#Julian V: Default

[tfsroleplay]

Julian steps off the train, looking around as he takes in Inkopolis Plaza. It’s a lot more… shiny, than Splatsville. Tinier too. He's used to the bit of trash on the ground (that he and Lil Buddy have definitely NOT occasionally tried to eat... look, Lil Buddy likes digging through the trash to find leftover food, Julian just likes munching on things that aren't food to feel the textures...) and not the cleanliness of this city...

But hey, there was a reason Splatsville was called the city of chaos and Inkopolis wasn't. Lil Buddy sat in his designated spot in Julian's backpack, since there was a Grizzco building here as well...

"...Very clean and shiny... Different from Splatsville..."

Lil Buddy says something to him, Julian immediately making a face.

"No, no going to talk to people... Don't know anyone besides 1 and 2..."

He looks around, trying to familiarize himself with the city. He debates on heading to the back alley to talk to the urchin back there, he's talked with Murch a couple times but never for anything serious. Though, before he can, head over, he glances up at the Great Zapfish hanging out around Inkopolis Tower, eyes widening slightly.

He remembers seeing the Tower lit up by fireworks in the sky, the Great Zapfish smiling down at everyone in the hub. There's a few Inkfish surrounding him, he's holding a taller girl's hand and she's saying something to him and smiling, are they celebrating something? The New Year, maybe? Or a possible Splatfest? He's not sure...

Before he can remember more, he hears Lil Buddy calling out to him, pulling him out of his thoughts.

"Ah—"

Lil Buddy is sitting on his shoulder now, just staring at him. He may have been staring a bit too long and just being silent... He gently moves the Small Fry back to his spot in the backpack, shaking his head.

"...mmm..."

[red-black-aesthetic-bout]

Round one matchups under the cut!!

EDIT: ROUND ONE IS CLOSED. CHECK PINNED FOR ROUND TWO

Bracket 1

Ruby Rose (RWBY) vs. Vanitas (Kingdom Hearts)

Mello (Death Note) vs. Rhaenyra Targaryern (House of the Dragon)

Kuga Yuma (World Trigger) vs. Kiki (Kiki's Delivery Service)

Clifford (Clifford the Big Red Dog) vs. Dracula (Castlevania)

Kai Satou (Your Turn to Die) vs. Ladybugs/Ladybirds (real life)

Zuko (Avatar: the Last Airbender) vs. Kuro (Katamari)

Kate (Shadows House) vs. The Cat (Ghost Trick)

Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch (Marvel comics) vs. Red X (Teen Titans)

Elric of Melniboné (The Elric Saga/Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion Multiverse) vs. Naomi Armitage (Armitage the Third)

Alucard (Hellsing Ultimate) vs Keith Kogane (Voltron: Legendary Defenders)

Lance (Sym Bionic Titan) vs. Panpeus (Gitaroo Man)

Six-Eared Macaque (Lego Monkie Kid) vs. Flick (Animal Crossing)

Watchdog (Jupiter-Men) vs. Crowley (Good Omens)

Eye of Sauron (Lord of the Rings) vs. Giant Horse (Breath of the Wild)

Razer (Jak X: Combat Racing) vs. Kieran Valentine (Monster High: Why Do Ghouls Fall In Love?)

Wei Wuxian (The Untamed/MDZS) vs. Yifa Snorgelsson (Dimension 20: Neverafter)

Shadow the Hedgehog (Sonic the Hedgehog) vs. Black Sonichu/Blake (CWC's Sonichu)

Sailor Mars (Sailor Moon) vs. The Toy Soldier (The Mechanisms)

Ada Wong (Resident Evil) vs. Jack Spicer (Xiaolin Showdown)

Top Hat (The Nightly Manner) vs. Marceline the Vampire Queen (Adventure Time)

Parr Family/The Incredibles (The Incredibles) vs. Pioneer 9 (17776 and 20020)

Guilmon (Digimon) vs. Julian Devorak (The Arcana)

Miles Edgeworth (Ace Attorney) vs. Sundancer (Worm - Parahumans)

Hal 9000 (2001: A Space Oddyssey) vs. Eas/Cure Passion (Fresh Precure)

Harley Quinn (DC comics) vs. Itachi Uchiha (Naruto)

Scorpia (She-ra and the Princesses of Power) vs. Redcloak (Order of the Stick)

Scarlet Kingsnake (real life) vs. Hornet (Hollow Knight)

Maka Albarn (Soul Eater) vs. Toa Tahu (Bionicle)

Thorn (Scooby Doo and the Witch's Ghost) vs. Litten (Pokémon)

Maned Wolf (real life) vs. Orko (He-Man)

Rebecca Rubin (American Girl Dolls) vs. Lucifer (Obey Me)

Death the Wolf/The Wolf/Lobo/Death etc. (Puss in Boots: the Last Wish) vs. Joker (Persona 5) Bracket 2

Miles Morales/Spiderman (Marvel comics) vs. Cynder (Spyro)

Edelgard von Hresvelg (Fire Emblem franchise) vs. Sanguine (The Elder Scrolls)

Artegor Nexus (Galactik Football) vs. Beidou (Genshin Impact)

Barb (Trolls) vs. Mao Mao (Mao Mao Heroes of Pure Heart)

Wrathion, the Black Prince (World of Warcraft) vs. Vox Akuma (Nijisanji En)

Romeo (Minecraft: Story Mode) vs. Hua Cheng (Heaven Official's Blessing/TGCF)

Sharkface (Red vs. Blue) vs. Ashley (WarioWare)

Carmen Sandiego (Carmen Sandiego) vs. Beatrice (Umineko no Naku Koro ni)

Claire Stanfield/Felix Walken (Baccano!) vs. Deathgripper (How to Train your Dragon)

Default Mii Brawler (Super Smash Bros Ultimate) vs. Silver (Pokemon franchise)

Joui Jouki (Ordem Paranormal) vs. Banica Conchita (Evillious Chronicles)

Dreadking Rathalos (Monster Hunter Generations) vs. Black Widow Spider (real life)

Celestia Ludenberg (Danganronpa) vs. Gira/Kuwagata Ohger (Ohsama Sentai: King Ohger)

Garnet (Steven Universe) vs. Black Knight (Monty Python and the Holy Grail)

Scott Summers/Cyclops (X-men) vs. Heather Chandler (Heathers)

Lon (Sendokai champions) vs. Edward Elric (Fullmetal Alchemist)

Darth Maul (Star Wars) vs. Detective Turret (Portal 2)

Easthies (Witch Hat Atelier) vs. Grim (Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy)

Zagreus (Hades) vs. Freddy Kreuger (A Nightmare on Elm Street)

Black Rose Dragon (Yu-Gi-Oh!) vs. Marian Hawke (Dragon Age 2)

Michael Burnham (Stark Trek franchise) vs. Mapo Tofu (Food Fantasy)

Flapjack (The Owl House) vs. Marinette Dupain-Cheng/Ladybug (Miraculous Ladybug)

Red-winged Blackbird (real life) vs. Pucca (Pucca)

Overblot Riddle (Twisted Wonderland) vs. Quattro Bajeena (Mobile Suit Gundam franchise)

Pyramid Head (Silent Hill) vs. Lord Hater (Wander Over Yonder)

Sigmund Sinclair (The Reckoning) vs. Vash the Stampede (Trigun 98/Trigun Maximum)

Ranma Saotome (Ranma 1/2) vs. Valerie Gray (Danny Phantom)

Mephone 4s (Inanimate Insanity) vs. Regina (Doki Doki Precure)

Mordecai Heller (Lackadaisy) vs. Sideswipe (Transformers G1)

Satan (Lil Nas X's Montero music video, and also Christianity or something) vs. Zealot Carmainerose (Epic 7)

Zero (Code Geass) vs. Yor Briar (Spy x Family)

Vincent Valentine (Final Fantasy franchise) vs. Ryuko Matoi (Kill la Kill)

THESE ARE OUR CONTESTANTS. NOW WHO'S READY TO RUMBLE!!!!!!

[drawingway]

My The Arcana fan apprentices

I will have this pin with their default sprite :v

I just find so much fun doing sprites. uurggh

Apprentice Kalastrias - main

LI: Julian

Apprentice Klaus

LI: Asra

Apprentice Letitia

LI: Lucio

Apprentice Yoe

LI: Muriel

Apprentice Cibarias

LI: Nadia

[slythraco]

Julian Albert - SFW ALPHABET

Author’s note: Took a break in my requests to write this ! Might do the NSFW version if you’d like it ! Let me know if you would like to see this with his other characters too 😉 have fun !

Masterlist

————————

A = Attraction (how do they show their attracted to you?)

Julian is not really the expressive type, always preferred to hide his feelings and emotions behind a wall of coldness and anger. So making you understand he likes you was quite a challenge for him. He started by complimenting you sometimes, which surprised you every time.

He would also help you with your work without you asking, then make it pass like a act of kindness because he’s in his ‘good day’ rather then assuming the real reason.

B = Baby (Do they want a family? Why/why not?)

Yes ! Absolutely, Julian and you always talk about finding a family one day. Even if he’s scared of the idea of being a father, you’re always there to comfort him, knowing he would make an amazing father.

C = Cuddle (How do they cuddle?)

Julian is a sucker for cuddles, he just love feeling your body against his. Every time you’re not far away from each other (and in private) he just feel the need to take you in his arms. So when you’re both at work, he take a break just to meet you at your desk who is literally 2 meters away and give you a good hug before going back.

When you’re home, he loves to sit in bed, his back against the headboard, you between his legs while you read a book together. This position gives him room to kiss your neck and collarbones, but he can also touch your thighs or higher if he doesn’t feel like reading.

D = Dates (What are dates like with them?)

It’s all or nothing, he can either prepare the best night ever, Diner with candles, Sky gazing after a good meal, date in a gastronomic restaurant or just share a glass of whine at his home while dance to random musics. But you like these both ways of doing it. A good moment with Julian is always good to take.

E = Emotions (Do they express their emotions? If so, how?)

It was a big problem in the beginning of your relationship, the fact that he didn’t really open up to you to show his feelings. He was still protecting himself from getting hurt. But once he did it one time, and finally realises that you would never in any circonstances, judge him or leave him for what he truly feels. He became the most expressive person he’s ever been, he tells you everything that’s on his mind and it makes him very happy to have found someone to talk to about what’s going trough his mind. And you’re probably the only person that gets to see him like that.

F = Feelings (When did they know they were in love)

One day you got attacked by a meta-human, you got harmed a little bit but it was enough to make Julian scared and start freaking out. That’s when he realised how much he didn’t to lose you and how deeply in love he was.

G = Gentle (Are they gentle? If so, how?)

Gentle in his gesture, yes. Gentle in his words, no. Hear me out. Julian is the most attentive person, the last thing he wants is to hurt so when he’s hugging you or kissing you, it’s gentle and full of his love.

But sometimes, when he gets angry or is in a bad mood he can get rude in his words or get violent. Careful, he could never lay a hand on you, he would breaks things around him rather then get physical to you. But yeah, be prepared he can get really rude to you but he will always regret what he said and always excuse himself until you forgive him but he would certainly blame himself for the rest of his life.

H = Hands (Do they hold hands? If so, how?)

Yes, everywhere, Julian is not really into PDA but if there’s one thing to steal from it it’s this. When you’re walking outside, arriving at work, sitting next to each other, he always find a way to grab your hand and it’s honestly, adorable.

I = Impression (What was their first impression of you?)

Being his colleague, Joe had to warned him of your your coming in the office. It kinda bored Julian at first, knowing he’d have to share his lab with another person annoyed him but as soon as he saw you, all his bad thinking flew away.

He found you really nice, intelligent and way more punctual than Allen. And also really beautiful, you blew him away by your intelligence also. He really thought you were too good to be true.

J = Jealousy (Do they get jealous?)

Yes, Julian is a really insecure person, he’s always scared of loosing you so when he sees you talking to another men he would almost always ask you about him afterwards.

If the person your talking to gets a little bit too touchy for his taste he would intervene and either call you by your affectionate nickname (my love, my heart, my darling,...) or he would kiss you to make it clear who you belong to.

K = Kiss (How do they kiss? Who intiated the first kiss?)

His kisses are always gentle and full of love or passionate, he’s mostly the one to kiss you first just because he can’t contain himself when you’re around him. He could spend his whole life kissing your lips.

L = Love language (What are their love languages?)

Gifts, gifts, gifts. He loves to cover you with gifts. He likes to buy you little things that remind him of you. That’s his way of telling you he loves you.

M = Mornings (Are they a morning person? What are they like in the morning?)

It depends, on day work, since Julian is very focused on punctuality he can gets pretty stressful in the morning. Running everywhere to be ready in time, and make sure he tie is perfect.

But I’m off days, he’s the biggest lazy guy in town. Mostly because he loves just to lay in bed and cuddle with you rather then get up and start the day.

N = Nickel (Do they spoil you? Do they buy the person they love everything?)

Like I said before, Julian loves to buy you things so yes he spoils you A LOT ! And when you want him to buy you something, he can’t resist, always wanting to put a smile on your face.

O = Open (Do they say everything about themselves? Do they say everything all at once or overtime?)

Like mention before, It took a while to Julian to finally open up to you but as soon as he feels safe enough, he tells you everything !

P = Patience (Do they have patience? Are they angered easily?)

Julian has zero patience, he gets mad when he doesn’t have what he wants right now. It amuse you sometimes so you tease him with it but it’s is at your own risk.

Q = Quaint (What’s their favorite non modern thing to do?)

Julian as a disc record player in his appartement, he loves to listen to old vinyl with you. You learns to dance a slow with him thanks to it.

R = Remember (What’s their favorite moment in the relationship?)

It’s hard to choose but probably the day you accepted to be his girlfriend, it was such a magical day. He prepared a wonderful date that night, he made a whole delicious meal for you to to share together in his appartement. You slowed dance in his living-room and then his kisses you for the first time before asking you to be his after admitting his feeling to you. You spent the rest of the night cuddling and kissing like teenagers, it really is an amazing memory.

S = Security (How protective are they?)

He globally trust you so he’s not really overly protective, unless you propose you help to the flash team. Even more since you got attacked by a meta not long ago, this is the only time he can get really protective.

Otherwise he’s just normally protective, telling you to be careful when you come back late from work, etc. But it’s always in a cute and loving way never toxic or anything, he just cares about your safety like any boyfriend would.

T = Talking (what do they like to talk about?)

Obviously, sciences and all of that, but he also loves to talk about you, he always want to know more about you, your past, your family. Every little knew information about you makes him really happy.

U = Ugly (Whats a bad habit of theirs?)

Criticising EVERYTHING and everyone. That’s one of us default he always finds someone to say about something (especially Barry Allen), he can be either funny because we all know how sassy Julian is but it can be annoying sometimes.

V = Vaunt (Do they like to show you off?)

Yes ! He’s always so happy to present you as his girlfriend. He’s so proud to have you by his side. The worst thing is when someone goes to him and say ‘No way, you’re really dating Y/N’ with that, you’re stuck with him for an eternity, he will be doomed to hear him boast of having a wife as brilliant as you.

W = Whole (Do they feel incomplete without you?)

Absolutely, Julian would be lost without you. You’re his everything, all he does is to make you happy so yes.

X = Xylophone (What’s a song that reminds of your guy’s relationship?)

Can’t help falling in love - Elvis Presley

You two danced to this song the night he kissed you for the first time.

Y = Yuck (What’s something they hate that you do?)

Teasing him, you love to make him crazy and angry because let’s face it, Julian angry is the sexiest thing ever.

Z = Zzz (Are they a heavy or a light sleeper ?)

Heavy sleeper for sure, when he finally leaves work and get to bed, you never hear about him again before he wakes up the next day.

[bottomvalerius]

Odd affection for all three of yours and Val?

👀👀👀 y e s thank you!💕💕

Donna

They really like tracing people’s faces— very soft, featherlight touches. See: ASMR face tracing videos lol Likes to really get the feel for someone’s features. I’ve mentioned they just love tracing along the bridge of Julian’s nose, but they also do it to Nadia and Portia too; they know the exact number of freckles Portia has. They really like the feeling of Muriel’s undereyes? And they really like tracing Asra’s hairline/temples. Theyre v privy to tracing Valerius’s full lips the most lmao if they’re cuddling with someone, their hands are either in their hands or skimming over their face!

Sam

When sitting with someone, he really likes either sitting literally hip to hip, or if his partner allows it, keeping them in his lap? Not sure if this necessarily odd, but it’s a constant for him and not always sexual. He just really likes the feeling of wrapping his arms around someone like that, and again, he really likes resting his head on people. The goal is to make them feel small and him feel Big LOL Donna was almost constantly in his lap when they dated— it was their default mode lmfao

Damien

If Damien is REALLY close to you (I see him like this with say his himbo farmer Anthony), he will totally use his very long nails to get your backne lmao He’s definitely into popping black heads cause he can just get in there, but it involves a BIG level of intimacy on all ends lmfao Anthony just really appreciates it as he’s very flattered Damien even takes off his gloves near him, let alone want to do that to him. To a lesser extent, if you have a big black head just on your face you need popped, and you’re close, he’s in there (he just may ask you to close your eyes while he does it lmfao)

Valerius

He’s very good at memorizing drink orders. He has Donna’s memorized, and even after they pass and are resurrected (and he loses his memories of them), his body just kinda instinctively knows how much sugar and cream to put in, which is very shocking to them as no one gets it right but Asra. I think any gesture of him serving someone else is actually a big display of affection for him; pouring you wine being the biggest as that’s truly more of a servants job. He won’t make a big deal out of it outwardly, but if you’re paying close attention, it’s pretty touching lmao

BONUS Val x Donna !!

Valerius gets two because I’m a simp but it applies to Donna too: they both work in each other’s favorite scents into their day-to-day! Donna knows he likes fresher, clean scents with not too many strong notes, and in the reverse, Valerius knows they enjoy sweeter scents like vanilla and cherry blossom. It’s something they didn’t necessarily coordinate; Donna just knows Valerius has sensitive nose, and Valerius just has them on his mind a lot, it just works into their lives that way

[lettherebemonsters]

002 for lore and bashir because im v curious about how that came to be

002 | Send me a ship and I will tell you:

When I started shipping them: Maybe last year? The story of how it came to be was thanks to @lilstinky stanning Brent Spiner so hard that you could feel it through the Borg Collective. It was GLORIOUS! So many headcannons of Lore and Julian, and then @shadethechangingman did art of Lore and Julian that was SO AWESOME (like one where they were kissing but I can’t find it ;A;. There are some BADASS doodles of Lore and Weyoun though...) I was like...huh......I kind of like this ship.....wait.....no.....NO I LOVE THIS SHIP. I WILL DIE FOR THIS SHIP.

And then came......the fan fiction. The SINGLE most character accurate Loreshir fan fiction there is is Stick and Carrot on AO3. It’s basically Lore wallowing in manic depression in DS9 and he and Julian end up having such a batshit relationship it’s insane.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/9532097

Read it and enjoy. The one thing I HATE is the hologram thing, but meh. That’s just me.

My thoughts: I love these two together so much. Lore gets smothered in the attention he’s so desperate for and you know.....STOPS LASHING OUT BECAUSE HE FINALLY HAS THE ATTENTION HE SO DESPERATELY NEEDS?! He finally finds someone who loves him for HIM and he finally gets to be vulnerable.

What makes me happy about them: The fact that Julian Bashir is so accepting, and that he suffered very similar injustices for being an Augment. Julian is LITERALLY the only human alive who KNOWS Lore’s suffering......which makes Lore trust him more than he could trust other organics. Because Julian is him if he escaped his Hell and found a place where he could belong.

What makes me sad about them: The fact that Julian never got to meet Lore for real. It’s a widespread belief among fans I’ve heard talk on Tumblr and Youtube that Lore NEEDED to be on DS9. But of course....Brent couldn’t be in three places at once. :C

Things done in fanfic that annoys me: That Lore is always portrayed as straight. ALWAYS. Data is debatable but Lore was in the closet for 26 years and his dad treats him like abusive dads treat their gay children (going so far as the whole ‘ let’s fix the broken child’s brain’ that reminds me of parents who try to ‘ungay’ their kids.) I love a lot of the stories, but yeah......it’s very weird for me that the default will always be Lore straight (and Data going head over heals for a female in 2 seconds flat. Why?????)

Things I look for in fanfic: Lore being accurate to his portrayal in the show, showing that he ISN’T a villain but a victim that went too far (more extremist antihero if he was allowed to show a softer side.) Plus his mate needs to be someone who tries to understand him and not force him to change. He has to choose to change, not be forced to change.

My wishlist: For Lore to be redeemed and be happy. Because we all want Lore to freaking BE HAPPY.

Who I’d be comfortable them ending up with, if not each other: Hugh and Lore, and...hmm.....Julian and Garak are BFFs but I see them as friends more than lovers.

My happily ever after for them: Lore becomes a CMO and remains on DS9 with Julian, they get married and build android children of their own. They also have a Bajoran wedding and wear the earrings. :3

[themadvigilantist]

more dantalion headcanons:

other names of dantalion: Donskion, Dansiation, Danskalion

faceclaims for him: [in alphabetical order of last name accompanied with historical significance: labeled w/resources to rp with or not]

taiyo ayukawa: 

(though this was only for a brief moment and by then, it is forgotten.) set on first time on earth when mimicking a human on a poster before switching to one that would be more fitting for himself. early 2000s or late 1990s. no icons, no gifs.

julian rhind-tutt: 

a trickster of sorts, tends to vary upon time period. some gifs, no icons

fairuza balk: 

one of the more recent; secondary default. Used more as a negotiator. like the david tennant mask, this mask too show have icons, some gifs but rarely anything outside of the craft.

una damon: 

early in dukedom, his knowledge of other’s weaknesses as well as being part of a priestess that officiated marriages, he had used to help fellow demons before wanting powers himself. unlike in that specific universe, it was more of his control to turned the witches back to normal after making a direct copy of their book due to slowly gaining his wings back, something that he didn’t want. Not the only set of witches’ spellbooks he had directly copied and using a dilemma as a distraction. mid 1990s. no icons, no gifs, severely underused.

danai gurira: 

more relaxed though and is skilled with blades. seemed to have existed for sea travel at a brief time of being a pirate. mostly for war in intergalactic circles. very queenly. used somewhere between 500 years when in america. it is shown that she was the face before he had fallen to hell. has icons, has gifs.

christina ricci:

existed after the white facility, during the time where v had murdered others on the west wing of the facility, they had the east wing of the facility. used a hatchet than a hammer. used the face of a child that would stare at them that was later killed by her captors. has gifs, has icons.

takako fuji: 

(alternate fcs: anna moon, aiko horiuchi, misaki saisho, and junko bailey) most powerful form is funnelling their old spirit form when haunting or possessing someone. tends to only be used on earth. second time on earth, gave the original that he had mimicked peace and a general in his army in hell as a form of thank you. otherwise, very much like a small librarian to be underestimated at first meetings. early 19th century to late 1980s. no icons, not enough grudge-less gifs, severely underused.

timothy olyphant:

another negotiator. common sense and tends to be the most human out the masks dantalion have. mainly shown during his stint in america but, will occasionally appear in the modern day as of late. plenty of icons, plenty of gifs.

alexander siddig: 

when undercover as an agent during the tudor times, sending women that he had personally trained as an army of assassins to cripple armies. useful for historical armies to win under his orders and in turn, gave him plenty of souls to serve him. plenty of gifs and icons.

david tennant: 

default. existed the second vin was admitted to the white facility. tends to wear this mask and is more of a cloned vessel by vin’s hand. shows old scars from the fall the longer he shows that face but, found it quite endearing that the face he had is everywhere. has icons, has gifs.

[tfsroleplay]

"...Inkopolis...?"

Julian repeats the word after hearing Deep Cut discuss the train station being opened again. It feels a bit familiar, though he's never been there. At least, he doesn't think he has... Sure, he's been in Inkadia before, the Salmonids' grounds weren't exclusive to the Splatlands, but the main city? No, he just stayed with his family and did whatever they needed him to do during runs.

...So why does the city feel familiar in his head...? Guess he'll have to go there and check it out.

[phillipstosch]

Bibliography

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/early-europe-and-colonial-americas/colonial-americas/v/brooklyn-biombo

https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.kingston.ac.uk/stable/community.10330858?searchText=family+history+and+art&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dfamily%2Bhistory%2Band%2Bart%26so%3Drel%26efqs%3DeyJjdHkiOlsiWTI5dWRISnBZblYwWldSZmFXMWhaMlZ6Il0sImNsYXNzaWZpY2F0aW9uIjpbXSwiY291bnRyeSI6W10sImNvbGxlY3Rpb25faWRzIjpbXX0%253D&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3Affc1e499e7896056d1d8b1ded45b32f2&searchkey=1647274065161&seq=1 

Leonie Castelino

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HVjy3YbwrM 

Susan Hudson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slLi4yP1p3Q

Francesco Clemente 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko5VvS_mpQ8

Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00xb6vx/michael-palins-hemingway-adventure-episode-1

Bill Viola 

https://biblehub.com/jonah/2-5.htm

Georg Baselitz: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQtSSE6ZEI: 

Frank O. Gehry, Richard Serra: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEDyBQRmF-w Julian Schnabel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9zTCUybXoE

Richard Rogers: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwABGZa3T5I 

Cindy Sherman 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED6QhmRchZI 

Isaac Julien: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcQxjc0mcK0:

Judy Chicago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlH85Kgdnq0

https://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Reden/2021/11/211118-Leo-Beack-Medaille-Englisch.pdf?__blob=publicationFile

[neonstatic]

14, 22, 26, 28!!! 🌸

14. what is your current desktop picture?

(pictured above… it’s a default pic i think? but wow it works w my blog theme huh!) 

22. do you have a secret talent? if yes, what is it?

god… no, i have nothing. i’m more of a “somehow good at a lot of things” kind of person but i do not have, like, my own thing. but um i guess one cool thing abt me is that i’m v good at remembering melodies and v sensitive to “wrong” pitches. back in the day when you couldn’t download a song on yt w/o it sounding slightly off it’d drive me mad! 

26. you just got a free plane ticket to anywhere in the world, but you have to leave immediately. where are you going to go?

why did i even rb this ask thing when i am this boring– assuming i can’t wait for anyone to accompany me i guess i would visit a good online friend of mine. ust so i can feel their presence face to face and give them a good hug.

28. you discover a beautiful island upon which you may build your own society. you make the rules. what is the first rule you put into place?

my first thought was “you may only address me as the following: king rulian (an hommage to my idol, king julian), your highness, your majesty, big daddy” so let’s go with that

[neptunecreek]

Podcast Episode: The Secret Court Approving Secret Surveillance

Episode 001 of EFF’s How to Fix the Internet

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

In this episode, you’ll learn about:

How the FISA Court impacts your digital privacy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resources

NSA & FBI

Stellar wind

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

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

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

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

Crossfire Hurricane

Crossfire Hurricane (Wikipedia)

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

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

Court Cases

Smith v Maryland (Wikipedia)

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

US v. Miller (Wikipedia) 

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

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

United States v. Maolin case page (EPIC)

Jewel v. NSA case page (EFF)

About Federal Judges - Article III Judges (US Courts) 

Section 215 & FISA

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

FISA Court Docket

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

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

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

Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) (Wikipedia)

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

Books

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace 2.0 by Lawrence Lessig

National Security Investigations and Prosecutions by Douglas Wilson and David Kris  

Transcript of Episode 001: The Secret Court Approving Secret Surveillance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julian Sanchez: Thanks for having me on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danny O'Brien: Judge Judy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cindy Cohn: Exactly.

Julian Sanchez: Exactly.

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

Julian Sanchez: I am always there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/3nn8UGL

[drjulianomidi]

A doctor is the most dedicated person, who saves the life of patients by their services. After the treatment of a patient, he or she relieves from the illness. Those people are suffering from the pain of humanity; they cure them of diseases and illness. The doctors have to make the happiest and healthier to the patient. For more Dr Julian omidi details visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBtaEBAtNds

[whatxdoxthexcardsxsay]

Main: The main verse follows the story of The Arcana, in which Iris is a magician’s apprentice in Vesuvia, telling forturnes and selling charms, before the widowed Countess Nadia hires her to find the late Count Lucio’s murderer before the start of the Masquerade.

This will be the default fantasy verse used, unless another is specifically chosen.

[Tags included- v: main; sometimes this will be untagged.]

Modern: This is the default, modern-world verse that will be used with most modern-day muses and will be one of two main stories. One, Iris is a budding magician, searching for a way to regain her lost memories and to find her ‘master’ Asra, who has gone off on an unknown journey and has been missing for two years. Two, Iris is a performing artist with Rennassiance Faires around the world, selling fortunes during the day and selling protection charms during the day, and solving mysteries with ghosts and spirits at night.

[Tags included- v: a modern magician in a modern world; v: traveling mage; v: scarborough faire.]

Marvel: Set for any Marvel universe (including MCU), to be use with any Marvel muse. Iris is a mutant with the ability to astral project and dream walk. Because of this, Iris is often able to tell a person’s hopes, dreams, fears by going into their psyche. Additionally, she can tell if a person is possessed, controlled, or cursed. She comes from a long line of mages, dating back centuries, but due to a recent accident that almost cost Iris her life, most of her knowledge and memories of magic has been lost, and thus, her magic is a big chaotic. Her kind heart sometimes leads her open to be maniuplated, which can result in her unintentionally working for the bad guy. Her code name is Arcana.

[Tags included- v: marvelous arcana; v: arcana UPRIGHT; v: arcana REVERSED.]

DC: With possible ties to Merlin in her bloodline, Iris honed her magicals talents and skills under Madame Xanadu (aka the Arthurian sorceress, Nimune). She communicates with the Major Arcana through a tarot deck that has been passed down for generations. (She is the reincarnation of Ganieda, Merlin’s sister, but possesses none of her past life’s memories) Iris channels her powers through the cards, can astral project, dream walk, and create illusions.

[Tags included- v: student of xanadu.]

Once Upon a Time: In the Enchanted Forest, Iris is an apprentice to a powerful magician named Asra. Her master was hired by a king to find out why his daughters went through so many dancing shoes even though there were no balls and they were always limping and in pain in the morning. However, thanks to a pompus knight making a deal with Rumple, Iris was separated from Asra when he was trapped in a magical realm. She spent years studying magic, trying to find a way to bring him back. She caught the ire of the Evil Queen when she helped Snow White to escape her grasp a few times. In the cursed Storybrooke, her name was now “Daisy”, and she worked as an art teacher at Henry’s school. Once the curse is broken and Iris regained her memories, she immediately started her search for Asra again, her skills now stronger and hopefully just enough to find her beloved master again.

[Tags included- v: 12 little princesses dancing in a row; v: a story book with no magic; v: now the story has magic.]

Charmed: Iris is a modern-day witch, with the specialized powers of astral projection and electricity manipulation. Asra is her Whitelighter, with whom she had a brief affair. She works in a mystery bookstore, owned by Nadia and Lucio Vesuvia. [NOTE: Mun has only watched the original Charmed series!]

[Tags included- v: a charmed life.]

Supernatural: Iris is a Witch (Natural), who only practices her magic in order to help spirits move on into the afterlife and to assist hunters with protective charms and sigils. She tries not to advertise the fact she is a Witch, but she won’t sit by and let innocents get hurt.

[Tags included- v: saving people magic things the family business.]

Star Wars: Ris Gale is a Force-using “witch” from the planet Dathomir. How she left the home planet will be decided by the players. Ris is a bit more reserved than the typical Dathomirian witch, but she is still quick, agile, and talented with the force, using songs referred to as “spells” to channel the Force. 

[Tags included- v: witches of dathomir.]

Harry Potter: Iris Galen is an Irish witch attending Hogwarts, sorted into Hufflepuff. Her favorite class is Divination, with her weakest one being Potions. She has dear friends in all four houses and is known by her peers for just geninuely being such a nice person, which has gotten her some negative attention by bullies, but she doesn’t let them dissuade her. She longs to open her own tea shop after graduating.

[Tags included- v: a huffle’s life for me.]

Tea Shop: Your basic barista AU. Iris works as a barista at a tea and book shop called The Mystical Arcana, owned by Asra Alnazar. Her usual customers include an E.R. doctor named Julian, a fashionista influencer named Nadia with her assistant Portia, Nadia’s ex-husband and mayor’s son Lucio, and veternary assistant Muriel.

[Tags included- v: a tall latte with a double shot of magic]

College: Typical college AU. Whether or not magic is a thing in this world shall be determined by myself and my partner. Either way, Iris is a college student, living on her own at the dorm building, working at the library coffee shop part-time for some spending money. She is initially studying for a business degree, at the insistent requests of her aunt, who wishes her to take over the family bookstore, but she’d rather be writing mystery stories.

[Tags included- v: a mage has got to study.]

...and more to be added!

[tfsroleplay]

"...Big Run happening. Salmonids angry, you stealing Golden Eggs. I will be there with family, just watching and... interfering if needed. Make sure no one gets left behind..."

[weekinethereum]

August 8, 2017

Ethereum News and Links

Protocol

Diving Into The Ethereum Virtual Machine

Bamboo 0.0.01 Tutorial. "Bamboo makes state transition explicit and avoids reentrance problems by default."

More Yoichi Hirai: What I think about what KEVM people think about EVM

Swarm's recent conference videos are online

Stuff for developers

ZeppelinOS technical details

Using Zeppelin contracts in Truffle

Insights from Ujo on building on Ethereum

Ethereum light client with React Native

web3js had a few releases this week

Matt Condon's Ethereum for Dev Beginners

Ecosystem

ETH Gas Station: it's time for wallets to lower their default gas price

EtherScamDB: MyEtherWallet's open-source database for Eth scams

Hudson Jameson: Why I Am Advising Status and SmartContract.com

Ujo: Distributing & Claiming the EGO Album Badge

UNICEF Ventures has an Ethereum multi-sig

r/ethereum passed 100,000 subscribers on August 7

How decentralized storage projects Storj, Swarm, Filecoin and Sia differ.  Also the Swarm v Filecoin view from LivePeer's Doug Petkanics

Project Announcements and white papers

Virtue Poker releases white paper draft

Legacy -- transfer memory and belongings when you die

Ethfinex -- Bitfinex's ERC20 dex. White paper

Docstamp:  timestamp your docs on Ethereum

Oracul: you can probably guess it's an oracle system. Prototype

Firefly -- $5 air gapped hardware wallet

Leeroy -- Twitter for Ethereum using MetaMask. Impressive!  See also Reddit thread.

FOAM -- Geospatial data protocol for Ethereum

Project Updates

KyberNetwork MVP release

PlutusDEX beta available to token sale buyers

Toshi - switch between test networks, iOS Chat improvements, main net release this year

FunFair releases baccarat and craps running on state channels, live on the testnet. Lots of interesting info from Jez San in the Reddit thread.

Mysterium Q&A update

Melonport July update

Iconomi July Update

Become one of the first DAA managers on Iconomi

Design for BAT Mercury

Jaak announces META token to incentivize sharing rights data

Jaak also has a trial project with Viacom UK

Interviews and Talks

Vitalik's Shenzhen talk and Q&A

Recent Vlad Zamfir talk

Bancor's Eyal Hertzog on Epicenter

Arthur Falls talks to MME, the Swiss lawyers who helped with the Ether sale

Swap Protocol on NeoCash Radio

Status Q&A series with Rocketpool

Andrew Keys on the Hidden Forces podcast

Brian Armstrong on the 20 minute VC

Token Sale Projects

0x token sale details -- must register first starting Aug 9

Announcing Airswap: implementation of Swap white paper

SlotNSlot's Android demo video

Token Sales

Ryan Zurrer: Keepers that maintain blockchain networks

ICOMonitor by Neufund -- transparency monitor for token sales

Matt Slater: The decentralized web is the birth of a new asset class

Julian Moncada: How VCs fit into a decentralized world

OmiseGo to airdrop their tokens for wide distribution

Concerning bit in this Nathaniel Popper NYT piece from a former SEC staffer who claims that if you buy a token because you think the price might appreciate, then it's a security.  That'd be an extraordinarily broad and novel interpretation of the Howey test, but certainly hints at the ambiguity of current SEC guidance that is hindering blockchain innovation in America.

General

Laura Shin on Shapeshift's Prism

Jay Rush with a meditation on the potential uses and misuses of this technology

Coinbase announces plan to support Bitcoin Cash - and maybe BCC trading - by the end of the year, similar to what they did for ETC

Brian Armstrong on how to hire executives

Sign of the NYTimes: Grandpa Had a Pension. This Generation Has Cryptocurrency.  

IPFS' Filecoin long anticipated sale is here. It has already and is going to raise a crazy amount. Stefano Bernardi didn't like what he found when he dug into Filecoin sale details

A week or so ago, they raised $52m from insiders at a big discount.  Not sure why this sale needs to be so rushed?

Preston Byrne: Thoughts on the Filecoin SAFT

Q&A (to come) with Juan Benet

"Fast" Fully Homomorphic Encryption c/c++ library

Dates of note

From Token Sale Calendar:

Upcoming token sale start dates:

August 9 – Lampix

August 14 – SmartRE

August 15 – Ox Protocol (mandatory registration Aug 9-12)

August 15 – BitDice

August 15 – Propy

August 15 – MyBit

August 15 – Latium

August 17 – Decentraland

August 20 – SlotnSlot

August 24 – REAL (Real Estate Asset Ledger)

August 25 – Avalon

August 28 – HelloGold

August 28 – ChronoLogic

August 30 – LookRev

August 31 - Monetha

September 5 – Viberate

September 12 – Evermarkets

September 13 – Unikoin

September 13 – Eventchain

September 18 – Winding Tree

October 1 – Hirematch

October 10 – Swap

Ongoing token sales:

Indorse

Fluence

Everex

Authoreon

Blocklancer

Agora

Macroverse

Blockpass

LastWill

NeverDie

Brickblock

Atlant

GroceryX

Agrello

TribeToken

RexMLS

Want to be included?  If you are building your project on Ethereum, email weekinethereum @ gmail [period] com with 1) your URL, 2) sale date and 3) a brief description of how you are using Ethereum.  Listings are free.  But please make sure to follow those instructions.  If you don’t follow the instructions, you likely won’t get a response.

WARNING: list may include scams.  Do your own research and due diligence before putting value at risk.

[I aim for a relatively comprehensive list of Ethereum sales, but make no warranty as to even whether they are legit; as such, I thus likewise warrant nothing about whether any will produce a satisfactory return. I have passed the CFA exams, but this is not investment advice. If you're interested in what I do, you can find my somewhat out-of-date investing thesis and token sale appreciation strategies in previous newsletters.]

New email

From now on, please use weekinethereum @ gmail [period] com for newsletter communications.

Some time in August, there will be an announcement that I've joined ConsenSys.  Here's a logo to draw your eye in case you were going to skip over this section:

I'm very excited about this move and will have significantly more to say in the future.  The newsletters should become more regular again! In the meantime, I wanted to make it clear so that you can judge whether I favor ConsenSys projects.

My charge from Joe Lubin is pretty similar to what Status has told me: keep telling the truth and covering the space objectively, even if the truth hurts.

Permalink

I measure the success of each issue by how much it gets upvoted and shared.  This is the link: http://www.weekinethereum.com/post/163960217423/august-8-2017 Follow me on Twitter? @evan_van_ness

This newsletter is supported by Status.im and ConsenSys (have you seen that we're hiring?).  But in case you still want to send Ether or tokens:  0x96d4F0E75ae86e4c46cD8e9D4AE2F2309bD6Ec45

Sign up to receive the weekly email.

[uni-tierra-califas]

UT Califas demo ateneo, 6-24-17, 2.00-5.00 p.m.

Comrades: 

We will convene the Democracy Ateneo this coming Saturday on June 24 in San Jose at Casa de Vicky (792 E. Julian St., San Jose) from 2.00-5.00 p.m. to resume our scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below and raised by the current conjuncture we find ourselves. 

Recent statements warn that Trump's presidency, or more accurately, his non-stop bluster and blunders, are likely to destabilize key regions of strategic interest to the U.S. There are two underlying assumptions in this notion that should give one pause. First, much of the U.S. mainstream media and political punditocracy privilege specific "theaters" of war such as the Middle East and Eastern Europe, marginalizing by default other regions, notably, Latin America and other spaces across the Global South. Second, and probably most importantly, the threat of war discourse tied to regions that hold strategic interest for the U.S. suggests that war is not or has not already been underway. Our attention is focused on what we are told are legitimate or necessary wars. In essence, there are recent or current wars in specific countries, Syria and Afghanistan for example, that are rendered highly visible but there is, as Bob Marley once sang, "war everywhere war." Military analysts identify at least two kinds of wars in the present. There are the more traditional wars we have grown accustomed to marked by bombing campaigns, highly visible military operations, the architecture of bases and convoys, and so on. And then there are the less traditional —wars that are other than war, what military elites name as "unconventional wars." This type of warfare is not necessarily new, but it has taken on an increasing importance during what Robert Kurz calls the U.S.'s "economic militarization." (see, R. Kurz, "World Power and World Money: The Economic Function of the U.S. Military Machine within Global Capitalism and the Background of the new Financial Crisis.") The unconventional wars are not focused on a specific battlefield or tied to particular region and, as a consequence, not completely about conquering territory. This is low intensity war and it is war other than war. It is a type of warfare less invested in pitched battles and more occupied with controlling whole populations, even groups that might be scattered across a region or concentrated in the margins, but fundamentally pose a threat precisely because they are not typical combatants. In fact, the U.S. military imagines one of its greatest threats to be those "zones of non-being." (see, R. Zibechi, "The Militarization of the World's Urban Peripheries") The production of refugees across the planet are emblematic of the confluence of these multiple wars. "War, rumors of war." For the U.S. military, the solution to the threats it believes are arrayed against it is full spectrum dominance across the globe. (see, Joint Vision 2020) Much can be said about how such an approach is in the service and at the same time one of the primary engines of this later stage of neoliberalism. Kurz's genealogy of the enduring position of the dollar as world currency through its "mutation from the arms dollar to the gold dollar" is worth quoting at length: "The United States’ astronomical debt arising from this process of economic militarization could already in the 1980s no longer be funded from its own savings. But the economic power of the military machine was also reflected in foreign affairs. It was the military power of the United States as world police that offered global financial markets a safe haven —or so it seemed. This impression was reinforced significantly by the perceived victory over the opposing Eastern (European) system. The dollar maintained its function as world currency through the mutation from the gold dollar to the arms dollar. And the strategic nature of global wars in the 1990s and turn of the century in the Middle East (in the Balkans and in Afghanistan) was directed at preserving the myth of the safe haven via the demonstration of the ability to intervene militarily on a global scale, thereby also securing the dollar as world currency. On this ultimately irrational basis, excess (that is, not profitable and investable) capital from the third industrial revolution from around the world flowed increasingly into the United States, thus indirectly financing the defense and military machine." (see, R. Kurz, "World Power and World Money," pp. 192-193.) In Kurz's analysis, the rise of the U.S. military machine and its global intervention from the 90s onward served to funnel excess capital back into its own maw. The particulars of the circuits could be traced following this analysis. A focus on the interlocking technologies of full spectrum dominance and the ambitions of U.S. military industrial complex minions make apparent what is often masked: the omnipresence of war. Here we do not just mean traditional or non-traditional war, but counterinsurgency that is ultimately "class" warfare. While this may no longer be the traditional antagonistic, agonistic classes, as Kurz, John Holloway, and others remind us, it is nonetheless still the kind of class warfare that Karl Marx invited us to analyze and to contest. Foucault may have said it best, "it is one of the essential traits of Western societies that the force relationships which for a long time had found expression in war, in every form of warfare, gradually became invested in the order of political power." (see, M. Foucault, History of Sexuality, v. 1, 1990) There really is no special category for war despite the efforts of military intellectuals and politicians to insist on a specific taxonomy of warfare cloaked in national interests. Thus, we forget that war is persistent, always with us as a fundamental element of the production of the class relation. (That its omnipresence is in some cases easily forgotten is no accident.) War does not appear as as an essential element in the production of this class relation for the simple reason that it has been, as Achille Mbembe informs us, domesticated (see, A. Mbembe, "Necropolitics"). War and warfare in the Western European imaginary has been forged into categories that exalt good wars as opposed to bad, or illegitimate wars versus legitimate ones. The result of this epistemological shift, according to Mbembe, is to construct an apparatus that masks the slavery and colonialism that propelled the West into global dominance and defines it to this day. The nation state and capitalism have been imbricated in geographies of racial violence and colonial dominance from the 16th century to the present. "Everywhere war." The U.S. continues as the principal benefactor of warfare. In fact, the U.S. unabashedly insists that it alone has inherited the mantle to designate what is legitimate and illegitimate in warfare. Such arrogance knows no limits. It reaches its most grotesque level when the U.S. blusters about being the ultimate, final human rights arbiter across the globe. But, at the end of the day the U.S. is committed to repression which, Kristian Williams reminds us, is part of "the normal operations of the liberal state." Counterinsurgency is, pace Williams, a new type of warfare and style of war designed to eliminate or contain any project that threatens the dominant system. (see, K. Williams, "The Other Side of the COIN: Counterinsurgency and Community Policing.") The cloak of domesticated warfare organized through national interests, of which the U.S. has through much of the 20c claimed to be at the center, manages class warfare at home and abroad. War in the national interest has been one of the key devices that W.E.B Du Bois warned has made it possible for the white working class to claim and exploit a shared class interest and racial privilege against enslaved Africans and despoiled Native Americans as well as others who have been victims of U.S. colonial expansion. This is democratic despotism, that is, the idea that American democracy has been organized through a series of "black codes" that criminalize marginal populations within and beyond the territory of the U.S. to justify their dispossession of them and their commons in order that they can be exploited while privileging the white working class. According to Du Bois, the maintenance of an herrenvolk democracy as a strategy of class warfare that only serves a few requires expansion, acquisition of ever more resources and wealth to maintain the elevated lifestyle of those select few designated to enjoy the fruits of racial capitalism. (see, W.E.B Du Bois, "African Roots of War") "Until the philosophy which holds one race /superior and another inferior /is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned /everywhere is war, me say war." The Fourth World War, the designation the Zapatistas use to explain the current state of an omnipresent, ubiquitous warfare that impacts everyone on an everyday basis, does not always have a visible enemy or select strategic targets to be overrun. It is a war that is organized in the interstices of abstraction and extraction. It is a war battled out daily in the formation of a social relation that at times does not appear so visible, or as an obvious site of violent conflict. But, it is everywhere around us. It is a war often carried out by either the military or the police or both. It surfaces when a black or brown body is so devalued that it is gunned down without pretext except for fear of the other or reckless disregard, the result of a system that allocates "premature death" for one group against another, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore laments. (see, R.W. Gilmore, "Race and Globalization.") Similarly, we often overlook the impact our lifestyle decisions have on other regions of the world, usually oblivious to the hidden costs for the maintenance of our pristine digitized urban landscapes. The decisions we make about our lifestyle for the most part can have devastating, life or death consequences. But, how to break a social relation and refuse to be complicit in a war that is not of our making? On May 28 the EZLN and National Indigenous Congress (CNI) convened the "Constitutive Assembly for the Indigenous Governing Council (CIG)" made up of some 1,482 participants representing over 52 peoples to officially select María de Jesús Patricio (also known affectionately as "Marichuy") as spokesperson who will "participate as an independent candidate to the presidency of the Republic in 2018." (see, M. Gómez "Indigenous Governing Council") The success of the CGI and its naming of Marichuy as CGI spokesperson and candidate is part of the CNI and the EZLN's ongoing effort to disrupt the Fourth World War. The CNI and the Zapatistas have conspired to organize from below and to the left putting forward an Indigenous woman "whose name we will seek to place on the electoral ballot for the Mexican presidency in 2018 and who will be the carrier of the word of the peoples who make up the CIG, which in turn is highly representative of the Indigenous geography of our country." (see, EZLN & CNI, "The Time Has Come") The Constitutive Assembly and the momentous selection of its spokesperson continues the CIG's fulfillment of the CNI-Zapatista intervention in the election spectacle and might be viewed as torreando with the dominant political system and mainstream media. Not torreando in a frivolous way, nor in a way to compete or to take over the system, but in a clever way intended to expose the limits of the spectacle including the system overall and the failure of key institutions. It is a maneuver "to crash the party of those above which is based on our death and make it our own, based on dignity, organization, and the construction of a new country and a new world." The CNI-Zapatista initiative gestures to a critical political innovation in the formation of the governing council and the permanent assembly across Mexico that sustains it, a critical success in organizing the majority of Mexico from below and to the left. More to the point, it makes more visible the struggle for an alternative to the corrupt political system and its maintenance of war, revealing the devastating impact the war has had on Mexico from below. "This is the destruction that we have not only denounced but confronted for the past 20 years and which in a large part of the country is evolving into open war carried out by criminal corporations which act in shameless complicity with all branches of the bad government and with all of the political parties and institutions. Together they constitute the power of above and provoke revulsion in millions of Mexicans in the countryside and the city." (see, EZLN & CNI, "The Time Has Come")

"Now is the time," as the Zapatistas have said on other critical occasions, "to sharpen hope." But, this new weapon, a weapon of hope forged through the shared efforts of the CNI and the Zapatistas is not a conventional arm. It is a convivial tool. It is a device co-generated in struggle by a community long victimized, and targeted, in the warfare of over five hundred years of slavery and colonialism, and most recently, neoliberalism. As a convivial tool it is forged horizontally with the equal participation of all that brings to bear the wisdom common to all convivial apparatuses —that the new tool celebrates all who helped forged it without in any way diminishing any one in its construction or application. "What we've seen on our limited and archaic horizon," explains SupGaleano, "is that the collective can bring to the forefront the best of each individuality." (see, SupGaleano, "Lessons on Geography and Globalized Calendars," April 2017) And, it is a tool, or weapon, that can be wielded by anyone and everyone because its only purpose is the regeneration of the community. It is worth quoting the CNI-EZLN statement from the CIG convening at length: "We reiterate that only through resistance and rebellion have we found possible paths by which we can continue to live and through which we find not only a way to survive the war of money against humanity and against our Mother Earth, but also the path to our rebirth along with that of every seed we sow and every dream and every hope that now materializes across large regions in autonomous forms of security, communication, and self-government for the protection and defense of our territories. In this regard there is no other path than the one walked below. Above we have no path; that path is theirs and we are mere obstacles." (see, EZLN & CNI, "The Time Has Come") The CIG's purpose and their selection of Marichuy is the articulation of a powerful tool forged through centuries of struggle but most recently, at least since 1994, decades of convivial research and insurgent learning. In the closing of the Zapatista hosted seminar, "The Walls of Capital, The Cracks of the Left," Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés states it plainly: "that’s what the National Indigenous Congress’s effort is about, and that is why the candidate and the Indigenous Governing Council will make a tour. It’s not to win votes; we already know that there will be few votes and that they’ll still defraud us out of those few votes, and that the bad system will revive the dead to vote in its favor. Enough of that already!" (see, Closing Words of the Seminar “The Walls of Capital, The Cracks of the Left,” April 2017) South Bay Bay Crew NB: If you are not already signed-up and would like to stay connected with the emerging Universidad de la Tierra Califas community please feel free to subscribe to the Universidad de la Tierra Califas listserve at the following url <https://lists.resist.ca/cgibn /mailman/listinfo/unitierracal ifas>. Also, if you would like to review previous ateneo announcements and summaries please check out UT Califas web page. Additional information on the ateneo in general can be found at <http://ccra.mitotedigital.org /ateneo>. Find us on tumblr at <http://uni-tierra-califas.tum blr.com> and twitter @UTCalifas. Please note we have altered the schedule of the Democracy Ateneo so that it falls on the fourth Saturday of every even month from 2.00 to 5.00 p.m.