http://alphaila.com/articles/?p=452
Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and
aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one
admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel
free to complain about it.
We talk about how bad teams like Edmonton last year or the Islanders
two years ago are. And yeah, they were pretty bad.
But really, I don't think we have a concept yet of how truly, truly
terrible this current group of Islanders is. They won four of their
first seven games this year ... then earned points in four of their
next 18.
Those Edmonton and Islanders teams of the last two years both finished
last in the league by decent margins, but they still had 27 and 26
wins, respectively. Is there any way in hell you see this team, which
already lost 14 in a row this year, getting 27 wins?
And it's not just that they're not a good hockey team, either. It's
that they're honestly the most unintentionally boring hockey teams.
They're so not good at anything -- scoring, defense, special teams,
goaltending - that they almost make the teams they play worse at them.
If anything, the only skill they have is getting teams to occasionally
play down to their level to make it close.
It's really easy to pick on the worst team in hockey but I think this
Islanders team might be one of the worst I've ever seen.
(Coming Up: Patrick Kaleta and Derek Dorsett in a Fight of the Year
candidate; Ondrej Pavelec needs a nickname; Winter Classic wine; Kevin
Bieksa to the Senators; Brad Richards to the Rangers; Chicago fans
find out how running up the score feels like; Habs face a Subban
question; Jeff Skinner's super-shift; the resurgence of Sergei
Kostitsyn and Ryan Miller; laughable Leafs solution; and someone
proposes a preposterous Oilers/Devils trade.)
Certainly the worst in a decade. Their leading scorer is James
Wisniewski. He has 15 points. And he's minus-18.
That's 2003-04 Penguins Dick-Tarnstrom-led-us-in-scoring bad, and so,
in fact, is the team. Remember how comically bad those Penguins were?
Sure you do. A fun fact is that they had the exact same number of
points through 25 games (only 15!) as do the current Islanders.
But let's say they catch fire. And I don't mean "catch fire" in
relative terms where they win then lose a shootout in back-to-back
games. I mean win four or five in a row. They're still on pace to be
as bad as the pre-lockout Pens.
And OK, sure, you can certainly make the case that Mark Streit and
Kyle Okposo, two of the best players on the team, have been injured
all year. But even with them, this team is still going to bleed goals,
since they've allowed 83 through 25 games (3.32 per) and not score any
(53 in 25, 2.12). They've allowed four or more goals 12 times. They've
scored two or fewer 17 times. If they continue on their current pace,
they will allow 272 goals and score just 173. Several teams have
allowed that many or more (the '06 Pens allowed 316), but no one has
scored less than 193 since the end of the lockout.
These numbers are so remarkably bad that no one short of Alex Ovechkin
or Sidney Crosby would turn them semi-respectable in attack. And even
then, they'd still probably be the worst team in the league.
And scarily, they've gotten worse since Scott Gorton was fired.
Through 17 games, they'd scored 37 (2.17 per) and allowed 58 (3.41),
taking 11 points (on pace for 53). Since Jack Capuano took over,
they've allowed 25 (3.13) and scored just 16 (2.0), taking four points
(on pace for 41). How long until Garth Snow fires him too?
They're not that Sharks team that lost 71 games, or the '92-93
Senators. But watch an Islanders game this year and try to argue that
this is not an historically and hysterically bad team. I think you'll
find it as difficult as watching the game itself.
Open This Story in a New Tab
A new data set from Firefox reveals our browsing habits.
By Jeremy Singer-VineUpdated Monday, Dec. 6, 2010, at 7:13 AM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2276790/
http://www.slate.com/id/2276790/Considering the virtual reams of data
we generate for companies like Facebook every day, they give us awful
little in return. While they sell the information to third parties or
use it to display targeted advertisements, we're left with a largely
anecdotal understanding of Internet habits. We can install programs to
track our personal Internet usage, but it's difficult to place these
individual habits in a broader context. I may spend two hours a day
surfing around, but how does that compare to my peers? Enter Firefox,
the open-source project that happens to be the world's most popular
browser.
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Since mid-2009, the folks behind Firefox have encouraged its users to
install Test Pilot, a plug-in that collects anonymized browser usage.
Test Pilot tracks many different "events" like booting up or shutting
down the browser, adding a bookmark, and turning Firefox's
private-browsing feature on and off. (Unsurprisingly, the
private-browsing data have received the bulk of the attention.) Every
few months, Mozilla Labs, the group in charge of Test Pilot, releases
another set of data collected by the plug-in, often examining a
specific aspect of browsing—say, what parts of the toolbar people
click most. Last month, Mozilla Labs released its most comprehensive
Test Pilot data set, the second version of what it's calling "A Week
in the Life of a Browser."
The abundance of data in "Week in the Life," which covers a week's
worth of 27,000 users' browsing activities, can be paralyzing. Faced
with several gigabytes of decompressed data, where do you start? Tab
usage, I decided.
In the past decade, the ability to open multiple—even dozens of—Web
pages in a single window has shifted from a fringe, power-user feature
to a mainstream offering. Today, every major browser supports tabbed
browsing, even slow-to-evolve Internet Explorer. A browser with 27
open tabs has, fairly or not, come to symbolize the frenetic,
attention-deficient aspects of our Web-centric lives. What can
Firefox's data on this feature tell us about ourselves? You'll find
some preliminary answers (and charts!) below. But first a few caveats
about the data.
Advertisement
Companies like Nielsen pay people to let software spy on their
Internet activity. These companies sell this information to
advertising companies, academic researchers, and the like. It has led
to handsome profits and fascinating insights. Researchers at the
University of Chicago, for example, used Nielsen data to estimate the
extent to which Web surfers self-segregate by ideology—a study Slate
then used to create a "media isolation" profiler. But if you want
access to most of Nielsen's data, you'll have to cough up some serious
change.
Mozilla Labs, on the other hand, gives Test Pilot data away for
free—with tradeoffs. Data collection requires a balancing act between
creepiness and the desire for useful detail. Because Mozilla wants to
recruit as many participants as possible and isn't paying them, Test
Pilot collects much less personal information than Nielsen does.
There's no information on income, race, or location. In fact, only
about 4,000 of the 27,000 users in the latest data dump answered such
basic questions as: "What is your gender?," "How old are you?," and
"How much time do you spend on the Web each day?"
The demographic data Test Pilot users did provide, however, raise a
giant red flag. Of course, Firefox users skew toward the type of
people savvy enough to use a browser other than the one that comes
pre-installed on their computer, typically Internet Explorer or
Safari. And though Test Pilot recently passed the million-active-user
mark, people who install it represent an even more specific class of
technophilic users who are comfortable with plug-ins. (That's not to
say bias isn't present in the Nielsen panel: It overrepresents people
who don't mind a large corporation tracking their online habits.)
What's remarkable, however, is how enormously Test Pilot
underrepresents women—just 6.5 percent of the "Week in the Life"
survey respondents said they were female. There are so few
female-identifying participants—just 257—that we can have very little
confidence whether the women in this study are representative of most
other women.
These caveats in mind, let's look at the tab data. Test Pilot recorded
the number of tabs users had open every 15 minutes and every time they
opened a new tab or window. In "A Week in the Life of a Browser," the
27,000 participants quietly logged more than 12 million of these
tab-related events. (Two earlier Test Pilot studies also logged tab
data, but for fewer participants and in the absence of demographic
details.) Let's start with the most obvious question: How many tabs do
users have open, on average? About one-half of users kept an average
of more than 2.38 tabs open, and one-quarter kept an average of at
least 3.59 tabs open. Thanks to some particularly prolific tabbers
(for reasons unfathomable, a participant once had 1,103 tabs open),
the average of these averages is 3.2 tabs. Here's a visual overview,
which shows the proportion of participants who kept an average of zero
to one tabs open, one to two tabs open, and so on.
What about the extremes of our browsing habits? One-half of the
participants maxed out at fewer than eight tabs, but one-quarter of
users had 11 or more tabs open at least once during the study. Here's
another histogram showing the distribution of maximum tabs open:
These overall data give us a sense of how we compare to other Firefox
users. But what can they tell us about broad demographic trends? As
noted, any comparison of the sexes must be done cautiously given how
few women participated in the study. That said, men kept more tabs
open than women—an average of 4.45 tabs versus 3.86 tabs. Men also
kept more tabs open at the heights of their browsing, maxing out at an
average of 11.33 to women's 10.38.
We can also observe how tab usage rises and falls with age:
If you break these averages out by sex, you get this:
Men's and women's browsing habits appear to follow remarkably
different trajectories with age—that is, if (a very big if) the Test
Pilot data correspond to browser habits in the general population. In
this sample, at least, women younger than 18 used more tabs on average
than any other age-gender combination and far more than men of that
age. But while men's tabbing habits increased after high school, they
decreased among women. The odd, mirror-image movements continue
through the 46-to-55-year-old groups. Why? If you have a hypothesis,
leave them in the comments below.
I'm hesitant to make conjectures about this early data but, if
pressed, will offer a few hypotheses. The general trend in open tabs
by age group may reflect a balance between increasing responsibility
and decreasing Web-nativeness. Juggling life and work may demand more
tabs than juggling life and college, which in turn may require more
tabs than juggling life and high school (if such a distinction
exists). But after a certain age—one's mid-30s, it seems—the wild Web
may be bewildering enough without also having 12 tabs open. The gender
split is more perplexing. Perhaps it reflects social and economic
structures—like the different career trajectories generally available
to men and women. Or, more controversially, perhaps it reflects
psychobiological differences between the sexes.
These data alone won't offer us deeper insight into, say, our
distractibility in front of a screen. Before that can happen, we'll
need more data. Though Mozilla continues to release additional Test
Pilot results, more robust analyses beg for data from the other major
browsers. (Google and Microsoft have collected similar user
information for Chrome and Internet Explorer, but they don't have
immediate plans to release the raw data publicly, their press officers
tell me.) We'll also need professional statisticians—which I am
decidedly not—to crunch the numbers with greater sophistication. And
to make the data relevant outside the boundaries of your computer
screen, we'll need to link it to research in sociology, psychology,
and other disciplines. The Danah Boyds of this world could have a
field day.
But that's no reason to wait. The more that academics and laypeople
play with these data today, the faster we'll get to the point that
they're useful. And the analyses above are just a few of the
near-infinite possibilities. If there's an aspect of browsing behavior
you'd like Slate to investigate, or if you'd like to share analyses
you've already performed, drop us a line in the comments.
(To find what sorts of numbers are available for crunching, see the
tables on this page.)
The End
Why projectionists will soon be no more.
By Grady HendrixPosted Monday, Dec. 6, 2010, at 7:12 AM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2276862/ http://www.slate.com/id/2276862/More
people die in a movie theater than you would think. "I was at a
theater and the manager came up to the booth and said there'd been
four shows that day and this guy had sat through three of them. I went
downstairs, sat down next to him, and sure enough, he was dead," says
Joe Rivierzo, a projectionist. "I called the paramedics and told them
that the man is dead, there's no question about that, and I'm going to
bring the house lights up just a little and please just carry him out
of the theater. So they did. No one really noticed; they just thought
he was having a bad day. The show kept playing."
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Rivierzo has been a projectionist for 30 years. His father was a
projectionist. His grandfather was a projectionist. Between them,
they've seen it all. "In the '60s there was a screening of
Frankenstein. Projectionist dies right in the middle of the movie.
They call one projectionist after another, saying, 'This guy's died.
Can you finish the show?' and none of them want to do it. Finally they
reach my father, and they don't tell him anything; they just say the
guy can't finish his shift, can you fill in? My father goes up, and
the guy is lying there on the floor of the booth. He knows this guy,
and he has to keep stepping over his body to do the changes while they
wait for the coroner to arrive. He's up there, alone in the booth,
playing a horror movie and stepping over his good friend's body."
And where there's death, there's sex. Jose Ramos has been the
projectionist at the Anthology Film Archives since the '90s, but his
career started back in the '80s in New York City's porno houses. "I
remember one time I had a break in the film," he says. "I forgot where
I was and turned on the lights like I was in a normal theater. You
could hear everyone screaming, because the porno houses were just
about backdoor sex. At the Roxy, I used to have to do the music and
the lights for the strip show and the live sex acts. It was wild
times. The strippers would change clothes in my booth to get away from
the tricks, and you'd get to know each other. We're all just people,
regardless of our chosen profession."
Advertisement
But these days, stripping is thriving while projectionists have fallen
on hard times. In an age when studios claim that box-office salvation
will be found in new projection technology like Imax and 3-D,
projectionists themselves are facing complete and total annihilation.
Rivierzo is an executive board member of Local 306 in New York City,
the last uncombined projectionists union in the country. At the height
of its power in the '40s and '50s, it had 3,000 members. These days,
it's down to 400, and that number's dropping fast, which makes no
sense because currently there are more theater screens in the United
States than at any other point in history.
But nowhere is technology eliminating the need for human labor faster
than in motion-picture projection. From the birth of cinema until the
1960s, the system was the same: Every projection booth had two
reel-to-reel projectors with carbon arc light sources. The movie would
start playing on one machine, and the projectionist's job was to watch
for the changeover cues: usually a small circle or an X in the upper
right-hand corner of the screen.
"You see those cues all your life," Ramos says. "Some people know what
they are, and some people don't. There's two of them: There's the
machine cue, and you already have your reel threaded up to seven or
eight on the countdown reel, and when you see the first one, you hit
the switch and the second machine starts to run, and when you see the
second cue, you step on the pedal or flip a switch, and this projector
shuts down and that one starts up. If you do it smooth, it's seamless;
if you do it wrong, it fucks up."
Getting a lamp that was bright enough to throw a projected image onto
a screen hundreds of feet away was a huge problem, and the first
solution was the carbon arc. Two carbon electrodes are brought
together, they touch and are then pulled apart, creating a brightly
burning arc. The strong, steady light would bounce off a reflector and
toward the lens.
"You had to keep them a certain distance from each other," Ramos says.
"There were mechanisms in there that moved the rods, but they weren't
always reliable because a lot of these machines were really old. The
bigger theaters had thicker arcs, and the smaller ones had smaller
arcs, and we would monitor it. All the theaters had two lines drawn on
the ceiling because the reflection would hit the ceiling, too, and
when you saw that the light was going off the ceiling lines, you would
have to adjust it."
Then, in the late '60s, projectors started switching to xenon bulbs.
These were expensive, sometimes running up to $1,000 each, but they
provided a strong, steady light source that didn't need to be
monitored. And for Rivierzo, this was the beginning of the end.
"Most guys will say the problems started with platters, but I would
argue it was xenon bulbs. Before that, it was a reel-to-reel system,
and it was labor intensive because you had to change the film every 20
minutes, and you had to change the carbon. Once they were able to get
over that hurdle and get a dependable, inexpensive bright white light,
they could come up with a system to feed the film forever."
And they did. Platters appeared in the mid-'70s and, suddenly, instead
of two projectors showing individual 20-minute reels of film,
projectionists were taking all the individual reels and building them
into one monster reel that lay on its side on a spinning platter, and
the entire film would feed through a single projector. Films would
still have to be built—assembled from individual reels into
platters—but with no need for reel changes and a consistent light
source, projectionists were no longer needed to run the movies. The
unions tried to hold back the inevitable, but chain theaters wanted to
get away from expensive union contracts, and the first thing to go
were licensing standards.
"Giuliani came in and started to change things to be more favorable to
management, and we sensed it was going to be a problem," Rivierzo
says. "They wanted to get rid of the projectionist license completely.
We fought it at city council, and eventually what they did was water
down the test so anyone could pass it."
"Before, you used to have to take a 100-question exam to become a
licensed projectionist," Ramos says. "And you had to know electricity,
you had to know your currents and your storage and so forth, and you
also took a practical exam. But they dumbed it down to a 40-question
exam, and the department of consumer affairs took over testing rather
than the bureau of gas and electricity. So managers were able to get
their license and run the theater, run the box office, run everything,
for ten bucks an hour."
As multiplexes put mom-and-pop theaters out of business, the number of
movie screens increased while the number of individual theaters
decreased. For the companies running chains, movie theaters were
machines designed to make money, and the biggest concession they
received from the union was the ability to hire fewer projectionists.
"For a 12-screen multiplex, one projectionist will work," Ramos says.
"He might get help on 'make and break day,' usually Thursday, when
another projectionist comes in for about six hours and helps him build
the new films and break down the old ones. But otherwise, it's just
one guy. You set the timer to start the show, you set the type of
sound system you have for the soundtrack, and you leave it. You walk
around to make sure it's running, but with 14 screens, it's impossible
to be in all of them at the same time."
To get more out of each projectionist, the chain multiplexes are
standardized. Says Rivierzo, "There's automation. There's status
boards that'll tell you what's running, what's down, and what has to
be threaded. Most multiplexes put all their screens on one floor to
make it easier for one projectionist to check them. And some theaters
are laid out exactly the same, AMC theaters in particular, you can
close your eyes in Chicago or New York and know exactly where you are
in the house. Even the way the panels are put in; they use the same
equipment."
Ironically, as movie theaters tout their state-of-the-art projection
facilities, like Imax and 3-D, they no longer have the staff to ensure
that the equipment is maintained. Imax and 3-D require extremely
bright light sources, and when the projector bulbs start to fade, the
image on the screen dims. Avatar may have cost millions to make, and
it may require state-of-the-art equipment to project, but if the
$1,000 bulb is old, all those expensive images will look like mud. And
with fewer projectionists, there's less quality control.
"Some theaters used to change the bulb with every new show that came
in," Ramos says. "But now, you have 14 bulbs, and every bulb is $700
or $800, so you're talking a good chunk. With a bulb, you get
1,500-2,000 hours of life, and there's supposed to be a procedure
where you rotate them every 500 hours and make sure they don't burn
up. But if I've got to work 14 theaters in a night, and I'm scheduled
to come in one hour before opening, how much time do I have to do that
shit? And at the end of a 12-hour day, I'm not going to walk through
and rotate every bulb."
Besides union labor, the physicality of films has always been
expensive. If a movie like Hot Tub Time Machine is going to open on
1,500 screens, that means that 1,500 35mm prints need to be struck,
each one weighing approximately 50 pounds. They'll have to be shipped
via air and ground to 1,500 different screens across the country,
where 1,500 projectionists will have to unpack the five to six reels
and build them onto platters. The platters will run for a week or two,
then the prints will be broken down and shipped back to the studio.
It's an expensive, labor-intensive system. Digital projection, on the
other hand, will see films downloaded remotely to hard drives in
theaters and then beamed onto screens via projectors. And that will be
the end of union projectionists.
"Digital will eliminate us completely," Rivierzo says. "All you have
to do is load it and play it, and a lot of this stuff can be done
off-site. We have theaters now running with 35 percent of the house
digital. Once they go over 51 percent running digital, and they run it
that way for 90 consecutive days, they can eliminate the presence of a
projectionist. Our only saving grace is they can't manufacture these
digital machines fast enough."
The image of technology replacing humans used to be that of a robot
arm replacing union guys on automobile production lines, but the auto
unions have largely survived intact. It's projectionist unions that
have been hit hardest, and these days technology and a concerted
effort on the part of theater chains to eliminate union labor have
resulted in the death of projection as a career.
"We had a guy call the other day looking for extra work because his
daughter was diagnosed with M.S.," Rivierzo says. "He had left and
opened a plumbing business and he just wanted to pick up a couple of
shifts somewhere. And I said, 'Joe, there are no shifts somewhere,'
and he couldn't believe it. Years ago, you could do that. A guy could
come in the office and say, 'I just bought a house, and I need to get
the down payment together, so can you give me a couple of days in some
porno house?' And there were porno houses everywhere. We don't do that
anymore."
"You're probably going to have isolated pockets—Imax, screening rooms
in private homes—stuff like that. But how many guys can you have?
Fifty? Twenty? We used to have over a thousand members, and there were
third-generation projectionists in the union. There won't be a fourth
generation or a fifth. We have a membership that's getting older, and
they've been well-paid for many years, but limited in their abilities
to what they've done in the projection booth. Now that guy has to go
out and find a new job. It's sad. It really is."
With projectionists gone, another part of our lives will lose the
human touch. During the Solidarity strikes in Poland in the early
'80s, Rivierzo was working at a mom-and-pop theater and received a
print for the night's show that smelled like vinegar. He began
searching the reels of the innocuous Hollywood feature and found that
a chunk of nitrate film stock had been spliced into middle of the
film. Nitrate is an incredibly dangerous early film stock that is so
flammable it will burn underwater. It is so volatile that playing it
requires not only fireproof projection booths but special projectors
equipped with multiple, built-in fire extinguishers. Projectionists
are trained to treat it like the deadly explosive that it is, and
Rivierzo, knowing it could catch the theater on fire, refused to play
it.
First the manager begged and then he threatened, but Rivierzo wouldn't
budge. Finally, the theater's owner showed up and promised Rivierzo
that he would assume all responsibility if anything happened, but he
insisted that the film be screened. Reluctantly, Rivierzo agreed, and
he carefully threaded up the flammable stock. That night, the cinema
hosted a private show for the owner and a crowd of Polish community
leaders. The nitrate footage Rivierzo screened was some of the first
film smuggled out of Poland, shot by film students on antiquated
equipment, that showed police breaking up the Solidarity strikes with
bullets. It was the first proof that the crackdown on the Solidarity
movement was worse than anyone was being told, and that night's
screening was designed to raise money from Polish expats for the
cause.
The Starus NC2500S DLP is the world's brightest digital movie
projector. One day it will be standard issue in many movie theaters
and it can do a lot of things very well. But one thing it won't do is
what Rivierzo did that night. It will be a very good projector, but it
will never be a projectionist.
The Protective Effect of Family Acceptance for Gay Teens
By Alice Park Monday, December 6, 2010 | 24 comments
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While the acceptance of gay, lesbian and bisexual teens continues to
grow — albeit gradually — study after study consistently shows that
many of these adolescents still experience considerable rejection from
the very source they crave acceptance most: their families.
Now a study reveals for the first time the impact that a supportive
family can have on the physical and mental health of gay, lesbian and
bisexual children. Researchers led by Caitlin Ryan, director of the
Family Acceptance Project, a research, education and policy initiative
designed to better understand the role that sexual orientation has on
family dynamics, found that teens from families who supported their
sexual orientation were less likely to abuse drugs, experience
depression or attempt suicide than those in less accepting families.
The teens in the more supportive environments also self-reported
higher levels of self-esteem and self-worth. (More on Time.com:
Cyberbullying? Homophobia? Tyler Clementi's Death Highlights Online
Lawlessness)
That acceptance from their families can have a positive effect on
teens isn't surprising, but what sets the new study apart is the fact
that Ryan and her colleagues were able to define specific behaviors by
parents and family that were perceived as being either accepting or
rejecting of teens' sexual orientation, and to connect these behaviors
to mental and health outcomes in kids.
Ryan points out, for example, that parents who tried to show support
by attempting to change their children's sexual preferences — in order
to help their children become more accepted in school and society —
were instead perceived as rejecting their child's individuality and
sexual expression. "What we showed was that by trying to prevent a
child from learning about their sexual identity or from being part of
support groups, or by telling them they are ashamed of them or not
talking about their sexual identity, these kinds of reactions are
rejecting behaviors that are all linked to negative health and mental
health outcomes in children when they become adults," says Ryan. (More
on Time.com: 'It Gets Better': Wisdom From Grown-Up Gays and Lesbians
to Bullied Kids)
Based on in depth interviews with families and children who were gay,
lesbian, bisexual or transgender, the researchers collected a list of
55 positive behaviors and a similar number of negative behaviors that
volunteers were then asked to rate based on the frequency with which
they experienced them.
Positive behaviors included, for example, anything from openly
discussing the child's sexual orientation to participating as a family
in gay, lesbian or bisexual events, while negative behaviors included
not discussing the child's sexual identity at all, or keeping it
secret from family and friends. (More on Time.com: Florida's Gay
Adoption Ban Crumbles: The Dad Behind the Case
Celebrates)http://healthland.time.com/?N=0&Nty=1&s=LGBT&x=0&y=0&p=0&cmd=tags&srchCat=Wellness
- ixzz17LS3fg6P
When Ryan's team compared the responses of those in supportive versus
less accepting families, they found that teens in the more nurturing
families had nearly half the rate of suicide attempts during a
designated six-month study period as those in less supportive
households. These youngsters also scored lower on a scale designed to
assess depression, and were less likely to report substance abuse in
the five years prior to the study.
The findings, published in the Journal of Child and Adolescent
Psychiatric Nursing, says Ryan, "are very exciting because they
empower ethnically and religiously diverse families and those that are
socially conservative in ways that help them to understand how they
can help their children and balance their deeply held values and
beliefs with the love they have for their child." (More on Time.com: A
Glimmer of Hope in a Bad-News Survey About Bullying)
The Family Acceptance Project is conducting research to define
behaviors that families can use to become more supportive and
nurturing of gay, lesbian and bisexual adolescents, and much of that
education, says Ryan, involves building new skills in communicating
and showing empathy for their children in ways that are not punitive
or hurtful, but respectful of their sexual choices.
That's especially important since other research suggests that their
sexual orientation can lead to more severe sanctions for gay, lesbian
and bisexual teens, both at school and in the criminal justice system.
A new study, published Monday by Pediatrics, found that even after
controlling for the fact that gay and lesbian youth may be more likely
to be involved in criminal activity out of self-defense or rebellion,
they were still punished more severely than heterosexual teens for the
same transgressions. The data highlight the importance of ensuring
that adolescents of all sexual orientations feel supported and
respected, especially at home. "Even for parents who are really
struggling with accepting their child's sexual orientation, there are
ways to show their children that they love them, and to give them some
hope that there will be a time when the family will be able to support
them more proactively," says Ryan.
The Shameful Attacks on Julian Assange
Dec 3 2010, 10:00 AM ET 580
Getty Images
Julian Assange and Pfc Bradley Manning have done a huge public service
by making hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government
documents available on Wikileaks -- and, predictably, no one is
grateful. Manning, a former army intelligence analyst in Iraq, faces
up to 52 years in prison. He is currently being held in solitary
confinement at a military base in Quantico, Virginia, where he is not
allowed to see his parents or other outside visitors.
Assange, the organizing brain of Wikileaks, enjoys a higher degree of
freedom living as a hunted man in England under the close surveillance
of domestic and foreign intelligence agencies -- but probably not for
long. Not since President Richard Nixon directed his minions to go
after Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and New York Times
reporter Neil Sheehan - "a vicious antiwar type," an enraged Nixon
called him on the Watergate tapes -- has a working journalist and his
source been subjected to the kind of official intimidation and threats
that have been directed at Assange and Manning by high-ranking members
of the Obama Administration.
Published reports suggest that a joint Justice Department-Pentagon
team of investigators is exploring the possibility of charging Assange
under the Espionage Act, which could lead to decades in jail. "This is
not saber-rattling," said Attorney General Eric Holder, commenting on
the possibility that Assange will be prosecuted by the government.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the Wikileaks disclosures
"an attack on the international community" that endangered innocent
people. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs suggested in somewhat
Orwellian fashion that "such disclosures put at risk our diplomats,
intelligence professionals, and people around the world who come to
the United States for assistance in promoting democracy and open
government."
It is dispiriting and upsetting for anyone who cares about the
American tradition of a free press to see Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton
and Robert Gibbs turn into H.R. Haldeman, John Erlichman and John
Dean. We can only pray that we won't soon be hit with secret White
House tapes of Obama drinking scotch and slurring his words while
calling Assange bad names.
The truly scandalous and shocking response to the Wikileaks documents
has been that of other journalists, who make the Obama Administration
sound like the ACLU.
Unwilling to let the Democrats adopt Nixon's anti-democratic,
press-hating legacy as their own, Republican Congressman Peter King
asserted that the publication of classified diplomatic cables is
"worse even than a physical attack on Americans" and that Wikileaks
should be officially designed as a terrorist organization. Mike
Huckabee followed such blather to its logical conclusion by suggesting
that Bradley Manning should be executed.
But the truly scandalous and shocking response to the Wikileaks
documents has been that of other journalists, who make the Obama
Administration sound like the ACLU. In a recent article in The New
Yorker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Steve Coll sniffed that
"the archives that WikiLeaks has published are much less significant
than the Pentagon Papers were in their day" while depicting Assange as
a "self-aggrandizing control-freak" whose website "lacks an ethical
culture that is consonant with the ideals of free media." Channeling
Richard Nixon, Coll labeled Wikileaks' activities - formerly known as
journalism - by his newly preferred terms of "vandalism" and "First
Amendment-inspired subversion."
Coll's invective is hardly unique, In fact, it was only a pale echo of
the language used earlier this year by a columnist at his former
employer, The Washington Post. In a column titled "WikiLeaks Must Be
Stopped," Mark Thiessen wrote that "WikiLeaks is not a news
organization; it is a criminal enterprise," and urged that the site
should be shut down "and its leadership brought to justice." The dean
of American foreign correspondents, John Burns of The New York Times,
with two Pulitzer Prizes to his credit, contributed a profile of
Assange which used terms like "nearly delusional grandeur" to describe
Wikileaks' founder. The Times' normally mild-mannered David Brooks
asserted in his column this week that "Assange seems to be an
old-fashioned anarchist" and worried that Wikileaks will "damage the
global conversation."
For his part, Assange has not been shy about expressing his contempt
for the failure of traditional reporting to inform the public, and his
belief in the utility of his own methods. "How is it that a team of
five people has managed to release to the public more suppressed
information, at that level, than the rest of the world press
combined?" he told The Sydney Morning Herald. "It's disgraceful."
Assange may or may not be grandiose, paranoid and delusional - terms
that might be fairly applied at one time or another to most prominent
investigative reporters of my acquaintance. But the fact that so many
prominent old school journalists are attacking him with such unbridled
force is a symptom of the failure of traditional reporting methods to
penetrate a culture of official secrecy that has grown by leaps and
bounds since 9/11, and threatens the functioning of a free press as a
cornerstone of democracy.
The true importance of Wikileaks -- and the key to understanding the
motivations and behavior of its founder -- lies not in the contents of
the latest document dump but in the technology that made it possible,
which has already shown itself to be a potent weapon to undermine
official lies and defend human rights. Since 1997, Assange has devoted
a great deal of his time to inventing encryption systems that make it
possible for human rights workers and others to protect and upload
sensitive data. The importance of Assange's efforts to human rights
workers in the field were recognized last year by Amnesty
International, which gave him its Media Award for the Wikileaks
investigation The Cry of Blood - Extra Judicial Killings and
Disappearances, which documented the killing and disappearance of 500
young men in Kenya by the police, with the apparent connivance of the
country's political leadership.
Yet the difficulties of documenting official murder in Kenya pale next
to the task of penetrating the secret world that threatens to swallow
up informed public discourse in this country about America's wars. The
250,000 cables that Wikileaks published this month represent only a
drop in the bucket that holds the estimated 16 million documents that
are classified top secret by the federal government every year.
According to a three-part investigative series by Dana Priest and
William Arkin published earlier this year in The Washington Post, an
estimated 854,000 people now hold top secret clearance - more than 1.5
times the population of Washington, D.C. "The top-secret world the
government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11,
2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive," the Post
concluded, "that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people
it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many
agencies do the same work."
The result of this classification mania is the division of the public
into two distinct groups: those who are privy to the actual conduct of
American policy, but are forbidden to write or talk about it, and the
uninformed public, which becomes easy prey for the official lies
exposed in the Wikileaks documents: The failure of American
counterinsurgency programs in Afghanistan, the involvement of China
and North Korea in the Iranian nuclear program, the likely failure of
attempts to separate Syria from Iran, the involvement of Iran in
destabilizing Iraq, the anti-Western orientation of Turkish Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and other tenets of American foreign
policy under both Bush and Obama.
It is a fact of the current media landscape that the chilling effect
of threatened legal action routinely stops reporters and editors from
pursuing stories that might serve the public interest - and anyone who
says otherwise is either ignorant or lying. Every honest reporter and
editor in America knows that the fact that most news organizations are
broke, combined with the increasing threat of aggressive legal action
by deep-pocketed entities, private and public, has made it much harder
for good reporters to do their jobs, and ripped a hole in the delicate
fabric that holds our democracy together.
The idea that Wikileaks is a threat to the traditional practice of
reporting misses the point of what Assange and his co-workers have put
together - a powerful tool that can help reporters circumvent the
legal barriers that are making it hard for them to do their job. Even
as he criticizes the evident failures of the mainstream press, Assange
insists that Wikileaks should facilitate traditional reporting and
analysis. "We're the step before the first person (investigates)," he
explained, when accepting Amnesty International's award for exposing
police killings in Kenya. "Then someone who is familiar with that
material needs to step forward to investigate it and put it in
political context. Once that is done, then it becomes of public
interest."
Wikileaks is a powerful new way for reporters and human rights
advocates to leverage global information technology systems to break
the heavy veil of government and corporate secrecy that is slowly
suffocating the American press. The likely arrest of Assange in
Britain on dubious Swedish sex crimes charges has nothing to do with
the importance of the system he has built, and which the US government
seems intent on destroying with tactics more appropriate to the
Communist
http://cdn1.sbnation.com/photo_images/5125/44212_Canucks_Avalanche_Hockey.jpg
http://cdn1.sbnation.com/photo_images/5125/44212_Canucks_Avalanche_Hockey.jpg
David Zalubowski - AP
"I missed you, Jes!" (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
View full size photo »
Time passes so quick in our instant information age that it's a bit
jarring when you think about how much things change in just a few
years. In the pre-lockout era, the online hockey world was quite a bit
different. Most people stuck with major sites like ESPN and TSN, while
a few independent voices managed to get heard. If you tinkered with
the Wayback Machine, you'll find these online fossils. There was Lyle
Richardson's Spector site, the old version of Raw Charge known as
Boltsmag, Sharkspage, Eric McErlain, James Mirtle and a handful of
others. If the worst hosting company ever hadn't blown up my archive,
you'd find stuff from me circa 2004 too.
Most of us from that era are still contributing to the hockey world in
some form or another. However, the hockey blogosphere lost a notable
name back in 2008, when Jes Golbez Ursulak retired from his eponymous
Hockey Rants and became "just a fan." That was right before the
2008-09 season happened.
Two years can seem like an eternity in the online world. What's Jes
been up to, and does he still have another Hockey Rant left in him?
Jes took some time off from the real world to answer some questions --
and yes, there's a good old-fashioned Hockey Rant in this.
First off, what have you been doing since retiring from Hockey Rants
and AOL Fanhouse?
I got married, went to England for a honeymoon, got my CMA
designation, and picked up other hobbies. I still go to a few
Vancouver Giants games now and then and 1-2 Canucks games if I can
afford it.
Have you kept up with the hockey blogging community or have you
stepped back from the whole thing and watched hockey more casually?
I got so burnt out that I read very little (about hockey) for a few
months. I still follow casually, but I'm nowhere near the hockey nut I
used to be. I used to know at least a little bit about almost every
player that came in/out of the league in some respect, but now I just
worry more about the Canucks, Blues, and other major issues. Given how
much time I spend on the internet, it's hard to avoid hockey news.
As one of the "first generation" of hockey bloggers, what's your
feeling on the current "bloggers vs. MSM" debate created by Colin
Campbell's Email-gate and what do you think of the evolution of the
hockey blogging scene?
The same old MSM stereotypes about bloggers exist, especially from
idiots like Damien Cox (Fitting name, given his shaved head looks like
a circumcised penis), but it used to be the MSM would almost never
even mention bloggers, and only with a sneer. Internet sites of many
sorts, from bloggers to Facecrack, have had a noticeable effect on
hockey news and opinion over the last couple of years.
Back before you youngin's were even crawling and drinking from Mount
Mommy, I was about one of maybe a dozen bloggers out there. I
mentioned the word 'blog' to my friends and family, and they thought I
was coughing up a hairball. Message boards were really the only place
where fan opinion was found.
The real wave started after the lockout. I was amazed at, just about
overnight, about 100 new blogs opened up shop.
From there, it's just ballooned and it's more the norm than the exception.
Two things that do irk me, however.
1. The lack of independent blogs. These mega sites, such as SBNation,
have gathered up so many independent bloggers and it gives them all a
very similar look. The content might be different, but it just seems
homogenized.
2. I HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE having to
sign-up/register/log-in/give personal info to make comments on any
site, or register to read an article. Why do I need 30 different
accounts and passwords just to talk hockey? The #1 reason for my lack
of participation is the fact that once I see something like "you must
register", I just walk away.
*growl* )
** I'll rant at the end about this more **
If you were still blogging today, do you think you'd find value having
press credentials?
Not really. I had them for the World Junior Championships here a few
years back, and it was an interesting experience, and I did enjoy it
for what is was, but made it felt more like a job than a hobby. I
don't want to talk to players or coaches (booorrring) nor do I want to
be hamstrung if the team feels like I'm being too mean. I considered
myself an 'outsider', even among other bloggers and hockey fans.
I understand the allure of a hockey writing job, but it seems to me
that it would suck the enjoyment out of the game, and not be a good
financial move. It's the same reason I stopped pursuing learning about
game programming and development after 1 year at BCIT. Games are fun,
but the work behind it was not..
Since you've been away, has there been any story that tempted you into
writing about hockey again?
I did a guest post once for Raw Charge (Mike's note: Hat tip to John
Fontana for digging this up), and I had a couple of itches about
certain stories, but once I actually starting typing, I don't feel the
spark coming back. It's like working out at the gym. I've been
slacking off for awhile, and going back to re-start is painful. Unless
the desire is there, and it's not, I can't see myself writing again.
The amount of hockey bloggers, both independent and as part of a
network, has grown quite a bit since you've left the scene. Who do you
still keep up with?
Yahoo is my #1 destination since I can view the scores, stats, and a
great stable of writers and bloggers. It's a good portal to what is
going on around the league, and the best blend of mainstream and
fan-driven content I've seen to date. They did it right.
I stay in touch with some people on Facebook (like John Fontana
*nudge*), and still follow a few blogs I'm familiar with. I don't
visit daily like I used to, but enough to keep up. There are just too
many sites to visit these days.
I'll also throw a shout-out to Down Goes Brown, which has given me
quite a few laughs on my lunch break.
One other reason I've not had the inclination to write again is the
sheer volume of blogs out there. It's hard to keep up and it's hard to
stick out and be original. I'd rather not do something if 1000's of
others are doing it.
Great, now I sound like a whiny Hipster.
What do you make of your Vancouver Canucks this season?
They are great until the meet the Blackhawks, and then they fold
(Mike's note -- except for the game after this interview took place).
There are just some teams that always seem to get the better of
another. The Yankees have pwned the Twins in the playoffs for the past
decade, pretty much, and now the Hawks own the Canucks. If the Canucks
don't meet the Hawks in the playoffs, they actually have a decent shot
at success. Yes, I'm as afraid of the Hawks as the Canucks are, even
after they traded away half of their team to the Thrashers.
Other than Keith Ballard's struggles, the season has gone pretty much
as expected.)
Finally, did you realize that the first result in Google Image Search
for "Jes Golbez" is your infamous "Pahlsson Is God" sign from your bet
with Earl Sleek?
That is why I don't gamble! When I do, I lose BIG.
OK kids, you asked for it and now you got it. Here's one last Hockey
Rant for old time's sake...
Long-Winded Rant time:
The recent Colon Campbell story did get my blood rising a bit.
Is Damien Cox a troll? I'm not sure he's smart enough, but he
certainly continues to whip the shopworn "bloggers/mother's
basement/amateur/lack of professionalism" line as an automatic defense
against a movement that threatens his line of employment and gets a
lot of response for doing so.
Tyler Dellow, a mellow fellow who has always been smarter than the
average bear, did a very detailed analysis and investigation that the
mainstream outlets USED to do before becoming lazy, corporate lackies
who think Kim Kardashian's bowel movements constitute breaking news.
The amount of work Dellow put into finding out what he did would put
most journalists to shame. Dellow is a lawyer, and is certainly quite
the opposite of the stereotypical blogger image some like to portray.
Mainstream outlets picked up the story, and Dellow's background or
lack of MSM credentials certainly didn't stop many outlets from
spreading the word. Sure, it was mentioned that Dellow is a blogger
and not the typical professional, but the evidence was damning and
well researched.
Yet, here we have Damien Cocks citing Dellow for a 'lack of
professionalism'? Mmmhmm.
You want lack of professionalism? How about Cocks's article that
basically accuses Jose Bautista of using steroids. Phrasing it in the
form of a question doesn't hide the intent.
Accusing an athlete of using steroids without a SHRED of proof is professional?
Damien is a scared little man, and he's yelling at clouds in a vain
attempt to keep readers away from other people that don't get paid to
write superior material. He seems to think writing for a major paper
is a badge that gives him some sort of magical credibility. It
doesn't.
How about this pathetic little scribe by Tony "Skeletor" Gallagher,
who should sell his image for Hallowe'en costuming? He was pretty
nasty in ripping the Thrashers a new one for their summer trade with
the Hawks. Yet, how did that turn out?
That is the kind of stuff I'd expect on HFBoards, or a fan blog. If
these guys are so professional, why isn't their material reflective of
that?
It used to be that Cox and his cronies were the only game in town, and
to read just any news and opinion, you had to go to the big outlets.
Sure, there were message boards, but actual platforms for well-written
opinion, news, or analysis was still mostly confined to a few places.
Look, these dweebs can certainly opine on hockey all they like, but it
is sad that they still continue to get a big platform and get paid to
write birdcage liner.
Newspapers and other MSM sites wonder why readership is down. Big
OBVIOUS tip: There is much better material available elsewhere, fan
driven or not. Fighting it won't help.
A big thanks to Jes for revisiting the hockey blog world, even for
just one post. And thanks to Raw Charge's John Fontana for putting
this idea forward.
Inception, Explained
By Robert Capps and Patrick Di Justo mailto:rants@wired.com
mailto:rants@wired.com
November 29, 2010 |
3:37 pm |
Wired December 2010
Consider us incepted. Ever since Christopher Nolan's blockbuster hit
theaters in July, we've been trying to suss out dream from reality.
Now that we can bring the movie home, we can put our freeze-frame
thumb to use. (Haven't seen the movie? Stop reading. This is one big
spoiler.) Nolan specializes in puzzles, and Inception is no exception.
The trick isn't the plot—come on, it wasn't that complicated. The
challenge is picking out Nolan's lies. Does hero Dom Cobb's totem tell
the truth about whether he's dreaming? Is the sequence in Mombasa just
good action or good action in a paranoid dream? Below, our take on
what's really going on. To make sure we haven't lost our minds, we let
Nolan himself weigh in. As they say in Inception, the only way forward
is downward—so into the rabbit hole we go.
Use the scrollbar below to view all layers of Inception.
Q&A: Christopher Nolan on Dreams, Architecture, and Ambiguity
By Robert Capps mailto:rants@wired.com mailto:rants@wired.com
November 29, 2010 |
12:00 pm |
Wired December 2010
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Director Christopher Nolan
Photo: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters/Corbis
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(Spoiler alert:</STRONG Details and plot points about Inception follow.)
Christopher Nolan, director of Memento, and The Dark Knight, tends to
let his twisty genre deconstructions speak for themselves. But he
agreed to talk to Wired about the decade-long inception of his movie
Inception (on DVD December 7). We talked to him about heists,
architecture, and the difference between ambiguity and a lack of
answers. Hint: One is better (looking at you, Lost).
Wired: Inception has such high ambitions. What did it take to get the
script to work?
Christopher Nolan: The problem was that I started with a heist film
structure. At the time, that seemed the best way of getting all the
exposition into the beginning of the movie—heist is the one genre
where exposition is very much part of the entertainment. But I
eventually realized that heist films are usually unemotional. They
tend to be glamorous and deliberately superficial. I wanted to deal
with the world of dreams, and I realized that I really had to offer
the audience a more emotional narrative, something that represents the
emotional world of somebody's mind. So both the hero's story and the
heist itself had to be based on emotional concepts. That took years to
figure out.
Wired: You mix in other genres as well. There's a bit of noir, and in
the snow scene you play with the conventions of James Bond-style
action-movies.
Nolan: I'm a lover of movies, so that's where my brain went. But I
think that's where a lot of people's minds would go if they were
constructing an arena in which to conduct this heist. I also wanted
the dreams in Inception to reflect the infinite potential of the human
mind. The Bond movies are these globe-trotting spy thrillers,
filmmaking on a massive scale. The key noir reference is the character
Mal; it was very important to me that she come across as a classic
femme fatale. The character and her relationship to Cobb's psyche is
the literal mani-festation of what the femme fatale always meant in
film noir—the neurosis of the protagonist, his fear of how little he
knows about the woman he's fallen in love with, that kind of thing.
Wired: In addition to genre-play, Inception is also a classic heroic
epic—a Joseph Campbell The Hero with a Thousand Faces type of story.
Nolan: I've never read Joseph Campbell, and I don't know all that much
about story archetypes. But things like The Inferno and the labyrinth
and the Minotaur were definitely in my mind.
Wired: There's a character called Ariadne, named after the woman who
helped guide Theseus through the labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur.
Nolan: Yeah, I wanted to have that to help explain the importance of
the labyrinth to the audience. I don't know how many people pick up on
that association when they're watching the film. It was just a little
pointer, really. I like the idea of her being Cobb's guide.
Wired: A common observation about your movie is that the grammar of
dreams and the grammar of filmmaking have lots of overlap—Inception
seems to be a movie about making movies. Saito is a producer, Cobb's a
director, Ariadne's a writer, and so on. Was that your intention
Nolan: I didn't intend to make a film about filmmaking, but it's clear
that I gravitated toward the creative process that I know. The way the
team works is very analogous to the way the film itself was made. I
can't say that was intentional, but it's very clearly there. I think
that's just the result of me trying to be very tactile and sincere in
my portrayal of that creative process.
Wired: Have you read the online discussions of the film?
Nolan: I've seen some of it, yeah. People seem to be noticing the
things they're meant to notice, the things that are meant to either
create ambiguities or push you in one direction or another. But I've
also read plenty of very off-the-wall interpretations. One of the
things you do as a writer and as a filmmaker is grasp for resonant
symbols and imagery without necessarily fully understanding it
yourself. And so there are interpretations to be imposed on the film
that aren't necessarily what I had in my head.
Wired: One of the rules in Inception is that, in a dream, you never
know how you got somewhere. But in filmmaking, by necessity, you cut
from one place to another—for example, from Paris to Mombasa. Does it
indicate that Cobb is in a dream because you don't see how he got to
Mombasa?
Nolan: Certainly Inception plays with the relationship between films
and dreaming in a number of different ways. I tried to highlight
certain aspects of dreaming that I find to be true, such as not
remembering the beginning of a dream. And that is very much like the
way films tell their stories. But I wouldn't say I specifically used
the grammar of the film to tell the audience what is dream and what is
reality.
Wired: As a filmmaker, are you broadly trying to "incept" your
audience? Are you trying help them find some form of catharsis through
your work?
Nolan: Well, I think that there's a fairly strong relationship in a
lot of ways between what the team is trying to provide for their
subject, Fischer, and what we're trying to do as filmmakers. For me, a
key thing is what Cobb says about how positive emotion trumps negative
emotion every time. I think that's very true. I also think it's
noteworthy how the team must use symbols to construct an emotional
narrative for Fischer. This is extremely similar to the way a
filmmaker uses symbols to give an idea to an audience. The use of the
pinwheel, for example, in Fischer's emotional story. It's a very
cinematic device. A lot of people have related that to Citizen Kane.
And that is exactly the point—it's Rosebud, a visual symbol that
sticks in your head from earlier in the story and then can take on new
meaning later on. Inception definitely seems to be a film about
itself, the more I talk about it. [Laughs.]
Wired: There's also a distinct undercurrent about the importance of
architecture.
Nolan: The only job that was ever of interest to me other than
filmmaking is architecture. And I'm very interested in the
similarities or analogies between the way in which we experience a
three–dimensional space that an architect has created and the way in
which an audience experiences a cinematic narrative that constructs a
three–dimensional -reality from a two-dimensional medium—assembled
shot by shot. I think there's a narrative component to architecture
that's kind of fascinating.
Wired: Three times in Inception the camera takes a long pass over a
city. You have Tokyo looking sort of fractal, Paris look–ing very
rectilinear, and Mombasa looking very mazelike. What were you
conveying?
Nolan: The idea of showing Mombasa as mazelike was, for me, a very
specific narrative point in the film. When Cobb finally confronts Mal
at the end and she brings up the idea that Cobb no longer believes in
one reality, you need to have shown the audience the potential for the
real world to have the same rule set as the dreams. The mazelike
nature of Mombasa was very important for this.
Wired: So you needed to have a moment where the audience could believe
that Cobb had lost touch with reality?
Nolan: You need to have several moments like that for the ambiguity at
the end of the film to work and for everything that Mal says to
Cobb—effectively he's talking to himself, obviously—to resonate. It's
very important that the dream worlds reflect the same rules as what's
presented as reality. It's also very important that the rules of the
dream have analogies to what's presented as reality. Like the fact
that Cobb's being chased by anonymous corporations around the globe,
as well as the maze-like quality of some of the environments.
Wired: The last line of the movie is Cobb's son saying, "I built a
house," and there's a building made of blocks on the dining table.
Most people in the movie are builders of one kind or another. What
does that last line signify?
Nolan: That's a tricky one. Anyone who's worked with child actors,
even ones as great as the ones in this movie, knows that you basically
have to ask a kid to improvise and they're going to say whatever they
want to say. We certainly tried to choose the most apt takes. But yes,
the film is about architects, builders, people who would have the
mental capacity to construct large-scale worlds—the world of the
dream. Everything is about how they would -create, whether it's blocks
or sand castles or a dream. These are all acts of -creation. There's a
relationship between the sand castle the kids are building on the
beach in the beginning of the film and the buildings literally being
eaten away by the subconscious and falling into the sea. The important
thing in Inception is the mental process. What the dream-share
technology enables them to do is remove physicality from that process.
It's about pure creation. That's why it's a film about architects
rather than soldiers.
Wired: And they're so deft with their creative abilities that they can
literally use architecture as a weapon—with the Penrose staircase, for
example.
Nolan: I think it's very analogous to the way people play videogames.
When you play a videogame, you could be a completely different person
than you are in the real world, certain aspects of the way your brain
works can be leveraged for something you could never do in the real
world. It was important, for example, that Cobb not be as physically
skilled in the real world. And when he's charging through Mombasa, I
think Leo does a tremendous job of slightly differentiating his body
language and the way he moves in that world. Of course, that can be
based on what he believes of himself in that particular reality, so …
Wired: [Laughs.] Right. There's a line that I think is key to the
movie that's referenced throughout: "Do you want to take a leap of
faith?" What is the importance of that?
Nolan: Without getting too wild and woolly about it, the idea is that
by the end of the film people will start to realize that the situation
is very much like real life. We don't know what comes next, we don't
know what happens to us after we die. And so the idea of the leap of
faith is the leap into the unknowability of where the characters find
themselves.
Wired: I've seen the line used to support two interpretations. One is
that it's proof that the entire movie is a dream, something
reverberating around in Cobb's subconscious.
Nolan: Mm-hmm.
Wired: And the other is that it indicates that you as the audience
member have to take a leap of faith and decide whether the ending of
the movie is a dream or not. Would you talk about where on that
spectrum you fall?
Nolan: [Laughs.] I don't think I can talk about that, no. The
ambiguity is very much a part of the substance of the film—I'll put it
that way. The film does not specify one way or the other.
Wired: Early on, Cobb spins the top, puts the gun to his head, and the
top falls. It seems that you're giving the audience a baseline moment
of reality.
Nolan: Well, we give the character a moment of reality. I like films
where you're receiving the story largely from a subjective point of
view. And what I've tried to do with Inception is to explore this
world through Cobb's eyes. Through the entire film, as you see his
dependency on that symbol grow and through Ariadne's constant
questioning of him, I think we start to understand that the whole
reason he needs to spin the top at the beginning is because he's lost
his own sense of what's real and what's not.
Wired: Any other clues that you'd like the DVD audience to pay attention to?
Nolan: The one thing I have heard a lot is the kids are wearing the
same clothes at the end. And they're not. [Laughs.]
Wired: They're not?
Nolan: No, they're not. I'm not giving anything away there. Also I've
read a lot of misunderstanding or misremembering of the way those kids
are portrayed onscreen. But on the Blu-ray, people will be able to
check, say, the ages of the kids.
Wired: The kids are in different clothes and are older at the end?
Nolan: Yes, two sets of kids! The younger version of the boy is
actually my son, and it's not him who turns around at the end. There's
no ambiguity here.
Wired: I was so convinced that they were wearing the same clothes.
Nolan: They're very similar but not the same. That I would very much
like people to notice, because it was a very, very difficult thing to
pull off, taking two sets of kids all around the world and filming
things two different ways.
Wired: Wait—is it the second set of kids just at the very end? Or do
you interchange them somewhere else?
Nolan: I don't want to specify too much.
Wired: Wha?
Nolan: I was attempting to portray somebody trying to visualize
something that they can't visualize. It's a combination of memory and
imagining and dream, and all the different ways in which we as human
beings are able to visualize things. The way in which kids appear
throughout the film is a strenuous attempt to play with that.
Wired: Well, while we're talking about the costuming, one of the
unique advantages of having people in tightly tailored clothes and
heavily slicked hair is that they can easily be made to look like
they're fighting in zero g.
Nolan: It definitely helped.
Wired: What was it like planning for that zero-g sequence?
Nolan: It can be daunting as your department heads come in and say,
"Well, hang on a second, you've written this, but how are we going to
pull this off?" But what I've found in every film is that the
prac-ticalities of really doing things tend to inform the shape and
design of the film in productive ways. A lot of the time I find myself
very invigorated by the solutions to the practical realities we face,
whether it's in wardrobe or hair or photography or whatever. It's
those parameters which start to make the thing unique, make it what it
is. I can't really imagine myself ever making an animated film,
because in an animation, you don't have any of those tensions, those
limitations. I'd be missing an important part of my -creative process.
Wired: Is that why you built a spinning set to the do the zero-g scene
rather than do it in CG?
Nolan: Exactly. And so the look of what the characters are wearing, as
you say, the hairstyles, the design of the environment, it all had to
be practical for building those sets. The characters have to be
effectively lit with lighting that can rotate. All of that has an
effect on what the world of Inception is.
Wired: Where'd you get the idea for the spinning top as Cobb's totem?
Nolan: I actually had a spinning top—I'd given it to my wife as a
present at some point many years ago, and I just sort of stumbled
across it one day.
Wired: Cobb's top has an interesting shape. It's a pseudosphere, the
topological inverse of a normal sphere.
Nolan: The top I based it on was very, very difficult to spin. So the
particular shape of the top we ended up using—which was custom made
for the film by the prop department—has a particular center of gravity
to enable it to spin practically and easily. All of the shots of the
spinning top in the film are real.
Wired: In the movie you have five levels of reality, at least four of
which are moving at different speeds through time, and you managed to
pull off the distinctions among them using only color palettes. How
afraid were you that you were going to lose people?
Nolan: I was concerned, but I was invigorated by the challenge. And
the crosscutting at the end of the film and the interrelationships
between the levels were the jumping-off point for the whole project.
That was what I first conceived of, and for 10 years I was trying to
figure out how to get to that point at the end of the film. One of the
things that gave me that confidence was that the last 20 minutes of
The Dark Knight are based on very similar principles of crosscutting,
parallel action. So we went into the climactic action of the film
knowing the things you need to know to distinguish environments. One
of the limitations we put on ourselves—Wally Pfister, my director of
photography, and myself—is that we didn't want to do any
post-processing on the image. We wanted to have the distinctions there
in the design and the feel, so I wrote it into the script. It's
raining in level one, it's a night-interior in level two, and it's an
exterior with snow in level three. Even if you're cutting to a
close-up of Yusuf in the van in level one, you know where you are
because the rain is there.
Wired: Let me try another reading on you: When Cobb and Saito are in
limbo, they agree to a reality where Cobb can see his kids again—and
at the end of the movie we're still in limbo. Care to rule that out?
Nolan: If I start ruling things out, where do I stop? I will go as far
as saying that wasn't the way I read it. [Laughs.] How did you read
the end of the film?
Wired: My reading is that the movie has purposefully done a couple of
things to point you in different directions. I think at the end you're
supposed to remember the line about taking a leap of faith. For your
own personal catharsis as an audience member, you have to decide what
is real for yourself. So I personally choose to believe that Cobb gets
back to his kids, because I have young kids. I want him to get home.
Nolan: People who have kids definitely read it differently than people
who don't. Which isn't the same as saying there's no answer. Sometimes
I think people lose the importance of the way the thing is staged with
the spinning top at the end. Because the most important emotional
thing is that Cobb's not looking at it. He doesn't care.
Wired: Either way, he has found a reality where he got what he needed.
I know that you're not going to tell me, but I would have guessed that
really, because the audience fills in the gaps, you yourself would
say, "I don't have an answer."
Nolan: Oh no, I've got an answer.
Wired: You do?!
Nolan: Oh yeah. I've always believed that if you make a film with
ambiguity, it needs to be based on a sincere interpretation. If it's
not, then it will contradict itself, or it will be somehow
insubstantial and end up making the audience feel cheated. I think the
only way to make ambiguity satisfying is to base it on a very solid
point of view of what you think is going on, and then allow the
ambiguity to come from the inability of the character to know, and the
alignment of the audience with that character.
Wired: Oh. That's a terrible tease.
Teen Mathletes Do Battle at Algorithm Olympics
By Jason Fagone mailto:rants@wired.com mailto:rants@wired.com
November 29, 2010 |
12:00 pm |
Wired December 2010
Neal Wu's last chance for international glory, and maybe America's,
too, begins with a sound like a hippo crunching through a field of dry
leaves—the sound of 315 computer prodigies at 315 workstations ripping
into 315 gray envelopes in unison. "You have five hours," a voice
booms across the packed gymnasium. "Good luck."
At his desk on the gym floor, Wu, age 18, pushes his glasses up on his
nose and squints. He shouldn't need luck. This is a coding
competition—the International Olympiad in Informatics, held in August
at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada—and Wu is one of the
world's top competition programmers.
Gold medals awarded at the International Olympiad in Informatics (1999-2009)
He just graduated from Baton Rouge Magnet High School in Louisiana;
his parents are chemical engineers originally from Shanghai, although
Wu was born in the US. In seventh grade, he took first place in a
nationwide contest for middle schoolers called Mathcounts. (There's a
Neal Wu fan club on Facebook that celebrates his "awesome math
skills.") Yet according to Rob Kolstad, the US team's 57-year-old head
coach, Wu is merely "very good" at math. His true gift is for creative
problem-solving with code. In 2008, the first year he competed at the
IOI, he finished 10th out of 300 contestants. In 2009, he moved up to
seventh place. Since then, he has competed in six coding contests run
by Kolstad's organization, the USA Computing Olympiad; he won three of
them with perfect scores. Wu has the relaxed disposition of a star
athlete; he's confident without ever letting on that he is America's
Great Nerd Hope. "I hate to say he's the Tiger Woods of computer
programming," Kolstad says, "but he shares the properties of cool,
calm under pressure, and consistent, consistent performance."
Cool or no, there are a lot of expectations on Wu as he shuffles
through the contents of his gray envelope. Four stapled packets of
paper. Four word problems designed to test programming
prowess—specifically, the ability to crunch incredibly huge and
complex data sets in seconds. For each problem, Wu first has to choose
an algorithm, or series of computational steps. Then he has to code
it. Wu's coaches have drilled into his brain 16 standard algorithms
with names like Two-Dimensional Convex Hull, Greedy, Eulerian Path,
and Knapsack—an arsenal of mathematical machetes for hacking through
thickets of numbers—and in Wu's years of coding he has flexed and
massaged the algorithms into no fewer than 100 subtle variations. But
what makes IOI so difficult, unpredictable, and yes, even dramatic is
that competitors like Wu may have to invent and code their own ad hoc
algorithms on the spot. One-of-a-kind solutions to one-of-a-kind
problems. From scratch. In five hours.
It's grueling work, so Wu starts out slowly. He flips through the
problem sheets, scribbling an occasional note with his mechanical
pencil. The dominant sound in the gym changes from the shuffling of
paper to the clacking of keys, but Wu resists the urge to type right
out of the gate. "Typing is hypnotic," Kolstad says emphatically.
"When you're typing, you're not solving problems."
But Wu's nemesis, the Boy Wonder of Belarus, does not subscribe to this theory.
A tall kid with skinny arms, short brown hair, and a bashful smile,
Gennady Korotkevich started competing at IOI when he was 11. When Wu
was 11, he didn't even know about programming. At last year's IOI in
Bulgaria, Korotkevich upset Wu and everyone else to take first place,
becoming the youngest winner in the contest's 20-year history. This
year Korotkevich is back again, at the ripe age of 15, looking to
deprive Wu of his last shot at winning IOI. Next year Wu will be in
college and therefore ineligible.
Clockwise from top left: A printout of the Maze problem; Gennady
Korotkevich of Belarus; work in progress on Maze; American Neal Wu.
Photo: Michael Schmelling
Their styles couldn't be more different. While Wu is relaxed and
thoughtful, Korotkevich is a jackrabbit. "My parents are programmers,
and now I like it as well," he says in tentative English. Unlike the
sociable Wu (who interned at Facebook last summer), Korotkevich
squirms when I talk to him about his abilities, insisting he's nothing
special. At IOI, he sticks close to his Belarus teammates and coaches.
The gossip at IOI is 40 percent about the word problems, 10 percent
about which country's coaches have the best liquor (Canada, hands
down), and 50 percent about Gennady Korotkevich. Ask the kids who's
going to win this year and regardless of whether they're Kazakh or
Japanese, Swiss or Egyptian, they'll invariably grunt, "Belarus,
Belarus." And then they'll start laughing, as if to say, haven't you
been paying attention?
This morning, Korotkevich began typing five minutes and 40 seconds
after the competition began. Like several of the elite competitors at
IOI, he can code as fast as he can touch-type. Three minutes later,
Korotkevich completed his first program: a mere 22 lines of Pascal.
The three approved IOI programming languages are Pascal, C, and C++.
The Western kids, including Wu, tend to use C++, the most modern and
streamlined of the three. But Pascal still has a following in Eastern
Europe and Asia, even though coding in it is like "building a car with
just a screwdriver and a wrench," says Troy Vasiga, this year's IOI
chair.
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One Murder, Two Solutions
Competitors at the 2010 International Olympiad in Informatics tackled
eight programming problems in two days of competition. Here's one of
the simpler challenges, along with the solutions supplied by Gennady
Korotkevich and Neal Wu. Of the 315 competitors, 269 received a
perfect score.
The Task: Dr. Black has been murdered. Detective Jill must determine
the murderer, crime scene, and weapon. There are six possible
murderers (numbered 1 through 6, Professor Plum to Mrs. Peacock), 10
locations (1 through 10, ballroom to cellar), and six weapons (1
through 6, lead pipe to spanner). Detective Jill tries to guess the
correct combination (there are 360 possibilities). Each guess is a
theory. She asks her assistant, Jack, to confirm or refute each
theory. When Jack refutes a theory, he reports that one of the
guesses—murderer, location, or weapon—is wrong. The contestants are
tasked with implementing a procedure that plays the role of Detective
Jill. A brute-force program that tests all 360 theories earns a mere
50 points. An efficient program that tests no more than 20 theories
earns an additional 50.
Korotkevich's solution: Clear-headed and sleek. He sets up three
variables, x, y, and z, to represent the murderers, locations, and
weapons, respectively. Then he systematically tries all the
combinations in order, increasing the variables incrementally. In
other words, if his first theory is 1, 1, 1 and the computer tells him
that the location is incorrect, his next theory is 1, 2, 1. This is
efficient because all he has to do is keep track of which murderer,
which location, and which weapon to try next. That's just three things
to remember.
Language: Pascal
Lines of code: 22
Wu's solution: Successful but more complicated than necessary. Wu
first sets up a master list of all murderers, locations, and weapons.
To do this, he creates three arrays called, naturally, mur, loc, and
wep. Then he loops through the arrays, crossing off incorrect guesses
as he goes. Each time he forms a theory, he searches all three lists
to find a murderer, a place, and a weapon that hasn't been crossed
off.
Language: C++
Lines of code: 46
Korotkevich uploads his Pascal code to a network of 10
http://www.wired.com/software/coolapps/news/2004/12/66022machines
running a set of grading programs. Appropriately, there are no human
graders at IOI; instead, robots provide immediate results, which in
2010 were posted for the first time on a live online scoreboard. A few
seconds after Korotkevich submits a solution, his program receives a
perfect 100 and the scoreboard shows him in first place.
At the 20-minute mark, Korotkevich posts a perfect score on his second
problem, going up 200 points on Wu.
Meanwhile, Wu picks up his mechanical pencil, clicks the lead a couple
of times, puts it back down. He likes to alternate between a
mechanical pencil and a pen, drawing graph axes in ink and labeling
the vertices in pencil, which allows him to erase if he wants to
backtrack. He's still thinking, still strategizing. He has yet to
write a single line of code.
At the one-hour mark, Korotkevich runs his score up to 255. He's cruising now.
Wu, a smallish kid with black hair that is less unkempt than that of
your ordinary nerd, cranes his neck and glances around the gym, taking
in the scene: kids from 83 countries, their desks arranged in
cloverleaf clusters of four, looking—despite their races and
nationalities—like members of the same tribe. Many are wearing the
black Google T-shirt that was stuffed into their IOI schwag bag, and
most of the rest are decked out in team-issue polos or T-shirts from
prior competitions. (Notable exceptions: the three young women in head
scarves representing Team Libya.) Korotkevich is out there somewhere,
a mysterious wraith in a blue pullover. Wu has no idea how well his
rival is doing—during each competition period, the kids can see only
their own scores—but the contest organizers certainly know. They're up
in the gym balcony, tracking the live scoreboard on their laptops. And
it looks pretty bad. Wu is not even on the board yet. This is a
slaughter in the making.
And then, 70 minutes into the competition, Wu places his fingers on
the keyboard.
Competitive programming may strike you as history's worst idea for a
sport—shuffleboard minus the bracing speed, the Scripps National
Spelling Bee without the adorableness. In fact, battle-coding is a
surprisingly popular global pastime, indulged in by thousands of
high-school and middle-school programming clubs and turbocharged by
websites like TopCoder, a sort of social networking and gaming site
for algorithm nuts. At TopCoder, kids and adults alike battle one
another to solve IOI-style problems for cash prizes. Member ID neal_wu
shows up in red, signifying elite status. To get your name in this
color, you need a TopCoder rating of 2,200 or better. To become a
"target"—the elite of the elite—you need at least 3,000. Wu's rating
is 3,248, making him number six in the world. (Korotkevich also has a
TopCoder handle, tourist, and is ranked number five.)
As if TopCoder weren't enough, many of the national programming teams
host their own sites, where they post sample problems and practice
exams. The USA Computing Olympiad site is run by Kolstad, who also
holds a weeklong camp every year for 15 elite American coders—at the
end of that week, the four-person IOI team is selected. With his thick
shoulders and deep bellowing voice, Kolstad seems more like a football
coach than a computer guy. "I don't know how to do most of the
algorithms," he says. He prefers to focus on mental preparation and
attitude: "Just like Vince Lombardi, who, of course, didn't play
football on the field with his players."
The Training Pages section of USACO.org is open to coders from all
countries, but Kolstad says it's dominated by the Chinese, who have
been commanding the team portion of IOI for as long as anyone can
remember ("n large years," in IOI-speak). They also dominate the
International Collegiate Programming Contests. In February, a team
from China's Shanghai Jiaotong University won the ICPC world
championship in a stroll, while several American universities tied
with 16 other countries and foreign universities for 14th place. The
trend is the same in both contests: Western decline, Eastern
ascendance. Since international collegiate coding competitions began
in 1977, US universities won the first 13 ICPC contests in a row and
went on to earn four titles in the 1990s; the 1993 champion squad from
Harvard included a young Tony Hsieh, now CEO of Zappos. But the last
American victory came in 1997, and since then the contest has been
ruled by Russia, China, and Poland. "We're getting outtrained,"
Kolstad laments.
China's approach to IOI is proof of just how serious the contest has
become and how tied up it is in notions of national prestige and
economic competitiveness. To earn a spot on the Chinese team, a coder
has to beat 80,000 of his compatriots in a series of provincial
elimination rounds that last an entire year. Then he—the competitors
are almost all male—has to sit on a stage in front of hundreds of
onlookers and answer questions in English like "How will you show the
traditional culture of China to the foreign friends?" says Yi Wu, a
member of China's team. China is an extreme example, but pretty much
every kid roaming the Waterloo campus this week has beaten hundreds or
thousands of countrymen just to get here. Even the losers are
brilliant.
Rafael Schimassek, Portugal
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Photos: Michael Schmelling
Universities and corporations have taken notice, treating the
IOI—competitive programming's crowning event—as the equivalent of the
NFL Scouting Combine. This year's primary sponsor is BlackBerry maker
Research in Motion, whose CTO spoke at yesterday's glitzy opening
ceremony featuring the Waterloo Warriors cheerleading squad. Other
sponsors include Lenovo, IBM, Amazon.com, and Google. It's
understandable that so many tech companies would want to nurture IOI:
Google is famously built atop an algorithm called PageRank; Twitter's
"Who to Follow" feature is a set of algorithms; Amazon's entire site,
from sales rank to product recommendations, is a system of
interlocking algorithms. IOI may be an academic competition, but its
purpose is to advance a discipline that has driven the growth of the
Internet and turned geeks into billionaires. Here in Waterloo, what's
at stake for the kids is a college scholarship, but what's at stake
for the industry is something larger: the ability to keep innovating
new algorithms to make sense of an increasingly complex world.
The organizers of IOI, acknowledging this happy nexus, have decided
this year to sneak a few problems with real-world applications into
the coders' gray envelopes, particularly one called Languages.
By the time Wu gets to Languages, around the 90-minute mark on the
first day of competition, he has already made up much of the ground he
lost to Korotkevich, posting two perfect scores on the two easiest
problems within seven minutes of each other. Now he's got three and a
half hours to crack Languages. Good thing, because it's a hell of a
curveball: Given 10,000 text strings selected from random Wikipedia
articles written in various human languages, create a program that
identifies the language. The competition's science director, Gordon
Cormack, threw Languages into the mix out of sheer curiosity; he
genuinely didn't know what the best answer was and hoped the kids
would show him. Now they have: Wu's 227-line program analyzes the
frequency of each letter in the string (English has fewer ks and zs
than, say, Czech), narrowing the possible tongues to a handful, then
refining the guess by breaking the string into four-letter chunks and
analyzing the frequency of the chunks. With this strategy, Wu can
distinguish 56 languages, everything from Azerbaijani to Vietnamese,
85 percent of the time.
Wu finishes the day in seventh place, followed by his three US
teammates: Michael Cohen, an energetic, curly-haired Elijah Wood
look-alike and the son of a physics professor; Wenyu Cao, from the
prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts; and Brian
"Hamster" Hamrick, from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and
Technology in Virginia. (Kolstad and the kids joke that the US team
boasts "two and a half Asians," with Wu and Cao as the two and
"Hamster," whose father is Caucasian, as the half.) They're no
slouches: This summer, Cao studied advanced math at MIT and Cohen
studied physics at the University of Maryland. All except Hamrick will
begin day two within striking distance of becoming the overall winner.
In fact, their performances are good enough to push the US into a
virtual tie with China—a shock even to Kolstad.
The coach is giddy at the chance to bring attention to the American
coding program. The only kid returning next year is Cao, so Kolstad
will have to recruit a new team to carry the torch, on top of securing
new funding, as he does every year. (Team USA is itself an ad hoc
hack; one of its main sponsor, for some reason, is IBM Canada.)
Nothing could make Kolstad's job easier than a splashy rout of China.
As for the Boy Wonder from Belarus, he wraps up the day in first
place, 11 points ahead of Wu. He submitted 400 lines of tight,
efficient code and held the lead almost the entire five hours. Once or
twice, when an opponent from Bulgaria or Singapore overtook him, it
was almost like he could "sense the scoreboard," as Kolstad puts it.
Then he'd shoot back to the top. The day's events have dealt a fatal
blow to the theory that Korotkevich is a mere coding robot, an
uncreative automaton; if it were true, Languages would have fried his
circuits. But he aced it, achieving slightly higher than 90 percent
accuracy. "It was interesting, actually," Korotkevich tells me when I
stop him on the steps of the gym, his hands clasped behind his back
and eyes darting from side to side like a panicked squirrel. "I am not
used, quite, to such problems." He tells me that the rumors are
untrue: He practices only three to four hours a day, not six to seven.
There's nothing to do now but wait for the second and final day of
competition. Some of the English-speaking kids pass the time with an
afternoon game, their version of Taboo. At a long table in a dining
hall, each competitor writes down four nouns on slips of paper,
crumples them up, and tosses them into a hat. The kids will have to
guess the words from verbal clues. The hat fills with words to warm a
coder's heart: bubble sort, polynomial, integration. Also czar, Lakers
(a tricky one for this crowd), serial killer, and scandalously, a word
whose clue is given as "a way of showing affection with your tongue."
"French kiss," Wu guesses correctly as the table explodes into giggles.
Every year at IOI, there's a question so difficult that it humbles
even the adults who try to crack it. This year, that question comes on
day two. Called SaveIt, it's a classic ad hoc problem, not solvable
with any standard algorithm. SaveIt asks the coder to calculate a
table of the shortest distances through a large transportation network
consisting of 1,000 cities and 36 hubs. Then, to get the full 100
points, the coder has to cram that table into an incredibly small
space and decompress it without losing any information. It's as if
someone gave you an inflated beach ball and said, here, pack this into
a cookie jar. If you find the air nozzle, it's simple. Otherwise, it's
impossible.
At IOI, if you don't get full points on a program, you're allowed to
tweak it and resubmit it, which means that with most IOI problems you
can start off with a rough approach, a kludgy halfway solution, and
optimize it as you go. But you can't do that with SaveIt. If the key
insight eludes you—if you don't grasp how the transportation network
can be represented with 1s and 0s (the integers, not binary code) and
therefore compressed quite easily—you'll spend hours bashing your head
against your desk. Cormack, the science director, tells me that he
anticipates SaveIt will stump the vast majority of the kids. No more
than 10 of them will get the full 100 points, he predicts, and it will
take the whole five hours.
Wu, wearing a Facebook T-shirt, denim shorts, and running shoes, rips
into his gray envelope. As on day one, he pages through the tasks with
gentle, unhurried motions. When he gets to SaveIt, he thinks about it
for a while, then puts it down and decides to start on the day's other
hard problem instead, called Maze, whose difficulty is more like
climbing a ladder than a sheer rock face. Maze requires the coder to
draw a series of mazes of various sizes and complexities. A riff on a
classic unsolved question in computer science, it's a type of problem
called NP-complete, meaning that it's possible to find a good-enough
solution with a combination of creativity and moderate computing
power, but to find the best possible solution could take trillions of
years. The first couple of mazes are small enough to create by hand,
but as they get more labyrinthine, the kids have to write code to
generate them.
Meanwhile, Korotkevich starts on the two easiest problems, called
Memory and Traffic. He solves Memory within five minutes and Traffic
within 19, and by the 90-minute mark, he earns partial scores on Maze
and SaveIt.
Wu is off to a characteristically slow start, posting a measly 18
points to Korotkevich's 274. (He submitted an incomplete version of
Maze to make sure he was on the right track; if he weren't, he would
have gotten 0 points rather than 18.)
Up in the gym's balcony, a Dutch technology entrepreneur named Kim
Schrijvers is doing ESPN-style color commentary on a live web feed. He
notices the gap between Wu and Korotkevich. "Is Neal toying with us?"
Schrijvers asks.
I take a walk, get a cup of coffee, come back, reload the scoreboard.
No change. Wu in 272nd place; Korotkevich in first. Two hours left.
Over on his patch of gymnasium floor, the Boy Wonder from Belarus
allows himself a slight display of emotion. He smiles. Cormack rushes
up to me in the balcony.
"Gennady got SaveIt, he got it," Cormack says, making a noise like he
just coughed milk through his nose. "Wasn't hard enough! He got it
with two hours to go. Amazing." It's not only the speed that impresses
Cormack—it's the fact that Korotkevich used a sophisticated
compression technique known as arithmetic coding, one that requires
graduate-student-level chops. I ask Cormack if he's surprised to see a
15-year-old who knows arithmetic coding: "It would be foolish of us to
say that we are surprised by anything that Gennady does."
Wu can still catch up, but he's got to hurry. With an hour to go, he's
stuck in 23rd place, struggling with SaveIt. The flash of insight
hasn't hit him. His teammates are having more luck, though: Cohen
posts a perfect score on SaveIt and shoots up to fourth place, and Cao
thinks he's almost there. He makes a tweak, compiles his program.
Error. Segmentation fault. Crap. Something's off with his variables…
Half an hour left.
"It is quite amazing," says Vasiga, the contest chair, "how time
pressure focuses the mind in terms of optimization. Now is crunch
time, when all the neurons are firing and fingers are starting to go
at light speed."
Cao changes an n to an h, and his SaveIt program suddenly runs. He
submits it, and the next time the web scoreboard updates, it
shows—with 23 minutes left!—Cohen in fourth place and Cao in fifth.
"You have exactly 15 minutes remaining," the contest emcee booms.
A few more points on Maze push Cao up to fourth place.
"You have exactly five minutes."
"It's the desperate time," Schrijvers says. After all his banging away
on Maze, submitting his answers nine separate times, Wu has entered
the top 15. But his SaveIt program is still getting only 50 points out
of 100. With three minutes left, he makes a final SaveIt submission:
370 lines of C++. He clicks to reveal his score: still just 50 points
…
"Time is up."
Wu slowly threads his toothpick arms through the straps of his
backpack. As the gym empties, he lingers at his computer, staring at
the screen, as if he can't quite believe what just happened. He still
doesn't know how he did in relation to everyone else, but he knows
that he underperformed in his last IOI. The unflappable Tiger Woods of
computer programming looks dazed.
Schrijvers and his play-by-play crew roam the gym with a video camera,
capturing footage for the live feed. They spot Wu and stick a laptop
in his face so they can record his reaction as he learns the final
standings.
"So this is you, Neal," Schrijvers says, pointing to the web
scoreboard. "You are in 13th place." The top 25 are all considered
gold medalists, but that result still stings. Wu looks away and purses
his lips, clearly disgusted with himself.
Meanwhile, Kolstad enters the gym, beaming. "Troy, guess what?" he
booms at Vasiga. "We won your contest!" Cao and Cohen held on to
fourth and fifth places, and "Hamster" Hamrick was 43rd for a silver
medal. That was good enough for the Americans to pull off a stunning
upset, beating China. They're the new world champions.
"This is absolutely, absolutely brilliant," Schrijvers says.
Amid the jubilation, one of the US coaches nods to Wu: Nice job, man.
"Aaaaaahhh," Wu mutters dismissively. He'll have none of it.
Someone spots Korotkevich. The organizers crowd around him, patting
him on the back, congratulating him on his second straight win.
Kolstad watches Korotkevich quail from the attention and shakes his
head. "He was ahead for 98 percent of the competition. The question
is," Kolstad says slowly and with utter gravity, "will he die a
virgin?"
At the closing ceremonies two days later, the medalists clamber one by
one onto a banquet-hall stage for grip-and-grins with various
dignitaries. All are male except for a lone, pale-skinned girl from
Poland. Wu claps for silver medalist Hamrick and his fellow gold
medalists Cohen and Cao.
I catch Korotkevich sneaking a look at himself in a mirror before his
big moment. As he hoists the enormous Lucite winner's trophy, his
frail shoulders nearly buckle from the weight. His grin is epic.
Afterward, a slightly bummed Wu flies home to Baton Rouge to start
packing for his next adventure: freshman year at Harvard. A month
later, I give him a call to see how he's doing. He tells me he's
taking four classes: Expository Writing, Chinese, Math 55 (a course so
infamously punishing that it has its own Wikipedia entry), and CompSci
226, a graduate-level class taught by Michael O. Rabin. (Yes, the
Michael O. Rabin, Turing Award recipient and cocreator of the
Rabin-Karp string-hashing algorithm.) Wu reports he is the only
freshman in the class, and he says that his algorithm knowledge is
progressing to "way-more-advanced theoretical things" than IOI
contests tend to cover, including "ridiculous" new types of functions.
Wu is toying with the idea of joining the table-tennis club. He has
also met with the coaches at the Harvard Computing Contest Club, which
sends two teams to the International Collegiate Programming Contest
every year. For kicks, he took the tryout test for Harvard's team. He
came in first place.
Jason Fagone (@jfagone) writes for GQ and Philadelphia magazines and
is working on a book about the future of cars.
Dept. Of Hoopla
Snoops
by Zachary Kanin December 13, 2010
As storm clouds conspired over Manhattan one night recently, the
members of the Society of Professional Investigators, or SPI
(pronounced "spy"), gathered for their monthly dinner in the
wood-panelled back room of Forlini's, just south of Canal Street.
Mustachioed former law-enforcement agents huddled over breadsticks and
calamari as they waited for the evening's program—a PowerPoint
presentation by a retired F.B.I. undercover agent named Joaquin (
Jack) Garcia—to begin.
Since SPI's inception, in 1956, networking and professional education
have been at the core of its mission. According to the group's former
president Charles Iadanza, to become a full member of SPI you must
have completed at least five years of investigative service in law
enforcement or seven years as a licensed private investigator.
Iadanza, an investigator for the city, sat at a table rearranging his
silverware. He recalled a case from his homicide-unit days: "I had a
witness I was trying to find who went by the name of Boogaloo. He
weighed over three hundred pounds, and he slept in a coffin that he
kept in a hearse. And he ate only raw fish." He pushed his wineglass
forward an inch. "But he was the nicest guy you ever met."
Bruce Sackman, the current SPI president, rose to lead the Pledge of
Allegiance. Then he asked the attendees to introduce themselves: there
was a city fraud investigator, a licensed P.I. with the U.S. Postal
Service, a retired cop, the mystery writer E. W. Count ("Cop Talk"),
and three guests she had brought from France's Police Nationale. There
was an anti-bugging expert, a missing-persons expert, a medical-fraud
examiner, and a man who stood up and announced, "I'm Lionel—one name,
like God." Everyone laughed, and Lionel added, "I'm an underwear model
and a shepherd."
Next to Lionel sat Irving Botwinick, the chairman of the SPI board and
the owner of Serving by Irving, a process-serving agency whose motto
is "If they're alive we'll serve them; if they're dead, we'll tell you
where they're buried." Botwinick passed out press packets that
featured a picture of him jumping out of an airplane.
A tall, snappily dressed Englishman with a trim white beard stood to
introduce himself, sounding more James Bond than Sam Spade: "Good
evening. David Roberts, former New Scotland Yard Metropolitan Police,
in London, and the current treasurer. Who hasn't got a pink ticket?"
The P.I.s looked down to confirm that tickets were next to their
plates, and a few hands went up. Roberts said, "That means you haven't
paid. Please see me after."
Iadanza leaned across the table. "Dry British wit," he whispered.
Jack Garcia, the guest speaker, spent two and a half years undercover
with the Gambino crime family, an experience that he chronicled in a
best-selling memoir, "Making Jack Falcone." Garcia, who likes to say
that he is "three hundred and plenty pounds," showed slides of himself
in assorted disguises that had helped him nab drug dealers, money
launderers, crooked cops, corrupt politicians, terrorists, the N.F.L.
Super Bowl champion Mark Ingram ("I was buying stolen cars from this
guy"), and the Gambino bosses Greg DePalma, Arnold Squitieri, and
Anthony (the Genius) Megale (so named because he was "dumber than a
box of rocks").
The second half of the presentation revealed Garcia's interest in
photographs of Frank Sinatra associating with known mobsters. When,
suddenly, a slide appeared showing a ball of heroin that had been
surgically removed from a drug mule (not Sinatra), he said, "Sorry to
be showing this while you're eating."
"We've seen worse," someone yelled.
"Isn't that Jimmy the Weasel?" Lionel asked, referring to a mobster
with Sinatra in the next slide. It was.
After a brief Q. & A., Garcia departed. Over veal parmigiana and
stewed escarole, the P.I.s discussed business. Rainer Melucci, a
former SPI president, who has a thin gray mustache, said, "I've done
bug sweeps for Madonna, William Hurt, Tom Cruise, the Church of
Scientology."
"This guy does it all," Ron Semaria, a former I.R.S. agent and
forensic accountant, said. "He's a locksmith, fraud examiner,
electrician, TV repairman . . ."
"I learned that one from Mike the Nose," Melucci said.
While cannoli and slices of cheesecake were brought out, the Reverend
Marine Jourdan, a new SPI associate member, was still working the
room. Like many members, she is a graduate of John Jay College, but
she explained that her investigative skills derive from her abilities
as a medium. "I passed away—and came back, obviously—in March of '09,"
she said. "And that was my second time. The first time was November
16, 2005. That one was an intestinal strangulation. The second one was
five perforated ulcers." Through prayer, she said, she has helped
discover the remains of the Romanov children. More recently, she put
SPI on Facebook. ♦
Oops
Frenemies
by Lizzie Widdicombe December 13, 2010
"A sincere diplomat," Stalin once said, "is like dry water or wooden
iron." As any diplomat knows, the role requires a doubleness not just
of message but of manner—an extra slathering of the flatteries and
false civilities that grease the wheels of all human dealings. Of
course, when presenting more than one version of oneself, one always
runs the risk that wires will get crossed and hypocrisies will be
exposed, resulting in hurt feelings. That's what happened last week,
when WikiLeaks released a cache of secret State Department cables
containing some memorably snarky assessments of politicians who are,
in public, at least, friends of the United States: Nicolas Sarkozy is
an emperor with no clothes who has a "thin-skinned and authoritarian
personal style"; Prince Andrew speaks "cockily" and is "rude"; Angela
Merkel is "rarely creative." Frenemies don't fare so well, either: the
Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi is described, in one memo, as relying on
the aid of a Ukrainian nurse who is a "voluptuous blonde" and, in
another, as "just strange"; a Singaporean envoy is quoted referring to
North Korea's Kim Jong Il as a "flabby old chap" who "prances around
stadiums seeking adulation"; and Robert Mugabe is called a "crazy old
man." Oops.
Foreign-policy experts are debating whether the leaks constitute a
threat to national security, but their diplomatic damage is familiar
to any civilian who uses e-mail. To read the cables was to experience
all over again the feeling of receiving an e-mail and passing it on
with a comment like "WHAT AN IDIOT!!!!!!"—only to realize, too late,
that one has hit "Reply" instead of "Forward."
"It puts the fear of God in me," the Shakespeare scholar Stephen
Greenblatt said last week. The WikiLeaks news had brought to mind the
opening scene of "King Lear," in which two of Lear's daughters, Regan
and Goneril, engage in a contest to see who can flatter their father
more effusively, in order to win the biggest dowry. (The third sister,
Cordelia, stays out of it, saying that she won't practice their "glib
and oily art.") The first two profess their love for the King
extravagantly—"I love you more than words can wield the matter /
Dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty"—but, as soon as he's out of
earshot, they turn frosty. Greenblatt recited the exchange:
GONERIL: You see how full of changes his age is. . . .
REGAN: 'Tis the infirmity of his age: yet he hath ever but slenderly
known himself.
GONERIL: The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash.
The shocking thing about the sisters' comments, Greenblatt said, is
not their severity but their abrupt shift in tone. "It's the
coolness," he said. "Their words are stripped of the affect with which
we normally address each other." He noted that the scene is an
exaggerated version of all human interactions—we're all diplomats,
offering one assessment of our friends to their faces and a slightly
cooler version when they're not in the room or on the e-mail chain.
This doesn't make us liars. "What you say directly to your friend is
very different from what you say behind your friend's back, but that's
not the whole truth of the matter," he said. "Sometimes the whole
truth of the matter includes the warm, loving relations, too."
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Actual diplomats are perhaps more two-faced than the rest of us. A
former British U.N. diplomat, Carne Ross, observed that "there is an
extraordinarily rich vein of gossip inside diplomacy." Not only is
there a lot to gossip about—Qaddafi's nurse, for instance—but
diplomats tend to think of themselves as élite, and they regard
politicians as "cheap and tacky." Ross said that there is a tradition
of including, in diplomatic memos, "saucily penned portraits about
what these people are like in private." Such asides have caused
problems in the Internet age, even without the aid of WikiLeaks. Nigel
Sheinwald, the British Ambassador to the U.S., got in trouble when
someone leaked a telegram that he'd sent home describing Barack Obama
as "aloof," "insensitive," and "decidedly liberal." Ross, who runs a
nonprofit group called Independent Diplomat, which dispenses advice on
diplomatic strategy, said, "The old days are over. What you say in
private is going to have to match up with what you do in public a
little better than it has in the past."
But isn't there a purpose to such duplicity in life, if not in
diplomacy? Anthropologists have long argued that talking behind
people's backs plays an important role in social relations. John
Haviland, the author of "Gossip, Reputation and Knowledge in
Zinacantan" (an indigenous community in Mexico), pointed out that
getting the dirt on someone can be helpful for a leader making a
personnel decision. "There is a serious processing of information
there," he said. Furthermore, he added, a world in which people were
always uniform in their social interactions would be "kind of sad." He
went on, "It's not necessarily about what information comes out in
gossip sessions. It's about what side of yourself you're able to
reveal, and this nuance—the texture of social life—comes from having
intimate friends and more distant friends. You're always doing that
calculus. There's emotional satisfaction in being able to filter—and
vent." ♦
A Reporter at Large
No Secrets
Julian Assange's mission for total transparency.
by Raffi Khatchadourian June 7, 2010
Related Links Video: Raffi Khatchadourian discusses the WikiLeaks
video of a killing in Baghdad.
Keywords WikiLeaks; Julian Paul Assange; Internet; Iraq War; Video;
Confidential Documents; Intelligence
The house on Grettisgata Street, in Reykjavik, is a century old, small
and white, situated just a few streets from the North Atlantic. The
shifting northerly winds can suddenly bring ice and snow to the city,
even in springtime, and when they do a certain kind of silence sets
in. This was the case on the morning of March 30th, when a tall
Australian man named Julian Paul Assange, with gray eyes and a mop of
silver-white hair, arrived to rent the place. Assange was dressed in a
gray full-body snowsuit, and he had with him a small entourage. "We
are journalists," he told the owner of the house. Eyjafjallajökull had
recently begun erupting, and he said, "We're here to write about the
volcano." After the owner left, Assange quickly closed the drapes, and
he made sure that they stayed closed, day and night. The house, as far
as he was concerned, would now serve as a war room; people called it
the Bunker. Half a dozen computers were set up in a starkly decorated,
white-walled living space. Icelandic activists arrived, and they began
to work, more or less at Assange's direction, around the clock. Their
focus was Project B—Assange's code name for a thirty-eight-minute
video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq
in 2007. The video depicted American soldiers killing at least
eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists; it later became
the subject of widespread controversy, but at this early stage it was
still a closely guarded military secret.
Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his
colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other
institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site
called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years
ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material,
ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in
Guantánamo Bay, and the "Climategate" e-mails from the University of
East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin's private
Yahoo account. The catalogue is especially remarkable because
WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a
media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no
office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to
country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put
it to me, "I'm living in airports these days." He is the operation's
prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he
does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world
help maintain the Web site's complicated infrastructure; many
participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate
themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M,
for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are
conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems
from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually
no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful
institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.
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Iceland was a natural place to develop Project B. In the past year,
Assange has collaborated with politicians and activists there to draft
a free-speech law of unprecedented strength, and a number of these
same people had agreed to help him work on the video in total secrecy.
The video was a striking artifact—an unmediated representation of the
ambiguities and cruelties of modern warfare—and he hoped that its
release would touch off a worldwide debate about the conflicts in Iraq
and Afghanistan. He was planning to unveil the footage before a group
of reporters at the National Press Club, in Washington, on April 5th,
the morning after Easter, presumably a slow news day. To accomplish
this, he and the other members of the WikiLeaks community would have
to analyze the raw video and edit it into a short film, build a
stand-alone Web site to display it, launch a media campaign, and
prepare documentation for the footage—all in less than a week's time.
Assange also wanted to insure that, once the video was posted online,
it would be impossible to remove. He told me that WikiLeaks maintains
its content on more than twenty servers around the world and on
hundreds of domain names. (Expenses are paid by donations, and a few
independent well-wishers also run "mirror sites" in support.) Assange
calls the site "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document
leaking and public analysis," and a government or company that wanted
to remove content from WikiLeaks would have to practically dismantle
the Internet itself. So far, even though the site has received more
than a hundred legal threats, almost no one has filed suit. Lawyers
working for the British bank Northern Rock threatened court action
after the site published an embarrassing memo, but they were
practically reduced to begging. A Kenyan politician also vowed to sue
after Assange published a confidential report alleging that President
Daniel arap Moi and his allies had siphoned billions of dollars out of
the country. The site's work in Kenya earned it an award from Amnesty
International.
Assange typically tells would-be litigants to go to hell. In 2008,
WikiLeaks posted secret Scientology manuals, and lawyers representing
the church demanded that they be removed. Assange's response was to
publish more of the Scientologists' internal material, and to
announce, "WikiLeaks will not comply with legally abusive requests
from Scientology any more than WikiLeaks has complied with similar
demands from Swiss banks, Russian offshore stem-cell centers, former
African kleptocrats, or the Pentagon."
In his writing online, especially on Twitter, Assange is quick to lash
out at perceived enemies. By contrast, on television, where he has
been appearing more frequently, he acts with uncanny sang-froid. Under
the studio lights, he can seem—with his spectral white hair, pallid
skin, cool eyes, and expansive forehead—like a rail-thin being who has
rocketed to Earth to deliver humanity some hidden truth. This
impression is magnified by his rigid demeanor and his baritone voice,
which he deploys slowly, at low volume.
In private, however, Assange is often bemused and energetic. He can
concentrate intensely, in binges, but he is also the kind of person
who will forget to reserve a plane ticket, or reserve a plane ticket
and forget to pay for it, or pay for the ticket and forget to go to
the airport. People around him seem to want to care for him; they make
sure that he is where he needs to be, and that he has not left all his
clothes in the dryer before moving on. At such times, he can seem
innocent of the considerable influence that he has acquired.
Sitting at a small wooden table in the Bunker, Assange looked
exhausted. His lanky frame was arched over two computers—one of them
online, and the other disconnected from the Internet, because it was
full of classified military documents. (In the tradecraft of
espionage, this is known as maintaining an "air gap.") He has a
cyber-security analyst's concern about computer vulnerability, and
habitually takes precautions to frustrate eavesdroppers. A low-grade
fever of paranoia runs through the WikiLeaks community. Assange says
that he has chased away strangers who have tried to take his picture
for surveillance purposes. In March, he published a classified
military report, created by the Army Counterintelligence Center in
2008, that argued that the site was a potential threat to the Army and
briefly speculated on ways to deter government employees from leaking
documents to it. Assange regarded the report as a declaration of war,
and posted it with the title "U.S. Intelligence Planned to Destroy
WikiLeaks." During a trip to a conference before he came to the
Bunker, he thought he was being followed, and his fear began to infect
others. "I went to Sweden and stayed with a girl who is a foreign
editor of a newspaper there, and she became so paranoid that the
C.I.A. was trying to get me she left the house and abandoned me," he
said.
Assange was sitting opposite Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch activist, hacker,
and businessman. Gonggrijp—thin and balding, with a soft voice—has
known Assange well for several years. He had noticed Assange's panicky
communiqués about being watched and decided that his help was needed.
"Julian can deal with incredibly little sleep, and a hell of a lot of
chaos, but even he has his limits, and I could see that he was
stretching himself," Gonggrijp told me. "I decided to come out and
make things sane again." Gonggrijp became the unofficial manager and
treasurer of Project B, advancing about ten thousand euros to
WikiLeaks to finance it. He kept everyone on schedule, and made sure
that the kitchen was stocked with food and that the Bunker was
orderly.
At around three in the afternoon, an Icelandic parliamentarian named
Birgitta Jonsdottir walked in. Jonsdottir, who is in her forties, with
long brown hair and bangs, was wearing a short black skirt and a black
T-shirt with skulls printed on it. She took a WikiLeaks T-shirt from
her bag and tossed it at Assange.
"That's for you," she said. "You need to change." He put the T-shirt
on a chair next to him, and continued working.
Jonsdottir has been in parliament for about a year, but considers
herself a poet, artist, writer, and activist. Her political views are
mostly anarchist. "I was actually unemployed before I got this job,"
she explained. "When we first got to parliament, the staff was so
nervous: here are people who were protesting parliament, who were for
revolution, and now we are inside. None of us had aspirations to be
politicians. We have a checklist, and, once we're done, we are out."
As she unpacked her computer, she asked Assange how he was planning to
delegate the work on Project B. More Icelandic activists were due to
arrive; half a dozen ultimately contributed time to the video, and
about as many WikiLeaks volunteers from other countries were
participating. Assange suggested that someone make contact with Google
to insure that YouTube would host the footage.
"To make sure it is not taken down under pressure?" she asked.
"They have a rule that mentions gratuitous violence," Assange said.
"The violence is not gratuitous in this case, but nonetheless they
have taken things down. It is too important to be interfered with."
"What can we ask M to do?" Jonsdottir asked. Assange, engrossed in
what he was doing, didn't reply.
His concerns about surveillance had not entirely receded. On March
26th, he had written a blast e-mail, titled "Something Is Rotten in
the State of Iceland," in which he described a teen-age Icelandic
WikiLeaks volunteer's story of being detained by local police for more
than twenty hours. The volunteer was arrested for trying to break into
the factory where his father worked—"the reasons he was trying to get
in are not totally justified," Assange told me—and said that while in
custody he was interrogated about Project B. Assange claimed that the
volunteer was "shown covert photos of me outside the Reykjavik
restaurant Icelandic Fish & Chips," where a WikiLeaks production
meeting had taken place in a private back room.
The police were denying key parts of the volunteer's story, and
Assange was trying to learn more. He received a call, and after a few
minutes hung up. "Our young friend talked to one of the cops," he
said. "I was about to get more details, but my battery died." He
smiled and looked suspiciously at his phone.
"We are all paranoid schizophrenics," Jonsdottir said. She gestured at
Assange, who was still wearing his snowsuit. "Just look at how he
dresses."
Gonggrijp got up, walked to the window, and parted the drapes to peer out.
"Someone?" Jonsdottir asked.
"Just the camera van," he deadpanned. "The brain-manipulation van."
At around six in the evening, Assange got up from his spot at the
table. He was holding a hard drive containing Project B. The
video—excerpts of running footage captured by a camera mounted on the
Apache—depicts soldiers conducting an operation in eastern Baghdad,
not long after the surge began. Using the Freedom of Information Act,
Reuters has sought for three years to obtain the video from the Army,
without success. Assange would not identify his source, saying only
that the person was unhappy about the attack. The video was digitally
encrypted, and it took WikiLeaks three months to crack. Assange, a
cryptographer of exceptional skill, told me that unlocking the file
was "moderately difficult."
People gathered in front of a computer to watch. In grainy
black-and-white, we join the crew of the Apache, from the Eighth
Cavalry Regiment, as it hovers above Baghdad with another helicopter.
A wide-angle shot frames a mosque's dome in crosshairs. We see a
jumble of buildings and palm trees and abandoned streets. We hear
bursts of static, radio blips, and the clipped banter of tactical
communication. Two soldiers are in mid-conversation; the first
recorded words are "O.K., I got it." Assange hit the pause button, and
said, "In this video, you will see a number of people killed." The
footage, he explained, had three broad phases. "In the first phase,
you will see an attack that is based upon a mistake, but certainly a
very careless mistake. In the second part, the attack is clearly
murder, according to the definition of the average man. And in the
third part you will see the killing of innocent civilians in the
course of soldiers going after a legitimate target."
The first phase was chilling, in part because the banter of the
soldiers was so far beyond the boundaries of civilian discourse. "Just
fuckin', once you get on 'em, just open 'em up," one of them said. The
crew members of the Apache came upon about a dozen men ambling down a
street, a block or so from American troops, and reported that five or
six of the men were armed with AK-47s; as the Apache maneuvered into
position to fire at them, the crew saw one of the Reuters journalists,
who were mixed in among the other men, and mistook a long-lensed
camera for an RPG. The Apaches fired on the men for twenty-five
seconds, killing nearly all of them instantly.
Phase two began shortly afterward. As the helicopter hovered over the
carnage, the crew noticed a wounded survivor struggling on the ground.
The man appeared to be unarmed. "All you gotta do is pick up a
weapon," a soldier in the Apache said. Suddenly, a van drove into
view, and three unarmed men rushed to help the wounded person. "We
have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly, uh, picking
up bodies and weapons," the Apache reported, even though the men were
helping a survivor, and were not collecting weapons. The Apache fired,
killing the men and the person they were trying to save, and wounding
two young children in the van's front seat.
In phase three, the helicopter crew radioed a commander to say that at
least six armed men had entered a partially constructed building in a
dense urban area. Some of the armed men may have walked over from a
skirmish with American troops; it is unclear. The crew asked for
permission to attack the structure, which they said appeared
abandoned. "We can put a missile in it," a soldier in the Apache
suggested, and the go-ahead was quickly given. Moments later, two
unarmed people entered the building. Though the soldiers acknowledged
them, the attack proceeded: three Hellfire missiles destroyed the
building. Passersby were engulfed by clouds of debris.
Assange saw these events in sharply delineated moral terms, yet the
footage did not offer easy legal judgments. In the month before the
video was shot, members of the battalion on the ground, from the
Sixteenth Infantry Regiment, had suffered more than a hundred and
fifty attacks and roadside bombings, nineteen injuries, and four
deaths; early that morning, the unit had been attacked by small-arms
fire. The soldiers in the Apache were matter-of-fact about killing and
spoke callously about their victims, but the first attack could be
judged as a tragic misunderstanding. The attack on the van was
questionable—the use of force seemed neither thoughtful nor
measured—but soldiers are permitted to shoot combatants, even when
they are assisting the wounded, and one could argue that the Apache's
crew, in the heat of the moment, reasonably judged the men in the van
to be assisting the enemy. Phase three may have been unlawful, perhaps
negligent homicide or worse. Firing missiles into a building, in
daytime, to kill six people who do not appear to be of strategic
importance is an excessive use of force. This attack was conducted
with scant deliberation, and it is unclear why the Army did not
investigate it.
Assange had obtained internal Army records of the operation, which
stated that everyone killed, except for the Reuters journalists, was
an insurgent. And the day after the incident an Army spokesperson
said, "There is no question that Coalition Forces were clearly engaged
in combat operations against a hostile force." Assange was hoping that
Project B would undermine the Army's official narrative. "This video
shows what modern warfare has become, and, I think, after seeing it,
whenever people hear about a certain number of casualties that
resulted during fighting with close air support, they will understand
what is going on," he said in the Bunker. "The video also makes clear
that civilians are listed as insurgents automatically, unless they are
children, and that bystanders who are killed are not even mentioned."
WikiLeaks receives about thirty submissions a day, and typically posts
the ones it deems credible in their raw, unedited state, with
commentary alongside. Assange told me, "I want to set up a new
standard: 'scientific journalism.' If you publish a paper on DNA, you
are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data
that has informed your research—the idea being that people will
replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to
be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance,
in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and
that leads to abuse." Because Assange publishes his source material,
he believes that WikiLeaks is free to offer its analysis, no matter
how speculative. In the case of Project B, Assange wanted to edit the
raw footage into a short film as a vehicle for commentary. For a
while, he thought about calling the film "Permission to Engage," but
ultimately decided on something more forceful: "Collateral Murder." He
told Gonggrijp, "We want to knock out this 'collateral damage'
euphemism, and so when anyone uses it they will think 'collateral
murder.' "
The video, in its original form, was a puzzle—a fragment of evidence
divorced from context. Assange and the others in the Bunker spent much
of their time trying to piece together details: the units involved,
their command structure, the rules of engagement, the jargon soldiers
used on the radio, and, most important, whether and how the Iraqis on
the ground were armed.
"One of them has a weapon," Assange said, peering at blurry footage of
the men walking down the street. "See all those people standing out
there."
"And there is a guy with an RPG over his arm," Gonggrijp said.
"I'm not sure." Assange said. "It does look a little bit like an RPG."
He played the footage again. "I'll tell you what is very strange," he
said. "If it is an RPG, then there is just one RPG. Where are all the
other weapons? All those guys. It is pretty weird."
The forensic work was made more difficult because Assange had declined
to discuss the matter with military officials. "I thought it would be
more harmful than helpful," he told me. "I have approached them
before, and, as soon as they hear it is WikiLeaks, they are not
terribly coöperative." Assange was running Project B as a surprise
attack. He had encouraged a rumor that the video was shot in
Afghanistan in 2009, in the hope that the Defense Department would be
caught unprepared. Assange does not believe that the military acts in
good faith with the media. He said to me, "What right does this
institution have to know the story before the public?"
This adversarial mind-set permeated the Bunker. Late one night, an
activist asked if Assange might be detained upon his arrival in the
United States.
"If there is ever a time it was safe for me to go, it is now," Assange
assured him.
"They say that Gitmo is nice this time of year," Gonggrijp said.
Assange was the sole decision-maker, and it was possible to leave the
house at night and come back after sunrise and see him in the same
place, working. ("I spent two months in one room in Paris once without
leaving," he said. "People were handing me food.") He spoke to the
team in shorthand—"I need the conversion stuff," or "Make sure that
credit-card donations are acceptable"—all the while resolving flareups
with the overworked volunteers. To keep track of who was doing what,
Gonggrijp and another activist maintained a workflow chart with yellow
Post-Its on the kitchen cabinets. Elsewhere, people were translating
the video's subtitles into various languages, or making sure that
servers wouldn't crash from the traffic that was expected after the
video was posted. Assange wanted the families of the Iraqis who had
died in the attack to be contacted, to prepare them for the inevitable
media attention, and to gather additional information. In conjunction
with Iceland's national broadcasting service, RUV, he sent two
Icelandic journalists to Baghdad to find them.
By the end of the week, a frame-by-frame examination of the footage
was nearly complete, revealing minute details—evidence of a body on
the ground, for instance—that were not visible by casual viewing. ("I
am about twelve thousand frames in," the activist who reviewed it told
me. "It's been a morbid day, going through these people's last
moments.") Assange had decided to exclude the Hellfire incident from
the film; the attack lacked the obvious human dimension of the others,
and he thought that viewers might be overloaded with information.
The edited film, which was eighteen minutes long, began with a quote
from George Orwell that Assange and M had selected: "Political
language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder
respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind." It
then presented information about the journalists who had been killed,
and about the official response to the attack. For the audio of this
section, one of the film's Icelandic editors had layered in fragments
of radio banter from the soldiers. As Assange reviewed the cut, an
activist named Gudmundur Gudmundsson spoke up to say that the banter
allowed viewers to "make an emotional bond" with the soldiers. Assange
argued that it was mostly fragmentary and garbled, but Gudmundsson
insisted: "It is just used all the time for triggering emotions."
"At the same time, we are displaying them as monsters," the editor said.
"But emotions always rule," Gudmundsson said. "By the way, I worked on
the sound recording for a film, 'Children of Nature,' that was
nominated for an Oscar, so I am speaking from experience."
"Well, what is your alternative?" Assange asked.
"Basically, bursts of sounds, interrupting the quiet," he said.
The editor made the change, stripping the voices of the soldiers from
the opening, but keeping blips and whirs of radio distortion. Assange
gave the edit his final approval.
Late Saturday night, shortly before all the work had to be finished,
the journalists who had gone to Baghdad sent Assange an e-mail: they
had found the two children in the van. The children had lived a block
from the location of the attack, and were being driven to school by
their father that morning. "They remember the bombardment, felt great
pain, they said, and lost consciousness," one of the journalists
wrote. The journalists also found the owner of the building that had
been attacked by the Hellfires, who said that families had been living
in the structure, and that seven residents had died. The owner, a
retired English teacher, had lost his wife and daughter. An intense
discussion arose about what to do with this news: Was it worth using
at the National Press Club, or was it a better tactic to hold on to
it? If the military justified the Hellfire attacks by claiming that
there were no civilian casualties, WikiLeaks could respond by
releasing the information, in a kind of ambush. Jonsdottir turned to
Gonggrijp, whose eyes had welled up.
"Are you crying?" she asked.
"I am," he said. "O.K., O.K., it is just the kids. It hurts."
Gonggrijp gathered himself. "Fuck!" he said. Resuming the conversation
about ambushing the Army, he said, "Anyway, let them walk into this
knife—"
"That is a wonderful thing to do," one of the activists said.
"Let them walk into this, and they will," Gonggrijp said. "It is a
logical response."
Jonsdottir was now in tears, too, and wiping her nose.
"Now I want to reëdit the thing," Assange said. "I want to put in the
missile attack. There were three families living in the bottom, so it
wasn't abandoned." But it was impossible to reëdit the film. The
activists were working at capacity, and in several hours it would be
Easter.
At half past ten in the morning, Gonggrijp pulled open the drapes, and
the Bunker was filled with sunlight. He was wearing a long-sleeved
T-shirt and black pants, freshly washed and ironed, and he was
struggling to keep everyone on schedule. Last-minute concerns—among
them finding a criminal-defense lawyer in the United States—were being
addressed. Assange was at a computer, his posture upright as he
steadily typed.
"How are we on time?" he asked no one in particular.
"We have three hours," Gonggrijp said.
Assange wrinkled his brow and turned his attention back to the screen.
He was looking at a copy of classified rules of engagement in Iraq
from 2006, one of several secret American military documents that he
was planning to post with the video. WikiLeaks scrubs such documents
to insure that no digital traces embedded in them can identify their
source. Assange was purging these traces as fast as he could.
Reykjavik's streets were empty, and the bells of a cathedral began to
toll. "Remember, remember the fifth of November," Assange said,
repeating a line from the English folk poem celebrating Guy Fawkes. He
smiled, as Gonggrijp dismantled the workflow chart, removing Post-Its
from the cabinets and flushing them down the toilet. Shortly before
noon, there was a desperate push to clear away the remaining vestiges
of Project B and to get to the airport. Assange was unpacked and
unshaven, and his hair was a mess. He was typing up a press release.
Jonsdottir came by to help, and he asked her, "Can't you cut my hair
while I'm doing this?"
"No, I am not going to cut your hair while you are working," she said.
Jonsdottir walked over to the sink and made tea. Assange kept on
typing, and after a few minutes she reluctantly began to trim his
hair. At one point, she stopped and asked, "If you get arrested, will
you get in touch with me?" Assange nodded. Gonggrijp, meanwhile,
shoved some of Assange's things into a bag. He settled the bill with
the owner. Dishes were washed. Furniture was put back in place. People
piled into a small car, and in an instant the house was empty and
still.
The name Assange is thought to derive from Ah Sang, or Mr. Sang, a
Chinese émigré who settled on Thursday Island, off the coast of
Australia, in the early eighteen-hundreds, and whose descendants later
moved to the continent. Assange's maternal ancestors came to Australia
in the mid-nineteenth century, from Scotland and Ireland, in search of
farmland, and Assange suspects, only half in jest, that his proclivity
for wandering is genetic. His phone numbers and e-mail address are
ever-changing, and he can drive the people around him crazy with his
elusiveness and his propensity to mask details about his life.
Assange was born in 1971, in the city of Townsville, on Australia's
northeastern coast, but it is probably more accurate to say that he
was born into a blur of domestic locomotion. Shortly after his first
birthday, his mother—I will call her Claire—married a theatre
director, and the two collaborated on small productions. They moved
often, living near Byron Bay, a beachfront community in New South
Wales, and on Magnetic Island, a tiny pile of rock that Captain Cook
believed had magnetic properties that distorted his compass readings.
They were tough-minded nonconformists. (At seventeen, Claire had
burned her schoolbooks and left home on a motorcycle.) Their house on
Magnetic Island burned to the ground, and rifle cartridges that Claire
had kept for shooting snakes exploded like fireworks. "Most of this
period of my childhood was pretty Tom Sawyer," Assange told me. "I had
my own horse. I built my own raft. I went fishing. I was going down
mine shafts and tunnels."
Assange's mother believed that formal education would inculcate an
unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will
to learn. "I didn't want their spirits broken," she told me. In any
event, the family had moved thirty-seven times by the time Assange was
fourteen, making consistent education impossible. He was homeschooled,
sometimes, and he took correspondence classes and studied informally
with university professors. But mostly he read on his own,
voraciously. He was drawn to science. "I spent a lot of time in
libraries going from one thing to another, looking closely at the
books I found in citations, and followed that trail," he recalled. He
absorbed a large vocabulary, but only later did he learn how to
pronounce all the words that he learned.
When Assange was eight, Claire left her husband and began seeing a
musician, with whom she had another child, a boy. The relationship was
tempestuous; the musician became abusive, she says, and they
separated. A fight ensued over the custody of Assange's half brother,
and Claire felt threatened, fearing that the musician would take away
her son. Assange recalled her saying, "Now we need to disappear," and
he lived on the run with her from the age of eleven to sixteen. When I
asked him about the experience, he told me that there was evidence
that the man belonged to a powerful cult called the Family—its motto
was "Unseen, Unknown, and Unheard." Some members were doctors who
persuaded mothers to give up their newborn children to the cult's
leader, Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The cult had moles in government, Assange
suspected, who provided the musician with leads on Claire's
whereabouts. In fact, Claire often told friends where she had gone, or
hid in places where she had lived before.
While on the run, Claire rented a house across the street from an
electronics shop. Assange would go there to write programs on a
Commodore 64, until Claire bought it for him, moving to a cheaper
place to raise the money. He was soon able to crack into well-known
programs, where he found hidden messages left by their creators. "The
austerity of one's interaction with a computer is something that
appealed to me," he said. "It is like chess—chess is very austere, in
that you don't have many rules, there is no randomness, and the
problem is very hard." Assange embraced life as an outsider. He later
wrote of himself and a teen-age friend, "We were bright sensitive kids
who didn't fit into the dominant subculture and fiercely castigated
those who did as irredeemable boneheads."
When Assange turned sixteen, he got a modem, and his computer was
transformed into a portal. Web sites did not exist yet—this was
1987—but computer networks and telecom systems were sufficiently
linked to form a hidden electronic landscape that teen-agers with the
requisite technical savvy could traverse. Assange called himself
Mendax—from Horace's splendide mendax, or "nobly untruthful"—and he
established a reputation as a sophisticated programmer who could break
into the most secure networks. He joined with two hackers to form a
group that became known as the International Subversives, and they
broke into computer systems in Europe and North America, including
networks belonging to the U.S. Department of Defense and to the Los
Alamos National Laboratory. In a book called "Underground," which he
collaborated on with a writer named Suelette Dreyfus, he outlined the
hacker subculture's early Golden Rules: "Don't damage computer systems
you break into (including crashing them); don't change the information
in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and
share information."
Around this time, Assange fell in love with a sixteen-year-old girl,
and he briefly moved out of his mother's home to stay with her. "A
couple of days later, police turned up, and they carted off all my
computer stuff," he recalled. The raid, he said, was carried out by
the state police, and "it involved some dodgy character who was
alleging that we had stolen five hundred thousand dollars from
Citibank." Assange wasn't charged, and his equipment was returned. "At
that point, I decided that it might be wise to be a bit more
discreet," he said. Assange and the girl joined a squatters' union in
Melbourne, until they learned she was pregnant, and moved to be near
Claire. When Assange was eighteen, the two got married in an
unofficial ceremony, and soon afterward they had a son.
Hacking remained a constant in his life, and the thrill of digital
exploration was amplified by the growing knowledge, among the
International Subversives, that the authorities were interested in
their activities. The Australian Federal Police had set up an
investigation into the group, called Operation Weather, which the
hackers strove to monitor.
In September, 1991, when Assange was twenty, he hacked into the master
terminal that Nortel, the Canadian telecom company, maintained in
Melbourne, and began to poke around. The International Subversives had
been visiting the master terminal frequently. Normally, Assange hacked
into computer systems at night, when they were semi-dormant, but this
time a Nortel administrator was signed on. Sensing that he might be
caught, Assange approached him with humor. "I have taken control," he
wrote, without giving his name. "For years, I have been struggling in
this grayness. But now I have finally seen the light." The
administrator did not reply, and Assange sent another message: "It's
been nice playing with your system. We didn't do any damage and we
even improved a few things. Please don't call the Australian Federal
Police."
The International Subversives' incursions into Nortel turned out to be
a critical development for Operation Weather. Federal investigators
tapped phone lines to see which ones the hackers were using. "Julian
was the most knowledgeable and the most secretive of the lot," Ken
Day, the lead investigator, told me. "He had some altruistic motive. I
think he acted on the belief that everyone should have access to
everything."
"Underground" describes Assange's growing fear of arrest: "Mendax
dreamed of police raids all the time. He dreamed of footsteps
crunching on the driveway gravel, of shadows in the pre-dawn darkness,
of a gun-toting police squad bursting through his backdoor at 5 am."
Assange could relax only when he hid his disks in an apiary that he
kept. By October, he was in a terrible state. His wife had left him,
taking with her their infant son. His home was a mess. He barely ate
or slept. On the night the police came, the twenty-ninth, he wired his
phone through his stereo and listened to the busy signal until
eleven-thirty, when Ken Day knocked on his door, and told him, "I
think you've been expecting me."
Assange was charged with thirty-one counts of hacking and related
crimes. While awaiting trial, he fell into a depression, and briefly
checked himself into a hospital. He tried to stay with his mother, but
after a few days he took to sleeping in nearby parks. He lived and
hiked among dense eucalyptus forests in the Dandenong Ranges National
Park, which were thick with mosquitoes whose bites scarred his face.
"Your inner voice quiets down," he told me. "Internal dialogue is
stimulated by a preparatory desire to speak, but it is not actually
useful if there are no other people around." He added, "I don't want
to sound too Buddhist. But your vision of yourself disappears."
It took more than three years for the authorities to bring the case
against Assange and the other International Subversives to court. Day
told me, "We had just formed the computer-crimes team, and the
government said, 'Your charter is to establish a deterrent.' Well, to
get a deterrent you have to prosecute people, and we achieved that
with Julian and his group." A computer-security team working for
Nortel in Canada drafted an incident report alleging that the hacking
had caused damage that would cost more than a hundred thousand dollars
to repair. The chief prosecutor, describing Assange's near-limitless
access, told the court, "It was God Almighty walking around doing what
you like."
Assange, facing a potential sentence of ten years in prison, found the
state's reaction confounding. He bought Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "The
First Circle," a novel about scientists and technicians forced into
the Gulag, and read it three times. ("How close the parallels to my
own adventures!" he later wrote.) He was convinced that "look/see"
hacking was a victimless crime, and intended to fight the charges. But
the other members of the group decided to coöperate. "When a judge
says, 'The prisoner shall now rise,' and no one else in the room
stands—that is a test of character," he told me. Ultimately, he
pleaded guilty to twenty-five charges and six were dropped. But at his
final sentencing the judge said, "There is just no evidence that there
was anything other than sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the
pleasure of being able to—what's the expression—surf through these
various computers." Assange's only penalty was to pay the Australian
state a small sum in damages.
As the criminal case was unfolding, Assange and his mother were also
waging a campaign to gain full custody of Assange's son—a legal fight
that was, in many ways, far more wrenching than his criminal defense.
They were convinced that the boy's mother and her new boyfriend posed
a danger to the child, and they sought to restrict her rights. The
state's child-protection agency, Health and Community Services,
disagreed. The specifics of the allegations are unclear; family-court
records in Australia are kept anonymous. But in 1995 a parliamentary
committee found that the agency maintained an "underlying philosophy
of deflecting as many cases away from itself as possible." When the
agency decided that a child was living in a safe household, there was
no way to immediately appeal its decision.
The custody battle evolved into a bitter fight with the state. "What
we saw was a great bureaucracy that was squashing people," Claire told
me. She and Assange, along with another activist, formed an
organization called Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection. "We used
full-on activist methods," Claire recalled. In meetings with Health
and Community Services, "we would go in and tape-record them
secretly." The organization used the Australian Freedom of Information
Act to obtain documents from Health and Community Services, and they
distributed flyers to child-protection workers, encouraging them to
come forward with inside information, for a "central databank" that
they were creating. "You may remain anonymous if you wish," one flyer
stated. One protection worker leaked to the group an important
internal manual. Assange told me, "We had moles who were inside
dissidents."
In 1999, after nearly three dozen legal hearings and appeals, Assange
worked out a custody agreement with his wife. Claire told me, "We had
experienced very high levels of adrenaline, and I think that after it
all finished I ended up with P.T.S.D. It was like coming back from a
war. You just can't interact with normal people to the same degree,
and I am sure that Jules has some P.T.S.D. that is untreated." Not
long after the court cases, she said, Assange's hair, which had been
dark brown, became drained of all color.
Assange was burned out. He motorcycled across Vietnam. He held various
jobs, and even earned money as a computer-security consultant,
supporting his son to the extent that he was able. He studied physics
at the University of Melbourne. He thought that trying to decrypt the
secret laws governing the universe would provide the intellectual
stimulation and rush of hacking. It did not. In 2006, on a blog he had
started, he wrote about a conference organized by the Australian
Institute of Physics, "with 900 career physicists, the body of which
were sniveling fearful conformists of woefully, woefully inferior
character."
He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left
versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus
institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he
believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by
institutional hierarchies, and by "patronage networks"—one of his
favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a
manifesto of sorts, titled "Conspiracy as Governance," which sought to
apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate
governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of
functionaries in "collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a
population." He argued that, when a regime's lines of internal
communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators
must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy
dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.
These ideas soon evolved into WikiLeaks. In 2006, Assange barricaded
himself in a house near the university and began to work. In fits of
creativity, he would write out flow diagrams for the system on the
walls and doors, so as not to forget them. There was a bed in the
kitchen, and he invited backpackers passing through campus to stay
with him, in exchange for help building the site. "He wouldn't sleep
at all," a person who was living in the house told me. "He wouldn't
eat."
As it now functions, the Web site is primarily hosted on a Swedish
Internet service provider called PRQ.se, which was created to
withstand both legal pressure and cyber attacks, and which fiercely
preserves the anonymity of its clients. Submissions are routed first
through PRQ, then to a WikiLeaks server in Belgium, and then on to
"another country that has some beneficial laws," Assange told me,
where they are removed at "end-point machines" and stored elsewhere.
These machines are maintained by exceptionally secretive engineers,
the high priesthood of WikiLeaks. One of them, who would speak only by
encrypted chat, told me that Assange and the other public members of
WikiLeaks "do not have access to certain parts of the system as a
measure to protect them and us." The entire pipeline, along with the
submissions moving through it, is encrypted, and the traffic is kept
anonymous by means of a modified version of the Tor network, which
sends Internet traffic through "virtual tunnels" that are extremely
private. Moreover, at any given time WikiLeaks computers are feeding
hundreds of thousands of fake submissions through these tunnels,
obscuring the real documents. Assange told me that there are still
vulnerabilities, but "this is vastly more secure than any banking
network."
Before launching the site, Assange needed to show potential
contributors that it was viable. One of the WikiLeaks activists owned
a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. Millions
of secret transmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that
hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign
governments' information, and began to record this traffic. Only a
small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial
tranche served as the site's foundation, and Assange was able to say,
"We have received over one million documents from thirteen countries."
In December, 2006, WikiLeaks posted its first document: a "secret
decision," signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader
for the Islamic Courts Union, that had been culled from traffic
passing through the Tor network to China. The document called for the
execution of government officials by hiring "criminals" as hit men.
Assange and the others were uncertain of its authenticity, but they
thought that readers, using Wikipedia-like features of the site, would
help analyze it. They published the decision with a lengthy
commentary, which asked, "Is it a bold manifesto by a flamboyant
Islamic militant with links to Bin Laden? Or is it a clever smear by
US intelligence, designed to discredit the Union, fracture Somali
alliances and manipulate China?"
The document's authenticity was never determined, and news about
WikiLeaks quickly superseded the leak itself. Several weeks later,
Assange flew to Kenya for the World Social Forum, an anti-capitalist
convention, to make a presentation about the Web site. "He packed in
the funniest way I have ever seen," the person who had been living in
the house recalled. "Someone came to pick him up, and he was asked,
'Where is your luggage?' And he ran back into the house. He had a
sailor's sack, and he grabbed a whole bunch of stuff and threw it in
there, mostly socks."
Assange ended up staying in Kenya for several months. He would check
in with friends by phone and through the Internet from time to time,
but was never precise about his movements. One friend told me, "It
would always be, 'Where is Julian?' It was always difficult to know
where he was. It was almost like he was trying to hide."
It took about an hour on Easter morning to get from the house on
Grettisgata Street to Iceland's international airport, which is
situated on a lava field by the sea. Assange, in the terminal, carried
a threadbare blue backpack that contained hard drives, phone cards,
and multiple cell phones. Gonggrijp had agreed to go to Washington to
help with the press conference. He checked in, and the ticketing agent
turned to Assange.
"I am sorry," she said to him. "I cannot find your name."
"Interesting," Assange said to Gonggrijp. "Have fun at the press conference."
"No," Gonggrijp told the attendant. "We have a booking I.D. number."
"It's been confirmed," Assange insisted.
The attendant looked perplexed. "I know," she said. "But my booking
information has it 'cancelled.' "
The two men exchanged a look: was a government agency tampering with
their plans? Assange waited anxiously, but it turned out that he had
bought the ticket and neglected to confirm the purchase. He quickly
bought another ticket, and the two men flew to New York and then
rushed to catch the Acela to Washington. It was nearly two in the
morning when they arrived. They got into a taxi, and Assange, who
didn't want to reveal the location of his hotel, told the driver to go
to a nearby cross street.
"Here we are in the lion's den," Gonggrijp said as the taxi raced down
Massachusetts Avenue, passing rows of nondescript office buildings.
Assange said, "Not looking too lionish."
A few hours after sunrise, Assange was standing at a lectern inside
the National Press Club, ready to present "Collateral Murder" to the
forty or so journalists who had come. He was dressed in a brown
blazer, a black shirt, and a red tie. He played the film for the
audience, pausing it to discuss various details. After the film ended,
he ran footage of the Hellfire attack—a woman in the audience gasped
as the first missile hit the building—and read from the e-mail sent by
the Icelandic journalists who had gone to Iraq. The leak, he told the
reporters, "sends a message that some people within the military don't
like what is going on."
The video, in both raw and edited forms, was released on the site that
WikiLeaks had built for it, and also on YouTube and a number of other
Web sites. Within minutes after the press conference, Assange was
invited to Al Jazeera's Washington headquarters, where he spent half
the day giving interviews, and that evening MSNBC ran a long segment
about the footage. The video was covered in the Times, in multiple
stories, and in every other major paper. On YouTube alone, more than
seven million viewers have watched "Collateral Murder."
Defense Secretary Robert Gates was asked about the footage, and said,
clearly irritated, "These people can put anything out they want and
are never held accountable for it." The video was like looking at war
"through a soda straw," he said. "There is no before and there is no
after." Army spokespeople insisted that there was no violation of the
rules of engagement. At first, the media's response hewed to Assange's
interpretation, but, in the ensuing days, as more commentators weighed
in and the military offered its view, Assange grew frustrated. Much of
the coverage focussed not on the Hellfire attack or the van but on the
killing of the journalists and on how a soldier might reasonably
mistake a camera for an RPG. On Twitter, Assange accused Gates of
being "a liar," and beseeched members of the media to "stop spinning."
In some respects, Assange appeared to be most annoyed by the
journalistic process itself—"a craven sucking up to official sources
to imbue the eventual story with some kind of official basis," as he
once put it. WikiLeaks has long maintained a complicated relationship
with conventional journalism. When, in 2008, the site was sued after
publishing confidential documents from a Swiss bank, the Los Angeles
Times, the Associated Press, and ten other news organizations filed
amicus briefs in support. (The bank later withdrew its suit.) But, in
the Bunker one evening, Gonggrijp told me, "We are not the press." He
considers WikiLeaks an advocacy group for sources; within the
framework of the Web site, he said, "the source is no longer dependent
on finding a journalist who may or may not do something good with his
document."
Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me
that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed
record of events. In an invitation to potential collaborators in 2006,
he wrote, "Our primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in
China, Russia and Central Eurasia, but we also expect to be of
assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal illegal or immoral
behavior in their own governments and corporations." He has argued
that a "social movement" to expose secrets could "bring down many
administrations that rely on concealing reality—including the US
administration."
Assange does not recognize the limits that traditional publishers do.
Recently, he posted military documents that included the Social
Security numbers of soldiers, and in the Bunker I asked him if
WikiLeaks' mission would have been compromised if he had redacted
these small bits. He said that some leaks risked harming innocent
people—"collateral damage, if you will"—but that he could not weigh
the importance of every detail in every document. Perhaps the Social
Security numbers would one day be important to researchers
investigating wrongdoing, he said; by releasing the information he
would allow judgment to occur in the open.
A year and a half ago, WikiLeaks published the results of an Army
test, conducted in 2004, of electromagnetic devices designed to
prevent IEDs from being triggered. The document revealed key aspects
of how the devices functioned and also showed that they interfered
with communication systems used by soldiers—information that an
insurgent could exploit. By the time WikiLeaks published the study,
the Army had begun to deploy newer technology, but some soldiers were
still using the devices. I asked Assange if he would refrain from
releasing information that he knew might get someone killed. He said
that he had instituted a "harm-minimization policy," whereby people
named in certain documents were contacted before publication, to warn
them, but that there were also instances where the members of
WikiLeaks might get "blood on our hands."
One member told me that Assange's editorial policy initially made her
uncomfortable, but that she has come around to his position, because
she believes that no one has been unjustly harmed. Of course, such
harm is not always easy to measure. When Assange was looking for board
members, he contacted Steven Aftergood, who runs an e-mail newsletter
for the Federation of American Scientists, and who publishes sensitive
documents. Aftergood declined to participate. "When a technical record
is both sensitive and remote from a current subject of controversy, my
editorial inclination is to err on the side of caution," he said. "I
miss that kind of questioning on their part."
At the same time, Aftergood told me, the overclassification of
information is a problem of increasing scale—one that harms not only
citizens, who should be able to have access to government records, but
the system of classification itself. When too many secrets are kept,
it becomes difficult to know which ones are important. Had the
military released the video from the Apache to Reuters under FOIA, it
would probably not have become a film titled "Collateral Murder," and
a public-relations nightmare.
Lieutenant Colonel Lee Packnett, the spokesperson for intelligence
matters for the Army, was deeply agitated when I called him. "We're
not going to give validity to WikiLeaks," he said. "You're not doing
anything for the Army by putting us in a conversation about WikiLeaks.
You can talk to someone else. It's not an Army issue." As he saw it,
once "Collateral Murder" had passed through the news cycle, the
broader counter-intelligence problem that WikiLeaks poses to the
military had disappeared as well. "It went away," he said.
With the release of "Collateral Murder," WikiLeaks received more than
two hundred thousand dollars in donations, and on April 7th Assange
wrote on Twitter, "New funding model for journalism: try doing it for
a change." Just this winter, he had put the site into a state of
semi-dormancy because there was not enough money to run it, and
because its technical engineering needed adjusting. Assange has far
more material than he can process, and he is seeking specialists who
can sift through the chaotic WikiLeaks library and assign documents to
volunteers for analysis. The donations meant that WikiLeaks would now
be able to pay some volunteers, and in late May its full archive went
back online. Still, the site remains a project in early development.
Assange has been searching for the right way not only to manage it but
also to get readers interested in the more arcane material there.
In 2007, he published thousands of pages of secret military
information detailing a vast number of Army procurements in Iraq and
Afghanistan. He and a volunteer spent weeks building a searchable
database, studying the Army's purchasing codes, and adding up the cost
of the procurements—billions of dollars in all. The database
catalogued matériel that every unit had ordered: machine guns,
Humvees, cash-counting machines, satellite phones. Assange hoped that
journalists would pore through it, but barely any did. "I am so
angry," he said. "This was such a fucking fantastic leak: the Army's
force structure of Afghanistan and Iraq, down to the last chair, and
nothing."
WikiLeaks is a finalist for a Knight Foundation grant of more than
half a million dollars. The intended project would set up a way for
sources to pass documents to newspaper reporters securely; WikiLeaks
would serve as a kind of numbered Swiss bank account, where
information could be anonymously exchanged. (The system would allow
the source to impose a deadline on the reporter, after which the
document would automatically appear on WikiLeaks.) Assange has been
experimenting with other ideas, too. On the principle that people
won't regard something as valuable unless they pay for it, he has
tried selling documents at auction to news organizations; in 2008, he
attempted this with seven thousand internal e-mails from the account
of a former speechwriter for Hugo Chávez. The auction failed. He is
thinking about setting up a subscription service, where high-paying
members would have early access to leaks.
But experimenting with the site's presentation and its technical
operations will not answer a deeper question that WikiLeaks must
address: What is it about? The Web site's strengths—its near-total
imperviousness to lawsuits and government harassment—make it an
instrument for good in societies where the laws are unjust. But,
unlike authoritarian regimes, democratic governments hold secrets
largely because citizens agree that they should, in order to protect
legitimate policy. In liberal societies, the site's strengths are its
weaknesses. Lawsuits, if they are fair, are a form of deterrence
against abuse. Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his
creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without
accountability—is encoded in the site's DNA, and will only become more
pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.
After the press conference in Washington, I met Assange in New York,
in Bryant Park. He had brought his luggage with him, because he was
moving between the apartments of friends of friends. We sat near the
fountain, and drank coffee. That week, Assange was scheduled to fly to
Berkeley, and then to Italy, but back in Iceland the volcano was
erupting again, and his flight to Europe was likely to change. He
looked a bit shell-shocked. "It was surprising to me that we were seen
as such an impartial arbiter of the truth, which may speak well to
what we have done," he told me. But he also said, "To be completely
impartial is to be an idiot. This would mean that we would have to
treat the dust in the street the same as the lives of people who have
been killed."
A number of commentators had wondered whether the video's title was
manipulative. "In hindsight, should we have called it 'Permission to
Engage' rather than 'Collateral Murder'?" he said. "I'm still not
sure." He was annoyed by Gates's comment on the film: "He says, 'There
is no before and no after.' Well, at least there is now a middle,
which is a vast improvement." Then Assange leaned forward and, in a
whisper, began to talk about a leak, code-named Project G, that he is
developing in another secret location. He promised that it would be
news, and I saw in him the same mixture of seriousness and amusement,
devilishness and intensity that he had displayed in the Bunker. "If it
feels a little bit like we're amateurs, it is because we are," he
said. "Everyone is an amateur in this business." And then, his coffee
finished, he made his way out of the park and into Times Square,
disappearing among the masses of people moving this way and that. ♦
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