Snowden’s Rubik’s Cube
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Oliver Stone likes to destroy characters on the big screen paying attention to the flaws rather than the charisma of his charactes. Jesus, I didn't remember a single battle scene from the movie "Alexander" and this guy went from Greece to India on horse battling his way out. He is considered one of the biggest strategic minds in history. He was the only leader I recall who changed the faith of battles consistently by making swift, unexpected moves with his cavalry hitting the enemy where he least expected it. Being gay[2] is not the reason why Alexander was named "Great".
[1] In the case of Alexander he admitted that it was a huge failure, but I'm not sure if by failure he and I mean the same thing, probably not.
[2] Sexual relationships amongst men were a very natural thing in ancient Greece, especially between soldiers. Indeed Alexander was married twice AFAIK.
If you have to criticize him, you could say that his recent movies have not been up to the bar he set in the '90s -- but it definitely was a very high bar.
I'm much more worried about Gordon-Levitt playing Snowden, from the trailer he looks pretty bland.
Also maybe relevant is his opinion not an opinion after meeting Snowden for research on the role:
> "Now, as he would say, it’s not for him to say whether it was right or wrong. That’s really for people to decide on their own, and I would encourage anybody to decide that on their own. I don’t want to be the actor guy who’s like, ‘You should listen to me! What he did was right!’ I don’t think that’s my place. Even though that is what I believe – that what he did was right.” [1]
[1] http://www.ew.com/article/2015/09/18/joseph-gordon-levitt-sn...
As another commentator pointed out, it's one of those rare situations where the real-life character is more beautiful, fascinating and tall(!) than the actor. Don't you find this a little funny/awkward?
On the other side Laura Poitras new Assange documentary "Risk" screens in the Quinzaine (Directors fortnight) competition.
They're separate?
Average Americans know nothing about Snowden.
But the movie is a dramatization, not a documentary. Because of that, it got the general, non-CS-major public to care about Alan Turing. I'd say that's a pretty decent accomplishment.
I actually had a conversation with my mom about Alan Turing after she saw the movie. That's saying something. She still needs help browsing the web beyond AOL. She thought computers were "unhealthy" and borderline "dangerous" until very recently. I'm pretty sure she thinks her router contains the entire Internet on it. These are the kinds of people who need to be exposed to Turing, and "Imitation Game" breaks through to them. Great. I'll take that as a net-positive.
Imagine if they told the story of the Normandy invasion as being a squad of GIs pulling one over on mean old man Eisenhower, saving the day by inventing the flat-bottom motorized landing craft.
That said, the small amount of stuff set in the future about Turing's persecution was well done.
* They presented Turing's characacter as the generic caricature of the pedantic genius, kind of like The Big Bang Theory's Sheldon. Other reports I read on Turing's personality didn't match that at all.
* Holywood seems adamant to have a romantic man-and-woman relationship going along with the story, even if it had to be a platonic one since the lead character is famously gay.
I don't know though. I've never seen it. There's a whole section on Wikipedia if you care.
Aside from Snowden you don't have to elaborately hide an SD card in a Rubik's cube. Just strick it in a condom and shove it.
From what I've read security against this sort of exfiltration is focused on disabling USB ports and the like. Not trying to detect something the size of an SD card leaving the building. They're not doing a full cavity search or giving you an MRI each time you enter/exit.
Or just use a spy coin. The UK pound coin version is pretty good, but will stop working when we change our coins. Coins are handy because you carry them in your pockets, so they avoid xray checks at airports.
One of Snowden's main revelations was how little oversight there was.
He was motivated to come forward by the abuses he saw the NSA database put to, rather than its mere existence.
Snowden has reported his colleagues reguarly exfiltrated 'dirty pictures' from the NSA database. Snowden says 'nudies' were a 'commodity' traded around his colleagues.
If one can trivially sneak out dirty pics without oversight then...
Of course if Snowden could do it for the best of reasons, it is hard to believe moles and foriegn agents don't have similar access.
>Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator’s computer. "Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, ‘Wow, this was crazy’," Faulk told ABC News. - Wired: NSA Snooped on Innocent Americans’ Private Calls from Iraq, Former Operators Charge https://www.wired.com/2008/10/we-snooped-on-i/
However many people have access to this, I don't know if it's dozens, hundreds, or thousands, have a frightening amount of power. They have to realize it.
I guess they probably can't just type in "My Least Favorite Politician's Emails" into NSA internal search. Maybe this is the practical limitation that provides some nominal check on the power of these people?
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-...
PRISM can notify when new emails appear and can provide a live view of the targets online activity. [2]
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-...
NSA's James Clapper issued a denial "What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of – or give intelligence we collect to – US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line."
By 2014 overseas contract losses to US businesses attributed to dissatisfaction with NSA spying were estimated at $180 billion [2]
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-braz... [2] https://shadowproof.com/2014/08/01/nsa-spying-costs-u-s-comp...
While analyzing the metadata someone discovered that a certain rare and expensive camera model was used almost exclusively to shoot models, including nude ones. Searching the storage for pictures made with that camera model became a popular activity in that team :)
So it's pretty easy to trivialize privacy breaches and rationalize it as "no harm was done"
Perhaps the illicit nature of the trust violation adds something beyond the legally available porn.
Evidenced by the criminal risks voyeurs still take to get creepshots, upskirts,
Also expect at least two forced action/drama scenes that never happened.
They are staging the Hong Kong hotel meeting, of which real footage exists, as if it were an action scene.
Poitras's film contrasts the complete lack of 'action scene' with the consequences facing the protagonists.
Conveyed only by their attempts to suppress their mounting unease and the fight to calmly apply the opsec - the tension unbearably mounts second by second, the effect of distant sounds implies the real dangers.
Snowden's emotions are brutally felt, his lament at his loss left no dry eyes.
The stillness and unmoving camera style conveys more terror and excitement than jump cuts or explosive choreography can.
It may be that the "science" behind Primer appears more coherent and reasoned out than H.G. Wells' Time Machine, but it's still fairy dust.
Even Primer is fairy dust. The plot makes enough up to suspend your disbelief. For instance, I just made a rule up for my hypothetical new movie: travelling through time drops the traveler in the same location of the frame of reference they inhabit. This is always a fixed location relative to the Earth if the traveller is static relative to the Earth, and hence in the same frame of reference.
What kind of guard will let a cube not pass through the system like that? If I were that guard I would find that cube throw highly suspicious.
And while we are at it, wouldn't it be easier to hide the microSD card under the tongue for example?
And lastly, where exactly are you supposed to stick that card into in the facility? Even low-level security companies glue all USB/card reader inputs.
I've broken a few rubix cubes in my day and so many of them have hallow squares so I'm not surprised you could hide stuff in one. Hell if you customize one you can probably get it to hold a huge amount of data.
Even without customising it, 200GB on a single microSD card is no small amount of data.
http://rusolut.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/msd1xray.jpg
And an xray of a rubiks cube:
https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4138/4859926370_10d2a0d071.jpg
Overall, doubt you could see it without looking very carefully.
Or you could pop out a piece and you'd have room for dozens of MicroSD cards inside the pieces.
"especially considering that cube wasn’t released
until 2013"
To be meta-fair, most means those who have a brand name (those you could distinguish when you buy).
https://rubiks.com/blog/how-to-customise-the-rubiks-speed-cu...