical space to this novel regime.

Julian Sanchez: I remember in college jumping ahead and reading Lawrence Lessig code and discussing the puzzle of the idea of a perfect search. That is to say, if you had a piece of software, a virus let's say, that could go out and look only for contraband, it would only ever report back to the server if it found known child pornography or known stolen documents. Would that constitute a search? Is that the kind of conduct that essentially, because it would never reveal anything but contraband, could be done universally without a warrant or should we think differently about it than, for example, the Supreme Court thinks about dog sniffs. If it only ever reveals what is criminal, that is, the presence of narcotics or bombs, then it doesn't technically count as a search even though it is a way of peering into a protected space.

Julian Sanchez: more recently, whimsically, the Risen and Lichtblau story back in 2005 'Bush Lets US Spy on Callers Without Courts,' which was the first public hint of what we later came to know was a mass program of warrantless surveillance called, Stellar Wind. I was just dissatisfied with the quality of the coverage and ended up buying the one book you could get about FISA, 'National Security Investigations and Prosecutions' by David Kris and Douglas Wilson, and burning through it like Harry Potter. I just found it inherently fascinating. This was at a time when, and I was still a journalist at the time, it was a time when most of the reporters writing about this did not understand FISA very well. They certainly had not read this rather thick, and to normal human beings, boring treatise and so I found myself, because I now have this rather strange knowledge base, writing quite a lot about it, partly just because the quality of a lot of the coverage of the issue was not very well informed.

Cindy Cohn: We had a similar experience here at EFF, which was, at that time it was my colleague, Lee Tien and I, and we had read Kris and so we ended up becoming the only people around who knew about the secret court before everybody suddenly became aware of it. But let's back up a second. Why do we have a FISA Court? Where is it? I've talked a little about who is on it, but where does this idea come from?

Julian Sanchez: This grows out of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 that was passed in response to disclosures of a dizzying array of abuses of surveillance authority and their power more generally by the FBI especially, but the American intelligence community in general. For decades, oversimplifying a bit, effectively wire tapping had been initially just illegal period and then very tightly constrained and the FBI had essentially decided those rules can't possibly really apply to us and so FISA, for the first time, created an intelligence specific framework for doing electronic surveillance. The idea of having a separate court for this, I think, grew out of a number of factors.

Julian Sanchez: One is the sense that there was this need for extreme secrecy where you were dealing with potentially people with foreign state backing who were not necessarily going to be sticking around for criminal prosecution. And when you're talking about intelligence gathering, criminal prosecution isn't necessarily the point. And so this is an activity that is not really designed to yield criminal cases. You don't really want the methods ever disclosed. You're dealing with adversaries who have the capability to potentially plant people in ordinary courts, that's where you're discussing interests, sources, and methods in your intelligence so there was a sense that it would be better to have a separate, extra secure court. And also that you might not want to have to explain all this both highly sensitive and potentially quite complicated intelligence practices and information to whatever random magistrate judge happened to be on the roster in the jurisdiction where you were looking.

Julian Sanchez: And also that the nature of intelligence surveillance is quite different in so far as, again, you're not necessarily looking at someone who has committed a crime, you think someone is working on behalf of a foreign power and trying to gather intelligence for them or engage in clandestine intelligence activities. But you don't necessarily have a specific crime you think has been committed. Your purpose in gathering intelligence is not to prosecute crimes. These are the cluster of reasons around the formation of a separate court for that purpose and it originally consisted of seven federal circuit judges, now it's 11 after the USA Patriot Act increased the number and so they continue serving on their regular courts and then, in effect, take turns in rotation sitting for a week and hearing applications from the Justice Department and the FBI to conduct electronic surveillance.

Cindy Cohn: The court started out as one thing, this idea of individual secret warrants for spies basically, but it's really changed in the past decade. Can you walk us through how those shifts happened and why?

Julian Sanchez: And of course to the extent that older FISA Court opinions are not available. The first ever published opinion of FISA Court was in 2002 and it was quite a few years before we got a second. Now quite a number of more recent ones are public, but we still have to speculate about the earlier history of the court, but veterans of the court, that is retired FISC judges have effectively confirmed that, in its early years the FISA Court was primarily about assessing the adequacy of individual warrant applications. It was just a bread and butter magistrate judge usually almost scut work. Okay, have you made the showing that there is probable cause to believe that the target of the surveillance is an agent of a foreign power. You have, you haven't. In 99.9% of cases, it was, you have and they took a pass on that individual warrant and as we get to the, in particular, the post-9/11 era and you're dealing with questions of trying to, one, often figure out who an unknown target is. You might have someone whose using a particular email address or other account that you don't otherwise necessarily have an identity.

Julian Sanchez: You're potentially trying to sift through a lot of data to figure out who your target is or which data pertains to the people you're interested in. There is a shift toward more programmatic sorts of surveillance and so the court increasingly is not passing on the question of have you established a probable cause showing with respect to "bad guy X" but rather does the law, does a statute written to deal with pre-Internet communications technology permit you to do the surveillance you're contemplating and in particular, might it allow you to gather information in ways that go beyond just targeting a particular facility, a particular phone line, that is the home phone of a particular known target. And so it ended up building this kind of secret body of precedent around what kinds of programs for Internet type network surveillance were permissible under a statute that was not written with that in mind.

Cindy Cohn: They really did shift from individual warrants to approving whole programs and whole programs that really went beyond, is this person a spy to let's look at this whole network and see maybe if there is something that indicates that a spy might be there. It really flips the kind of basis way that we think about investigations. From my perspective, obviously, I've been litigating this in the courts for a long time so it kind of flipped the whole thing on its head.

Julian Sanchez: And so we know, for example, maybe I should give some maybe more concrete examples. We know there was a bulk telephony metadata program under one FISA authority that actually was sort of the second case of this kind the FISA Court had to consider. There was an earlier question presented by a program that used what was called the pen trap authority, pen register trap and trace authority, which is, in the traditional phone context, this is about essentially real-time metadata surveillance. Meaning let's say there's a particular phone number that we think is up to no good, maybe we don't have a full blown probable cause wiretap order for that number yet, but we want to know who this target is calling and whose calling that target.

Julian Sanchez: A pen register trap and trace order lets you get realtime data about what calls are happening to and from that number and who they are from and how long the call lasts and in the Internet era the question is, what kind of realtime metadata does that let you get and when the statute talks about a facility at which this information collection is directed, traditionally that meant a phone number is the facility, but in the Internet era, you had questions like, because the standard for this kind of trap is because you're not getting full blown, in theory, you're getting the full content, the full email, the full phone conversation. You can get one of these pen trap orders under Section 214 of the USA Patriot Act with a lot less than probable cause.

Julian Sanchez: The question is, we're talking about regular phones anymore, we're talking about Internet accounts and IP addresses and server. What can a facility be? Can we say, we want all the metadata and the realtime transactional information for a particular server and all the traffic coming to and from that? So we're not just talking about one individual phone line or maybe even a corporate phone line used by a number of people, but facilities that may be handling millions of peoples traffic, or at least tens of thousands of peoples traffic. The court, I don't think that is an opinion that is public in full at this point, but essentially said, at least with respect to international communications, we're going to be pretty permissive about what you can collect.

Danny O'Brien: This is the other shift that I see, which is that not only is FISA not dealing with regular phones anymore, but it's dealing with these big servers with millions of people, but also the sort of target has changed too, partly because we're not really talking about agents of a foreign power, we're not talking about spy versus spy. It became much more dissolved than that. It's like we're talking about random stochastic terrorists who you don't necessarily know who they are. But also, this switch between "we can do foreign surveillance because we're targeting foreign powers and their spies",to "we're just surveilling foreigners", like they don't have rights under this court. So the question is, how do we scoop out this data and separate the stuff that legally we are concerned about, which is US citizens communications, but everything else is kind of fair game. And then we have a secret court that doesn't even have any kind of representation of US citizens interests, but also making this kind of human rights and foreign policy decision too.

Julian Sanchez: The debate around the authorities that the FISA Court oversees has been very, US citizens-centric, so you can watch tapes from CSPAN where a lot of defenders are saying, "look, as long as they are targeting foreigners, who cares if they don't have constitutional rights". Some of us think, people are human and have human rights even if they had the poor taste to be born somewhere other than the United States and so this is perhaps not something we should entirely shrug off. But also that there's this interesting shift from the idea that you should be concerned if the communications of an American with Fourth Amendment rights are surveilled too. The idea that really what's significant in terms of encroaching on peoples' rights is who is targeted. And for practical reasons, of course, you understand why this would be the focus because you cannot in advance know whose communications you will intercept when you target somebody. You know who you're going to target, but you have no idea who they might talk to. That's the point in part of doing the surveillance.

Julian Sanchez: But if you look at the text of the Fourth Amendment, it doesn't say the "right of the people against being targeted shall not be violated". It says "the right of the people to be secure in their persons and houses" and papers or the digital equivalent thereof. And in a sense, the fundamental Fourth Amendment concern was, at the time, were the general warrants, with the idea of these sort of open-ended authorizations to search, that did not target anyone. From the perspective of the people who signed off on the Fourth Amendment, it was not a mitigating consideration to say, don't worry if your communications are collected, you weren't the target. The thing they found most egregious, the thing they thought was the most defensive abuse was surveillance that did not have a particular target that made it open to anyone to be swept into the dragnet.

Danny O'Brien: Right. And just to spell this out, general warrants and this is a British invention so I apologize, was this idea that you could just get a warrant for everybody in a town or everybody who might be associated with it so this early mass surveillance warrant.

Julian Sanchez: And it's intimately connected with political, essentially political dissent and suppression. Some of the most controversial early cases that the American framers looked to involved a publication called the 'North Britain 45', was the one that really annoyed the King and so there was an authorization given to the King's messengers to make diligent search for these unknown anonymous writers and publishers of this seditious publication. The whole problem was it was published in the United States so they didn't know in advance who was responsible so they thought we need the authority to be able to riffle through the possessions of all the folks we suspect of maybe not being as loyal as they ought to be and give them cart blanche to decide who the appropriate targets are so the British courts ultimately said was destructive of liberty in a pretty toxic way. Chief Justice Pratt, later Lord Camden wrote some pretty inspirational prose about why that kind of authority was fundamentally incompatible with a free society and that was a great influence on the defenders of the Fourth Amendment who had the same objection to general warrants or a general search authorizations that empowered customs officials to essentially look for contraband without particularized judicial authorization.

Danny O'Brien: And there's this subtle thing here where you only get to make that kind of discrimination, that kind of difference particularly when you're separating what is terrorism and what is political action, if there is someone in the court testifying on behalf of the person that might be being targeted and that's what a secret court like the FISA Court just didn't have for a very long time, barely has now.

Julian Sanchez: Regular courts don't have that either, of course. When you were going to apply for a wiretap, even if it's in a criminal case, you don't call up the lawyer of the person you're wiretapping and say, would you come in and do an adversarial proceeding in court about whether we can wiretap you. You tend not to get very much useful information that way. But there is the back end, which is to say, yeah, ex parte proceeding on the front end, you don't notify the target in advance that you're going to do a wiretap, but that process is conditioned by the knowledge that the point of a criminal wiretap, a so-called title three wiretap, is to gather evidence for a criminal prosecution that when that prosecution occurs, you're going to have discovery obligations to defense counsel. They are going to have an incentive to kick the tires pretty hard and poke everything with a stick and make sure everything was executed properly and the warrant was obtained properly and if it wasn't, get the case thrown out.

Julian Sanchez: That knowledge that you've got to expect that kind of wire brush when it comes time to go to court, means that really from the outset, you talk to people who work on getting criminal wiretap orders that they are in consultation with their lawyers and they are talking about how are we going to do this in a way that is going to stand up in court, because if this gets thrown out, you've just wasted your time and probably a fair amount of money in the process. The fact that that doesn't exist on the FISA side, that essentially 99% of FISA orders are not intended to ever result in a criminal prosecution are never going to result in disclosure to target, are effectively, permanently covert means you really don't have to worry about that. You are presenting to the FISA Court your version of "why I think there's evidence that this person is a foreign agent" and if you've cherry picked the facts as seems to have happened in the case of former Trump campaign advisor, Carter Page, if you decided to include the inculpatory information but leave out the information that might call into doubt your theory of the case or make it look like perhaps there's another explanation for some of these things that look incriminating on face.

Julian Sanchez: You're probably never going to be called into account for that because the FISA Court is relying on your representation and they are probably never going to hear from the target. They put together a very misleading argument for why I was a foreign agent.

Cindy Cohn: I feel like a part of the problem here is that judges, they really do only get one side of the story. This is one of the reasons that EFF helped get past some changes to the law as part of the USA Freedom Act to create another entity that could at least weigh in and help the court hear from the other side, make it a little more adversarial. But I do think the judges get captured and also one of the things we've learned now is that thanks to the US Supreme Court catching the Department of Justice not even telling criminal defendants when FISA information was used. They are supposed to be telling criminal defendants when FISA information was used and to date, nobody whose been prosecuted even in the public courts on the basis of secret FISA information has ever had access to be able to figure out whether what they were told was true.

Cindy Cohn: The Carter Page situation is really an anomaly compared to so many others-

Julian Sanchez: Literally unique. The only case of a FISA Court application being even partly public.

Cindy Cohn: And that didn't happen because there was a legal system to do it. That happened because of political decisions and so nobody else is going to get that, is the point I think. People should say, "Carter Page found out that there were lies underneath his". I think that it's good to get that input but I think it's unreasonable to expect that that's the only time that's ever happened. It's just the only time we've ever found out about it.

Danny O'Brien: As a non-lawyer and someone who tries to avoid looking at politics almost all the time these days, could you just explain what Carter Page was and why that was different?

Julian Sanchez: Carter Page was a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign who had all sorts of incredibly sketchy ties to Russia. He was actually someone who was on the FBI, the New York office of the FBI's radar before he had any association with the Trump campaign. They were essentially preparing to open an investigation of him before he was announced as a Trump advisor. When he tried to campaign, this was passed on to FBI headquarters and he, in a sense, they were generally trying to figure out to what extent the Trump campaign was aware of and potentially complicit in the electoral interference operation that Russia was running on Trump's behalf or at least against the interests of Secretary Clinton and because of the panoply of shady connections, Carter Page became the person they thought, this is the one we can most easily target or get a warrant for. We don't want to go after the candidate himself, but and at this point Page had actually left the campaign, but he was the one who seemed to be the most likely, to actually be directly connecting Russian intelligence with the campaign. The most plausible link.

Julian Sanchez: There was a really disturbing exchange between, I think it was, Marsha Blackburn and Inspector General Horowitz from DOJ, put out this IG report on Crossfire Hurricane that focused pretty centrally on the surveillance of Carter Page and I was very critical of the many errors and omissions and that process, in particular when it came to the renewals of the surveillance of Page. And Blackburn, I think she asked this with the aim that he would say this is incredibly unusual and therefore the only explanation for it is some sort of agenda to get Trump or political bias against Trump. But she asked, how common is it for there to be this many errors and this much sloppiness in the FISA process? Is this out of the ordinary? Horowitz had to, quite candidly, say, "I just don't know. I hope not, but we've just never done this kind of individualized deep dive on a FISA application before.

Julian Sanchez: We've done audits, but this kind of we're digging into the case file, not just looking at whether the facts in the application matched what was in the case file, but whether there are important facts that were left out and painted a misleading picture. We just haven't done that before so frankly, we don't know how unusual this is". And that ought to be disturbing.

Cindy Cohn: We do know though, even the programmatic looks at, the Inspector Generals have looked or when the FISA Court themselves has caught the Department of Justice in lies, which they have a lot, that this is really an ongoing problem. It's one of the big frustrations for us in terms of trying to bring some accountability to the mass spying is that the FISA Court ... the part where the FISA Court approves a lot of things that come before it doesn't really bother me as much as the fact that the FISA Court itself continually finds out that the Department of Justice has been lying to them and doing things very differently than they've represented and having a lot of problems and they always just kind of continue to say, "go and sin no more", rather than actually creating an accountability or changes and I think that that message gets received.

Danny O'Brien: And that's sort of the point where a court like this becomes a rubber stamp because the FBI or whoever is coming to them saying, "we just want to extend this investigation. It's just the same as it normally was." Do you think that the FISA judges get captured in this way, that they just end up spending so much time listening to the intelligence services and the FBI and not hearing the other side of the story, that they just end up being overly reliant on that point of view?

Julian Sanchez: Absolutely. That's just necessarily the case. I've heard from retired FISA judges that they would hear from government lawyers things like, "you will have blood on your hands if you don't approve this surveillance." And again, because most of the stuff is never going to be public, you have on one side, look, if you are too precious about protecting civil liberties, you have people saying there could be an attack that would kill dozens or hundreds or thousands of people and on the other side, you're never going to be accountable for authorizing too much surveillance because this is not designed to end in a trial. You're never going to be really grilled about why you approved this dubious electronic surveillance.

Julian Sanchez: I would add that there is a defense intelligence folks and former FISC judges themselves sometimes make of the very high approval rate, which is quite high or you certainly, for most of the court's history, it's been extremely high, 99% plus, though not that much higher, frankly, than ordinary title three applications. And one of the ways that they would defend this and say "we're not a rubber stamp despite this 99% approval rate" is, they would say look, you need to understand how this process really works in practice. Which is, it's not that they just come in blind with an application that we decide. There is this back and forth where they will have a read application, a first draft, and they will go to, not the judges directly, but FISA Court staff, who may be in contact with the judges and say, this is the application we were thinking of submitting and they'll hear back.

Julian Sanchez: Maybe you should narrow this a little bit, maybe we would approve it for a shorter period of time or for these people, but not those people or we would approve this if you had better support for this claim. And so there is this sort of exchange that then essentially results in applications only being submitted when the FBI and DOJ know it's in a state the FISC is going to approve it. Maybe they don't submit it at all if the court says, "no, this is not something we would sign off on." And just to finish this point of, which is, and you would think, okay, that would explain it, but the problem is, you've created a process that is guaranteed to result in a FISA docket history that consists only of approvals. So when you get a proposed application and the court says, well, this doesn't quite meet the standard, that application doesn't actually ultimately get submitted.

Julian Sanchez: It only gets submitted when they know the court is going to say yes, when they've refined it in such a way that the court is willing to sign off on it. The problem is then you've created a body of precedent that consists exclusively of approvals. A particular set of facts where the balance of considerations is such that the court is going to say yes and so then you thus have no record of where the boundaries are of these are the conditions and the fact patterns under which the court will say no so that years down the line, a judge who is looking at applications can say, "okay, here is our record of yeses and nos. Here's our record of what's within bounds and here's our record of what's out of bounds." You only have a history of yes and that is very problematic. You don't have a documentary record of what previous judges have said, no, under these facts that's a bridge too far.

Cindy Cohn: And so that's why some of the former judges have said, look, this isn't really a court anymore. It's more like some kind of administrative agency. This is what you do if you want the FCC to approve a license. You can have this back and forth and then you finally submit something that works. There's lots of other kinds of bodies that work that way, but courts don't. And courts don't for some good reasons.

Danny O'Brien: All right, you've said that this court doesn't really have much oversight, but I have heard spoke that there's another institution around the FISC called the FISCR. Is that just like the superlative of the FISC or how do those relate?

Julian Sanchez: What we really is need is a FISCR. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review is where appeals from the Foreign Intelligence Court go. They've sat, that we know of, maybe a half a dozen times, all in the 21st century. It's possible they sat previously and we don't know about it, but five or six times that the public is aware of and the interesting thing structurally about the FISCR is that effectively the only time they are going to hear a case is on the rare occasions when the government didn't get what they want.

Cindy Cohn: I have to agree. This isn't really a way that holds the FISC accountable when it makes errors and certainly not when it makes errors that hurt you, the people who are the subjects of surveillance. You know, we managed however, to get some reforms over the years. EFF played a pretty big role in getting some changes to the FISA Court as part of the USA Freedom Act. What's your view on those changes and the impact of them, Julian?

Julian Sanchez: I think they've been pretty significant. I think we already have cases that we know about where the amicus of the USA Freedom Act created a panel of amici or friends of the court who at least in cases involving novel questions of law or technology can be invited by the court to provide their expertise, provide perhaps a contrary view to the government's argument inevitably why they should have more power to surveil, more broadly. And we already have cases where amici have successfully opposed/proposed surveillance that we know about or identified problems with practices by the FBI. There is, I think, a release made about a year and change ago that was essentially initiated by one of the amici that involved discovery that the FBI agents were searching this bulk foreign surveillance database. It's called the 702 database in a variety of improper ways and essentially taking this supposedly foreign intelligence database and routinely looking for US person information without any real connection to any national security or foreign intelligence case.

Julian Sanchez: We were probably catching more problems than we were before. It doesn't fundamentally change the structural problems with the court, but it does, I think, make it a little bit better. It has already paid off in ways that are public and perhaps in others that we don't know about.

Cindy Cohn: I think so too. Honestly, we felt like the first thing we have to do is get more information out about it so that we can make our case that Congress ought to step in and change it because those kinds of changes take a pretty strong lift on our side if we want to try to change things especially because the other side gets to do secret briefings to the intelligence communities.

Cindy Cohn: The theme of this podcast is how do fix these things. Julian, what would it look like if we got this right. We need to do national security investigations. I don't think anybody would say that we're never going to do those. What would it look like if we got the role of the FISA Court right?

Julian Sanchez: I mentioned this, I'm not sure this is the right idea, but it's worth putting out the possibility which is just we don't necessarily need a FISA Court. There are other countries that just have all surveillance governed by a uniform set of rules that regular judges are handling. And you could say, applications will go to the whatever jurisdiction is appropriate with the extent that you know one. You'll use the same procedures you use any time a court that is not a special secret court has to handle classified information, which can happen in a variety of circumstances like for example, when you need to prosecute someone for a crime that involves using classified information. But assuming the FISA Court is going to stick around, I think the most important thing that can be done is just remove the presumption of permanent covert.

Julian Sanchez: The amici, I think, have been very useful, but they are fundamentally a kind of clutch. They are a way of trying to partially reintroduce the kind of back end accountability that is the norm for criminal searches and criminal electronic surveillance in criminal investigations, surveillance that is criminal. One way you could do that more directly is just by ending the presumption of permanent covertness. I think the idea that electronic surveillance is going ultimately to be disclosed to the target eventually. It's something the Supreme Court has effectively said is an essential constitutional requirement, that one of the things that makes a search reasonable in Fourth Amendment terms is, if not at the time it's conducted then at least after the fact the target of that surveillance or that search needs to become aware of it and have an opportunity to challenge it and have an opportunity to seek remedies if they believe that they've been targeted inappropriately.

Julian Sanchez: The idea that you can just systematically make a judgment that that's not appropriate, that that's not necessary for this entire category of surveillance targets, even in cases where they do the surveillance and they say "we were wrong, this person was not a foreign agent, we didn't find what we expected", just seems totally misguided. You can't that frivolously dispense with an essential constitutional requirement. There may be cases where you don't want to reveal the surveillance after the fact, especially if we're talking about a foreign person, someone who does not actually have Fourth Amendment rights, but there may be cases where there are some powerful considerations that you should maybe for quite a while not disclose that the surveillance happened, but this shouldn't be the presumption.

Julian Sanchez: This is something they should have to argue for in the individual case. That, okay, the surveillance is done, why should you not have to tell this US person, and maybe in very many cases, there will be good reasons not to, but it shouldn't be taken for granted. It should be something that eventually they should assume we will in fact have to disclose or certainly if it turns out we were wrong, it's very likely the court is going to make us disclose and therefore, one, introduce the actual check on the back end of people kicking the tires and having the opportunity to challenge surveillance they believe is improper. But also on the front end, creating the understanding on the part of the people who are submitting these applications that you cannot assume this will be secret. You cannot assume that you will be accountable if you've targeted, especially an American, either on weak evidence or a selective arrangement of the evidence. I think that would go a long way toward aligning incentives in a much healthier way.

Cindy Cohn: I totally agree. I certainly, from your mouth to the Ninth Circuit's ears, because we have that very question up in EFFs case concerning national security letters, which do empower the government to request information from service providers and then carry what is essentially turning out to be an eternal gag on those companies. I completely agree with you that having something, the public having a little sunshine, be the disinfectant for some of the problems that we've seen can be very helpful.

Cindy Cohn: I also think that I'm not quite sure why we need a secret court hand selected by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to do this. Our Article three judges do handle cases involving classified information. We have a very special law called the Classified Information Protection Act that governs that and people are not regularly leaking classified information out of the federal courts. So I feel like it might have been reasonable in 1978 to think that that could be a problem. I think now in 2020 we have a lot of experience with regular courts handling classified information and we don't see a problem there. We might be able to help a little bit by broadening the scope of the judges involved from the hand picked ones.

Danny O'Brien: Isn't this also part and parcel of fixing all the problems around the FISA Court, reforming the classification process because I think that something you've identified, Julian, is this dark black ops world of government where the default is to classify information and then just the rest of government which has this presumption that it should be exposed to public review and we've got this creeping movement particularly around surveillance where the presumption is classification. And there's no external way of challenging that. The same people who want to conduct these programs are also the people that determine whether they are secret or not.

Julian Sanchez: I think that's absolutely right and it's one of the reasons I think the FISA Court has the appearance of a regular court. You always hear when people criticize the FISA Court, they say, "these are regular Article three judges." But in a lot of ways, it is sort of potemkin court because it is a court with a lot of the trappings but divorced from the larger context that gives us some reason to have confidence in the output, I guess, of the legal process which is to say, these Article three judges, but normally Article three judges do not exist in a vacuum, they exist in a context of higher courts who will be reviewing their decisions and hearing arguments from whoever lost the case that you ruled on and may issue a bench slap, may overturn your ruling in a perhaps gentle and perhaps somewhat scathing way.

Julian Sanchez: You have the knowledge that this is something that advocacy groups are going to look at write about, that the legal community is going to write law review articles about that you may find your peers and colleagues in the legal community not making fun of you, but the gentile law journal version of a kick me sign on your back if you write something that's not very well thought out. So you remove all of that context, you remove the review from above, the review, in a sense by a larger community and you remove a lot of the incentives for decisions to be effectively high quality.

Danny O'Brien: Can I just quickly ask, what's an Article three judge? What does that mean?

Julian Sanchez: Article three of the Constitution establishes the judicial branch so these are judges who are part of the judicial branch of the American government as laid out in Article three of the Constitution.

Danny O'Brien: Right. As opposed to FISA, which is really part of the executive almost?

Cindy Cohn: Article three judges, as Julian said, are judges who are appointed and approved by Congress in accordance with the way the Constitution creates the judiciary. There's lots of other people who are judges in our world who get called judge, but aren't Article three judges. So the magistrate judges who are judges who handle a lot of stuff for judges. Immigration judges. Lots of people.

Danny O'Brien: Judge Judy.

Cindy Cohn: Judge Judy. Well, she's a state court judge. But TV judges. Lots of people get called judges and so when people like Julian and I say Article three judges, we mean judges who were selected by the President and approved by the Congress in accordance with the processes that have developed out of Article three. Article three of the Constitution doesn't actually lay all of that out, but that's the process. It's to distinguish from other kinds of judges and the FISA Court is made up of judges who have been approved under Article three. It's just a subset of those that are handpicked by the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court to serve on it. And for a long, long time, the Chief Justice would generally only pick judges who lived in the eastern side of the country. There were very, very few judges from the 9th circuit, which is where we are out here in California. And the theory was, what if they have to get on their horse and drive to DC to look at secret things. And we made fun of them and so did a lot of other people point out that there are ways that you don't physically have to be in DC and that you can still review classified information because the FBI does it all the time. We finally have one judge from the Ninth Circuit who is on the FISA Court.

Julian Sanchez: Although by statute, I think there is a kind of minimum number of FISA Court who have to live within, I forget the distance, but it's 30 miles of DC or something like that. But it is a very unusual structure. That's to say, I think it's pretty basically unique. This is a court with 11 judges, all of whom were chosen by one person, John Roberts. And you can say, "they are all people who have been at least approved by the Senate and confirmed to their regular posts", but the composition of the panel is important. They don't usually sit as a panel. They usually, individually, take turns hearing cases. But there is a lot of social science research showing that essentially your peer group matters. If you have a bench that is composed of lets say, democratic appointees and republican appointees that if the majority of judges are conservative, liberal judges on that panel, on that bench, will tend to vote more like conservatives and vise versa.

Julian Sanchez: Conservatives, or at least someone who started as a conservative, with a bunch of democratic appointees as their peers will come to vote more and more like a liberal and in deed may vote more liberally than the initially conservative judge with a majority peer group of liberals. So the fact that you have people chosen essentially by one person probably not particularly ideologically diverse or diverse in perspective. I know there's a lot more former prosecutors and former defense attorneys who get picked for the FISC. That's probably true for the judiciary in general, it does mean you have not just all the structural reasons that the court is going to be disposed to be deferential to the government, but also a selection bias in the composition of the court to the extent that John Roberts is favorably disposed toward granting the government this kind of authority and chooses people whose perspectives he finds congenial]. You're going to have a body that probably does not have a lot of very staunch civil libertarians on it.

Cindy Cohn: One of the things that we did as part of helping push for this amicus rule is to include in the kind of people who can help the judges, technical people, because one of the things we saw after Mr. Snowden revealed a lot of the spying and the government unilaterally made some of these decisions public is that they were not nearly as well reasoned as we had hoped. And some of that may be because the judges don't have the kind of help that they need to do this because of the secrecy and the limitations on access to classified information.

Cindy Cohn: We were able to get the amicus to include not just lawyers, but also technical people. But I feel like at that point it's kind of too late. One of the things that I think would make, frankly, and this just isn't FISA Court, but I think all courts do a better job with technical issues is if they had more resources to explain how the tech works for them. I think that especially in the kinds of situations around mass spying, which is where we started and where we spend a lot of EFFs energy anyway. These are complex systems and if you're turning a legal analysis about whether how our people are targeted and how target information is collected, you have to understand how the technology works.

Julian Sanchez: There's some specific rulings related to the bulk metadata collection, both the telephone records collection under 215 and then that prior Internet metadata ruling where looking back on some of these that eventually have became public, the court is effectively saying well, there's a ruling from the late 70s, supposedly Maryland that says telephone records are not protected by the fourth amendment, you don't have a fourth amendment right against your telephone records being obtained by the government because you've essentially turned over this information voluntarily and this is information the company keeps as a matter of course in its own business records. The FISA Court effectively reads that as, communications metadata is not protected. Again, the opinions that have been released are fairly heavily redacted but it doesn't appear to be anywhere where in okaying this kind of very broad collection that doesn't require particularized warrants based on probable cause, anyone who spoke up and said, well, Internet communication does not work like the old phone system.

Julian Sanchez: All this traffic that is occurring over the network, when you send an email, Comcast does not keep a business record of what emails you sent. Maybe your employer or your email provider has a record like that, but Comcast, as a backbone provider, doesn't have that as a business record you can routinely obtain. You are collecting information that is, as far as the backbone provider is concerned, just content as much as the content of the email itself or the content of a phone conversation would be content. So there is this way in which this technological difference between how the phone network works and how packet switch networks like the Internet work, that is pretty clearly directly material to whether this important precedent applies and if this precedent doesn't apply, it makes a huge difference because it means what you're doing is essentially collection of content that is protected by the fourth amendment as opposed to collection of some kind of business record that, under this unfortunate precedent, is not protected by the fourth amendment.

Julian Sanchez: And it's not that you can't imagine some kind of potential argument they would make about this, but what's disturbing is that it didn't even look like the court had considered this. The court had not even factored in, there's actually this technological difference that calls into question whether this is the appropriate precedent. And it's one thing to say, they made a decision about that, that I don't approve of, but it's another thing to say, they have not even factored this in. They are not even questioning whether this technological difference makes an important legal difference because they don't seem to be even cognizant that these two networks operate in very different ways.

Cindy Cohn: I'm a huge fan of metaphors, but sometimes you read these decisions and you realize that the court actually didn't go beyond the metaphor level to figure out whether that's actually what's going on and just because there are similarities between phone networks and the way emails work doesn't mean that they are actually the same. I wanted to just summarize some of the ideas we've had because, again, we're trying to fix things here and I think that the fixes that we have talked through are perhaps get rid of the secret court all together and let the regular courts handle these cases is definitely worth thinking about.

Cindy Cohn: Certainly that all of the court's decisions and the material presented to the court would eventually be made public and that the burden is on the government to say why they shouldn't be made public. There is certainly stuff that can be redacted if you need to protect people's personal privacy but the government needs to demonstrate why these things should be private and I would argue they need to do that periodically, that it's just not one and done and then it stays secret forever.

Cindy Cohn: I think we've talked a little bit about making sure that the judges are chosen differently. That the choice by the chief justice causes real dangers and hazards in the ability of the court over time to really be ... to hold the government to its word and make the government do its work. I certainly think that the, personally, I don't put words in yours, but that the rule of the amici is small but mighty and needs to get bigger so that the court really does have something, especially in cases ... one of the things that we've lost is the adversarial process at the end that we have in the case of regular warrants. If we're not going to have that adversarial process at the end when we decide whether the evidence is admissible, we need to have more of an adversarial process in the beginning so that there is more of a shake out of what they get to do at the beginning since there isn't going to be one at the end.

Danny O'Brien: We have this to-do list of what to fix and taking notes. We also wanted to try and imagine what this better world would look like if we did manage to fix the Internet. But I want to narrow this down a bit. Julian, as somebody who's a journalist who writes about a secret court and has to do the research to try and map out what's going on there. If we did fix this process, how would your job change? What could you imagine writing about now and presenting to the public that maybe you can't or struggle to explain in the current situation?

Julian Sanchez: It's already changed significantly. Again, for decades there were basically no FISA Court opinions that were public. And then there were a very tiny handful and now there are dozens of public FISC opinions since the passage of USA Freedom. It's possible to talk concretely about what the FISA Court says on a range of complicated questions as opposed to just merely speculating about the different ways a court might interpret a statute that is, again, often not super clear because it was written before the technologies that now applies to existed. But certainly to have a more adversarial back end would open up, I think, the possibility of evaluating how often essentially they get it right. We just have no sense currently of how often electronic surveillance approved by the FISC is actually generating intelligence useful enough to justify the intrusion.

Julian Sanchez: We don't authorize wiretaps to catch jay walkers, as a rule. There is a list of fairly serious crimes that are eligible for wiretaps. But in the FISA case, you have a number of definitions of foreign intelligence. FISA orders have to be geared toward collecting foreign intelligence information and a lot of the definitions of that is rather complex multi-part definition are the kind of things you would think. Threats to the national security of the United States, but one of the rather broader ones is information that is relevant to the conduct of foreign affairs of the United States. And so when you're looking back and saying, did we get anything worthwhile out of this, there's a whole lot of communications between people who are not terrorists or spies or criminals that, if they are business people or government officials, or talking to business people or government officials might well in some sense be relevant to the conduct of foreign affairs of the United States, and because you don't have as you do on the, it's a different title three, the Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1969, ordinary criminal wiretaps are sometimes called title three orders.

Julian Sanchez: In that case, at least, you can say, you did the wiretap, what percentage of these wiretap orders you got resulted in a prosecution, how many of those resulted in convictions and to the extent that you did a wiretap and then you convicted someone of a fairly serious crime you have at least a sense that it was not completely frivolous, that you didn't just invade people's privacy for no reason. We don't have anything like that on the FISA side really. Surveillance ends and then 99% of the time there is no prosecution. That's not the point of FISA or a foreign intelligence surveillance. But okay, they stopped at some point wiretapping someone. Did they get it right? Did they get it wrong? Was the information in the application a fair representation of the facts available? Were they diligent about trying to present a complete picture to the court or did they only present what supported their desired results? That's all a perspective that we'd be much more likely to have if effectively people who were surveilled but ultimately weren't doing anything wrong had the ability to drag that into the light.

Cindy Cohn: Julian's point is really well taken. One of the things we've seen when we've lifted up the cover a little bit on some of these FISA Court investigations is how little they get out of some of them. Certainly, in the context of Section 215, which is the mass telephone records collection that, at the end of the day, there was one prosecution against a Somali guy who was sending money home. That was the only one where the FISA evidence was used. And then the Ninth Circuit just ruled in this case, which is called Maolin, a couple of weeks ago that frankly, the government was overstating how much the FISA Court information was being used and essentially was misleading Congress and the American people about the usefulness of it even in the very one case left standing.

Julian Sanchez: There is absolutely a pattern we see when, whether it was foreign wiretapping, the one component of Stellar Wind was first disclosed. It turned out this had saved thousands of lives, absolutely essential in preventing terrorist attacks and then years later the inspectors general of the various intelligence agencies put out a report that says, actually we dug into this and we talked to the officials and they really could not come up with a concrete case of an intelligence success that depended on this warrantless surveillance that was part of Stellar Wind. With the metadata program after the Snowden disclosures, we heard "no, no, there are so many cases where terrorist plans have been disrupted as a result of this sort of surveillance." And then again a little bit later, not quite as long after the fact and that case happily, we get two different independent panels, the 'Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board' and a handpicked presidential committee looking at this and concluding fairly quickly, no, that wasn't true. In fact, we just couldn't identify any cases where unique intelligence of operational value was derived from this frankly enormous intrusion on the communications privacy of American citizens that, in the rare cases where there was some useful information that was passed on, it was effectively duplicative of information that the FBI already had under traditional lawful targeted orders for a particular person's records.

Cindy Cohn: That takes me to the last one on our list of things that would be great if we fixed the FISA Court, which is some real accountability for the people who are affected by what happens in the FISA Court. And I appreciate the inspectors general, they have done some good work uncovering the problems, but that's just not the same as really empowering the people affected to be able to have standing, whether it's in a secret court or a regular court and be able to say this information has come out that I was spied on and I want to have some recompense and there's a whole set of legal doctrines that are currently boulders on our way to getting that kind of relief in our NSA spying cases that I think that some more clarity in the FISA Court and some more reforms of the FISA Court would really help get out of the way.

Danny O'Brien: So this is: "see you in court,in a court that I can see."

Cindy Cohn: Exactly.

Julian Sanchez: Exactly.

Danny O'Brien: Julian, thank you so much for taking us through all of this. I look forward to your weekly column explaining exactly what happened every day in a new reformed FISA Court and look forward to seeing you on the Internet too.

Julian Sanchez: I am always there.

Cindy Cohn: Thank you so much, Julian. We really appreciate you joining us and your willingness to get as wonky as we do is greatly, greatly appreciated over here at EFF, not just on this podcast, but all the time.

Julian Sanchez: Thank you so much for having me. I look forward to catching up with you guys when we can get on planes again.

Cindy Cohn: Wow, that was really a fun interview. And boy, we went deep in that one.

Danny O'Brien: I like it. I like it when you folks get nerdy on the laws.

Cindy Cohn: The thing about the secret court is, even though you can get pretty wonky about it, everyone is impacted by what this court does. This court approved tapping into the Internet backbone. It approved the mass collection of phone records. And it approved the mass collection of Internet metadata. Two of those three programs have been stopped now, but they weren't stopped by the court, they were stopped Congress or by the government itself deciding that it didn't want to go forward with them.

Danny O'Brien: After those things were made public, even though this whole system was designed to keep them secret.

Cindy Cohn: Right. It took them going public before we were even able to get to the place where we saw that the court had approved a bunch of things that I think most Americans didn't want. And clearly Congress stopped two of the three of them and we're working on the third.

Danny O'Brien: I do feel like I'm honing a talking point here and I feel that it is this contradiction with foreign intelligence surveillance court. It's not really a court because there aren't two parties discussing. It's just one effectively. It's not really about foreign data because it's brief has expanded for these programs that are taking place on US soil and can scoop up US persons' information. And I'm not going to say it's not intelligent, but it doesn't have the technical insider advise and intelligence that allows it to make the really right decisions about changing technology. I think that really just leaves surveillance out of its title. That's the only thing that's true about this name.

Cindy Cohn: It is the surveillance court. I think that's certainly true, and I agree with you about the intelligence, that basically this court really isn't equipped to be doing the kinds of evaluations that it needs to be able to do in order to protect our rights.

Danny O'Brien: Not without help. I mean, I think getting an amicus role into this and getting assistance and getting what Julian described as this ecosystem, this infrastructure of justice around it, super structure is the important thing.

Cindy Cohn: And that's the thing that became so clear in the conversation with Julian, is just how fixable this is. The list is not very long and it's pretty straight forward about what we might need to be able to bring this into something that has accountability and it fixes some of the problems and that's really great since that's the whole thing we're trying to do with this podcast is we're trying to figure out how you fix things. And I think it's pretty clear that if we really do need to fix the Internet, we also need to fix, as a piece of that, we need to fix the FISA Court.

Danny O'Brien: We'll both, after we finish recording here, go off and do that. And if you'd like to know more about that particular work that we do when we're not in the studio, you can go to EFF.org/podcast where we have links to EFF blog posts and work, but we also have full transcripts, links to the relevant court cases and other background info on this podcast. Bios on our amazing guests and also ways to subscribe to fix the Internet so you won't miss our next exciting episode.

Danny O'Brien: Thanks for listening in and we'll see you next time.

Danny O'Brien: Thanks again for joining us. If you'd like to support the Electronic Frontier Foundation, here are three things you can do today. One, you can hit subscribe in your podcast player of choice and if you have time, please leave a review, it helps more people find us. Two, please share on social media and with your friends and family. Three, please visit EFF.org/podcast where you will find more episodes, learn about these issues and donate to become a member and lots more.

Danny O'Brien: Members are the only reason we can do this work. Plus you can get cool stuff like an EFF hat or an EFF hoodie or even a camera cover for your laptop. Thanks once again for joining us and if you have any feedback on this episode, please email [email protected]. We do read every email. This podcast was produced by the Electronic Frontier Foundation with help from Stuga Studios. Music by Nat Keefe of Beat Mower.

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