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shirlleycoyle · 4 years

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How to Escape the Confines of Time and Space According to the CIA

She turned to me the other morning and said, “You heard of The Gateway?” It didn’t register in the moment. She continued, “It’s blowing up on TikTok.” Later on, she elaborated: it was not in fact the ill-fated 90s computer hardware company folks were freaking out about. No, they’ve gone further back in time, to find a true treasure of functional media.

The intrigue revolves around a classified 1983 CIA report on a technique called the Gateway Experience, which is a training system designed to focus brainwave output to alter consciousness and ultimately escape the restrictions of time and space. The CIA was interested in all sorts of psychic research at the time, including the theory and applications of remote viewing, which is when someone views real events with only the power of their mind. The documents have since been declassified and are available to view.

This is a comprehensive excavation of The Gateway Process report. The first section provides a timeline of the key historical developments that led to the CIA’s investigation and subsequent experimentations. The second section is a review of The Gateway Process report. It opens with a wall of theoretical context, on the other side of which lies enough understanding to begin to grasp the principles underlying the Gateway Experience training. The last section outlines the Gateway technique itself and the steps that go into achieving spacetime transcendence.

Let’s go.

Screengrab: CIA

THE TIMELINE

• 1950s – Robert Monroe, a radio broadcasting executive, begins producing evidence that specific sound patterns have identifiable effects on human capabilities. These include alertness, sleepiness, and expanded states of consciousness.

• 1956 – Monroe forms an R&D division inside his radio program production corporation RAM Enterprises. The goal is to study sound’s effect on human consciousness. He was obsessed with “Sleep-Learning," or hypnopedia, which exposes sleepers to sound recordings to boost memory of previously learned information.

• 1958 – While experimenting with Sleep-Learning, Monroe discovers an unusual phenomenon. He describes it as sensations of paralysis and vibration accompanied by bright light. It allegedly happens nine times over the proceeding six weeks, and culminates in an out-of-body experience (OBE).

• 1962 – RAM Enterprises moves to Virginia, and renames itself Monroe Industries. It becomes active in radio station ownership, cable television, and later in the production and sale of audio cassettes. These cassettes contain applied learnings from the corporate research program, which is renamed The Monroe Institute.

• 1971 – Monroe publishes Journeys Out of the Body, a book that is credited with popularizing the term “out-of-body experience.”

Books by Robert Monroe.

• 1972 – A classified report circulates in the U.S. military and intelligence communities. It claims that the Soviet Union is pouring money into research involving ESP and psychokinesis for espionage purposes.

• 1975 – Monroe registers the first of several patents concerning audio techniques designed to stimulate brain functions until the left and right hemispheres become synchronized. Monroe dubs the state "Hemi-Sync" (hemispheric synchronization), and claims it could be used to promote mental well-being or to trigger an altered state of consciousness.

• 1978 to 1984 – Army veteran Joseph McMoneagle contributes to 450 remote viewing missions under Project Stargate. He is known as “Remote View No. 1”. This is kind of a whole other story.

• June 9th, 1983 – The CIA report "Analysis and Assessment of The Gateway Process" is produced. It provides a scientific framework for understanding and expanding human consciousness, out-of-body experiments, and other altered states of mind.

• 1989 – Remote viewer Angela Dellafiora Ford helps track down a former customs agent who has gone on the run. She pinpoints his location as “Lowell, Wyoming”. U.S. Customs apprehend him 100 miles west of a Wyoming town called Lovell.

• 2003 – The CIA approves declassification of the Gateway Process report.

• 2017 – The CIA declassifies 12 million pages of records revealing previously unknown details about the program, which would eventually become known as Project Stargate.

THE REPORT

Screengrab: CIA

Personnel

The author of The Gateway Process report is Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnell, hereon referred to simply as Wayne. There isn’t a tremendous amount of information available on the man, nor any photographs. In 1983, Wayne was tasked by the Commander of the U.S. Army Operational Group with figuring out how The Gateway Experience, astral projection and out-of-body experiences work. Wayne partnered with a bunch of different folks to produce the report, most notably Itzhak Bentov, a very Googleable American-Israeli scientist who helped pioneer the biomedical engineering industry.

A scientific approach

From the outset of the report, Wayne states his intent to employ an objective scientific method in order to understand the Gateway process. The various scientific avenues he takes include:

• A biomedical inquiry to understand the physical aspects of the process.

• Information on quantum mechanics to describe the nature and functioning of human consciousness.

• Theoretical physics to explain the time-space dimension and means by which expanded human consciousness transcends it.

• Classical physics to bring the whole phenomenon of out-of-body states into the language of physical science (and remove the stigma of an occult connotation).

Methodological frames of reference

Before diving into the Gateway Experience, Wayne develops a frame of reference by dissecting three discrete consciousness-altering methodologies. He’s basically saying, there’s no way you’re going to get through The Gateway without a solid grounding in the brain-altering techniques that came before it.

1) He begins with hypnosis. The language is extremely dense, but the basic gist is as follows: the left side of the brain screens incoming stimuli, categorizing, assessing and assigning meaning to everything through self-cognitive, verbal, and linear reasoning. The left hemisphere then dishes the carefully prepared data to the non-critical, holistic, pattern-oriented right hemisphere, which accepts everything without question. Hypnosis works by putting the left side to sleep, or at least distracting it long enough to allow incoming data direct, unchallenged entry to the right hemisphere. There, stimuli can reach the sensor and motor cortices of the right brain, which corresponds to points in the body. Suggestions then can send electrical signals from the brain to certain parts of the body. Directing these signals appropriately, according to the report, can elicit reactions ranging from left leg numbness to feelings of happiness. Same goes for increased powers of concentration.

2) Wayne continues with a snapshot of transcendental meditation. He distinguishes it from hypnotism. Through concentration the subject draws energy up the spinal cord, resulting in acoustical waves that run through the cerebral ventricles, to the right hemisphere, where they stimulate the cerebral cortex, run along the homunculus and then to the body. The waves are the altered rhythm of heart sounds, which create sympathetic vibrations in the walls of the fluid-filled cavities of the brain’s ventricles. He observed that the symptoms begin in the left side of the body, confirming the right brain’s complicity. Bentov also states that the same effect might be achieved by prolonged exposure to 4 – 7 Hertz/second acoustical vibrations. He suggests standing by an air conditioning duct might also do the trick. (David Lynch and other celebrities are committed adherents to transcendental meditation today.)

3) Biofeedback, on the other hand, uses the left hemisphere to gain access to the right brain’s lower cerebral, motor, and sensory cortices. Whereas hypnosis suppresses one side of the brain, and TM bypasses that side altogether, biofeedback teaches the left hemisphere to visualize the desired result, recognize the feelings associated with right hemisphere access, and ultimately achieve the result again. With repetition, the left brain can reliably key into the right brain, and strengthen the pathways so that it can be accessed during a conscious demand mode. A digital thermometer is subsequently placed on a target part of the body. When its temperature increases, objective affirmation is recognized and the state is reinforced. Achieving biofeedback can block pain, enhance feeling, and even suppress tumors, according to the report.

Image: e2-e4 Records.

The Gateway mechanics

With that, Wayne takes a first stab at the Gateway process. He classifies it as a “training system designed to bring enhanced strength, focus and coherence to the amplitude and frequency of brainwave output between the left and right hemispheres so as to alter consciousness.”

What distinguishes the Gateway process r from hypnosis, TM, and biofeedback, is that it requires achieving a state of consciousness in which the electrical brain patterns of both hemispheres are equal in amplitude and frequency. This is called Hemi-Sync. Lamentably, and perhaps conveniently, we cannot as humans achieve this state on our own. The audio techniques developed by Bob Monroe and his Institute (which comprise a series of tapes), claim to induce and sustain Hemi-Sync.

Here, the document shifts to the usage of quotes and other reports to describe the powers of Hemi-Sync. Wayne employs the analogy of a lamp versus a laser. Left to its own devices the human mind expends energy like a lamp, in a chaotic and incoherent way, achieving lots of diffusion but relatively little depth. Under Hemi-Sync though, the mind produces a “disciplined stream of light.” So, once the frequency and amplitude of the brain are rendered coherent it can then synchronize with the rarified energy levels of the universe. With this connection intact, the brain begins to receive symbols and display astonishing flashes of holistic intuition.

The Hemi-Sync technique takes advantage of a Frequency Following Response (FFR). It works like this: an external frequency emulating a recognized one will cause the brain to mimic it. So if a subject hears a frequency at the Theta level, it will shift from its resting Beta level. To achieve these unnatural levels, Hemi-Sync puts a single frequency in the left ear and a contrasting frequency in the right. The brain then experiences the Delta frequency, also known as the beat frequency. It’s more familiarly referred to these days as binaural music. With the FFR and beat frequency phenomena firmly in place, The Gateway Process introduces a series of frequencies at marginally audible, subliminal levels. With the left brain relaxed and the body in a virtual sleep state, the conditions are ideal to promote brainwave outputs of higher and higher amplitude and frequency. Alongside subliminal suggestions from Bob Monroe (naturally), the subject can then alter their consciousness.

Image: Thobey Campion

The Gateway system only works when the audio, which is introduced through headphones, is accompanied by a physical quietude comparable to other forms of meditation. This increases the subject’s internal resonance to the body’s sound frequencies, for example the heart. This eliminates the “bifurcation echo”, in which the heartbeat moves up and down the body seven times a second. By placing the body in a sleep-like state, The Gateway Tapes, like meditation, lessen the force and frequency of the heartbeat pushing blood into the aorta. The result is a rhythmic sine wave that in turn amplifies the sound volume of the heart three times. This then amplifies the frequency of brainwave output. The film surrounding the brain—the dura—and fluid between that film and the skull, eventually begin to move up and down, by .0005 and .010 millimeters.

The body, based on its own micro-motions, then functions as a tuned vibrational system. The report claims that the entire body eventually transfers energy at between 6.8 and 7.5 Hertz, which matches Earth’s own energy (7 – 7.5 Hertz). The resulting wavelengths are long, about 40,000 kilometers, which also happens to be the perimeter of the planet. According to Bentov, the signal can move around the world’s electrostatic field in 1/7th of a second.

To recap, the Gateway Process goes like this:

• Induced state of calm

• Blood pressure lowers

• Circulatory system, skeleton and other organ systems begin to vibrate at 7 – 7.5 cycles per second

• Increased resonance is achieved

• The resulting sound waves matches the electrostatic field of the earth

• The body and earth and other similarly tuned minds become a single energy continuum.

We’ve gotten slightly ahead of ourselves here though. Back to the drawing board.

Image: kovacevicmiro via Getty Images

A psycho-quantum level deeper

Wayne then turns to the very nature of matter and energy. More materially (or less if you will), solid matter in the strict construction of the term, he explains, doesn’t exist. The atomic structure is composed of oscillating energy grids surrounded by other oscillating energy grids at tremendous speeds. These oscillation rates vary—the nucleus of an atom vibrates at 10 to the power of 22, a molecule vibrates at 10 to the power of 9, a human cell vibrates at 10 to the power of 3. The point is that the entire universe is one complex system of energy fields. States of matter in this conception then are merely variations in the state of energy.

The result of all these moving energies, bouncing off of energy at rest, projects a 3D mode, a pattern, called a hologram, A.K.A our reality as we experience it. It's best to think of it as a 3D photograph. There's a whole rabbit hole to go down here. Suffice it to say, the hologram that is our experience is incredibly good at depicting and recording all the various energies bouncing around creating matter. So good, in fact, that we buy into it hook, line, and sinker, going so far as to call it our "life."

Consciousness then can be envisaged as a 3D grid system superimposed over all energy patterns, Wayne writes. Using mathematics, each plane of the grid system can then reduce the data to a 2D form. Our binary (go/no go) minds can then process the data and compare it to other historical data saved in our memory. Our reality is then formed by comparisons. The right hemisphere of the brain acts as the primary matrix or receptor for this holographic input. The left hemisphere then compares it to other data, reducing it to its 2D form.

In keeping with our species' commitment to exceptionalism, as far as we know humans are uniquely capable of achieving this level of consciousness. Simply, humans not only know, but we know that we know. This bestows upon us the ability to duplicate aspects of our own hologram, project them out, perceive that projection, run it through a comparison with our own memory of the hologram, measure the differences using 3D geometry, then run it through our binary system to yield verbal cognition of the self.

Screengrab: CIA

The click-out phase

Wayne then shows his cards as a true punisher, issuing, "Up to this point our discussion of the Gateway process has been relatively simple and easy to follow. Now the fun begins." Shots fired, Wayne. What he's preparing the commander reading this heady report for is the reveal—how we can use the Gateway to transcend the dimension of spacetime.

Time is a measurement of energy or force in motion; it is a measurement of change. This is really important. For energy to be classified as in motion, it must be confined within a vibratory pattern that can contain its motion, keeping it still. Energy not contained like this is boundary-less, and moves without limit or dimension, to infinity. This disqualifies boundary-less energy from the dimension of time because it has no rate of change. Energy in infinity, also called "the absolute state," is completely at rest because nothing is accelerating or decelerating it—again, no change. It therefore does not contribute to our hologram, our physical experience. We cannot perceive it.

Now back to frequencies. Wave oscillation occurs because a wave is bouncing between two rigid points of rest. It's like a game of electromagnetic hot potato (the potato being the wave and the participants' hands being the boundaries of the wave). Without these limits, there would be no oscillation. When a wave hits one of those points of rest, just for a very brief instant, it "clicks out" of spacetime and joins infinity. For this to occur, the speed of the oscillation has to drop below 10 the power of -33 centimeters per second. For a moment, the wave enters into a new world. The potato simply disappears into a dimension we cannot perceive.

Theoretically speaking, if the human consciousness wave pattern reaches a high enough frequency, the “click-outs” can reach continuity. Put another way, if the frequency of human consciousness can dip below 10 to the power of 33 centimeters per second but above a state of total rest, it can transcend spacetime. The Gateway experience and associated Hemi-Sync technique is designed for humans to achieve this state and establish a coherent pattern of perception in the newly realized dimensions.

Image: Spectral-Design via Getty Images

Passport to the hologram

In theory, we can achieve the above at any time. The entire process though is helped along if we can separate the consciousness from our body. It’s like an existential running head start where the click-out of a consciousness already separated from its body starts much closer to, and has more time to dialogue with, other dimensions.

This is where things get a little slippery; hold on as best you can. The universe is in on the whole hologram thing, too, Wayne writes. This super hologram is called a "torus" because it takes the shape of a fuck-off massive self-contained spiral. Like this:

Give yourself a moment to let the above motion sink in…

This pattern of the universe conspicuously mirrors the patterns of electrons around the nucleus of an atom. Galaxies north of our own are moving away from us faster than the galaxies to the south; galaxies to the east and west of us are more distant. The energy that produced the matter that makes up the universe we presently enjoy, will turn back in on itself eventually. Its trajectory is ovoid, also known as the cosmic egg. As it curls back on itself it enters a black hole, goes through a densely packed energy nucleus then gets spat out the other side of a white hole and begins the process again. Springtime in the cosmos, baby!

Screengrab: CIA

The entire universe hologram—the torus—represents all the phases of time: the past, present, and future. The takeaway is that human consciousness brought to a sufficiently altered (focused) state could obtain information about the past, present, and future, since they all live in the universal hologram simultaneously. Wayne reasons that our all-reaching consciousness eventually participates in an all-knowing infinite continuum. Long after we depart the space-time dimension and the hologram each one of us perceives is snuffed out, our consciousness continues. Reassuring in a way.

And that is the context in which the Gateway Experience sits.

[Deep breaths.]

THE TECHNIQUE

The following is an outline of the key steps to reach focus levels necessary to defy the spacetime dimension. This is an involved and lengthy process best attempted in controlled settings. If you’re in a rush, you can apparently listen to enough Monroe Institute Gateway Tapes in 7 days to get there.

The Energy Conversion Box: The Gateway Process begins by teaching the subject to isolate any extraneous concerns using a visualization process called “the energy conversion box.”

Resonant Humming: The individual is introduced to resonant humming. Through the utterance of a protracted single tone, alongside a chorus on the tapes, the mind and body achieve a state of resonance.

The Gateway Affirmation: The participant is exposed to something close to a mantra called The Gateway Affirmation . They must repeat to themselves variations of, “I am merely a physical body and deeply desire to expand my consciousness.”

Hemi-Sync: The individual is finally exposed to the Hemi-Sync sound frequencies, and encouraged to develop a relationship with the feelings that emerge.

Additional Noise: Physical relaxation techniques are practiced while the Hemi-Sync frequencies are expanded to include “pink and white” noise. This puts the body in a state of virtual sleep, while calming the left hemisphere and raising the attentiveness of the right hemisphere.

The Energy Balloon: The individual is then encouraged to visualize the creation of an “energy balloon” beginning at the top of the head, extending down in all directions to the feet then back up again. There are a few reasons for this, the main one being that this balloon will provide protection against conscious entities possessing lower energy levels that he or she may encounter when in the out-of-body state.

Focus 12: The practitioner can consistently achieve sufficient expanded awareness to begin interacting with dimensions beyond their physical reality. To achieve this state requires conscious efforts and more “pink and white noise” from the sound stream.

Tools: Once Focus 12 is achieved, the subject can then employ a series of tools to obtain feedback from alternative dimensions.

Problem Solving: The individual identifies fundamental problems, fills their expanded awareness with them, and then projects them out into the universe. These can include personal difficulties, as well as technical or practical problems.

Patterning: Consciousness is used to achieve desired objectives in the physical, emotional, or intellectual sphere.

Color Breathing: A healing technique that revitalizes the body’s energy flows by imagining colors in a particularly vivid manner.

Energy Bar Tool: This technique involves imagining a small intensely pulsating dot of light that the participant charges up. He or she then uses the sparkling, vibrating cylinder of energy (formerly known as the dot) to channel forces from the universe to heal and revitalize the body.

Remote Viewing: A follow-on technique of the Energy Bar Tool where the dot is turned into a whirling vortex through which the individual sends their imagination in search of illuminating insights.

Living Body Map: A more organized use of the energy bar in which streams of different colors flow from the dot on to correspondingly-colored bodily systems.

Seven days of training have now occurred. Approximately 5 percent of participants get to this next level, according to the report.

Focus 15 – Travel Into the Past: Additional sound on the Hemi-Sync tapes includes more of the same, plus some subliminal suggestions to further expand the consciousness. The instructions are highly symbolic: time is a huge wheel, in which different spokes give access to the participant’s past.

Focus 21 – The Future: This is the last and most advanced state. Like Focus 15, this is a movement out of spacetime into the future.

Out-of-Body Movement: Only one tape of the many is devoted to out-of-body movement. This tape is devoted to facilitating out-of-body state when the participant’s brain wave patterns and energy levels reach harmony with the surrounding electromagnetic environment. According to Bob Monroe, the participant has to be exposed to Beta signals of around 2877.3 cycles per second.

CONCLUSIONS

Wayne expresses concern about the fidelity of information brought back from out-of-body states using the Gateway technique. Practical applications are of particular concern because of the potential for “information distortion.”

The Monroe Institute also ran into a bunch of issues in which they had individuals travel from the West to the East Coast of the U.S. to read a series of numbers off of a computer screen. They never got them exactly right. Wayne chalks this up to the trouble of differentiating between physical entities and extra-time-space dimensions when in the out-of-body state.

Wayne swings back to support mode though, lending credence to the physics foundation of the report. He cites multiple belief systems that have established identical findings. These include the Tibetan Shoug, the Hindu heaven of Indra, the Hebrew mystical philosophy, and the Christian concept of the Trinity. Here he seems more interested in hammering home the theoretical underpinnings that make The Gateway Experience possible, rather than the practical possibilities promised by The Gateway Tapes.

Possibly with his CIA top brass audience in mind, Wayne then gives an A-type nod to The Gateway Experience for providing a faster, more efficient, less subservient, energy-saving route to expanded consciousness. This finishes with a series of recommendations to the CIA for how to exploit Gateway’s potential for national defense purposes.

Screengrab: CIA

The missing page

One curious feature of The Gateway Report is that it seems to be missing page 25. It’s a real cliffhanger too. The bottom of page 24 reads “And, the eternal thought or concept of self which results from this self-consciousness serves the,” The report picks back up on page 26 and 3 sections later as if Wayne hadn’t just revealed the very secret of existence.

The gap has not gone unnoticed. There's a Change.org petition requesting its release. Multiple Freedom of Information Act requests have demanded the same. In all cases, the CIA has said they never had the page to begin with. Here’s a 2019 response from Mark Lilly, the CIA’s Information and Privacy Coordinator, to one Bailey Stoner regarding these records:

Screengrab: CIA via Muckrock

One theory goes that that rascal Wayne M.-fricking-McDonnell left the page out on purpose. The theory contends that it was a litmus test—if anyone truly defies time-space dimensions, they’ll certainly be able to locate page 25.

[Cosmic shrug.]

Thobey Campion is the former Publisher of Motherboard. You can subscribe to his Substack here.

How to Escape the Confines of Time and Space According to the CIA syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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96thdayofrage · 3 years

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“Special thanks to BitDefender for helping fix our issues,” DarkSide said. “This will make us even better.”

DarkSide soon proved it wasn’t bluffing, unleashing a string of attacks. This month, it paralyzed the Colonial Pipeline Co., prompting a shutdown of the 5,500 mile pipeline that carries 45% of the fuel used on the East Coast, quickly followed by a rise in gasoline prices, panic buying of gas across the Southeast and closures of thousands of gas stations. Absent Bitdefender’s announcement, it’s possible that the crisis might have been contained, and that Colonial might have quietly restored its system with Wosar and Gillespie’s decryption tool.

Instead, Colonial paid DarkSide $4.4 million in Bitcoin for a key to unlock its files. “I will admit that I wasn’t comfortable seeing money go out the door to people like this,” CEO Joseph Blount told The Wall Street Journal.

The missed opportunity was part of a broader pattern of botched or half-hearted responses to the growing menace of ransomware, which during the pandemic has disabled businesses, schools, hospitals and government agencies across the country. The incident also shows how antivirus companies eager to make a name for themselves sometimes violate one of the cardinal rules of the cat-and-mouse game of cyber-warfare: Don’t let your opponents know what you’ve figured out. During World War II, when the British secret service learned from decrypted communications that the Gestapo was planning to abduct and murder a valuable double agent, Johnny Jebsen, his handler wasn’t allowed to warn him for fear of cluing in the enemy that its cipher had been cracked. Today, ransomware hunters like Wosar and Gillespie try to prolong the attackers’ ignorance, even at the cost of contacting fewer victims. Sooner or later, as payments drop off, the cybercriminals realize that something has gone wrong.

Whether to tout a decryption tool is a “calculated decision,” said Rob McLeod, senior director of the threat response unit for cybersecurity firm eSentire. From the marketing perspective, “You are singing that song from the rooftops about how you have come up with a security solution that will decrypt a victim’s data. And then the security researcher angle says, ‘Don’t disclose any information here. Keep the ransomware bugs that we’ve found that allow us to decode the data secret, so as not to notify the threat actors.’”

In a post on the dark web, DarkSide thanked Bitdefender for identifying a flaw in the gang’s ransomware. (Highlight added by ProPublica.)

Wosar said that publicly releasing tools, as Bitdefender did, has become riskier as ransoms have soared and the gangs have grown wealthier and more technically adept. In the early days of ransomware, when hackers froze home computers for a few hundred dollars, they often couldn’t determine how their code was broken unless the flaw was specifically pointed out to them.

Today, the creators of ransomware “have access to reverse engineers and penetration testers who are very very capable,” he said. “That’s how they gain entrance to these oftentimes highly secured networks in the first place. They download the decryptor, they disassemble it, they reverse engineer it and they figure out exactly why we were able to decrypt their files. And 24 hours later, the whole thing is fixed. Bitdefender should have known better.”

It wasn’t the first time that Bitdefender trumpeted a solution that Wosar or Gillespie had beaten it to. Gillespie had broken the code of a ransomware strain called GoGoogle and was helping victims without any fanfare, when Bitdefender released a decryption tool in May 2020. Other companies have also announced breakthroughs publicly, Wosar and Gillespie said.

“People are desperate for a news mention, and big security companies don’t care about victims,” Wosar said.

Bogdan Botezatu, director of threat research at Bucharest, Romania-based Bitdefender, said the company wasn’t aware of the earlier success in unlocking files infected by DarkSide. Regardless, he said, Bitdefender decided to publish its tool “because most victims who fall for ransomware do not have the right connection with ransomware support groups and won’t know where to ask for help unless they can learn about the existence of tools from media reports or with a simple search.”

Bitdefender has provided free technical support to more than a dozen DarkSide victims, and “we believe many others have successfully used the tool without our intervention,” Botezatu said. Over the years, Bitdefender has helped individuals and businesses avoid paying more than $100 million in ransom, he said.

Bitdefender recognized that DarkSide might correct the flaw, Botezatu said. “We are well aware that attackers are agile and adapt to our decryptors.” But DarkSide might have “spotted the issue” anyway. “We don’t believe in ransomware decryptors made silently available. Attackers will learn about their existence by impersonating home users or companies in need, while the vast majority of victims will have no idea that they can get their data back for free.”

The attack on Colonial Pipeline, and the ensuing chaos at the gas pumps throughout the Southeast, appears to have spurred the federal government to be more vigilant. President Joe Biden issued an executive order to improve cybersecurity and create a blueprint for a federal response to cyberattacks. DarkSide said it was shutting down under U.S. pressure, although ransomware crews have often disbanded to avoid scrutiny and then re-formed under new names, or their members have launched or joined other groups.

“As sophisticated as they are, these guys will pop up again, and they’ll be that much smarter,” said Aaron Tantleff, a Chicago cybersecurity attorney who has consulted with 10 companies attacked by DarkSide. “They’ll come back with a vengeance.”

At least until now, private researchers and companies have often been more effective than the government in fighting ransomware. Last October, Microsoft disrupted the infrastructure of Trickbot, a network of more than 1 million infected computers that disseminated the notorious Ryuk strain of ransomware, by disabling its servers and communications. That month, ProtonMail, the Swiss-based email service, shut down 20,000 Ryuk-related accounts.

Wosar and Gillespie, who belong to a worldwide volunteer group called the Ransomware Hunting Team, have cracked more than 300 major ransomware strains and variants, saving an estimated 4 million victims from paying billions of dollars.

By contrast, the FBI rarely decrypts ransomware or arrests the attackers, who are typically based in countries like Russia or Iran that lack extradition agreements with the U.S. DarkSide, for instance, is believed to operate out of Russia. Far more victims seek help from the Hunting Team, through websites maintained by its members, than from the FBI.

The U.S. Secret Service also investigates ransomware, which falls under its purview of combating financial crimes. But, especially in election years, it sometimes rotates agents off cyber assignments to carry out its better-known mission of protecting presidents, vice presidents, major party candidates and their families. European law enforcement, especially the Dutch National Police, has been more successful than the U.S. in arresting attackers and seizing servers.

Similarly, the U.S. government has made only modest headway in pushing private industry, including pipeline companies, to strengthen cybersecurity defenses. Cybersecurity oversight is divided among an alphabet soup of agencies, hampering coordination. The Department of Homeland Security conducts “vulnerability assessments” for critical infrastructure, which includes pipelines.

It reviewed Colonial Pipeline in around 2013 as part of a study of places where a cyberattack might cause a catastrophe. The pipeline was deemed resilient, meaning that it could recover quickly, according to a former DHS official. The department did not respond to questions about any subsequent reviews.

Five years later, DHS created a pipeline cybersecurity initiative to identify weaknesses in pipeline computer systems and recommend strategies to address them. Participation is voluntary, and a person familiar with the initiative said that it is more useful for smaller companies with limited in-house IT expertise than for big ones like Colonial. The National Risk Management Center, which oversees the initiative, also grapples with other thorny issues such as election security.

Ransomware has skyrocketed since 2012, when the advent of Bitcoin made it hard to track or block payments. The criminals’ tactics have evolved from indiscriminate “spray and pray” campaigns seeking a few hundred dollars apiece to targeting specific businesses, government agencies and nonprofit groups with multimillion-dollar demands.

Attacks on energy businesses in particular have increased during the pandemic — not just in the U.S. but in Canada, Latin America and Europe. As the companies allowed employees to work from home, they relaxed some security controls, McLeod said.

Since 2019, numerous gangs have ratcheted up pressure with a technique known as “double extortion.” Upon entering a system, they steal sensitive data before launching ransomware that encodes the files and makes it impossible for hospitals, universities and cities to do their daily work. If the loss of computer access is not sufficiently intimidating, they threaten to reveal confidential information, often posting samples as leverage. For instance, when the Washington, D.C., police department didn’t pay the $4 million ransom demanded by a gang called Babuk last month, Babuk published intelligence briefings, names of criminal suspects and witnesses, and personnel files, from medical information to polygraph test results, of officers and job candidates.

DarkSide, which emerged last August, epitomized this new breed. It chose targets based on a careful financial analysis or information gleaned from corporate emails. For instance, it attacked one of Tantleff’s clients during a week when the hackers knew the company would be vulnerable because it was transitioning its files to the cloud and didn’t have clean backups.

To infiltrate target networks, the gang used advanced methods such as “zero-day exploits” that immediately take advantage of software vulnerabilities before they can be patched. Once inside, it moved swiftly, looking not only for sensitive data but also for the victim’s cyber insurance policy, so it could peg its demands to the amount of coverage. After two to three days of poking around, DarkSide encrypted the files.

“They have a faster attack window,” said Christopher Ballod, associate managing director for cyber risk at Kroll, the business investigations firm, who has advised half a dozen DarkSide victims. “The longer you dwell in the system, the more likely you are to be caught.”

Typically, DarkSide’s demands were “on the high end of the scale,” $5 million and up, Ballod said. One scary tactic: If publicly traded companies didn’t pay the ransom, DarkSide threatened to share information stolen from them with short-sellers who would profit if the share price dropped upon publication.

DarkSide’s site on the dark web identified dozens of victims and described the confidential data it claimed to have filched from them. One was New Orleans law firm Stone Pigman Walther Wittmann. “A big annoyance is what it was,” attorney Phil Wittmann said, referring to the DarkSide attack in February. “We paid them nothing,” said Michael Walshe Jr., chair of the firm’s management committee, declining to comment further.

Last November, DarkSide adopted what is known as a “ransomware-as-a-service” model. Under this model, it partnered with affiliates who launched the attacks. The affiliates received 75% to 90% of the ransom, with DarkSide keeping the remainder. As this partnership suggests, the ransomware ecosystem is a distorted mirror of corporate culture, with everything from job interviews to procedures for handling disputes. After DarkSide shut down, several people who identified themselves as its affiliates complained on a dispute resolution forum that it had stiffed them. “The target paid, but I did not receive my share,” one wrote.

Together, DarkSide and its affiliates reportedly grossed at least $90 million. Seven of Tantleff’s clients, including two companies in the energy industry, paid ransoms ranging from $1.25 million to $6 million, reflecting negotiated discounts from initial demands of $7.5 million to $30 million. His other three clients hit by DarkSide did not pay. In one of those cases, the hackers demanded $50 million. Negotiations grew acrimonious, and the two sides couldn’t agree on a price.

DarkSide’s representatives were shrewd bargainers, Tantleff said. If a victim said it couldn’t afford the ransom because of the pandemic, DarkSide was ready with data showing that the company’s revenue was up, or that COVID-19’s impact was factored into the price.

DarkSide’s grasp of geopolitics was less advanced than its approach to ransomware. Around the same time that it adopted the affiliate model, it posted that it was planning to safeguard information stolen from victims by storing it in servers in Iran. DarkSide apparently didn’t realize that an Iranian connection would complicate its collection of ransoms from victims in the U.S., which has economic sanctions restricting financial transactions with Iran. Although DarkSide later walked back this statement, saying that it had only considered Iran as a possible location, numerous cyber insurers had concerns about covering payments to the group. Coveware, a Connecticut firm that negotiates with attackers on behalf of victims, stopped dealing with DarkSide.

Ballod said that, with their insurers unwilling to reimburse the ransom, none of his clients paid DarkSide, despite concerns about exposure of their data. Even if they had caved in to DarkSide, and received assurances from the hackers in return that the data would be shredded, the information might still leak, he said.

During DarkSide’s changeover to the affiliate model, a flaw was introduced into its ransomware. The vulnerability caught the attention of members of the Ransomware Hunting Team. Established in 2016, the invitation-only team consists of about a dozen volunteers in the U.S., Spain, Italy, Germany, Hungary and the U.K. They work in cybersecurity or related fields. In their spare time, they collaborate in finding and decrypting new ransomware strains.

Several members, including Wosar, have little formal education but an aptitude for coding. A high school dropout, Wosar grew up in a working-class family near the German port city of Rostock. In 1992, at the age of 8, he saw a computer for the first time and was entranced. By 16, he was developing his own antivirus software and making money from it. Now 37, he has worked for antivirus firm Emsisoft since its inception almost two decades ago and is its chief technology officer. He moved to the U.K. from Germany in 2018 and lives near London.

He has been battling ransomware hackers since 2012, when he cracked a strain called ACCDFISA, which stood for “Anti Cyber Crime Department of Federal Internet Security Agency.” This fictional agency was notifying people that child pornography had infected their computers, and so it was blocking access to their files unless they paid $100 to remove the virus.

The ACCDFISA hacker eventually noticed that the strain had been decrypted and released a revised version. Many of Wosar’s subsequent triumphs were also fleeting. He and his teammates tried to keep criminals blissfully unaware for as long as possible that their strain was vulnerable. They left cryptic messages on forums inviting victims to contact them for assistance or sent direct messages to people who posted that they had been attacked.

In the course of protecting against computer intrusions, analysts at antivirus firms sometimes detected ransomware flaws and built decryption tools, though it wasn’t their main focus. Sometimes they collided with Wosar.

In 2014, Wosar discovered that a ransomware strain called CryptoDefense copied and pasted from Microsoft Windows some of the code it used to lock and unlock files, not realizing that the same code was preserved in a folder on the victim’s own computer. It was missing the signal, or “flag,” in their program, usually included by ransomware creators to instruct Windows not to save a copy of the key.

Wosar quickly developed a decryption tool to retrieve the key. “We faced an interesting conundrum,” Sarah White, another Hunting Team member, wrote on Emsisoft’s blog. “How to get our tool out to the most victims possible without alerting the malware developer of his mistake?”

Wosar discreetly sought out CryptoDefense victims through support forums, volunteer networks and announcements of where to contact for help. He avoided describing how the tool worked or the blunder it exploited. When victims came forward, he supplied the fix, scrubbing the ransomware from at least 350 computers. CryptoDefense eventually “caught on to us ... but he still did not have access to the decrypter we used and had no idea how we were unlocking his victims’ files,” White wrote.

But then an antivirus company, Symantec, uncovered the same problem and bragged about the discovery on a blog post that “contained enough information to help the CryptoDefense developer find and correct the flaw,” White wrote. Within 24 hours the attackers began spreading a revised version. They changed its name to CryptoWall and made $325 million.

Symantec “chose quick publicity over helping CryptoDefense victims recover their files,” White wrote. “Sometimes there are things that are better left unsaid.”

A spokeswoman for Broadcom, which acquired Symantec’s enterprise security business in 2019, declined to comment, saying that “the team members who worked on the tool are no longer with the company.”

Like Wosar, the 29-year-old Gillespie comes from poverty and never went to college. When he was growing up in central Illinois, his family struggled so much financially that they sometimes had to move in with friends or relatives. After high school, he worked full time for 10 years at a computer repair chain called Nerds on Call. Last year, he became a malware and cybersecurity researcher at Coveware.

Last December, he messaged Wosar for help. Gillespie had been working with a DarkSide victim who had paid a ransom and received a tool to recover the data. But DarkSide’s decryptor had a reputation for being slow, and the victim hoped that Gillespie could speed up the process.

Gillespie analyzed the software, which contained a key to release the files. He wanted to extract the key, but because it was stored in an unusually complex way, he couldn’t. He turned to Wosar, who was able to isolate it.

The teammates then began testing the key on other files infected by DarkSide. Gillespie checked files uploaded by victims to the website he operates, ID Ransomware, while Wosar used VirusTotal, an online database of suspected malware.

That night, they shared a discovery.

“I have confirmation DarkSide is re-using their RSA keys,” Gillespie wrote to the Hunting Team on its Slack channel. A type of cryptography, RSA generates two keys: a public key to encode data and a private key to decipher it. RSA is used legitimately to safeguard many aspects of e-commerce, such as protecting credit numbers. But it’s also been co-opted by ransomware hackers.

“I noticed the same as I was able to decrypt newly encrypted files using their decrypter,” Wosar replied less than an hour later, at 2:45 a.m. London time.

Their analysis showed that, before adopting the affiliate model, DarkSide had used a different public and private key for each victim. Wosar suspected that, during this transition, DarkSide introduced a mistake into its affiliate portal used to generate the ransomware for each target. Wosar and Gillespie could now use the key that Wosar had extracted to retrieve files from Windows machines seized by DarkSide. The cryptographic blunder didn’t affect Linux operating systems.

“We were scratching our heads,” Wosar said. “Could they really have fucked up this badly? DarkSide was one of the more professional ransomware-as-a-service schemes out there. For them to make such a huge mistake is very, very rare.”

The Hunting Team celebrated quietly, without seeking publicity. White, who is a computer science student at Royal Holloway, part of the University of London, began looking for DarkSide victims. She contacted firms that handle digital forensics and incident response.

“We told them, ‘Hey listen, if you have any DarkSide victims, tell them to reach out to us, we can help them. We can recover their files and they don’t have to pay a huge ransom,’” Wosar said.

The DarkSide hackers mostly took the Christmas season off. Gillespie and Wosar expected that, when the attacks resumed in the new year, their discovery would help dozens of victims. But then Bitdefender published its post, under the headline “Darkside Ransomware Decryption Tool.”

In a messaging channel with the ransomware response community, someone asked why Bitdefender would tip off the hackers. “Publicity,” White responded. “Looks good. I can guarantee they’ll fix it much faster now though.”

She was right. The next day, DarkSide acknowledged the error that Wosar and Gillespie had found before Bitdefender. “Due to the problem with key generation, some companies have the same keys,” the hackers wrote, adding that up to 40% of keys were affected.

DarkSide mocked Bitdefender for releasing the decryptor at “the wrong time…., as the activity of us and our partners during the New Year holidays is the lowest.”

Adding to the team’s frustrations, Wosar discovered that the Bitdefender tool had its own drawbacks. Using the company’s decryptor, he tried to unlock samples infected by DarkSide and found that they were damaged in the process. “They actually implemented the decryption wrong,” Wosar said. “That means if victims did use the Bitdefender tool, there’s a good chance that they damaged the data.”

Asked about Wosar’s criticism, Botezatu said that data recovery is difficult, and that Bitdefender has “taken all precautions to make sure that we’re not compromising user data” including exhaustive testing and “code that evaluates whether the resulting decrypted file is valid.”

Even without Bitdefender, DarkSide might have soon realized its mistake anyway, Wosar and Gillespie said. For example, as they sifted through compromised networks, the hackers might have come across emails in which victims helped by the Hunting Team discussed the flaw.

“They might figure it out that way — that is always a possibility,” Wosar said. “But it’s especially painful if a vulnerability is being burned through something stupid like this.”

The incident led the Hunting Team to coin a term for the premature exposure of a weakness in a ransomware strain. “Internally, we often joke, ‘Yeah, they are probably going to pull a Bitdefender,’” Wosar said.

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ink-beneath-her-fingernails · 4 years

Text

BNHA/MHA First Watch-Through Notes

1x01

these are... stupid... and... a mess. bc I am stupid and a mess. you have had your warning. I didn’t even go back and skim through this when I was done I’m just releasing these little bastard thoughts into the void they’re not my problem now

I’m watching dubbed btw

I know, I know... it’s the only one I have access to rn tho

I... do not know how to feel about funimation’s new intro?

well I guess it’s not really new but

listen I haven’t watched anything of funimation’s since the og fruits basket ok I’m used to the DUN-DUN *funimation* ((....you should be watching))

he is. babie. green babie.

but also why do these small children have such wild hair colors

I mean I’m here for it

I just wasn’t expecting it

oH SHIT THEY GOT POWERS POWERS

so this is the famous deku

I’m guessing this is like a flashback or memory or something?

I missed the bully’s name

speaking of the bullies, they changed order? It was wings, fire, stretchy hands, but now it’s fire, stretchy hands, wings. I know that they probably wanted to show the “leader” closest and that’s why but,,

also wtf?? these are kids. like bullies should not be a thing, I think we can all agree on that, but yeah, it’s gonna happen. but these kids are, what? eight? nine? maybe their powers (’quirks,’ whatever) aren’t super powerful yet, but this blonde kid has fire powers. has nobody talked to them about just how dangerous this is? forget roughing the other two up or intimidating them or giving them a hard time, this could genuinely escalate and get way out of hand super fast, and someone could get seriously injured.

oof. boy is dead.

this eight year old (purple hair) sounds like he’s a thirty yo new teacher trying to sound hip and cool but also wise and knowing to his class who Does Not Care

that wasn’t purple kid?? that was current deku???

wack

then this fourteen year old sounds like he’s a thirty yo new teacher trying to sound hip and cool but also wise and knowing to his class who Does Not Care

also they were four?

jeepers heckin criminey who starts beating people up at four years old

have to say though, I loved that sky-to-puddle transition

jiminey fucking crickets I’m not even a minute into the episode these notes are going to be stupidly long I’m sorry

!! I love his little skipping-dance thing when he’s impatient at the crosswalk!

alright... I’ll admit it... his character design is pretty adorable

also tf is that thing

it looks half shark half poorly drawn dog

I mean I get it’s probably a person and that’s their quirk or whatever but

did this kid just run all the way across the city just to watch this guy start shit at the station so he could see the heroes take him down??

I mean respect tbh but also priorities kid

also I really appreciate that the cops are just kind of calmly directing everyone and everyone else is just kind of chillin like “oh. another villain. that’s too bad.” like tbh that’s one of the things that always kind of annoys me about movies and shows like this where there’s like repeatedly villain attacks because yes they are scary, especially when you’re caught up in them, but if you’re just kind of there and not directly in the action or being directly threatened, then why are you freaking out? you’ve lived in this city for how long? there’s an attack every, what, two days? this isn’t routine for you by now?

I started this like 15 min ago and am only like a minute and a half into the ep smh

ngl this intro kinda pops off

that hero guy seemed... kind of evil lookin tho

love the animation oml

also the lyrics to this are great???

OH IS THAT A NARRATIVE FOIL I SEE IMPLIED THERE

I THINK IT IS

“and they were narrative foils” “oh my god they were narrative foils”

k ngl rewinding real quick bc I missed some of the intro and there’s always so much fun stuff to see and unpack in those

also I wanna read all the lyrics

k so I was wondering this before but I’m just gonna say it... why does the hero guy have rabbit ears

alright character designs lookin p fire so far

last guy I keep missing but he kind of looks like steven universe?? idk I still have to watch that show too tbh so,,,

does the big hero guy turn into a giant bird?

oh that intro got me excited for this

these characters look so lit!!

“the first incident?” so this isn’t just like a natural factor of their world? it hasn’t always been going on? there was, like, a definitive start to it all? was that kid really the first incident or the first one they noticed? was that actually the first incident or is it just like the commonly told first incident, like an old myth/legend/folktale/old wive’s tale?

interesting that it started with a baby and then moved to people of all ages?

oh they don’t know the cause of the quirks? interesting

((why do I feel like finding out the answer to that is gonna be like A Big Thing™ at some point in the series))

I really like the visuals they put with this exposition?? idk why it’s just,,, very appealing

also his voice is very nice to listen to tbh, so that’s a definite plus

I hate it when the main character’s voice is super annoying

but like how long ago was it that this started? he just said “before long”

I like that in this universe they actually acknowledge that hey comic books are a thing and this whole superheroes/villains/powers thing is kind of ridiculous bc it’s legit like playing out scenes straight from those comic books but also this is real life and it’s actually happening and really does pose a lot of danger and complications to a lot of people, so we’re going to treat it as something real and serious and affecting us

I might’ve spoken too soon but I really hope they don’t blow that mindset

I feel like too often superhero shows/movies just either completely gloss over the effects this stuff has on society as a whole, or it’s like a completely new thing for them, like there’s never been the concept of a fictional superhero or a comic book there before.

“was an age of heroes”??? oh no what happens

k but why is this guy dressed like the ‘do not cross’ lines

kind of a lame hero costume tbh :/

why. does he have. sleeves. but no shirt.

edna mode would never do you like that honey go see her

“Death Arms”?? what kind of alias is that?? also wouldn’t it make more sense for arms to be uncovered than his chest, then??

“The Punching Hero”

I’m sorry I Cannot take this guy seriously

waterbending??

asdkfdls idk why but this firehose guy really reminds me of that one alchemist from fmab with the top hat and the monocle and the peg leg that spun like a top and Scar murked

“rescue specialist” see?? that makes sense!! it makes me so happy that they’re actually thinking more about the worldbuilding and how dangerous scenarios would work if 80% of the population had powers of different kinds, beyond “big bad guy meet big good guy. punch punch good guy wins”

also dear god thank you for putting someone on crowd control I know I was just saying it was great these people weren’t really treating this like the end of the world and it is good that they were mostly staying back by themselves but. they were still standing very close to an ongoing fight. priorities, people. self preservation. they are things. that I do not believe most people in superhero universes have in the slightest.

aww he’s too short

(but is he shorter than edward elric)

((do we know))

(((somebody please tell me if this information is available)))

alsdfkj l;a that guy calling in late bc the train got held up by the villain... do you think that’s another equivalent of “oh...I’m...sick... yeah, totally, I’m sick” and “my dog ate my homework” to them? “there was a villain attack” or “some idiot on my block decided to show off their quirk and it got out of hand”

ope Big Hero™ is here

...why am I surprised that they have fans?? I mean I guess that makes sense they’re basically celebrities and public figures right?

okay Big Hero™ is Kamui got it

wait no that is not the Big Hero™

but they are another hero and their name is Kamui got it

“Kamui Woods” ok that’s actually helpful I was gonna ask what his skin was supposed to be bc I didn’t think it was scales and it does look kind of like bark... Now going to take that as permission to assume it’s the latter

kamui kind of reminds me of some pokemon but I’m not sure which one?? I’m sorry idk pokemon v well but thy def remind me of one of them

“...a fAnBOY” he looks and sounds like he just tricked someone into confessing to murder why is he so smug about that smh

you know what. speaking of. I don’t get why everyone views being a fan of something/someone as something to be embarrassed or ashamed about?? why do people make fun of other people for it? why do we treat it like some big dark secret we try to hide? when did liking something become a bad thing? like?? sorry I have hobbies and interests and you don’t? sorry I think this person is talented? sorry I thought this book was life-changing? sorry I listen to this album so much because it’s good? sorry this show made me laugh during a really rough time? like goddamn it’s nobody’s business what you like unless you’re trying to force it on you when you’ve asked them to stop or it’s hurting someone? if they’re being safe and respectful about it for everyone involved then there shouldn’t be a problem? stop making people feel like freaks or be scared to enjoy something just a little too much? just let people have good things in life and consume the media that makes them happy? it has little to no effect on you? I don’t get why it’s you’re problem?? sorry to get all soapboxy this is something that’s always really annoyed me

does kamui have flowers on their belt

icon

k but isn’t wood like... really easy to break tho

I mean... comparatively speaking?

“illegal use of powers during rush hour traffic” alsfjsadlkf

wait so he’s listing charges for the guy, does that mean heroes are officially licensed here and can actually arrest people? and... actually work with law enforcement?? gasp no wait but I thought that was impossible except for The One Officer On The Inside That The Hero Has Convinced Of Their Cause™

hold up... “assault, robbery, and illegal use of powers during rush hour traffic... you are the incarnation of evil” ...bro chill lmao

I mean those aren’t good things but,,,, buddy “evil” can get so much worse holy shit sunflower child has no idea what’s in store for them

the show can do a hell of a lot even if they decide not to go that dark

well deku did say he was new

also off topic but I just looked it up and DEKU IS HALF A FOOT TALLER THAN ED

I’M SORRY BUT THAT’S HILARIOUS

CAN YOU IMAGINE THIS EXCITED GREEN CHILD MEETING ED THE GREMLIN ELRIC AND JUST TOWERING OVER HIM

he’d probably get along well w al though so ed would have to like him anyways

ok but back to bnha

ope kamui just got upstaged

but honestly?? he was actin a lil cocky and she seems like a queen so I ain’t mad about it

oh great creeps are everywhere apparently

YES THANK YOU THEY NEED TO INCLUDE SUPERPOWERS IN LEGISLATION SOMEHOW OTHERWISE PEOPLE CAN GET AWAY WITH ANYTHING GEEZ

just. more worldbuilding that I appreciate.

jfc they muzzled him?

ok i wasn’t that mad about kamui being upstaged (idk why I kinda like the guy) but now she’s acting a little too cocky for me and I feel kind of bad for Death Arms and Backdraft (?) because they definitely do deserve at least a little credit

yes. official. overseen by the government. I’m not saying it’s necessarily a good idea bc I’m not getting into the whole mess the MCU basically did regarding that, but it really does add to the worldbuilding and making it seem more realistic/draw you in a little more because you can bet that would be a thing that would actually happen in some capacity if such a large percentage of the population had superpowers, and crime was at an all-time high at the same time, with normal methods without powers likely not doing much to combat that, and it being even harder because everyone’s is different

wow so they really do have roles similar to celebrities huh?

I actually love how he’s analyzing the new hero

that’s!! the good!!! nerdery!!!!

ngl thought that guy was gonna be like “well that’s never gonna happen” lmao glad he didn’t turn out to be an asshole

this guy’s hair and his sweater need an upgrade

I’m sorry honey it’s just not a Look™

I mean ngl I’d probably wear it but also I am the absolute last person to look to for a good idea of fashion so

wow we hate asshole teachers

this kid’s hair grows wtf

they seriously just break out their quirks when they get annoyed?? I mean me too probably but

oh wait he’s not totally an asshole

but that still is kind of a dick move because even if it seems really really likely that most of them do, a lot of them probably feel like that’s just what’s expected of them or that that’s their best bet at an ok life, or they don’t think they’ll actually be able to get a career as a hero, and he has to know that there are kids (or at least one) in his class who don’t have powers and who will probably be shut down at every turn on that career track??

also what is it with the absurd number of people whose hair grows/flys/whatever and whose hands change chape and/or elongate

the girl who just throws up the rock n roll sign is my favorite

also why does this teacher remind me of gilderoy lockhart

I get that his eye thing is part of his quirk... but does he face no consequences health-wise from putting his grubby fingers all over his eyeballs?? you don’t know where your hands have been

the famed bakugo

we finally meet

you seem like a cocky asshole and if I remember correctly you have firepowers

you know who else seemed like cocky assholes and one point or another and had firepowers??

roy mustang and zuko

and one of those guys is an awkward, angry turtleduck, and the other one is a rightly smug bastard who succeeded in pulling a coup on the government who was surveilling him and holding half his team hostage

so yeah I have a feeling I’m gonna like this guy

probably

at some point

eventually

it might take a while

“the only place worthy of me” oh dear

All Might!! Big Hero™ has a name!!

oh being a hero solely bc you want to be rich and popular? lame

aklsdfsjaslkfd teach just callin deku out in front of everyone

r.i.p.

it was nice having you as a main character for eight whole minutes I’m sorry you have to face death-by-embarrassment you deserved better

ope

bakugo doesn’t want anyone stealin his thunder

lemme guess deku is also his Main Rival™ or at least will be

awwwww poor guy

how much you wanna bet he gets the highest scores in all the exams bc he studies the heroes so much and that’s how he gets in

that lady got forcefields for her quirk? damn she lucked out

“this cash is mine” *drops cash*

are all the heroes like fine mt. lady can deal w the guy she keeps stealing all our credit anyway so there’s no point??

....is that all might?

k but... y’all should be taking notes on the heroes too if you want a better chance at that career and better schools for it? I know they’re probably making fun of it bc he doesn’t have a quirk but still

also I find it really interesting that the kids all act like the quirks are absolutely everything but at that scene on the street earlier people were complaining about missing the days they didn’t have to worry about “every rando w a quirk” or something... like maybe it’s because the kids grew up w it? Idk just the difference in mindset between (presumably) generations seems cool to look into

wow we love bullies so much

no we don’t pls stop you’re not as cool as you think you are

DESTROYING SOMEONE’S NOTEBOOK/JOURNAL/SKETCHBOOK IS ONE OF THE MOST DICK MOVES SOMEONE CAN MAKE CHANGE MY MIND

alright bakugo you’ve definitely moved onto my shitlist for the moment

don’t stay there

well you know what they say about greatness... some people are destined for it, yeah, but some become it, and some have it thrust upon them

cliches are there for a reason buddy

and either way... I could be wrong but... there doesn’t seem like anything great or heroic about bullying people... I mean idk that’s just my opinion but

god I hope they eat bakugo alive at ua

deku I know you’re a sunshine child but you have to get in now. you have to. out of pure spite. please.

yeah, friend 1b is right buddy...

destroy him deku

DESTROY THEM DEKU

oh suicide jokes huh

bakugo you’re on thin fucking ice you’ve just moved way up in my shit list

wow I hate him <3

EXACTLY

THANK YOU DEKU

I hate it when shows have someone make a suicide joke like that and just? no one addresses it?? or the characters don’t seem to realize that it needs addressing, at least to themselves??? so this is refreshing

voiced my thoughts exactly

he really is an idiot

NO BUDDY YOUR DREAMS ARE STILL POSSIBLE AND VALID

YOUR NOTES ARE SALVAGEABLE

he really is a jerk deku you’re right

awww little deku is so cute

alright I’m gonna make a prediction

this is his mom right

is this gonna be

another

dead anime mom?

and lemme guess she always told him she was sure he’d be a hero/she knew he’d become one, and then she died, and that’s why he’s so set on it

probably not

but just... placing my bets now

w h a t is this child doing

he’s a hair’s breadth away from head-desking

are we... just gonna... ignore that robbery that was happening on the street a few minutes ago

OKAY WE GET IT YOU’RE HERE CAN YOU GO BACK TO SAVING PEOPLE THEY’RE STILL IN DANGER

HIS CACKLES I CAN’T

alsdkjf;lsjk I feel bad for him but also,,, that transition was gold

but also the face his mom made before he started laughing... she knew he probably wouldn’t get one didn’t she

but why do they assume it won’t happen if they don’t get it by a certain age? they said after that baby people all around the world were getting powers, and showed people of all different ages when they said so. that implies that they got those powers at those ages, after the baby was born but not when they were children themselves? like yeah there’s probably some point where you’d consider them “aged out” and therefore less likely to get a quirk but... she just said he’s in kindergarten.

fourth generation? so the appearance of quirks isn’t a super recent thing then

they can tell if someone is going to manifest a quirk or is starting to by looking at x-rays?

also I know I’m seriously overusing the word “interesting” but

maybe I’m reading too far into this but it’s also kind of interesting that his father and his (current) main antagonist have such similar powers?

OH!!!! lore drop!! kind of!!! that’s a really interesting (wow there it is again) thing they chose to be an indicator for that kind of thing in this universe

*cue izuku contemplating chopping off his pinky toes*

I feel like... all might’s... not gonna be that great....

DEAR LORD HOW MANY TEARS CAN THIS CHILD HOLD IN HIS EYES

also ngl when little deku’s eyes are wide and he doesn’t move he looks really creepy and kind of like a child-sized doll

like pinocchio

how sure are we that deku isn’t made of wood

hmmmmmmmmm I do love this animation

ah Internal Angst™

the fuck is that laughter??

skin suit? no thanks

but guess we aren’t ignoring that earlier scene

yeah all might’s in the city alright

he’s gonna break this up isn’t he

yepppppp that’s him

idk I think alex louise armstrong did it better sorry bud :/

“texas smash”??

he just... punched liquid apart

this kid’s still gonna go flying and hit the ground hard buddy thanks for your help

oh he stuck around

and he’s not hurt too bad

“justicing”

he’s using the city’s sewer system being difficult to navigate as his excuse for why he wasn’t paying attention to keeping bystanders safe like he “usually” does?

the armstrongs do the sparkle better

a;ldkfsdlfls this is really funny to watch ngl

“that’s... a pretty good point.” yeah no shit lmao

I love how he’s just. awkwardly patting deku.

yeah he’s gonna end up accidentally adopting this kid isn’t he

is he hurt?? or did the other guy actually take him over while deku was unconscious??

nah I think he’s just hurt I’m p sure he really did get the guy

but still

that was... a big boom.... that’s not good

he’s just.... abandoning this kid on the rooftop??

but also he probably really does have to go if blood is coming out of his mouth

do heroes in this universe have secret identities?

I feel like yes but also no??

watch as this guy’s like “I don’t have a quirk either” and he’s just. like. an armstrong or something

that or he’s gonna crush this kid’s dreams and be like “no, it’s not possible” and I will be forced to ensure deku becomes the most successful hero ever out of Even More Pure Spite™ even if he idolizes the guy

oh yeah he’s gonna get his dreams crushed

IS ALL MIGHT GONNA VOUCH FOR HIM AND GET HIM AN OPPORTUNITY AT UA BC HE FEELS BAD FOR HIM

hmm this outro kinda slaps too

overall feelin good, like it so far, definitely think I won’t have trouble continuing watching at least for now

#this took me... almost 2 AND A HALF HOURS #IT'S A 24 MINUTE EPISODE #THESE AREN'T EVEN GOOD NOTES #but whatever #notes #bnha notes #mha notes #bnha #mha #yap yap #1x01

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pagetgram · 4 years

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Getting To Know The Cast Of Criminal Minds

As Criminal Minds rolls out its 15th and final season, the beloved cast gathers to discuss serial killers (what else?), special guest stars, and their millions of phenomenal fans in this exclusive interview. (x,x)

By David Hochman

The scene is quintessential Hollywood: a train station at dusk. Steam billowing up from the tracks. Loved ones bracing for their emotional farewells. What could be more fitting for the cast of Criminal Minds?

Chugging into its 15th and final season after more than 300 episodes, the police procedural is among the 10 longest-running dramas of all time, and in the top 20 for longest-running scripted television shows. "This is Gunsmoke and Guinness Book territory," says Matthew Gray Gubler, who has played quirky FBI brainiac Dr. Spencer Reid since episode 1.

To honor the landmark occasion, all eight series regulars are gathered at a railway museum in L.A.'s Griffith Park for photos, poignant reflections, and a few behind-the-scenes confessions (mostly involving a tradition called "hot tub wine machine"—stay tuned).

On TV, the tenacious profilers of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit—or simply "BAU" to fans—are a hard-bitten bunch, tracking down serial killers and other vicious "unsubs." But in person, clearly good friends across the board and decked out today in their spiffiest finery, the cast can scarcely hold back tears as they get candid about their extended journey together and what it means to come to the end—sniff, sniff—of Criminal Minds.

Originally published in Watch! Magazine, July-August 2019.

Judging from the misty eyes and group hugs, it looks like the series wrap-up is generating "all the feels," as they say. Are you able to get through scenes this season without a tissue break?

Joe Mantegna (Senior Supervisory Special Agent David Rossi, Seasons 3-present): This is my 50th year in show business, and next to voicing on The Simpsons, Rossi is my longest-running role. I came in with dark hair and now it's gray. I arrived without much of a game plan, and the show and character are now a deep part of who I am. This cast is a true family for me. So every episode this year has an added bittersweet layer. When the director announces, "This is the last profile scene" or "This is our last scene on the jet," you look around with a real sense of passing. It's monumental.

Kirsten Vangsness (BAU Technical Analyst and Media Liaison Penelope Garcia, Seasons 1-present): The term that keeps coming up is "ambiguous loss"—that feeling of losing something you love, and that everything's about to change. In this case it's not a person, thank goodness. But still, in the middle of a scene, it hits you. But you can't cry; you have all this makeup on. Plus, what are you crying for? It's been such an incredible experience. I will have done every single episode except episode 5, every episode of the first spinoff, and two episodes of the second spinoff. I love these people. No, sir. I'm not crying. You're crying. [Editor's note: She's crying.]

Paget Brewster (Supervisory Special Agent and BAU Unit Chief Emily Prentiss, Seasons 2-7, 9, 11-present): Um, I'm in complete denial, so I'll break down into tears the week after we end, but not before. I'm pretending this show's never, ever going to end.

Without spoiling anything, what can you say about Season 15?

A.J. Cook (Supervisory Special Agent Jennifer "JJ" Jareau, Seasons 1-present): Well, I can tell you that we will find out what happens now that JJ has expressed her true feelings for Dr. Reid.

Matthew Gray Gubler (Supervisory Special Agent Dr. Spencer Reid, Seasons 1-present): Don't you mean "Jeid?" That's what the internet is calling us. Hey, I'm not spoiling anything. I mean, don't rule out, uh, "Jemily" or "Jarcia" this season, either!

Adam Rodriguez (Supervisory Special Agent Luke Alvez, Seasons 12-present): And we do have guest stars. We love guest stars! [Editor's note: Among others, watch for Jane Lynch to return as Reid's schizophrenic mother, and for Rachael Leigh Cook as a potential new love interest for Reid.]

Daniel Henney (Supervisory Special Agent Matt Simmons, Seasons 10, 12-present): Overall, I'd say 15 has more of an arc through the episodes than previous seasons. Our unsub, Chameleon, is played by Michael Mosley, and he's definitely into some gruesome, creepy stuff.

Brewster: Like, we have a scene where a bunch of body parts are hanging from a tree. Our prop guy, who's a professional fisherman in real life, was on top of a 15-foot ladder with a foot and an ear hanging off his fishing pole.

Aisha Tyler (Special Agent Dr. Tara Lewis and forensic psychologist, Seasons 11-present): And people wonder why my house in L.A. is like a fortress and I'm armed! I'd say it's a direct result of Criminal Minds. This show is definitely dark. I'm not going around profiling sociopaths and serial killers, but, yeah, being on Criminal Minds, you become more perceptive about people's bad behavior.

Anybody else find it hard letting go in real life after chasing serial killers at work all day?

Cook: I'm blessed with a good shut-off switch. Once the day's done, I can block everything out. But as soon as I became a mom, something shifted where the naive girl from Canada got the boot and mama bear arrived. We saw that happen with JJ on the show, too. When she became a mom, it was suddenly like, "Whoa, watch out for that guy in the park!"

Henney: I'll tell you a story. About two months ago, I'm at home sleeping and a burglar alarm goes off, and I literally switched into Simmons mode. All the training I'd done with the FBI guys and our tech advisers instantly came into play. I threw on black sweatpants. I was creeping around the perimeter of my house, FBI-style. I clocked all my points of ingress and egress. When you do so many episodes, basic instincts kick in.

Did you identify the unsub?

Henney: Nobody was there! It was a stupid, faulty window sensor.

Brewster: The show definitely sharpens your reactions to your surroundings. When you start the show, you have access to the FBI training manual, which, frankly, no civilian should ever see because the photographs are so grisly. You end up going through a period of hypervigilance where you can't go into a sandwich shop or airport without thinking, Uh-oh! I think that couple's going to end up in a domestic dispute tonight.

Group question: What's your standout memory from these many seasons?

Rodriguez: I jumped onto this flying carpet 12 seasons in, and my first scene was out in the middle of the desert, and we shot all night long. There was an old car that was supposed to be in the scene, but it broke down and they ended up rolling it into the shot, which was funny. But more than that, I remember how welcoming people were. I was the new guy, but I felt immediately at home.

Brewster: We watched your family grow, too, Adam. You had a kid. A.J. had two kids. I met my husband on set. We've been lucky enough to live our lives and develop together as people.

Cook: For me, having both my boys appear in the show was an absolute treasure. Mekhai, who's 10, has been doing it way longer than Phoenix, who's 4, and he loves it, though I can't tell if it's the acting or that everybody's giving him cookies and ice cream all the time.

Henney: I was really proud to play Simmons because, as an Asian American actor, you don't often get the chance to play the quintessential American guy's guy. He's married to a Caucasian woman and has mixed-race children—which is true with me, too [Henney is also of mixed descent]—and I loved representing that on television. To have a kissing scene with Kelly, my wife on the show—you weren't seeing that 10 years ago.

Tyler: Directing a couple episodes was an incredible opportunity. But for me, just the experience of seeing this through to the end is so rewarding. I was only supposed to do six episodes. Everything's been gravy since then.

Mantegna: Hands down, my highlight was being able to work in my passion for law enforcement and the military by making my FBI character a former Marine. That allowed me to bring in Meshach Taylor, one of my dearest, oldest friends, as my commanding officer in Vietnam, and directing two of the three episodes that involved him as a character.

That included the episode where his character died, because Meshach had died. To actually bury him on camera as my dear friend—I'm the godfather of his kids, and he's the godfather of mine—it was everything. If I do nothing else on television, doing that for Meshach to me means the top of the ladder.

TV shows come and go. How do you explain the enduring success of Criminal Minds?

Tyler: Well, I'd say it's not about prurient interest in the macabre. I think the reason people like the show is because we want to know that there's a smart, dedicated team of professionals out there working very hard to make sure that the rest of us stay safe. Even if we don't know who they are and we can't see them, it's comforting that people are sacrificing their personal lives and their relationships so that they can put evil people away.

Rodriguez: I meet young people all the time, teenagers, who love the show and say they love the game of it all—figuring out how these processes work and the skills that go into solving crimes. I think we've probably inspired a generation of people to go into this important work—on the good-guy side, not on the bad.

Cook: So many people have struggled in their lives, and they can relate to what they see on the show. Hardworking moms, people that have been abused, people who've experienced loss.

Vangsness: I think it comes down to a show with some of the greatest characters on television. Garcia is just a bundle of positive energy, and that resonated. Her desk is a living piece of art to how she's connected with the audience. I've got a papier-mâché heart pen a fan from France gave me. There's a little rabbit from a fan in Japan. A German woman knitted a Penelope doll that's sitting there. Oh, and Richard Simmons gave me a necklace one time because he loved the show!

Criminal Minds fans are a devoted bunch.

Henney: I once checked into a ski lodge in Switzerland and my television wasn't working, so I went to the front desk. The two desk guys started staring at me like zombies and pointed to their TV, where Criminal Minds was on, with me on the screen.

Brewster: It takes you by surprise in the weirdest places. You'll be in a bathroom at a movie theater and girls are outside whispering, That's Emily Prentiss, and they wait for you to finish so you can wash your hands and hug them.

What are you going to miss most about the show?

Cook: Um, everything. The scenes in the jet are my favorites because it's such a tight space that we forget we're on a TV show and just enjoy hanging out together. This show, for me, was a coming of age. You can look online and find me in the beginning of season 1 wearing this ridiculous pink pinstriped blazer that will haunt me forever. I look like I'm 12. But I've grown up along with JJ. [Tearing up.] I'll miss it all so much.

Gubler: Likewise, I really look up to Spencer Reid, and I feel so honored to have played him for so long. I will miss his long, you know, three-page monologues of technical jargon about protons or whatever. I'll miss the way he holds his hands like an ostrich foot when he's solving a problem. He's definitely way smarter than I'll ever be, but I like to think that some Dr. Reid qualities have imbued themselves into my own personality a little bit. If nothing else, I've adopted his ever-changing hairstyles.

Tyler: I'll miss being an FBI badass. I'd love to take the FBI jacket, but it's absolutely illegal to walk around wearing it.

Vangsness: I can tell you what I won't miss. Garcia's glasses—because I have them all already. I've bought every pair she's ever worn, so I have a collection of around 65 at home. They remind me to be confident like her, to see life through her eyes. Garcia is my Sasha Fierce.

Brewster: I will miss the hot tub wine machine.

Hot tub wine machine?

Vangsness: You heard that right, mister. It's an epic hot tub party at my house that the women on the show have turned into a standing gig—or more like a floating gig.

Brewster: It's basically a therapy and gossip and splashing-around session fueled by chardonnay and rosé.

Tyler: And it's ladies only because it gets kinda frisky.

Rodriguez: This is a sore subject for me even as a very securely and happily married man.

Mantegna: They do send us pictures on group text, which is thoughtful of them.

Vangsness: I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to tell you that this fine tradition makes it into our last episode. I co-wrote the finale, and we tried to cram in as many little Easter eggs and satisfying plot tie-ups as we could, both for fans and for each other. So within the episode, you'll see the BAU version of hot tub time machine. We worked really hard solving these super-intense crimes over what will be 325 episodes. After all these years, don't you think we deserve a little spa time?

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psychopersonified · 4 years

Text

Tea and Soju

Bridging piece between “Are we ever going to talk about this?” and “KIdnapped!Q”. The events here feed into the plot but can be read as a series of drabbles.

Tags: Established relationship, but open secret. Intimacy in plain sight. Bond feeling his age. Mostly fluff with plot points. Tiny bit of angst. Q-Branch being weird.

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

Christ, he feels like a teacher on a school trip. “Might I remind the class that the french police are notoriously speed adverse and do not take well to British nationals breaking the law on their home soil?”

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

SIS HQ, M’s Office - 12th Floor

Eve hands him his next mission dossier without preamble when he enters the antechamber to M’s office.

“He doesn’t want to see me today?”

Eve shakes her head. “Crisis in Hong Kong. He’s tied up with the station chief all morning. Besides your next assignment is a more or less a straightforward reconnaissance.”

There is no such thing as a straightforward in their world, Bond disagrees in his mind. He flips open the file and takes a seat on the edge of her desk, ”What is it?”

Eve comes around to stand next to him:

“MI6 Persons of interest: First is Marco Sciarra. Formerly linked to Silva on the periphery and several other possible terrorist links. Word has it, he’s meeting with an entrepreneur by the name of Kim Min Jun in Geneva next week. Which brings us to the second person: Mr Kim is connected to one of the Korean Chaebols - grandson to the Chairman,” Eve points to his picture in the file.

Kim Min Jun is a handsome man in his mid thirties. Perfectly coiffed and flawless skinned. The photo looks to be a media shot; designer clothes and posture befitting a princeling from a privileged background. His expression in the picture is cold and slightly imperious.

“You know how it is, the chaebols control nearly all aspects of the Korean economy including politics. So what he’s doing talking to someone like Sciarra piques our interest.”

Curious indeed. “What do we know about Sciarra and the princeling? And why Geneva?”

“Sciarra we know very little except he’s a fixer of sorts. Procuring equipment and expertise for his clients. You’re going to have to fill in the blanks for us when you track him,” Eve is apologetic on behalf of the research team.

“Kim we know more about. He’s dabbling in cryptocurrency at the moment. The Korean government has banned ICOs so many crypto start-ups are registering in friendlier countries. Switzerland has one of the friendliest regulations for fintech startups. Kim is unveiling his ICO (Initial Coin Offering) to investors next week. His new cryptocurrency is called- $PECTRE.”

Considering the concerns around cryptocurrencies and their use, I suppose that’s fitting. Is it really spelled that way?” Bond points at the name on the printed page. -Classy-. He thinks sardonically. Eve chuckles.

The next page his is cover brief. He reads it out loud, “Cover story… CEO Private Security Contractor. Should be easy enough to fill out.” He likes the ‘private security’ covers, its the easiest for him to slip into considering it is essentially the same skillset.

“The timing coincides with the Geneva Motor Show and the EBACE (European Business Aviation Conference & Exhibition) so there will be influx of fat cat corporate and private executives around the city with their private security teams - seems like a good reason to explain you and your Walther’s presence.”

“Hmm… What’s this?” he reads the next paragraph. They have teamed him up with the freshly minted 008. Logical - considering Agent Park is speaks Korean, he can work the Chaebol angle while 007 tracks Sciarra.

Then Bond sees it, the two other cover names belonging to people he knows well - Mr. Collin Mitchel and Mr. Nishant Chowdhary will be joining them on the trip.

Eve can see Bond’s hesitation, “Well, your cover will look rather silly without a ‘fat cat’ of your own to secure won’t it? … M approved their request to attend the auto and aviation show yesterday afternoon, so it’s a happy coincidence. Besides, they can help run your Ops.”

Q will be pleased about his shopping trip getting approved. All that engineering in one place, it was all Q could talk about for days. This mission will take almost three weeks just looking at the timeline, bookended by the two exhibitions. Mr Kim’s ICO launch will happen in between that, but intel has him arriving early for preparations.

Altogether, the mission parameters seem perfect and spending a so much time with Q in picturesque Geneva is something he can only dream of - but it does mean he is weighed down with the task of ensuring security for both the boffins.

It would not have mattered in his younger days; what with his cavalier attitude towards the lives of people he crossed paths with on his missions - to the point that even the previous M rebuked him for it (e.g. Strawberry Fields). This older and wiser 007 can feel the creep of responsibility and the extra precautions he will need to take.

Eve the omniscient seems to sense his emotions, smiles kindly at him - and despite being a decade younger, she tells him, “Time to grow up James.”

——————————

SIS HQ - Cafeteria

Friday afternoon 12:30pm

“So, we finally finished the analysis on Hayden’s phone... I know, its been over a month. There’s been so much going on with the spike in ransomware attacks on UK targets and Hayden hasn’t been the most cooperative.” Mark is sitting opposite Q on the crowded communal cafeteria bench, chewing on his pesto pasta salad.

It is peak lunch hour and the place is chock a block full. Q is still waiting for his lunch, “Anything of interest?”

“It looks like a rooting malware was downloaded into his phone at one point and then removed to avoid detection. We’ve gone though the logs of each app to find what might have been compromised but we still can’t find anything…”

At that moment, Agent 007 appears from behind Q. He drops a brown envelope and an armful of packaged food onto the long table. He then picks out a sandwich and a bottle of iced tea and wordlessly slides it in front of Q. The agent then squeezes himself into the small opening on the bench between Q and the next occupant. He has to sit straddling the bench, perpendicular to the table and angled towards Q in order to fit.

Mark notices that Q doesn’t even flinch at the sudden invasion of his personal space, his attention still on Mark even as he unscrews the top off the bottle and begins to unwrap his sandwich without so much as an acknowledgement of 007.

Taking his cue, Mark continues, “The likeliest target was his email, but they’re mostly administrative, we don’t send classified information through emails. We’re combing the logs to see what could have interested the hackers.”

“Is this about Hayden?” 007 asks, catching up to the conversation while inhaling his massive panini sandwich.

Mark nods, “It’s going to take more time to figure out if the hackers got anything useful out of the whole thing.”

007 considers, “They went though all the trouble of setting up a trap like that - it would have taken months. No one expends resources like that unless they know what they want out of it...”

He shifts the sandwich in his hands, stuffing a piece of chicken that escaped back into the bread before he continues, “They would have known MI6 wouldn’t be so callous with classified information. So perhaps Hayden wasn’t the actual target - he might have just been a vector. A way to get into the system.”

Q finally turns to 007, “But it is unlikely that they would spend time rooting around our systems for information they might find relevant, it would take too long. Not to mention the navigating layers of security. The longer they stay inside the system, the higher chances of being found out.”

“Precisely. If it were me, I’d use the access to engineer it so that my target -gives- me what I’m looking for. Then bugger the hell out of there before they realise it.” Bond emphasises the word ‘gives’ by tapping a forefinger on the table top.

“She managed to slip away, but as I understand, DEF CON was her opportunity to break things off with Hayden - even he mentioned as much. I’m willing to bet their final rendezvous was to allow her to remove the malware from his phone. Think a bout it, why remove the malware unless you’ve already got what you need and you’re covering your tracks?” Bond takes a swig from Q’s iced tea.

“Bond, if it were you, what would you do with the access?” Q asks prompting him further.

“It would depend on what I’m looking for. If we take it that Hayden was not a random target, then consider what his position and clearance will give him access to. I could use social engineering to pose as Hayden and requisition seemingly innocuous information that might point me in a direction or to confirm intel,” Bond takes them thorough his thought process.

Mark thinks out loud, “His emails just contain administrative stuff. Meeting schedules, budgets, department rosters, project timelines… hiring and resignation notices—“

Bond cuts him off before he misses the point, “Put motive aside for the moment and look at the behaviour. If we work on the premise that the information was given to the hacker, try checking his inbox - though it’s likely the hacker would have deleted it. So check his deleted email logs, even if they emptied the bin, I’m sure you have ways around that don’t you?”

The two boffins stare at him for a moment. The type of work they do meant that they are naturally wired as detail oriented and deep technical thinkers, but can sometimes miss the forest for the trees.

Mark swallows the last of his mouthful, expression excited. He picks up his trash and water bottle and starts to extricate himself from the bench, “Good chat 007. I’m going to—,” he makes a flailing gesture in the direction of the lift banks, indicating he was going to get right on it. “I’ll update the both of you later!” he calls back to them almost as an afterthought.

—

Moment later, another SIS employee slides into the vacated seat, grateful to have found an opening. But once she realises who is sitting across from her, she seems to hesitate before nodding politely to Bond and Q who return the gesture.

The general population in SIS are a little wary around the Double-0 agents. Something about knowing definitively that the person you’re facing has taken a life possibly with their bare hands - even if it is in the service of the nation that makes most people uncomfortable.

It is exactly how 007 likes it anyway; keeps the small talk at bay. Bond turns his attention to Q, his voice dropping lower now that it is only two of them in the conversation, mouth inches from Q’s ear, “What are you doing after lunch? Do you have time to talk about Geneva?” he taps the official looking brown envelope on the table.

“Ah, I have a meeting with the people from Aston Martin at Tintagel House. Shouldn’t take long. We can discuss after that?” Q suggests.

Bond perks up like a child trying to guess his Christmas present. “Oh? Am I getting a new car?”

“You realise that there are twelve other agents we have to outfit besides yourself…” Q gives him a pointed look, reclaiming his iced tea that Bond stole.

“Besides, it might end up being an electric car; and we know how you feel about any vehicle we issue you that has anything short of a V8 inside.”

007 at least had the temerity to look sheepish. He recalls the heated argument several years ago with Q-Branch the last time they attempted to send him out with a hybrid car. An argument he may live to regret, now that the technology has progressed so rapidly.

“Can I come with?” Bond asks, trying not to sound too needy by concentrating on wiping his fingers with a paper napkin. It has been over month ago that they agreed to share living arrangements, but he’s been away on mission for half of it so realistically speaking, his wardrobe has spent more time in Q’s bedroom than his person.

“You can wait in the lab. Or… you might even try locating that mythical office of yours. Legend has it you were given one, even if it might be a hot desk.” Q teases him.

—————

Tintagel House, Albert Embankment

In the end, Q relents and lets Bond walk him the short distance to Tintagel House and the rented co-working space that Q-Branch employees use when they need to meet external vendors.

The two representatives from Aston Martin are waiting when they arrive. Q introduces himself as Collin Mitchel from MTech R&D Consulting. Bond’s presence is explained away as ‘private security’ a convenient excuse when he wants to be ‘seen but not heard’.

To the outside world, the four of them - Q (Collin Mitchel), R (Jenny Khoo), S (Nishant Chowdhary), and P (Mark Trent) are Senior Project Managers of MTech, a private engineering R&D firm specialising in IT security and customised equipment solutions.

The little exclusive R&D company is the front that allows Q-Branch to procure components and equipment without being directly involved. Their role as Senior Managers is carefully crafted to position them high enough to have clout when dealing with external contractors but not high enough to warrant any further interest in them personally. A careful balancing act.

This is their cover story for most of their day-to-day lives outside the walls of SIS. The first and most superficial layer of their identities. It is their public persona - the names on their takeaway coffee cups and the names the world would call them.

As for the car, it is not a production car at all. ‘Mr Mitchel’ is custom designing a car to very exacting specifications. They have the chassis pinned down based on the Vantage. And the body will be a custom designed beauty, if the concept drawings are anything to go by - but the engine and other mechanicals have yet to be finalised. Collin is leaning towards electric as the small motors leave more room inside for ‘modifications’. The auto show will give him inspiration for how he can implement the vision.

Bond still doesn’t know who the car is for; Q refuses to say. Aside from the travesty of the electric motor, the renderings of the car seem exactly his style. Surely he is due for a replacement. His poor track record keeping cars in one piece not withstanding, the older V8 Vantage he is usually assigned is looking frankly anaemic at this point.

The meeting ends an hour later. As Q walks them out of the building, the senior rep who’s known Collin for a while now asks a curious question. “Hey Mitchel, seeing that your office is so close the the SIS building, have you ever met an MI6 agent?”

Q is unperturbed by her question. It is a question that comes up often in various forms during small talk. “Well, they’d be shit spies if I can spot them,” is his practiced reply. He takes a peek over her shoulder at Bond who is standing to the side - listening to everything.

“Ha! True… Imagine though, you could be having lunch at the place across the street and sitting next to someone like Jason Bourne.” The rep seems to find the idea titillating.

“Nevermind the spies, imagine the kind of tech they have in there. I read somewhere that they’ve got submersible cars and portable jet-packs..,” the second rep, an engineer, chimes in. “Being the Quartermaster must be the coolest job.”

Again Q unconcerned. The codename has been around for decades, since even before Major Boothroyd. Q himself had heard the name thrown around in engineering school, used to reference the more ridiculous solutions that students came up with.

“Yes, I suppose it would…” Q agrees with the assessment and leaves it at that.

———

SIS HQ, Q-Branch - Lower Ground Floor 1

Agent Marcus Park does not know the ‘rules’ yet. The newly minted Double-0 replaces the outgoing 008 who has miraculously survived to see retirement. Park is of Korean descent, mid 30s, former Captain in the Royal Army…… Tall and lean, at home in street fashion and cleans up well when needed. Tech and social media savvy, he’s the new generation agent - as long as he stays alive long enough.

He’s been measured, photographed, scanned, sampled, pinched, poked and prodded all day in Medical and Q-Branch as they collect the the information they need to customise all the bits that will go into his kit. Marcus thinks the Q-Branch minions know more about him by now than he knows himself. They even know his bone density and which side of his molars he prefers to chew on.

Thankfully by mid afternoon, Nish releases him temporarily to let him have a break. He has taken the opportunity to make himself a cup of tea and have some biscuits. He returns to Nish’s workspace to wait for further instructions carrying his tea in a borrowed novelty Q10 mug.

Nish is typing on his workstation, reviewing Park’s results but seems distracted - stealing surreptitious looks his way. A few other minions slow down as they walk by as well. As the new agent, Marcus is expecting some sort of hazing. Though he’s expecting it to come from the senior Double-0s.

He thinks it is better to get it done with. “I get the feeling something’s up? Is the tea spiked?”

Nish tries to find his words, without making Q-Branch seem like weird people, but just ends up gulping air like a goldfish.

“Earl grey? In the fancy tin?” Marcus prompts.

“No. No… It’s not spiked. That’s the Quartermaster’s tin.”

“Ah, he’s particular about that sort of thing is he?” Mischief. “I won’t tell if you won’t,” he taps the side of his nose.

Josh, the minion occupying the next table waves his arms frantically at Nish from behind 008. He points repeatedly at the CCTV monitor mounted on the column above his workstation. On it, they can see feeds from all levels of Q-Branch, including the lift lobby and main doors of each floor - it is as much for security as well as work safety.

Nish takes a quick peek at the monitor and starts to worry. “Not exactly…. It’s not the tea, and Its not the Quartermaster you should be worried about.“

Okaay… Marcus is starting to think Q-Branch are a weird bunch. He had only been officially introduced to Q in the morning. Marcus has been an agent for several years but stationed overseas. As a field agent, he normally collected his tech from his handlers so never expected that the skinny, floppy haired man-child he’d crossed paths with maybe twice in the SIS bulling was THE Quartermaster. He seemed normal enough from the brief encounter, perhaps bordering on patronising - but that could be just the formality that made it seem so.

“Josh will make you a fresh cup!” Nish snaps his fingers urgently at the other man. Josh rushes up to Marcus to retrieve the mug.

“Oh, don’t trouble yourself. This one is fine.” Marcus waves him away still holding on to the mug. Josh is paralysed, not knowing what to do. He can’t very well wrestle it out of the agent’s hands.

Too late.

”Ah 008. Nish. How is the fitting going?” Q’s voice carries from behind Nish. Nish does not have to turn around to know that 007 is with him. Josh slinks away quickly.

“Quartermaster. It’s going very well. Taking a break, just replenishing the sugar levels,” 008 lifts the mug of tea and the plate of biscuits. If the Quartermaster is that particular about his tea he’s going to try and get a rise out of him.

But Q does not react. Instead it is the man next to him that stills ever so slightly - no that’s not accurate, it was more like an almost imperceptible shift in body language. The body loosing that casual ease, control sliding into place.

A fellow double agent Marcus is sure. Predators know other predators. They study each other for a moment.

Q realises they haven’t been introduced. “Ah 008, have you met 007?”

Both men extend a hand out for a polite shake. Introductions ensue.

Nish uses the opportunity to signal to Josh to check his chat program.

:: Make a fresh pot and get back here with 3 mugs ASAP! ::

Josh flees to the pantry just in time, as the introductions finish. Nish then draws everyones’ attention to the data they have collected so far in the day. And when he runs out of interesting things to say about the data, he tries to shift the conversation to the new car for 008.

“Ah, about 008’s car - how did the meeting with Aston Martin go?” Which was apparently the wrong thing to say.

There is no mistaking the hurt and affront as 007’s eyes go wide and the set of his mouth goes slack.

Q grimaces at Nish and squeezes his eyes shut a moment before turning to face 007. The lowered tilt of his head and the apologetic smile up at 007 tells Nish that there might have been a misunderstanding about it. Oops?

What follows is an uncomfortable summary of the meeting with Aston Martin. With Q trying to convey his excitement about the project without offending 007 further.

Marcus listens attentively, leaning casually on Nish’s worktable, asking appropriate questions and offering his input about the design and potential modifications - all the while taking sips from the mug cupped in his hands. With each consecutive sip, he notices 007’s stare get more intense, eyes like blue chips of ice - Bond seemed to be watching him drink.

Curious. Marcus is confident of his own charms, but he hasn’t even tried anything yet. Surely 007 would be much more discrete than this if he were interested. The senior agent is not conventionally handsome but he has a rugged charm - if you like that sort of thing. Still, it might be an enlightening experience. He catches Bond’s stare and flicks the tip of his tongue against the lip of the mug before taking the next sip.

Bond is not happy. He is still smarting from the disappointment, then he has to listen to 008 ingratiatingly espouse the benefits of going electric with the new car and tolerate his drinking out of Q’s mug. And to top it off, 008 is now -taunting- him??

He doesn’t know when it happened, but Q is so attuned to Bond’s breathing by now he can feel the irritation radiating off the man standing next him. He thinks it is a rather disproportionate response to not getting a new company car for an agent his age - especially when he was never promised one in the first place.

Nish thinks this afternoon is headed straight for a disaster. Why is Marcus molesting the mug - it is like waving a red cape in front of an angry bull. Bond is so still it it is foreboding. Where the hell is Josh??!

Josh finally appears with a tray of mismatched mugs filled with tea. He nudges his way in between 007 and 008 using the tea tray as a wedge.

“Oh! Thank you Josh. You didn’t have to…” Q is bewildered; his minions don’t usually make tea for their visitors with the exception of Mallory. It is not encouraged to prevent the double-0s from feeling further entitled.

Josh deliberately picks a spot on the table, right on the small strip of clear space in front of 008 to set the tray down. This forces Marcus to put down the Q10 mug somewhere else and help Josh clear a bigger area to fit and unload the tray.

Nish swipes the mug in the ensuing distraction and sets it on the far end of the worktable away from 008. Bond catches the action and cotton’s on; then decides to take matters into his own hands.

In a bizarre turn of events, 007 proceeds to pick up each fresh mug of tea and offers it to Nish first; then to Josh - who accepts it out of pure shock. And then finally to Marcus - who looks bemused as he accepts it.

Then he leans very close to Q, a hand on the small of his back - voice intimate, “I’ll go get your tea.” Then he leaves for the pantry; collecting the Q10 mug when he rounds the table.

This leaves the four of them (Q, Nish, Josh and Marcus) standing around the worktable in awkward silence. Q just shrugs and smiles tightly, not sure what has gotten into Bond today.

Marcus can tell something happened, and it had to do with tea - but is still not sure exactly what. He has to revise his assessment of Q-Branch and perhaps 007; they are DEFINITELY a weird bunch.

—————————————————————

London to Geneva

The twelve hour drive included several refuel and recharge stops. With 007 in his old V8 Vantage and 008 in a hand me down Audi R8 formerly assigned to 003. Q and Nish on the other hand were enjoying the brand new modified Tesla Model X.

The Tesla was meant to be a support vehicle for handlers or other members of the support team that needed to be closer onsite - a mobile Ops centre of sorts. The large central screen was perfect for video conferencing and the software that controlled most of the car’s functions made it easy to add specialised ‘apps’ that increased its capabilities. The ‘summon’ mode that came stock with the car had been hacked to near true autonomous levels - turning it into a bulletproof infiltration or escape pod that could be summoned remotely if needed.

To top it off, the boot space was now fitted with hot-swappable modules that could contain anything from an armoury, a medical lab, a mini workshop, a surveillance drone launchpad etc. depending on mission parameters. The teams could even use its batteries as a power generator for a limited time.

All in all, another technological marvel courtesy of Q-Branch. But the best thing about it was also the simplest. The fact that the electric motors had enough punch to allow support teams to catch up to, or flee from hot situations.

A fact not lost on the boffins during their test drive to Geneva. While the sport cars that 007 & 008 drove had higher top speeds, the Model X’s acceleration was as advertised - ludicrous.

“Oh my God. This thing is insane! Check the accelerometer, how many Gs did we pull?”

At motorway legal speeds, they were unmatched. Something the boffins took plenty of pleasure doing on the open road - overtaking the agents whenever they had the chance.

Q tuts smugly at them as he pushes the car performance, “Oh hello 007, 008. Mind picking up the pace? We haven’t got all day…”. The dark grey Tesla pulls out from behind the convoy and shoots smoothly past the stunned agents.

Over the 3-way call and the roar of his noisy V8 engine, Bond can hear Nish and Q hooting and cackling like teenagers. Drunk on instant torque - Nish even tried to egg the agents into a race.

“Come on! Last one to Saint Quentin buys dinner!” Nish called out over the connection.

“Where are they? Did we loose them?” Q ribs the agents.

A testament to his growing maturity, 007 refused to take the bait. He could out manoeuvre them easily even with the handicap; but as senior agent on this mission, he’s not about to encourage dangerous driving that will attract the attention the french police and get them pulled over for no good reason.

Agent 008 however, did take the bait - turning the section from Beaune to Saint Quentin into a light game of tag all the while quibbling with the boffins good naturedly.

“Dinner is a broad term. Are we talking Maccies or the Ritz?” Marcus wants clarification. His Audi R8 pulling out into the overtaking lane and closing the distance.

“Ah, there you are 008.” Q catches him in the rearview mirror.

“Mate, the Ritz of course! Risotto with Grana Padano cheese and truffle oil and a bottle of the best Chasselas in the house,” Nish is surfing the menu on his tablet.

“… wet blanket…” someone mutters over the line.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with 007 having the slowest car of the lot does it?” Marcus goads.

The roar of Bond’s V8 engine barely drowns out their laughter.

By the time they arrived at the next rest stop, Bond had reached the end of his patience. He is not about to let the inexperienced boffins attempt to race a young impetuous double-0 through the twisty alpine roads with its sharp drops up to Geneva.

He forces Nish to switch cars with him. As for Q, he pinned with a strong hand behind the neck like you would a naughty cat by the scruff - and fixed him with a disapproving glare.

That effectively put an end to the game. Bond’s sports car was far less intuitive to drive - unaided by fancy tech and electronics, the performance machine required skill and experience to control. Nish has not much of either with the car, so had to treat it with respect.

Which left Bond driving the Model X with Q as passenger. It is essentially a glorified minivan in his eyes.

“Since when were you the sensible one?” Q grouses, tapping on the navigation screen to check their arrival time.

“Haven’t you been in my ear nagging about it for years?”

“And you chose now to listen to me?”

“We can’t both be irresponsible at the same time.” Now there’s a sobering thought, the havoc the both of them can wreck on the world… maybe that’s why interpersonal relationships are frowned upon, “The world isn’t ready for it.”

Q looks over at Bond and taps some options on the screen. Suddenly the car feels different, just as they are about to merge back onto the motorway. The instant torque that throws him into his seat when he puts his foot on the accelerator catches him by surprise.

Twenty minutes into the drive and Bond has to grudgingly admit that the acceleration was addictive, and the silence a relief to his ears. The seats and suspension far less a strain on his back and the large screen is easier to read. 007 has to face the terrifying possibility that he might be getting… SOFT.

“Admit it, it’s not as bad as you thought it would be.”

“Yes fine, I’m starting to see what all the fuss is about. Can you drift in it?”

“Not quite yet…. We have figured out how to bypass the stability control and add it as a shortcut tile onscreen—,“ Q points to the red ‘Chase Mode’ button on the corner of the main screen.

“—but its a heavy car and no one in Q-branch has managed to get the tail to spin out without nearly killing themselves in the process.” Q grins at him, “You up to the challenge?”

Bond quirks a smile as he puts his foot down on the accelerator to effortlessly and silently overtake a lumbering lorry.

“Sure, when we get home… But what happens if I need to turn the car OFF and ON again in the middle of a chase?” He’s not quite ready to surrender his internal combustion engine for a mobile phone on wheels.

————-------

Geneva Motor Show - Palexpo, Grand-Saconnex

Aston Martin Exhibition Stand

“Bond, if you stand like that next to the Vantage any longer, the press is going to think you’re a hired model.”

The agent is doing his patented man-in-suit ‘pose’ - that blend of deliberate insouciance he’s perfected over the years, feet right distance apart, one hand in his pocket. Hell, his suit is probably more expensive than what some of the actual models here are wearing. If Q was being honest, Bond makes the car look even better.

Q knows what Bond is doing. He’d basically herded Q over to the massive Aston Martin stand and refused to let him leave. Dragging him back to draw his attention to one thing or another whenever Q tried to move on. The bastard is fishing for a new car and not so subtly hinting which one he wants.

“Come over here,” he uses his free hand to gesture to Q, cajoling and demanding at the same time.

Q has to roll his eyes. He comes to stand in front of the information sign next to the car. He knows it already, the recently updated Vantage now has a 4.0 litre twin turbo V8 engine pushing out 503hp, 0-62mph in 3.6 seconds with a price tag that does not even bear thinking.

Q does a bit of mental math, “At that price, not to mention the cost of the additional modifications, we usually want to get more than a single use out of it…” a direct jibe at 007’s track record.

Bond just smiles cheekily and leans in close, “But surely if it meant the difference between if I get home in one piece or… several pieces, it’d be worth it. Consider it safeguarding Her Majesty’s assets.”

-Oh low blow-. That’s emotional blackmail. If they weren’t in public, Q would have smacked him soundly with the stack of glossy brochures he’d been collecting all day.

“Or we could write you off as depreciated assets and be done with it,” that was extra mean, and Q knows it. So he softens the blow by handing Bond the stack of brochures to free his hands and starts to inspect the car - making a show that he is ‘considering’ the request.

He pops open the bonnet to examine the engine setup, walks around checks the tyres and breaks, checks the boot space before climbing in to examine the interior and driver’s setup and controls.

Q is surprised when an Aston Martin executive lands in the passenger seat all of a sudden and introduces himself as the Deputy head of Engineering before drawing Q into a conversation about the car’s performance and clever electronic bits.

In his peripheral vision, Q sees Bond round the car to stand just outside the driver’s door - trapping Q in the driver’s seat. Bond braces and arm on the hood of the car and leans into the cabin, ostensibly to listen to the explanations from the executive.

Lecture completed, Bond finally allows Q to climb back out. Q grudgingly accepts a brochure from one of the marketing reps circling the stand and when he turns to regard Bond, silently asking -Happy now?-.

The man is standing close - he picks the brochure out of Q’s hands, placing it on the very top of Q’s growing collection before handing the entire stack back to the quartermaster. A satisfied smile on his face that conveys -I want one-.

Nish appears just then interrupting their silent repartee, “Q!— I mean Collin.” Nish hisses his name in a not quite whisper. 007 has to suppress the urge to roll his eyes. The boffins keep forgetting to use their cover names.

“Have you seen the concept Lagonda? That thing is ‘effing bonkers!” Nish is holding a champagne flute. “They’ve got drinks too yeah!”

Their priority passes as well as MTech’s connections score them invitations to exclusive launches by select manufacturers. For the boffins, it is Disneyland but with free alcohol. 007 can only hope that they will manage not to get too drunk on ‘gratis’ bubbly by the end of the day.

———

It was not all play and no work for the agents though. The day proved to be a fruitful outing for all of them.

At the Bugatti concept unveiling, 008 spots his mark. Kim Min Jun is watching the event together with the other VIPs. Marcus makes his move, insinuating himself into his small entourage of young, rich, social climbers. He scores an invite to drinks and party that evening at the Mambo in the city.

007 too finds his mark walking the show floor with a stunning woman presumably his wife. He watches as Don Marco and Kim meet briefly upstairs in the invitation only pavilion of the Bugatti stand. 007 takes his opportunity, swiping an unattended marketing pass from a table and goes up to the woman whom he later learns is Donna Lucia Sciarra. From her, he finagles their hotel name and duration of stay whilst giving her a tour of the cars on display.

———----------------------

The Ritz-Carlton, Hotel De la Paix - 2:00am

Bond gets back to the Ritz at 2am. He’d spent the evening with Donna Lucia while her husband was away attending to business. While Lucia wasn’t averse to physical dalliances of her own, she was loyal to her husband and his chosen profession. She had enough understanding of economics to know that her own position and lifestyle depended on it.

Which meant that 007 despite his charms could not get much information out of her other than a hint that Sciarra’s activities revolved around a client (presumably Kim). However the evening did present him with the opportunity to plant trackers and upload a virus into Sciarra’s laptop.

Now back at the Ritz, his room is oddly empty - Q is not in the room nor the connecting one. Neither bed has been slept in, nor was there a note of explanation. He checks his phone in case he missed a message - nothing.

Bond searches his jacket for his earpiece and puts it back in, “Q? Are you there?” No answer, but a moment later a sleepy Nish answers.

“Yes 007? I thought you’d finished with your objective tonight? The virus will continue to monitor and transmit data, but it will take time for HQ to shift through to find anything of interest. Did you need anything else?”

“Where’s Q?” voice carefully neutral.

“Uhh… in his room? He said he had a headache and had me standby on comms tonight. Why?” Nish is starting to sound concerned.

Bond stamps down his rising unease. He’s about to request Nish to check Q’s location when the room lock beeps and the man himself enters, dressed as he was during dinner. Q is swaying on his feet a little, that and the flushed skin indicated that he might be slightly inebriated.

Eyes locked on each other. “Nevermind. False alarm,” he tells Nish and removes the earpiece.

“Where the -hell- were you?” Bond is relived, but can’t keep the irritation out of his voice.

Q is a little taken aback by it. “I…uh… 008 called, needing assistance. It seems Kim Min Jun has few topics of interest outside of the serial partying expected of a socialite. Financial investments is one and the other, engineering. He’s a software engineer by education though his actual coding experience is limited, however he does retain an -intense-“ head tilt to emphasise the world “—interest in the field.”

He’s rambling. Bond knows Q does that when he’s stalling. “What happened?” he asks, more gently this time.

“008 was having difficulty maintaining Kim’s interest, so requested my help. We met up with him at his rented residence for a private party. Sciarra was present as well. Marcus did the requisite drinking, including most of my share, while I did the talking. Mostly about IT security, a little bit about encryption - fundamentals for the most part.”

Q elaborates while walking further into the room. He starts to empty his pockets and removes his jacket. When he’s done, he leans against the hallway wall - clearly tired.

“After a while, Sciarra who hadn’t spoken much the entire night brings out a tablet. He had a game on it, some sort of storm the castle type strategy puzzle. The game is adaptive - machine learning adjusts the game’s response to the skill level of the player in real time. It does not have preset levels or preset game paths like traditional games.”

“I can’t imagine it would be something for commercial release, it’s terrible as a game - it felt more like a simulation. But to the right people, it would be entertaining I suppose. He asked if I could help him solve the game. He’d been struggling for weeks apparently.”

Then more quietly he adds, “Park and I were concerned that if we did not indulge him, Sciarra would leave early… and that would put you in a precarious situation.”

Q braces for Bond’s exasperation, “Q… we’ve discussed this. You are not to put yourself in danger for my sake.” Sleeping with a colleague had its complications.

“At no point this evening was Sciarra or Kim aggressive nor did I feel any immediate danger.. just a general unease.” Q tries to defend himself.

And quickly continues, “We spent close to an hour on it, trying multiple strategies before making significant headway. I wanted to leave after that, so made an excuse about being too drunk for anymore strenuous thinking. Sciarra did not seem inclined, wanting my help to finish it. Kim was more accommodating and let us leave. He seemed pleased though, enough to invite us to the launch of his ICO.”

Bond has a sinking feeling in his stomach. So that’s what Lucia alluded to, when she said her husband was out scouting for opportunities. What was 008 thinking? He’d tossed an unprepared boffin into shark infested seas and chummed the water.

“Invite YOU, you mean… I think their interests rest solely in you at this point.” Despite the disapproval roiling off him, Bond can sense how uncomfortable Q is and steps in close, hands wrapping around his ribcage. Q melts into the comforting touch, resting his hands on the lapels of Bond’s jacket.

“I suppose… James, I’m going confess - I’m feeling somewhat out of my depth in this. Sciarra makes me nervous. And the personal manipulation feels… distasteful. Intellectually I understand the need for it, but it’s so different when you’re in the thick of it, that constant anxiety about being found out.”

“I’m guessing you felt a connection with Kim? The manipulation works best if there is a connection but also feels the worst.” Bond hopes the explanation would help.

Q nods in agreement. “Kim is a good conversationalist, we have overlapping interests, in any other situation we could very well be friends. How do you do this?” It is a rhetorical question. He is beginning to understand what 007 has to do in the line of duty; how this line of work can alter your perception of the world. He recalls Bond’s file and the trauma of Vesper Lynd.

In a moment of drunken paranoia and insecurity of his own, Q’s internal commentary goes into a wild tangent - what if Bond with his training and psychopathic tendencies is toying with him? How would he even begin to tell? Cold creep of horror constricts his chest. What if one day James tells him that he’s done playing house? Itch scratched?

He tries to distract himself by picking at a loose thread sticking out of Bond’s shirt where a button should be, the next one down is missing as well. How unlike Bond, he’s usually so fastidious with his wardrobe— ohh!

“Did she… pop your buttons??” The mental image is not helping his insecurities at the moment. This is nothing, just a couple of buttons - nothing compared to the cuts and bruises Bond comes home wearing all too often. But it is enough to remind Q that as recent as half an hour ago, Bond was in the embrace of someone else. There is even a lingering hint of her perfume.

His expectations in this regard has not changed just because of their as of yet undisclosed relationship. Q can maintain a clinical detachment while reading about and even on occasion listening to 007’s amorous encounters in the line of duty. But he is usually spared the physical aftermath. James always return to him carefully put back and scrubbed clean of evidence so to speak. So to be confronted with it for the first time is jarring, especially in his current state of mind.

Bond feels Q stiffen in the embrace. The gentle idling hands on his chest suddenly ceasing their movements - recoiling slowly into loosely balled fists. He grabs Q’s hands before they slip off his chest.

The action snaps Q out of his spiral of paranoid thoughts, anchoring him. The cold tightness around his chest eases - the warm reality he chooses to believe in edging out the insecurities.

Bond sighs heavily, he is going to have a talk with with 008 in the morning. Park should have checked with him before involving Q in this. The Quartermaster for all his eager willingness to help any agent in need; is not trained psychologically to handle up close deception nor does he have the right personality traits for this type of field work.

“I need a shower.”

“I could use a shower.”

They both declare at the same time. This makes the both of them smile, lifting the dark mood.

“Care to join me? You scratch mine and I’ll scratch yours?” Bond starts to go in for a kiss but stops in time when realises that the taste the Lucia’s lipstick is probably still on his skin.

“I’ll join you, but they’ll be no scratching involved.” Q is already starting to undress him, pulling his shirttails out of his trousers. “Shower, then sleep,” is as detailed a plan he can muster at the moment.

“Oh, thank goodness.” Bond exhales, visibly deflating - the bravado bleeding out of him. He is no longer as indefatigable as his reputation suggests.

“By the way, fair warning: I will likely be quite the tosser in the morning. I can already feel the beginnings of a hangover. Do you think throwing up now would help?”

“How much did you have to drink?”

A less than attractive burp escapes him. “No idea. Several rounds, at least, of what they call Poktan-ju. It’s some sort of bomb-shot. Soju mixed with beer? Christ, those things are potent.”

Bond kisses his temple and guides him to the bathroom, “Come on, I’ll hold your hair.”

—————————————

Ritz-Carlton - Breakfast

“You’re shagging the Quartermaster.” Park concludes after the lecture.

Not quite the response Bond was looking for after his talk about not putting untrained personnel in harm’s way; but one has to admire his cheek.

“The bed in his room is always made. No personal items on the bedside table. The adjoining door is always open. There are no used clothing anywhere in his room or bathroom, only fresh ones the hotel laundry returns in the wardrobe. And even those have his jumpers mixed in with your suits…” Marcus checks Bond’s reaction, just to make sure he wasn’t going to need to avoid an impending punch.

“The clincher though, is he leaves his phone charging in your room on the bedside table next to what I’m assuming is his side… I peeked. If you’re trying to keep it a secret, you’re doing a pretty shit job,” he finishes with considerable smugness.

Bond wonders if the previous M hired the next generation based solely on the measure of their precocious impertinence. The four of them have been using the Quartermaster’s room as a meeting room every morning for sitrep before they got on with the day’s agenda. So he supposes it is only expected for an agent of Park’s calibre to catch on sooner rather than later.

“Congratulations, you’ve figured out something every boffin in Q-Branch would have been able to tell you,” Bond deadpans.

A congenial chuckle escapes Marcus, “I have to say though, I’m somewhat embarrassed at how long it took for me to notice. For a short while I mistook your territorial displays as invitation. I was about to proposition you at one point… even if you aren’t exactly my type.”

Now that, genuinely was surprising. The amusing confession is an olive branch, and Bond accepts it by not punching Marcus in the face to underscore the message of his lecture.

And in regards to the lesson, Marcus concedes, “Fine! I’ll take your suggestion into consideration… for future reference.”

“Instruction—”

“—Advice.”

“Direction.“

“Counsel.”

“Order.” Bond is beginning to understand Mallory’s accelerated hair loss over the last two years.

“How about we settle at strong recommendation?” Marcus suggests affably, some measure of contrition in his cheeky smile.

Bond just blinks slowly and sighs. Agent 009 must be certifiable to want to one day succeed Mallory into a leadership position.

He looks over Marcus again. Despite the rebellious backtalk, the younger agent looks like shit warmed over. He is nearly slumped over the breakfast table.

“Should we have your stomach pumped?” The pathetic sight pulls a shred of pity out of him. Q isn’t even awake yet and if Marcus drank most of his share for him; it is no small feat that the agent managed to get out of bed this morning. Bond is aware of the ‘fellowship’ drinking required in other cultures, so spares Park a second lecture.

Marcus just waves the comment away. “Nnngh. Put a bullet in me and be done with it.”

—

Bond’s buzzing phone signals the end of the conversation. No caller ID, number withheld. He answers but says nothing.

“You boys at MI6 just can’t resist a challenge can you?” a familiar voice says without preamble.

Now this is interesting. “Felix. How are you? To what do I owe this call?”

“The puzzle box. The dammed game. It’s a test. Sciarra has been toting that thing around for months. We’re not sure for what yet. But it seems your new boy and the computer nerd he brought along made quite an impression last night.”

-Ah shit…- “And how do you know this?”

“Standard stuff, you know better than to ask. What I can tell you is Sciarra’s been seen poking around Silicone Valley. Word is, his next stop was going to be Russia but seems you boys have given him reason to delay that.”

“What do you know about Kim Min Jun? Your guys have better access to South Korea than we do.”

“Not as much as we’d like. The boy is a princeling, but only on the periphery - he’s a bit of an outcast. His connection to the family is through his mother who is the youngest of four. She was sent to the Europe for her education, where she met a man - a fellow student. She had a child by him outside of her family’s approval.”

“They married for the sake of appearances, but her family never warmed to him. He had some means, but nothing compared to her family. So eventually they split and she returned to Korea with their young son. Kim’s full name is Ferdinand Oberhauser-Kim Min Jun. Though he dropped the use of his father’s family name in favour of his mother’s surname Kim.“

“Alright so that’s his past, what about his current?” 007 continues to fish for information.

“Kim might not be a central figure or direct heir but he is still considered family, so there are… sensitivities involved. If it leaks that the we have interest in a family member of a powerful Chaebol, the political and public fallout could jeopardise international relations.” Leiter is being unusually forthcoming this morning.

“I see… so is this a courtesy call or do you need something?” the bored tone belying the interest underneath.

Felix clears his throat. -Here it comes- Bond thinks, “It seems your side has had better luck getting close to Kim. We’d like to know what he’s up to with the ICO. In return, we’ll tail Sciarra and let you know what he’s looking for in Silicone Valley and Russia.”

He doesn’t answer immediately, milking it for all its worth. It is not everyday that the CIA admits to being one step behind.

Eventually he answers, “Well, no point doubling up on the same job.” He doesn’t tell Felix that, MI6 already has a virus in Sciarra’s laptop. Anyway, Leiter might have more information and a partnership might be useful in the future. If the CIA is also interested in Kim, there might be something larger at play.

There is a hint of relief in Felix’s voice, “Always a pleasure doing business with you James. Oh and, wherever you found that computer nerd, I hope he’s insured. We don’t know how far this goes. We’ll be in touch.”

—————————————————

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bountyofbeads · 6 years

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/local/social-issues/it-was-getting-ugly-native-american-drummer-on-the-maga-hat-wearing-teens-who-surrounded-him/2019/01/19/41678d84-1c1b-11e9-8813-cb9dec761e73_story.html?__twitter_impression=true

In an interview with The Post, Omaha tribe elder Nathan Phillips says he “felt like the spirit was talking through me” as teens jeered and mocked him.

‘It was getting ugly’: Native American drummer speaks on the MAGA-hat-wearing teens who surrounded him

By Antonio Olivo, Cleve R. Wootson Jr., Joe Heim |January 19, 2019 at 6:32 PM | The Washington Post |

Posted January 19, 2019 |

The images in videos that went viral on social media Saturday showed a tense scene near the Lincoln Memorial.

In them, a Native American man steadily beats his drum at the tail end of Friday’s Indigenous Peoples March while singing a song of unity urging them to “be strong” in the face of the ravages of colonialism that now include police brutality, poor access to health care and the ill effects of climate change on reservations.

Surrounding him are a throng of young, mostly white teenage boys, several wearing “Make America Great Again” caps, with one standing about a foot from the drummer’s face also wearing a relentless smirk.

Nathan Phillips, a veteran in the indigenous rights movement, was that man in the middle.

In an interview Saturday, Phillips, 64, said he felt threatened by the teens and that they suddenly swarmed around him as he and other activists were wrapping up the march and preparing to leave.

Phillips, who was singing the American Indian Movement song that serves as a ceremony to send the spirits home, said he noticed tensions beginning to escalate when the teens and other apparent participants from the nearby March for Life rally began taunting the dispersing indigenous crowd.

A few people in the March for Life crowd began to chant “Build that wall, build that wall,” he said.

“It was getting ugly, and I was thinking: ‘I’ve got to find myself an exit out of this situation and finish my song at the Lincoln Memorial,’ ” Phillips recalled. “I started going that way, and that guy in the hat stood in my way and we were at an impasse. He just blocked my way and wouldn’t allow me to retreat.”

So, he kept drumming and singing, thinking about his wife, Shoshana, who died of bone marrow cancer nearly four years ago, and the various threats that face indigenous communities around the world, he said.

“I felt like the spirit was talking through me,” Phillips said.

The encounter generated a wave of outrage on social media less than a week after President Trump made light of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre of several hundred Lakota Indians by the U.S. Cavalry in a tweet that was meant to mock Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who Trump derisively calls “Pocahontas.”

Related: [Trump invokes one of the worst Native American massacres to mock Elizabeth Warren]

In a statement, the Indigenous Peoples Movement, which organized Friday’s march, called the incident “emblematic of our discourse in Trump’s America.”

“It clearly demonstrates the validity of our concerns about the marginalization and disrespect of Indigenous peoples, and it shows that traditional knowledge is being ignored by those who should listen most closely,” Darren Thompson, an organizer for the group, said in the statement.

Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), who with Rep. Sharice Davids (D-Kan.) became the first Native American women elected to Congress last fall, said the video was difficult to watch.

“To see a group of students from a Catholic school who are practicing such intolerance is a sad sight for me,” said Haaland, who is Catholic.

Some of the teens in the video wore sweatshirts from Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills, Ky., which sent students to Washington to participate in Friday’s antiabortion March for Life event, according to an archived page of the school’s website that was taken down Saturday.

Related: [A march takes on new meaning in the age of Trump]

School officials and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington released a joint statement Saturday.

“We condemn the actions of the Covington Catholic High School students towards Nathan Phillips specifically, and Native Americans in general,” the statement said.

“The matter is being investigated and we will take appropriate action, up to and including expulsion.”

Chase Iron Eyes, an attorney with the Lakota People Law Project, said the incident lasted about 10 minutes and ended when Phillips and other activists walked away.

“It was an aggressive display of physicality. They were rambunctious and trying to instigate a conflict,” he said. “We were wondering where their chaperones were. [Phillips] was really trying to defuse the situation.”

Phillips, an Omaha tribe elder who fought in the Vietnam War and now lives in Michigan, has long been active in the indigenous rights movement.

A co-founder of the Native Youth Alliance cultural and education group, he shows up to Arlington National Cemetery every Veterans Day with a peace pipe to pay tribute to Native Americans who served in the U.S. military.

“My job has always been taking care of the fire, to keep the prayers going,” Phillips said.

In that role, he has encountered anti-Native American sentiment before: In 2015, Phillips was verbally attacked by a group of Eastern Michigan University students who were dressed as Native Americans during a theme party near the town of Ypsilanti, according to news reports.

Phillips had approached the group, informing them that their celebration was racially offensive, a local Fox News station reported. One of the students threw a beer can at him, Phillips told the news outlet.

But the Friday incident, combined with the ensuing attention from media outlets scrambling to get his story, left him shaken.

“I’m still trying to process what happened,” Phillips said. “I’m feeling a little bit overwhelmed.”

Still, he said, he hopes the teens will find a lesson in all of the negative attention generated by the videos.

“That energy could be turned into feeding the people, cleaning up our communities and figuring out what else we can do,” Phillips said. “We need the young people to be doing that instead of saying: ‘These guys are our enemies.’ ”

#u.s. news #politics #maga #racisim

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cutsliceddiced · 4 years

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New top story from Time: Inside the Dangerous Mission to Understand What Makes Extremists Tick—and How to Change Their Minds

On a cool winter’s day in early 2014, the American academic Nafees Hamid was invited for tea at the second-story at the Barcelona apartment of a young Moroccan man. It started well enough; they sat down at the kitchen table, chatting amiably in French while two acquaintances of the host sat nearby in the living room. Halfway through the conversation, though, things took a turn. “He started saying things like, ‘Why should we trust any Westerner?’” Hamid recalls. “‘Why would we not kill every one of them? Why should I even trust you—you are an American—sitting here? Why should I even let you out of my apartment?’” The man briefly left the kitchen and went into the living room to speak to the others in Arabic, a language in which Hamid is not fluent. But he repeatedly heard one word he did know: munafiq—a term that, at best, means hypocrite; at worst, “enemy of Islam.”

“I realized that they were talking about me, and that this was going in the wrong direction,” says Hamid, who had arrived hoping to coax the Moroccan to participate in a study.

As quietly as possible, he opened the second-story window and jumped out, his fall cushioned by the awning of a fruit stand below. Adrenaline spiking, he bolted to the safety of a crowded train station a few blocks away.

Field research on jihad has its hazards. Hamid, now 36, had come to the apartment knowing—from a questionnaire he had already filled out—that the Moroccan man harbored extremist inclinations. The effort was part of a larger project to discover the roots of radicalization and what might cause someone to fight or die—or kill—for their beliefs.

Richard MillingtonNafees Hamid in London on August 19, 2020.

But the work goes on, a part of a larger undertaking by an unusual network of policy experts and international scientists, many of whom have their own harrowing tales of escaping danger or navigating dicey situations in pursuit of groundbreaking research. Recently, the group published the first brain-imaging studies on radicalized men and young adults susceptible to radicalization. The private research firm behind the group’s work, Artis International, is officially headquartered in Scottsdale, Ariz., but doesn’t truly have a base. Its academics and analysts operate from far-flung places, tapping an array of funding from various governments, the U.S. military and academic institutions. The central goal of the firm is to advance peace by figuring out what motivates people to become violent—and how to reorient them toward conflict resolution, or prevent them from becoming violent in the first place.

Read More: This Researcher Juggled Five Different Identities to Go Undercover With Far-Right and Islamist Extremists. Here’s What She Found

That means getting as close to the perpetrators and their supporters as possible. Much of Artis’ work has been rooted in behavioral sciences and informed by straightforward research methods, like surveys. But Artis researchers have also pushed the boundaries of social science, through everything from experimental surveys on armed forces to psychological tests on imprisoned extremists. Its investigations have led researchers to the front lines of the war against ISIS, restive areas in North Africa, and lately into Eastern Europe and cyberspace.

Even by Artis standards, the recent brain-imaging studies conducted in Barcelona—the work that had Hamid leaping from a window—were remarkable for the level of risk the researchers undertook. The scientists wanted to find hard neurological evidence to support previous social-science findings and widely held assumptions: that extremists could be influenced by their peers, and later, that social exclusion may harden the beliefs of a budding extremist. To gather this sort of information, researchers like Hamid would have to scour the streets of Barcelona for extremists; somehow convince hundreds of them to take surveys; and then, after identifying the most radicalized, coax them to undergo multiple brain scans at a seaside hospital campus. What could possibly go wrong?

Origins: A Research Void

The roots of the Barcelona brain studies go back to 2005, when the U.S. government was still absorbing the 9/11 attacks. Richard Davis, who would go on to co-found Artis International two years later, had recently started working as a policy adviser for the U.S. Homeland Security Council (which reports to the President) and was alarmed by how the government came to its counter-terrorism strategies. “It became clear that many of the decisions that were being made—grand decisions about terrorism—were being made with little to no field-based scientific evidence backing them,” he says.

One key problem is that empirical extremism studies require access to materials that governments might not want to share, like transcripts of intercepted communications or interrogations, explains Liesbeth van der Heide, a research fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in the Hague. Ideally, the studies also involve access to extremists themselves, who are even harder to come by. “There aren’t many of them,” she says. And the ones that succeed in carrying out violent plans “tend to die in an attack or flee.”

So most terrorism research has tended to draw on secondary sources—reports in the media, for example, or other books or articles already published on the subject, resulting, she says, in “an echo chamber repeating what others have said.” An exhaustive 2006 review of 6,041 peer-reviewed studies on terrorism published from 1971 to 2003 found that only 3% were based on empirical data. “Thought pieces”—articles where authors discussed an issue theoretically or offered an opinion—accounted for 96%.

This alarmed Davis. He believed that any government interested in curbing violence needed not more thought pieces, but a more scientific understanding of the people who commit it based on primary sources. Academics already doing this sort of work were rare exceptions, but both Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer turned forensic and clinical psychiatrist, and Scott Atran, an anthropologist, had spent extensive time with members of militant jihadist groups, from the Afghan mujahedin to al-Qaeda. Davis sought them out in the fall of 2005, and by 2007 had convinced them to help him launch a firm dedicated to on-the-ground research into violence reduction. They named it Artis, Latin for “of art,” “of skill” or, in some usages, “of science.”

That same year, Artis cobbled together funding from a range of institutions—including the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the French National Centre for Scientific Research—to study the underlying causes of political violence. They decided to focus on a social-psychology concept called “sacred values”—a person’s deepest, most nonnegotiable values—which would lay the groundwork for their Barcelona brain scans.

Sacred Values

In the 1990s, social psychologists Jonathan Baron at the University of Pennsylvania and Philip Tetlock at the University of California, Berkeley, developed the concept of “sacred values” to counter economic theories that suggested everything had a price. Certain values (like human life, justice, civil liberties, environmental or religious devotion) could be so sacred to people that they would be unwilling to act against them, no matter the cost or consequence.

Atran, who had been studying values for decades through the lens of anthropology, began applying this concept to the study of violent extremists after 9/11. It occurred to him then that, perhaps, the perpetrators had committed the suicide attacks in defense of deep values the rest of the world had been overlooking. By 2007, Atran had advanced this line of thinking in several articles about jihadist terrorists. His Artis colleagues found evidence that material incentives may backfire when adversaries see the issues at the heart of a dispute (like land and nationhood) as “sacred.”

The Artis team continued to hone the connection between sacred values and violence into 2014, when a comment from President Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper Jr., gave them a renewed sense of purpose. In an interview, Clapper said that the U.S. had underestimated ISIS militants because predicting a group’s will to fight was “an imponderable.” In response to that comment, Atran and his colleagues decided to use their knowledge of sacred values to measure militants’ will to fight, which they believed was indeed “ponderable.”

That same year, they did survey-based research on networks in Spain and Morocco responsible for the 2004 Madrid bombings. It found that people were more willing to sacrifice their lives if they were part of a close-knit group that shared their sacred values. They also began laying the groundwork for a separate study, eventually published in 2017, that found that among members of various forces who fought against ISIS, those who expressed the most willingness to fight and die for abstract values like nationhood, heritage and religion tended to prioritize those values over their social groups, like family.

Still, by 2014 most such work had come from what fighters said in interviews or surveys. Atran was convinced that sacred values were so deep and powerful that the brain must process them differently than it processes decisions about more mundane issues. But to truly understand the relationships between neural pathways associated with such values and willingness to sacrifice for them, Atran and his colleagues believed they needed to get a look inside extremists’ heads.

Recruitment

Barcelona’s Raval district is a maze of graffiti-sprayed buildings and narrow streets. In recent years, chic galleries and boutique clothing stores have begun to spring up between halal butchers and Arabic-language bookshops, filling the boarded-up storefronts emptied by the waves of evictions that ravaged the primarily immigrant neighborhood following the 2008 financial crisis.

The locale has also been the epicenter for a number of foiled terrorist plots, and is carefully monitored by both Spanish and international intelligence bodies for jihadist activity. That made it an appealing place for Hamid and his colleagues to recruit radicalized men for their inaugural brain study on extremists. The Artis researchers planned to use a combination of behavioral tests and brain scans in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to see whether a hardened extremist’s “will to fight” for his sacred values was susceptible to peer influence.

In early 2014, the group decided to target a small pocket of extremists in Barcelona’s Pakistani community that authorities had been tracking for years. They set their sights on 20- to 30-something first-generation Pakistani men who openly supported Lashkar-e-Taiba, an al-Qaeda affiliate based in South Asia. Initially, Hamid’s recruitment strategy consisted of becoming a regular at neighborhood cafés and conspicuously reading articles or books that he imagined might appeal to a jihadist, in hopes that someone would approach him. “That really didn’t work,” he says. “It was far more effective to be transparent.”

So he started to look for Urdu speakers who seemed like they had time on their hands. When he saw likely candidates chatting with friends on park benches or sipping tea at one of the many outdoor terraces in the Raval district, Hamid would approach them cautiously. “I didn’t want to seem like I was stereotyping an entire population … I think, also, I just didn’t want to get punched in the face.”

He explained that he was a psychologist conducting surveys on people’s strongly held values related to religion, culture and politics. After chatting for a while, he would invite them to take an initial survey designed to assess a person’s level of radicalization, according to three specific criteria: their support of the militant jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba; their approval of violence against civilians; and, lastly, their expressed willingness to aid or participate in armed jihad. The survey took 30 to 60 minutes to complete, and Hamid paid everyone who took it €20 ($22) for their time. For the purposes of the study, a person who fit all three criteria was considered radicalized, in which case, Hamid would call them to ask if their friends might also want to take the survey.

As a Pakistani American, Hamid was acutely sensitive to the fact that the people he was approaching might feel profiled. (And in fact, a number of the nonradicalized people who gleaned the thrust of the survey questions were offended, he said.) However, he also recognized the scientific importance of focusing on this particular population.

“We wanted to study radicalization in the context of violent Sunni jihadism, which at the time we conducted our research was the main international terrorist threat,” he explains. It made sense to focus on recruiting from population (and Moroccan population for a follow-up study on the brains of budding radicals) because they represented the two biggest Sunni Muslim groups in the area. And, “the majority of people pulled into terrorist groups from the Barcelona region came from those two ethnic groups,” he says.

The Artis team also believed that it was scientifically important to study groups that weren’t white college students—a population so overly represented in cognitive-science study that they have their own acronym: people from white, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies (WEIRD). “Studying sacred values and willingness to fight and die in two separate ethnic groups with very different cultural backgrounds allowed us to examine the generalizability of our claims,” says Hamid.

To protect both the extremists and the study itself, rather than using names, the researchers assigned each volunteer a number. They also tried to avoid asking any questions in the surveys that might put them in tricky legal terrain. “I would tell [the volunteers], ‘Do not tell me anything about a crime you committed, because that will implicate me,’” says Hamid. Instead, the researchers asked hypothetical questions aimed at assessing participants’ beliefs and values, rather than what a person had already done or intended to do with them.

By the end of 2015, Hamid and his team had convinced 146 people to take the survey. He and his colleagues then followed up with the most radicalized of the group—the 45 men who met all three criteria—offering them an additional €100 ($120) to come to a laboratory for the rest of the study. Thirty men, ages 18 to 36, agreed.

Into the Lab

The Autonomous University of Barcelona’s fMRI lab is located in the basement of a blocky gray building flanked by patches of green lawn where, on sunny days, college students like to picnic and read books. There, a team led by Clara Pretus, a neuroscientist in her mid-20s, put these 30 men through the next stages of the study.

The men came to the lab in groups of three or four. After a brief orientation to ease their nerves, the brain scans would begin. The men would lay prone on the bed of the fMRI machine, which would back them into a tube. They wore goggles affixed to a video screen that would flick on and project a statement written in Urdu: “Prophet Muhammad must never be caricatured” or “The Qur’an should never be abused,” for example. Each statement touched on an issue that mattered to the group, based on previous surveys and interviews. The scientists knew which statements aligned with each man’s sacred and nonsacred values, based on those same previous surveys, and they wanted to know how their brains would respond to each. To figure this out, they asked the men to rate how willing they would be, on a scale of 1 to 7, to fight and die for each declaration.

The machine snapped pictures of their brains as the men used a handheld device to make their ratings. After they had gone through all the prompts, Pretus offered them the opportunity to review the slides again—but this time, they’d be able to see how their own responses compared with those supposedly given by their “peers.” This peer group was presented to the men as “the average opinion of the Pakistani community in Barcelona.” But in reality, the researchers had fabricated the ratings for the sake of the experiment. In some instances, the researchers made them appear to align with the men’s responses. In other cases, their “peers” appeared to be more inclined to fight and die for specific values. In still others, less.

After the men had seen how the ratings of their so-called peer group differed from their own, they were given the opportunity to go through the slides one last time—this time outside of the machine—and rate their willingness to fight and die for each statement once again. The scientists wanted to see if the responses from their “peer group” would make them alter their initial responses. In cases where anyone changed his mind, scientists would go back through the fMRI images to see what was happening in his brain as he reviewed the peer information that ultimately compelled him to reconsider his initial answer.

After they completed the final task, the men, whose names they never learned, were free to take their money and go, disappearing into the streets.

Findings

Over the following weeks, the team analyzed the data. As expected, the men expressed greater willingness to fight and die for their sacred values than for their nonsacred values. More interesting were what parts of the brain appeared involved with each question. When participants rated their willingness to sacrifice for their sacred values (defending the Qur’an, for example), parts of the brain linked to deliberation (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus and parietal cortex, which Pretus describes as parts of the fronto-parietal or “executive-control network”) were far less active than when they rated their willingness to kill and die for issues they cared about less (like the availability of halal food in public schools). Dr. Oscar Vilarroya, the lead neuro-scientist on the team, says this indicates that humans don’t deliberate about their sacred values: “We just act on them.”

While this may seem like common sense, the finding was significant, since nearly all sacred-values research to that point had been based on surveys and other tools that assessed what people said—not tied to brain activity. “When you’re taking a social survey, you can lie,” explains Atran. “But brain patterns can’t be faked.” It was the first published study scanning the brains of extremists.

Knowing extremists essentially don’t deliberate when considering the values most important to them confirmed something Atran long believed: that deradicalization programs focused on altering extremists’ beliefs through logic and reasoning, or through trade-offs and material incentives, are doomed to fail. Others had made this argument to explain why programs like France’s civics- and reward-focused deradicalization program, launched in late 2016, had flopped within a year. Here was brain science to support the case.

There was one finding of the study, though, that provided a glimmer of hope for an alternative approach: the areas in the brain linked to deliberation lit up when extremists realized their “peers” weren’t as willing to resort to violence to defend a particular value. And when given the opportunity, post–brain scan, to revise their initial answers to the question “How willing are you to fight and die for this value?” many of them adjusted their rating to better align with their peers. Hamid says this shows that peer groups, like family and friends, play a powerful role in determining whether an extremist will become violent. They will never be able to change the extremist’s core views or values, he says, but they can convince that person that violence is or is not an acceptable way to defend those values. This finding, Atran believes, could have real implications for governments and organizations working in counterterrorism.

“The lesson … is don’t try to undermine their values,” Atran says. “Try to show them there are other ways of committing to their values.”

Critiques and Real-World Applications

The team’s work, published in the Royal Society Open Science journal in June 2019, has garnered a flurry of attention, especially from social psychologists and other academics interested in human motivation. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University and author of the controversial book The Coddling of the American Mind, commended Atran and his colleagues on their “ecological validity”—how relevant the studies are to real-world problems. “We often use the easiest subjects to obtain, which are college students,” he says. “But Scott, at great expense and with great difficulty has always been committed to ecological validity—to studying people who are truly involved in extreme behavior, including terrorist behavior.”

But academics with a background in neuroscience, including Jay Van Bavel, an associate professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, and Patricia Churchland, who studies the intersection of brain activity and philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, expressed more caution. Churchland reviewed the study for Royal Society. In her review, she says, she warned that the brain regions and neural networks from which scientists drew their conclusions are still not very well understood and have been associated with a range of functions beyond simply “deliberation.”

Atran points out that he and his colleagues never set out to map the connection between brain parts and behaviors. Instead, they sought to—and did—find brain patterns that lined up with the results of behavioral studies. (He adds the usual science disclaimer: “All results are tentative, and we look for replication.”)

Meanwhile, as the academic world weighs the research, the Artis team has published additional brain studies on radicalization. And the U.S. military and foreign governments are already plotting how they might put the findings to use. Since the Barcelona work first began, Davis and Atran have been fielding calls from security officials around the world seeking advice on how to deal with radicalized populations and how to apply their research to newer problems, like criminal groups spreading disinformation and taking advantage of weak governance amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Davis is adamant that his researchers steer clear of directly advising any military or government—he doesn’t want the fate of suspects or a nation’s security to be pinned on one of them. But he’s happy to send his colleagues around the world to share their research findings and even collaborate on projects.

And, in a twist, the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado got in touch in 2016 seeking to collaborate and study how a cadet’s sacred values and identity with varying groups affect their willingness to fight and die. This April, the Academy, with Artis’ assistance, completed a small study that found that cadets who both viewed religion as a sacred value and strongly identified as a member of a religious group took greater risks than their peers in virtual combat situations. One key takeaway, according to Lieut. Colonel Chad C. Tossell, the director of the school’s Warfighter Effectiveness Research Center, is that the “spiritual strength” of soldiers is as important as the weapons and technology they use. An early draft of the study says the simulation designed for the research could be “useful for selection and training.”

Davis is encouraged by the constant interest he gets from governments, from those in the U.S. to Kenya to Kosovo. The U.S. military continues to aid in funding as the firm sets its sights on the next frontiers: figuring out how and why democratic institutions collapse and how cyberspace is being used to divide people and harden their values, turning nonsacred values into sacred ones. Artis’ work is “first and foremost about field-based scientific research,” and giving policymakers the facts they need to responsibly respond to the problems of the day, Davis says. “We can debate what the meaning of the empirical evidence is, but it’s better to have it than not to have it.

—With reporting by Mélissa Godin and Madeline Roache/London

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

#Time #top stories #IFTTT #news

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khalilhumam · 4 years

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Belarus shuts down internet as thousands protest election results

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/belarus-shuts-down-internet-as-thousands-protest-election-results/

Belarus shuts down internet as thousands protest election results

Alexander Lukashenka has secured a sixth consecutive term as president

Screenshots of attempts to access Apple's App Store, YouTube, and the Golos website during presidential elections in Belarus on August 9, 2020. Photo (c): Franak Viačorka. Used with permission.

A loudspeaker on a stage in Minsk plays Viktor Tsoi‘s “Change,” as a man in a suit tries frantically to pull out the power cable. The video recording shows that he succeeds, only for other loudspeakers nearby to continue blasting out the classic late Soviet era rock song. He flounces off, exasperated. According to onlookers, he is a Belarusian security agent from the Belarusian government attempting to silence their protest anthem. That anthem is being sung by Belarusians enraged at an attempt by longtime president Alexander Lukashenka to win a sixth consecutive term. Since Lukashenka took office in 1994, the country has never held a free and fair election — the latest vote, and the run-up to it, appeared to continue that trend. In May, the popular opposition blogger Syarhei Tsikhanouski who had declared his intention to run for president was arrested. A second contender for the presidency, Viktor Babarika, was arrested on charges of criminal conspiracy. A third, Valery Tsepkalo, fled the country fearing political persecution. In mid-July, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Tsikhanouski's wife, registered as a presidential candidate in his stead. If elected, she promised to rule for six months and hold free and fair elections; she drew crowds of thousands and inspired a nationwide protest movement. When election day came on August 10, numerous observers on the ground wrote of ballot stuffing and falsification (the OSCE's mission was not accredited promptly enough to monitor the vote.) This morning, the country's electoral commission reported that Lukashenka had won 80.3 percent of the vote and Tsikhanouskaya 9.9 percent. Opposition supporters widely suspect electoral fraud; “I will believe my own eyes: the majority was for us,” said Tsikhanouskaya during a press conference. Last night, mass protests broke out across the country. Police responded with water cannon, rubber bullets, and stun grenades. Some 3,000 protesters have reportedly been arrested, several of whom were seriously injured. Tsikhanouskaya has denounced the violence and called for peaceful protest to continue over the course of the week. Hence the August 6 video from that protest stage was a perfect illustration of how many see relations between the rulers and the ruled in Belarus today. It is also a fitting metaphor given that in the run-up to the vote, the Belarusian authorities apparently attempted to pull the plug on a larger scale — by forcing the country offline.

The revolution will not be live-tweeted

Multiple internet providers in Belarus lost routing on the morning of August 9, as polls opened; several journalists present in Belarus during election day confirmed significant disruption to LAN, WiFi, and mobile data networks. Some were able to access websites by using VPN services.

Internet in Minsk is very bad. Many reporters got offline. And we receive significantly less of UGC. Websites are down. You can still send some text via Telegram (w Proxy), Signal (unstable), Facebook Messenger (sometimes it works for texts.) Slack is the best so far. — Franak Viačorka (@franakviacorka) August 9, 2020

Users who complained about lost internet access to their service providers and mobile operators received automated messages from bots apologising for the service outages, but offering no concrete explanation.

Друзья! Сегодня по независящим от нас причинам наблюдаются сложности с доступом к сервисам через мобильный и фиксированный интернет. Как только наш вышестоящий провайдер продолжит корректное обслуживание, доступ будет восстановлен автоматически. — А1 Беларусь (@a1belarus) August 9, 2020

Friends! Today, for reasons beyond our control, we are observing difficulties in accessing services via mobile and fixed internet. As soon as our upstream provider restores proper service, access will be restored automatically.

As of the morning of August 10, Belarusian internet users were still experiencing difficulties getting online. The country's three largest telecom providers (A1, Life, and MTS) all apologised for outages caused by “reasons outside our control,” reported the website Tut.By, a popular search engine and news aggregator. The blocks also appeared to be extended to specific websites. On the morning of election day, Zubr.in was inaccessible; the latter is a grassroots driven platform which allows users to submit reports of electoral law violations via a Telegram bot. Similarly, Naviny and Tut.By which are the country's two largest independent news platforms, as well as the website of newspaper Nasha Niva, all became inaccessible just after polls closed. Golos, a grassroots platform which includes an alternative vote counting system, was also the target of a DNS attack which attempted to collect users’ personal data. However, this block did not come as a surprise. On July 19, mobile internet in Minsk was also interrupted for a short period during a large rally at which Tsikhanouskaya was present. By July 29, popular Telegram channels and social media accounts were already sharing user guides for how to evade impending internet shutdowns, offering links to free VPN services and advice on how to install the Tor browser. On August 4, the popular Telegram channel NEXTA shared a screenshot of an email apparently from an employee of a Belarusian bank, advising a customer that any digital banking services were likely to be unavailable over the coming days. Furthermore, on Saturday 9, journalists from the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets in Minsk reported that when they attempted to purchase local SIM cards, they were warned by a sales assistant that they would be unlikely to work as mobile data and internet connectivity would be shut down across the city the following day day. NetBlocks, an NGO monitoring internet shutdowns worldwide, has released the following statement:

Network telemetry from the NetBlocks internet observatory confirm that internet connectivity in Belarus has been significantly disrupted as of Sunday 9 August 2020 amid tense presidential elections. Outages increased in severity through the day producing an information vacuum as citizens struggled to establish contact with the outside world. The incident is ongoing as of Monday afternoon.

An open letter expressing concern about the internet block, signed by over 20 NGOs and human rights defenders on August 10, described the attempt as follows:

During the whole day of 9 August 2020 Internet access in Belarus was wholly or partly limited. Blockings were either total or concerned specific Internet services, web sites, social networks, messaging services, whether local or global. It is alleged that the Belarusian authorities decided to block data transfer protocols which led to the disruption of connectivity of the Belarusian networks. All foreign traffic was directed through one channel only in an attempt to allow for deep-packet inspection making VPN services ineffective.

The Belarusian authorities have not denied that internet users have faced difficulties. Novaya Gazeta reports that when asked to explain the interruptions, general director of Beltelekom Vadim Shaybakov suggested that large volumes of foreign traffic were to blame; the National Digital Response Centre also claimed that internet connectivity problems began due to a large wave of DDoS attacks on Belarusian telecom operators’ infrastructure. This may be what President Lukashenka was referring to in an August 10 interview in which he stated that Belarus's internet had been “switched off from abroad,” and that the interruptions were “not the authorities’ initiative.”

Back to sending Telegrams

The Telegram messaging service, which is particularly popular across the Russian-speaking world, appeared to remain operational during the internet outages. Although users complained of slow upload speeds, they were able to send videos of clashes between protesters and riot police to popular channels. Two of these channels, NEXTA and Belamova, have proven indispensable in providing videos and updates from a country which had largely gone offline during the height of the protests (perhaps helped by the fact that NEXTA's owner is a Belarusian blogger based in neighbouring Poland). On election day, the former faced attempts to close its popular Twitter account, which was eventually restored:

Hey @TwitterSupport. Why are you banning @nexta_tv, the only independent channel streaming out of Belarus during the pro-democracy uprising?

— Yakov Feygin (@BuddyYakov) August 9, 2020

Several of NEXTA's posts purport to be from polling stations where Tsikhanouskaya won handily, including scans of documents with what are said to be the “real” figures in the respective districts. Therefore observers from the Internet Protection Society, a Russia-based NGO monitoring digital rights, believe that the outcome may be positive for the popular messaging platform (Moscow abandoned its long attempt to block Telegram earlier this year). These pieces of footage and photos from Telegram will play a crucial role in understanding the recent upheaval in Belarus, in light of restrictions on the media and other online sources. However, it is unlikely that they will cause the authorities to change their tune, days after a controversial victory. As the Ministry of the Interior's Spokeswoman Olga Chemodanova recently stated, you can't trust everything you read online.

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legit-scam-review · 5 years

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What You Should Know About Craig Wright

Recently, it was revealed that Craig Steven Wright, one of the most controversial figures in the crypto community, had filed 114 blockchain patents since 2017. He also quit Twitter, where he would often publish his opinions on anonymity (bad), Bitcoin SV (the real Bitcoin) and other cryptocurrencies (also bad).

He is also known for arguing that he is actually Satoshi Nakamoto, the original creator of Bitcoin. Here’s the complete list of things you should know about Wright.

Wright’s bio is really rich, but hardly verifiable

He was born in October 1970 in Australia, according to registration papers of one of his many companies. As per a Business Insider article citing his now-edited LinkedIn profile, Wright graduated from Brisbane’s Padua Catholic College in 1987. In the early 1990s, he worked as a sauce cook, “having trained in French cuisine,” and spent three years working with a catering company.

Wright was reportedly studying at the University of Queensland while working as a chef. He initially attended engineering classes, but switched to computer science in his fourth year.

In 1996, as per his earlier LinkedIn bio, he began working at Ozemail, where he was “managing a bunch of engineers,” thus starting his eventful career in tech. However, according to a 2007 Computerworld article, he began working in IT when he joined K-Mart in 1985 — which would have been even before he finished high school.

In April 1997, Wright says he joined the Australian Stock Exchange, maintaining security and firewalls. In November the same year, he launched a company called DeMorgan, described as “a pre-IPO Australian listed company focused on alternative currency, next generation banking and reputational and educational products with a focus on security and creating a simple user experience.”

In fact, up until July 2015, Morgan was the CEO of about 15 companies. As the Guardian points out, in the space of a week, he resigned as director from Cloudcroft Pty Ltd, Coin-Exch Pty Ltd, Daso Pty Ltd, Demorgan Holdings Pty Ltd, Demorgan Ltd, Denariuz, Ezas Pty Ltd, Integyrz Pty Ltd, Misfit Games Pty Ltd, Interconnected Research Pty Ltd, Zuhl Pty Ltd and Pholus Pty Ltd, and remained the director of just three companies: Hotwire Preemptive Intelligence Pty Ltd, Panopticrypt Pty Ltd and Hotwire PE Employee Share Plan Pty Ltd. Currently, his LinkedIn only features a startup called nChain, where he has allegedly been working as a “chief scientist” since June 2015.

Wright seems to be a man of libertarian views. According to the Cypherpunk mailing list archive, in September 1996, Wright wrote that he had developed cancer during his years at university and took a loan to pay for medical treatment because the health insurance didn’t cover it. He then mentioned that he served in the military and worked at a gas station “even though I am an engineer,” adding:

“So why and for what reason should I have to pay several 10’s of thousands each year to support others. I have never taken help from the government, I do not feel I should have to pay as well. And what am I paying for…to protect the status quo. I believe that there is more than enough help for ppl available. They just need to get off their butts and work.”

In sum, Wright’s biography seems to be considerably replete and busy — or, at least, he portrays it that way. On top of having two PhDs, Wright wields numerous certifications in computer forensics and information technology (IT). In February, he published two Medium articles in which he claimed to have worked as an “agent of influence” in Venezuela and Colombia. Picturing himself as a James Bond-esque character fighting terrorism and evil, Wright says he was “shot twice” during the operation. Also, at some point, he claims that he “was a pastor once.”

According to his story, the Australian entrepreneur came back from South America to witness Bitcoin — which he created (more about that below) — being used on the darknet.

“I discovered the creation I had given birth to, something I designed to bring light was being used for all the worst reasons. Not only drugs, but people. Anonymity is a curse. Nothing good comes of it.”

Wright has several times claimed that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, and refused to provide sufficient proof

Wright become a known figure in crypto community after media reports linking his identity to Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, surfaced in late 2015. Previously, in 2014, one of his few reported links to cryptocurrencies was that he tried launching the world’s first Bitcoin bank.

Thus, in December 2015, Wired and Gizmodo reported within hours of each other that the Australian computer scientist and entrepreneur might be the creator of the world’s largest cryptocurrency.

The Wired story claimed that Wright “either invented bitcoin or is a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did.” It was based on documents and emails that were purportedly leaked by “an anonymous source close to Wright” to an independent security researcher Gwern Branwen, who co-wrote the article with Wired author Andy Greenberg.

Similarly, Gizmodo ran a story that featured documents allegedly obtained by a hacker who accessed Wright’s email accounts, claiming that Satoshi Nakamoto was a joint pseudonym for Craig Steven Wright and his friend, computer forensics analyst and cybersecurity specialist David Kleiman, who died in 2013.

Moreover, on the same day the articles were published, Australian Federal Police (AFP) raided Wright’s house in the Sydney suburb of Gordon. However, the AFP clarified that the operation was not related to the Bitcoin claims.

A substantial part of the evidence presented in the reports — along with Wright’s previous claims — was soon proved false. First, Wright’s company Cloudcroft had declared to have two supercomputers, one of which allegedly produced by computer manufacturer SGI. However, SGI soon clarified that “Cloudcroft has never been an SGI customer and SGI has no relationship with Cloudcroft CEO Craig Steven Wright.”

Further, Wright had listed two PhDs on his LinkedIn page, including one from Charles Sturt University. Eventually, Forbes contacted the university and found out that it hadn’t granted Wright any PhDs, although it gave him three master’s degrees in networking and systems administration, management (IT), and information systems security. Wright was, however, awarded with a doctorate degree by Charles Sturt University later in 2017.

Also, a technical analysis of two PGP public keys attributed to Wright, but also linked to Satoshi Nakamoto, showed that they were created more recently than the documents in which they were featured.

Finally, a number of posts in Wright’s now-deleted blog that seemed to portray him as a person who was directly involved in Bitcoin’s creation had been backdated or edited; the archived versions of the posts from 2013 show none of those breadcrumbs that Wright could have planted to mislead the media into thinking he is Satoshi.

After the aforementioned stories went live, Wright promptly took down his social media accounts and disappeared for several months. On May 2, 2016, he came back (he now lives in London, United Kingdom, according to his LinkedIn profile) and publicly declared that he is the creator of Bitcoin. Later on in the same month, Wright published a sentimental apology piece where he refused to publish the proof of access to one of the earliest Bitcoin keys, saying he doesn’t have the “courage” do it.

However, Wright still claims to be the pseudonymous Bitcoin creator. Just last month, the entrepreneur filed two near-identical comment letters to the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in which he again declared that he is Satoshi. The documents were submitted in response to the agency’s request for industry input and feedback on Ethereum’s (ETH) mechanics and market.

Specifically, Wright wrote that he worked “under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto,” and “completed a project […] started in 1997 that was filed with the Australian government in part under an AusIndustry project registered with the Dept. of Innovation as BlackNet.”

BlackNet — an alleged precursor to Bitcoin — was submitted to the Australian government in 2001, according to one of Wright’s tweets (he deleted his Twitter profile earlier this month).

On Reddit, user Skoopitup argued that the BlackNet paper that Wright supposedly submitted in 2001 largely copied the official Bitcoin white paper (published October 2008), which notably contained significant corrections to an earlier draft that had been shared by Satoshi earlier in August 2008.

In his remaining comments to the CFTC, Wright wrote:

“The amount of misunderstanding and fallacious information that has been propagated concerning bitcoin […] has resulted in my choice to start to become more public. The system I created was designed in part to end fraud as best as that can be done with any technology. The lack of understanding […] has resulted in […] a dissemination of old scams.”

The Australian entrepreneur still hasn’t signed a message with the key associated with Bitcoin’s genesis block, which could be seen as strong evidence of him actually being Satoshi Nakamoto.

Wright played a key role in the BCH hash wars — and now claims that Bitcoin SV is the original Bitcoin

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a cryptocurrency that emerged on Aug. 1, 2017 after departing from Bitcoin’s original blockchain via a hard fork in an attempt to manage its scalability issue.

The BCH network performs hard forks as part of scheduled protocol upgrades. The fork scheduled for Nov. 15, 2018, however, was disrupted by a competing proposal that was not compatible with the original roadmap. As a result, the BCH community was split into three fractions: Bitcoin ABC, Bitcoin Unlimited and Bitcoin SV.

Craig Wright lead the Bitcoin SV team, whose goal was to restore “the original Satoshi protocol” by changing the current BCH structure. Specifically, that involved entirely overwriting the network scripts of Bitcoin ABC and increasing the block size of BCH from 32MB to a maximum of 128MB in order to increase network capacity and scale. Bitcoin SV’s cryptocurrency design was made by Wright’s nChain company.

At some point, after Jihan Wu, co-founder of major crypto miner and manufacturer Bitmain, who supported the Bitcoin ABC team, accused Wright of being a Blockstream spy and a “fake Satoshi.” In response, the computer scientist entered a verbal fight. Specifically, Wright tagged Roger Ver — another ABC proponent — and Bitmain with bankruptcy threats and accusations of being engaged in Silk Road machinations and child pornography.

Even though Bitcoin ABC essentially won the so-called “hash wars” and secured the original BCH ticker, Bitcoin SV lives on. In late February, Bitcoin SV’s value rose 20 percent, driving it into the top-10 largest cryptocurrencies by market cap. As of press time, Bitcoin SV is the 12th-largest token, with a market cap of $1.5 million, according to CoinMarketCap.

Craigh Wright has a lot of blockchain patents

According to the publication Hard Fork, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has published 155 patents applications filed by Wright — all of which were submitted through his company nChain. Thirty-five of those were published this year. The earliest document date relates to Aug. 31, 2017.

The majority of those applications mention blockchain. Specifically, Hard Fork writes, the term “blockchain” was used 114 times in patent titles. “Cryptocurrency,” in turn, is only featured six times, while “Bitcoin” is not mentioned at all.

Wright has written about his patents quest via Twitter (which has been deleted). According to the screenshots cited by Hard Fork, Wright decided to file his patents in Europe because it was “harder”:

“Once we have the EU, we have the PCT [Patent Cooperation Treaty] in the USA. The US is simpler.”

The Patent Cooperation Treaty has been signed by 152 countries. After filing one international patent application under the PCT, applicants can get simultaneously protection for their inventions in many countries.

As per Bloomberg, business-wise blockchain patents “are an essential ingredient for companies looking to reshape the financial services industry or spawn profitable cryptocurrency-related businesses.” Basically, such patents help companies attract investment, protect property rights and collect monopoly profits from other companies using their inventions.

It’s been argued that Wright is filing patents without the intent of actually using them, but instead to demand large payouts from companies which happen to use similar technologies in their line of work. As Marc Kaufman, an attorney who co-chairs the Blockchain Intellectual Property Council at the U.S. Chamber of Digital Commerce, told Fortune:

“His tactics and activities have all the marks of being a patent assertion entity or what’s pejoratively known as a troll. I’m not aware of his companies having any products.”

Craig Wright is being sued for at least $1 billion

In February 2018, the estate of David Kleiman — Wright’s associate and computer forensics expert who died in April 2013 seemingly of natural causes related to complications from a MRSA infection — brought the suit against Wright to the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Florida. The estate is represented by Ira Kleiman, David’s brother.

According to court documents that surfaced on Reddit, the plaintiff claims that Wright stole hundreds of thousands of BTC, worth over $5 billion dollars at the time, from David Kleiman’s estate. The statement by the plaintiff alleges that Wright recognized that Kleiman’s friends and family were initially unaware of the wealth he accumulated.

Specifically, the statement reads, Wright “forged a series of contracts that purported to transfer Dave’s assets to Craig and/or companies controlled by him. Craig backdated these contracts and forged Dave’s signature on them.”

Wright contacted Kleiman’s estate after his associate’s death and disclosed that he and David had worked together to develop blockchain and Bitcoin, according to the plaintiff.

In December 2018, new documents were published online, indicating that the court had rejected repeated requests from the nChain chief scientist to dismiss the lawsuit.

In an amended lawsuit supported by Judge Beth Bloom, a figure of 300,000 BTC ($1.5 billion as of press time) was now circulating.

“The Court finds that Plaintiffs have sufficiently alleged a claim for conversion,” the court document confirms, continuing:

“The Amended Complaint alleges that Defendant converted at least 300,000 bitcoins upon Dave’s death and transferred them to various international trusts, which was an unauthorized act that deprived the Plaintiffs of the bitcoins therein. Accordingly, Plaintiffs’ claim for conversion […] survives Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss.”

In March 2019, Jeff Garzik, one of the earliest contributors to the Bitcoin codebase, was reportedly subpoenaed by the court for documents relating to the Kleiman vs. Wright complaint.

Specifically, the court demanded “all documents, communications, and agreements that support his [Jeff’s] personal theory that Dave Kleiman is Satoshi Nakamoto.” In a 2018 interview with Bloomberg, Garzik suggested that Dave Kleiman was the original creator of Bitcoin.

Wright doesn’t have a particularly good relationship with crypto community

After some of the aforementioned inconsistencies related to Wright’s claim that he is Satoshi surfaced, the crypto community became increasingly skeptical about the Australian computer scientist. However, some of his claims in regard to other cryptocurrencies certainly didn’t help.

In January 2019, for instance, he called Andreas Antonopoulos, author of the book “Mastering Bitcoin,” a “shitcoin expert.” In February this year, Wright told CNBC Africa’s Ran Neuner in a rather rude form that he knows how to deanonymize and destroy privacy coins Zcash and Monero, which he apparently is going to do “sometime this year”:

“If you have a privacy coin, I will show you that it is basically as private as running through Times Square with your pants around your ankles.”

In October 2017, in a now-deleted tweet, Wright argued that the Lightning Network was “oversold.”

At the 2018 Deconomy conference in Seoul, South Korea, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin publicly questioned Wright’s competence, calling him a fraud.

“Given he makes so many non-sequiturs and mistakes, why is this fraud allowed to speak at this conference?”

In response, Wright tweeted: “Oh well…. looks like I broke Vitalek… He is a twig.. must remember to be gentle next time ….”

Last week, the Australian entrepreneur deleted his Twitter page after removing over 10,000 tweets.

On March 17, not long before erasing his presence on the social media outlet, Wright tweeted that he will be “taking action aggressively to remove any site that is in error or makes false claims,” referring to people calling him a fraud, among other things.

“You do not have a right to lies under ‘free speech’ nor harassment, nor libel and slander,” he wrote. “If an error is reported in a malicious context concerning me, expect to be living in a barrel when we finish with you.”

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todaynewsstories · 6 years

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Ankara aims to defuse tensions with European allies | Europe| News and current affairs from around the continent | DW

Under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s relations with Germany have, in recent years, gone from bad to worse.

In March 2017, Erdogan personally attacked Chancellor Angela Merkel, accusing her of using “Nazi measures” after Berlin prevented Turkish ministers from holding campaign rallies in Germany. Later that year, German parliamentarians were refused access to troops stationed at the Incirlik airbase in southern Turkey, prompting the withdrawal of the Bundeswehr from the base. In addition, there have been numerous cases of German citizens being imprisoned in the country in recent years.

After harsh words for Germany and Merkel in recent years, Erdogan will make a state visit to Berlin on later this month

Read more: Istanbul locals feeling the pinch of Turkey’s economic crisis

But now, Turkey wants to leave this in the past and is seeking to repair relations with Germany and the European Union – a desire that has coincided with Ankara’s ongoing spat with the United States and the downfall of the Turkish economy.

The visit of German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas comes at a time when Turkey desperately needs reliable allies. But this will require political action from Erdogan. Maas’ mission is to lay the groundwork ahead of Erdogan’s state visit to Germany at the end of the month.

Imprisoned Germans a priority

Maas’ first goal is to secure the release of seven German citizens, who have been jailed for political reasons since an attempted coup in 2016. Three of the detained have dual citizenship with Turkey.

Roy Karadag, a Turkey expert and director of the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies at the University of Bremen, expects the prisoners will be released soon. “I believe the German prisoners, or to be precise the hostages, will be set free in return for economic, financial and political support,” he said.

But Turkey will have to make substantial reforms if it wants to secure financial assistance from Germany and other European countries. And it will have to work to reassure foreign investors that Turkey is a safe place for them to operate, said Jürgen Hardt, foreign policy spokesman for Germany’s conservative Christian Democrats and Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU).

“Many potential investors are German-Turks or Turks living in European countries. There must be guarantees for their investments and personal safety,” he said. “No one traveling to Turkey should have to fear getting arrested just because they said something wrong from Ankara’s perspective.”

Read more: German journalist Mesale Tolu arrives home after Turkey lifts travel ban

‘Thousands of people are in prison’

Nils Schmid, the foreign policy spokesman for the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), is concerned about the many human rights violations in Turkey. “Thousands of people are in prison,” he said, singling out Turkish entrepreneur and human rights activist Osman Kavala, whom Schmid called “an immensely important partner when it comes to cultural exchange between Turkey and Germany.”

Schmid conceded Ankara’s right to hold terrorists to account, but argued Turkey can’t simply “cast a net of terrorism suspicions over the entire civilian population.” Turkish authorities regularly accuse imprisoned politicians and journalists of terrorism, he said. “That does not correspond to the European standards we expect from Turkey.”

Skeptical about the visit, Stefan Liebich of the socialist Left Party has warned against making too many hasty compromises with Turkey. Ankara must do much more than release a few Germans from prison, he said.

New refugee wave in the making

Also on the agenda during Maas’ visit will be the future of conflict in Syria. As the Syrian government gets ready to launch an offensive against the last major rebel stronghold in Idlib province, the United Nations is warning of a new humanitarian crisis. Turkey, which already hosts nearly 3.5 million Syrian refugees, could see another wave of refugees come its way.

Germany’s goal is to prevent further military escalation in the region, while attempting to focus on a post-war system for Syria. According to Bijan Djir-Sarai of the business-friendly FDP, the aim is to have a political framework that would allow Syrian refugees to go back to their home country.

“This is important. However, one should not forget that Turkey is an important actor in the refugee issue and we will need Turkey’s support,” he said.

One thing is certain, as far as Roy Karadag is concerned: “It is in Germany’s interest to prevent even more refugees from coming to Europe.”

“Diplomacy means having to talk to people we normally wouldn’t. That’s why Maas’ visit is important,” said Armin Paul Hampel, a senior politician with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). He added that if Turkey is serious about reviving relations with Europe, it will have to rethink its ties to Russia.

“Mr. Erdogan has been isolating himself, and turning more strongly toward Russia. This, in turn, is blocking his path to Western Europe. This cannot be in Turkey’s interest,” he said.