Nuclear Monster

  • The surest way to gain a link is to talk about the best movie of all time, Sneakers, as Priscilla Page has by taking apart the film for Birth.Movies.Death:

    Phil Alden Robinson’s Sneakers might just be the most undervalued movie of all time. It’s a political thriller, a caper, “tech-noir,” a little like Three Days of the Condor reimagined as a buddy film. Sneakers is awash in shades of blue, as if its story takes place in the shadows, or in the glow of an old computer screen. James Horner’s score features strings, a choir, and Branford Marsalis on soprano saxophone — it’s a wintry, whimsical, haunting thing. Sneakers is the creation of Phil Alden Robinson, Lawrence Lasker, and Walter F. Parkes, who sought to make a movie they would want to see. It took 10 years to write, ultimately becoming an excuse for these guys to hang out.

    Back when DVDs were still a thing you would own and want to collect, I’d give out copies of this movie to my friends who I am sure never watched it. Sneakers is fantastic, but when you roughly try to explain to someone that it’s a movie about hacking they think Hackers and immediately tune out because that is going to be a goofy, unrealistic, bad time. Sneakers is unrealistic, but the relationships in it are incredibly relatable.

    As Priscilla points out, this is also a movie that is not really high-tech. All of the 90’s and early 2000’s movies about hacking realized that people sitting at a computer typing is boring as shit to watch. So many of the crew’s solutions in Sneakers are about personal interactions and introduced concepts like social engineering that I didn’t know about when I saw the film.

    Go watch the movie, then read the rest of Priscilla’s article.

  • This morning, the Times’ Michael S. Schmidt reported that Comey left a fantastic paper trail before he was fired:

    President Trump asked the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, to shut down the federal investigation into Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, in an Oval Office meeting in February, according to a memo Mr. Comey wrote shortly after the meeting.

    “I hope you can let this go,” the president told Mr. Comey, according to the memo.

    The existence of Mr. Trump’s request is the clearest evidence that the president has tried to directly influence the Justice Department and F.B.I. investigation into links between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia.

    Mr. Comey wrote the memo detailing his conversation with the president immediately after the meeting, which took place the day after Mr. Flynn resigned, according to two people who read the memo. The memo was part of a paper trail Mr. Comey created documenting what he perceived as the president’s improper efforts to influence a continuing investigation. An F.B.I. agent’s contemporaneous notes are widely held up in court as credible evidence of conversations.

    There’s also this incredible buried lede:

    Alone in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump began the discussion by condemning leaks to the news media, saying that Mr. Comey should consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information, according to one of Mr. Comey’s associates.

  • Absolutely insane series of events.

    Yesterday the Washington Post’s Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe reported that Trump gave classified information to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in front of the Russian press during their jovial meeting at the White House:

    The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

    The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.

    “This is code-word information,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

    This isn’t the first time the embarrassment has mishandled classified information, but the follow-up was so flawed.

    The LA Times’ Michael A. Memoli and Noah Bierman quoting the national security advisor:

    McMaster said Trump “wasn’t even aware” of the source of the information and again called “the premise” of a Washington Post report that Trump had improperly shared highly classified intelligence “false.”

    This morning, the embarrassment confirmed the original article:

    That isn’t how that works. The president casually gave classified information to a foreign adversary in front of their state media.

  • Heartbreaking story from Alex Tizon:

    To our American neighbors, we were model immigrants, a poster family. They told us so. My father had a law degree, my mother was on her way to becoming a doctor, and my siblings and I got good grades and always said “please” and “thank you.” We never talked about Lola. Our secret went to the core of who we were and, at least for us kids, who we wanted to be.

    Everybody has family secrets when they’re growing up, but I don’t think I know anyone with anything like this in their past. Then there’s the awful editor’s note:

    And we were heartbroken to learn on Friday, March 24, that Alex Tizon had died. His story editor here at the magazine, Denise Kersten Wills, found out late that evening that Alex had been found dead in his home in Eugene, Oregon. He had died in his sleep, of natural causes. He was 57 years old.

  • After lying about his predecessor recording his calls, Trump has threatened to release secret recordings of his conversations with former FBI Director James Comey:

    If the White House records something it can be subpoenaed as Nixon’s recordings were during Watergate.