For many people, Edward Snowden is a hero and they believe that he did more for the freedom of free citizens than anyone else in recent history. For some, he is the biggest traitor that America has seen in the modern era. Few people have raised such opposing and violently clashing emotions and opinions as Edward Snowden has ever since he became the worlds biggest whistle-blower in 2013. Again whether he is a whistle-blower or not is a matter of individual opinion. Since 2013 the American government, their national security agencies particularly the NSA and the CIA, agitated members of the press, and a whole lot of American citizens have been working hard to punish Snowden and bring him to justice. The big problem is that they simply cant get their hands on Edward Snowden. He is not in America so they cant arrest him and put him on trial. Edward Snowden has been escaping from his American pursuers since 2013 when this cat-and-mouse game began. Its 2021 now and many people are asking Where is Edward Snowden now? They want to know Where is Edward Snowden today?

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Edward Snowden is a former computer intelligence consultant who was an employee and subcontractor for the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] in the early 2010s. Several members of Snowdens family have worked in senior government positions in America and he was a bit different from other kids from a young age. Though Snowden did not attend college he studied online and obtained a masters degree from the University of Liverpool, England, in 2011. He got interested in Japanese culture, studied the Japanese language, got interested in martial arts, studied Buddhism, and later worked in an anime company at its branch in the USA. In 2006 he applied for and got a job at the global communications division of the CIA at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He later got disillusioned with the CIA and quit his job. He then began working as a subcontractor for the CIA and he had access to thousands of documents that detailed the covert activities of the NSA and the CIA.

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What did Edward Snowden do? On May 20, 2013, Snowden got on a flight to Hong Kong after leaving his job at the NSA facility in Hawaii without informing anybody including his then-girlfriend Lindsay Mills. Then in June 2013 he revealed thousands of secret and classified NSA documents to journalists from major publications including The Washington Post and The Guardian. All hell broke loose. People were outraged at the sensational disclosures in these documents that revealed that the American government was conducting mass surveillance and obtaining private information about American citizens among others. The American government acted swiftly and on June 21, 2013, the United States Department of Justice charged Snowden with two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and deliberate theft of property of the American government.

So where is Edward Snowden in 2021? According to the latest reports, Edward Snowdens current location is in Russia. In June 2013 Edward Snowden flew into Russia to escape the authorities in Hong Kong and he has remained there ever since. Russia granted Snowden the right to asylum in 2013 and extended it every year. In October 2020, Russia granted permanent residency to Snowden and he makes a living now by speaking to civil rights activists and students both in Russia and abroad using the Internet and video link-ups. Even though he is not allowed to leave Russia he has the freedom to travel anywhere he wants inside the vast nation. Lindsay Mills joined Snowden in Moscow, Russia, in 2014 and later married him. They had a baby boy in December 2020 and he has been given Russian citizenship by the Russian authorities.

The Edward Snowden leaks marked a watershed in government surveillance programs and for the first time, the American security apparatus was forced to explain itself to the general public. They have not forgiven Edward Snowden for this and perhaps never will. While Snowden maintains that he leaked this information to inform the American public about what is done in their name and how the government is secretly working against them, the people who disagree with him have called him a traitor and criminal. The American government is constantly trying to bring him back to America and face justice and Snowden has claimed that they simply want him gone. Over the years several TV programs, TV shows, documentaries, and films have been made on Snowdens life and his actions and the debate about him continues. He is currently safe in Moscow, Russia, and the strongman of Russia, Vladimir Putin, is standing up to the American government. Nobody knows how long this will last and Edward Snowden continues to live his life in Russia constantly looking back over his shoulder to see if his past catches up with him one fateful day!

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Where is Edward Snowden Now 2021? What did Snowden Do?

Undermining encryption systems to give governments access to citizens personal messages would be a colossal mistake with disastrous consequences, said former CIA contractor Edward Snowden, who participated via videoconference in the first World Youth Day forum. Encryption

Privacy was meant to be the power of individuals, [] to protect ourselves from the institutional giants, [] either in modern times or in earlier times, argued Snowden, aforementioned by CNBC. It was an insulating layer that allowed those of us who have very little power in society [] they could think, act and associate freely, he added.

The former CIA and NSA collaborator also charged the tech giants for their desire to extend surveillance over their users. The same companies that have worked so hard to spread encryption over the years now [] they want to have as much information as possible, he explained, noting that those firms they are limiting the use of end-to-end encryption in the fields that serve your business interest. They dont have a social mindset, Snowden added. They dont care. They care about their interests, he said.

Disclaimer: This article is generated from the feed and not edited by our team.

Excerpt from:
Privacy is the power of individuals: Snowden warns that weakening the encryption of messages ... - Market Research Telecast

Its not often that major news organizations coordinate to sift through a large trove of leaked company documents and agree not to publish stories about them until a certain date. But in the world of news related to Facebook, these are extraordinary times.

Something similar happened in 2016 when the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published financial leaks in an investigation called the Panama Papers, uncovering details of the global elites tax havens, and in 2013 after exNational Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden released top-secret documents, kicking off a storm of coverage in global newspapers about how the U.S. and other governments spyon citizens and organizations.

Now its Facebooks turn.

Upcoming news stories based on thousands of Facebook documentswhich whistleblower Frances Haugen worked to release to more than a dozen news organizations as diverse as the Associated Press, CNN, Le Monde, Reuters and the Fox Business networkarent likely to be as revelatory as those epic leaks of time past. For one, the Facebook documents were the basis for the series of impactful stories from the Wall Street Journal, which received them from Haugen months ago. Those pieces revealed how the companys research showed Facebooks products could be toxic for some teens and offered details about how there were internal concerns that the company wasnt doing enough to stop human trafficking coordinated through its platform or to remove other dangerous content. The reporting led to a U.S. congressional hearing two weeks ago. But Haugen felt there were more stories to be told.

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New Facebook Storm Nears as CNN, Fox Business and Other Outlets Team Up on Whistleblower Docs - The Information

After disgraced pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud in 2017, hewasforced to relinquish his assets, including a highly collectible edition of the Wu-Tang Clan albumOnce Upon a Time in Shaolin.The U.S. government sold it this past summer for $4 million to, it has now been revealed, a cryptocurrency collective called PleasrDAO.

Shkreli, who is now serving a seven-year prison sentence,placed the winning $2 million bidon the album via the online auction house Paddle 8 in 2015.

The collective, which has been storing the record in a New York City vault, says they want to make the two discs 31 tracks more widely available to listeners. But thats despite Wu-Tangs leader, RZA, and producer, Cilvaringz, specifying in the original sale that the music could not be publicly released for 88 years, until2103.

Martin Shkreli exits federal court on May 3, 2016. Photo by Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images.

This album at its inception was a kind of protest against rent-seeking middlemen, people who are taking a cut away from the artist. Crypto very much shares that same ethos, the collectives chief pleasing officer, Jamis Johnson, told the New York Times. The album itself is kind of the O.G. NFT.

In fact, the new sale came with an NFT instead of a physical ownership deed. PleasrDAO paid $4 million in cryptocurrency to an intermediary represented by Peter Scoolidge, a lawyer who helped broker the deal with Cilvaringz.

The government received what waspublicly known to be owed under the asset forfeiture order, Scoolidge told theTimes,or about$2.2 million according to recent court filings.

Masta Killa, Ghostface Killah, Method Man, U-God, Cappadonna, Raekwon the Chef, and Inspectah Deck of the Wu-Tang Clan. Photo by Steven Ferdman/Getty Images.

Ahead of the sale,Scoolidge was given the rare opportunity to listen to the record in order to determine it was in working order. He used a Discman, playing the music for a select group oflaw enforcement and representatives of the U.S. Marshals, the U.S. attorneys office, and the Department of Justice.

As you can imagine, the tracks have a lot of colorful language on them, [so] theres a lot of giggling [as] people who are not hip-hop people [are] listening to this stuff, Scoolidge told Rolling Stone. It was pretty funny.

The collective that bought the album has 74 members. The groups name is a portmanteau based on the NFT artist Pplpleasr and the acronym D.A.O., which stands for decentralized autonomous organization.

Since it was founded less than a year ago, the collective has acquired a number of high-profile digital works, including NFTs by Edward Snowden and Pussy Riot, as well as one based on the popular Doge meme, which it began selling to the public in fractional shares.

This beautiful piece of art, this ultimate protest against middlemen and rent seekers of musicians and artists, went south by going into the hands of Martin Shkreli, the ultimate internet villain, Johnson told Rolling Stone.

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A Cryptocurrency Collective Has Been Revealed as the $4 Million Buyer of Martin Shkrelis Collectible Wu-Tang Clan Album - artnet News

Diane Weyermann, who oversaw the making of potent documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth, Citizenfour and Food Inc., and in so doing helped change the documentary world from an earnest and underfunded backwater of the movie industry into a vibrant must-see category, died on Oct. 14 at a hospice facility in Manhattan. She was 66.

Her sister Andrea Weyermann said the cause was lung cancer.

Diane was one of the most remarkable human beings I have ever known, said Al Gore, the former vice president and presidential candidate whose seemingly quixotic mission to educate the world about climate change through a decades-long traveling slide show became an unlikely hit film with an odd title, An Inconvenient Truth. She was enormously skilled at her craft and filled with empathy, he added, in a phone interview. It is not an exaggeration to say she really did change the world.

So did his movie. An Inconvenient Truth earned an Oscar in 2007, and Mr. Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize that same year, sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The film, which became one of the highest-earning documentaries ever made, was the second documentary made by the activist film company Participant, where Ms. Weyermann was a longtime executive, and hardly anyone in Hollywood thought it was a good idea. It was a movie about a slide show, after all.

When the filmmakers screened it for a major studio in hopes of getting distribution, some of the executives fell asleep. There was audible snoring, recalled Davis Guggenheim, the director, and when it was over, one of them said, No one is going to pay a babysitter so they can go to a theater and see this movie, but well help you make 10,000 CDs for free that you can give to science teachers.

Dejected, Mr. Guggenheim, Mr. Gore, Ms. Weyermann and others repaired to a steakhouse in Burbank, Calif., to brood, but Ms. Weyermann refused to be cowed.

Just wait till Sundance, she said.

An Inconvenient Truth received four standing ovations at the Sundance Film Festival, and Paramount bought the distribution rights.

Participant had been started in 2004 by Jeff Skoll, a social entrepreneur and the first president of eBay, with its own mission: to make movies about urgent social issues. A former public interest lawyer, Ms. Weyermann was running the documentary program at the Sundance Institute when Mr. Skoll hired her in 2005, though he was worried that Robert Redford, a friend and the founder of the institute, would be irked. (He wasnt, and blessed the move).

From the start, Diane brought knowledge, relationships, context and industry insights into our team, Mr. Skoll said in an email. Participant was a small, burgeoning company at the time, direct film industry expertise was limited, and we had very little documentary experience.

Participant would go on to make more than 100 films, including the features Spotlight, Contagion and Roma and the documentaries My Name Is Pauli Murray and The Great Invisible.

Diane built an incredible slate of films that have made a difference in everything from nuclear weapons to education to the environment and so much more, Mr. Skoll added. She was the heart and soul of Participant.

It was Ms. Weyermanns job to find, fund, form and promote documentaries from all over the world, and she traveled constantly to do so.

In 2013, Laura Poitras, the director of Citizenfour the Oscar-winning tale of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who exposed the governments widespread surveillance programs was holed up in Berlin when Ms. Weyermann came to see her.

Diane knew I couldnt travel to the U.S., Ms. Poitras said, because she was worried that she might be detained or arrested; during the course of her reporting, Mr. Snowden had become a fugitive and a cause clbre. She wanted to make sure I was OK, and I wanted her to see the cuts. I had hundreds of hours of film, and I told her right off, Im not going to be able provide any documentation film studios typically require detailed written proposals and she immediately said, Were going to do this and Ive got your back.

She loved being in the editing room, Ms. Poitras added. She had an amazing ability to see a film when it was really raw and be in tune with it and what the filmmaker needed. You wanted her notes; she always made the work better.

A directors whisperer is how Mr. Guggenheim described her.

It wasnt just the big box-office movies she supported, said Ally Derks, the founder of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. It was the small, fragile films she nurtured, too. She was in India with Rahul Jain, whose movie about pollution in New Delhi had just screened at Cannes. She was in Siberia with Victor Kossakovsky the Russian filmmaker whose 2018 film, Aquarela, has barely any dialogue or human beings and takes an immersive look at water, from a waterfall in Venezuela to glaciers crumbling in Greenland.

In a review in The New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis called Aquarela a stunning, occasionally numbing, sensory symphony, and took note of the films ending: a rainbow over the worlds tallest waterfall. It feels, she wrote, a little bit like hope.

Diane Hope Weyermann was born on Sept. 22, 1955, in St. Louis. Her father, Andrew, was a Lutheran minister; her mother, Wilma (Tietjen) Weyermann, was a homemaker and later worked for a glassware company.

Diane studied public affairs at the George Washington University in Washington, graduating in 1977, and four years later earned a law degree from the Saint Louis University School of Law. She worked as a legal aid lawyer before attending film school at Columbia College Chicago, graduating in 1992 with an M.F.A. in film and video.

That same year, Moscow Women Echoes of Yaroslavna, her short documentary film about seven Russian women, filmed by a Russian and Estonian crew, was screened at Ms. Derkss festival in Amsterdam. Ms. Weyermann also made a short film about her fathers hands.

She turned from making movies herself to helping others make them in 1996, when she became director of the Open Society Institutes Arts and Culture Program, one of the billionaire investor George Soross philanthropies, now known as the Open Society Foundation. She started the Soros Documentary Fund, which supported international documentaries that focused on social justice issues.

When Ms. Weyermann was hired by the Sundance Institute to set up its documentary film program in 2002, she brought the Soros Fund with her. There she set up annual labs for documentary makers, where they could work on their films with others, creating the sort of community that documentarians craved.

In addition to her sister Andrea, Ms. Weyermann is survived by a brother, James. Another sister, Debra Weyermann, an investigative journalist, died in 2013.

In 2018, Ms. Weyermann became co-chair, with the screenwriter and producer Larry Karaszewski, of the foreign-language film category for the Academy Awards. They promptly changed the name of the category to international feature film, pointing out that the word foreign was not exactly inclusive. Diane had a way of cutting through everyday nonsense, Mr. Karaszewski said.

In a 2008 interview, Ms. Weyermann was asked if she thought it was asking too much for a film to make a change in society.

When films are made solely for that purpose, they fall like a lead balloon, she replied. What I love about film is its a creative medium. Its not just Lets focus on an issue and educate, but: Lets tell a story, lets tell it beautifully, lets tell it poetically. Lets tell it in a way that isnt so obvious.

Read more:
Diane Weyermann, Executive Who Championed An Inconvenient Truth, Dies at 66 - The New York Times

If you're an expat who likes the weather in the Netherlands, please explain it to me. Personally, now that we're heading into autumn and winter, my mind wanders off to those moments cycling to work in 4-degree celsius torrential rain on a Monday morning. In the dark.

But the weather also has its benefits. Usually, it creates an excuse to snuggle up in a dimly lit brown cafe, have some deep-fried snacks and good beer with friends. And the festive season is coming up.

We've got Halloween coming up, which has procuredsemi-permanent recognition here in the Netherlands, even though most of us Dutchies are still on the fence as to how we're supposed to celebrate Halloween properly. Dressing up and getting hammered is fairly easy, but the whole trick or treat thing sometimes backfires.

You see, since forever we've celebrated Sint Maarten. I only vaguely recall the whole idea behind Sint Maarten, to be honest: some dude called Maarten, born in Hungary around 316 A.D. to two roman parents (If his dad's name was Nortius Maximus, I'm going to keel over laughing), basically had the philosophy of giving out stuff to the needy.

Good on him. It subsequently became linked to Christianity. You see, Maarten - even though interested in said religion - didn't want to become a Bishop, but he made the error of hiding from his devotees in a cot full of geese.

Again, Monty Python sketches pop up in my head.

Sint Maarten is basically a day to remember that the coming months will be harder, and that food will become scarcer.

Halloween is pretty much the same thing. Except this is a Celtic fest, originally, where people believed that the ghosts of the dead would come back to earth and - for some reason - thought it would be a good idea to mess with their crops. So, if you see someone staggering across the street wearing a slutty nurse costume, don't judge. Remember: they're warding off ghosts.

The idea behind the two is similar: stock up, share, 'cause it's gonna be tough.

Then we've got the similarities between Sinterklaasand Santa Claus, where admittedly there's a bit of a - lets call it a tussle - in opinions about the first one. I'm guessing there's probably a rap sheet to be found somewhere on Santa as well. I mean: Edward Snowden had to take up residence in Russia, so maybe that's why Santa lives on the North Pole

I could continue on for a bit to illustrate how basically all of the holidays we humans in different cultures celebrate are based upon the same principles. I think Bill and Ted summarised it best: "Be excellent to each other."

Don't judge.

Today, I read an article where the term "Wokum" was coined (whoever came up with that one is a genius, by the way). I liked that description. It was followed by the sentence: "all modern discussions are being settled here."

Nobody raised an eyebrow when Chris Pontius from Jackass did handstands in a kilt to show off his wiener on Dam Square (if he'd been on a bicycle path though, things might have worked out poorly for him).

But, the thing is, these next few months will undoubtedly raise some eyebrows, due to the festivities. And opinions. Opinions are like a**holes, they say -everyone has one.

So, going into these next months of scarce food, rising gas prices, and what else the world will throw at us - like the distressed baboon it's rapidly becoming - welcome to Wokum. Be excellent to each other.

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Welcome to Wokum... - IamExpat in the Netherlands

Succession returned on Sunday night with more of what weve come to expect: affectionate swearing, major business decisions dictated by complex psychosexual dynamics and millionaires treating private helicopters like theyre Uber Xs.

There was one surprising guest star, though: the Bosnian capital where the media kingpin Logan Roy decides to hide out in a distinctly unglamorous airport hotel. It initially seems like an odd choice to his family, until Shiv points out that Bosnia-Herzegovina has no extradition treaty with the US. While Logan is still in control, his decision to fly there is a silent admission that hes scared he might be running out of options.

But are things that simple? Can a global tycoon who fears arrest just disappear to another country? And what sunshine paradises are available to the discerning billionaire, should the heat of the law become unbearable?

If the question is whether an individual with significant means could seek to lawyer up and place himself in a jurisdiction that would maximise the possibility of avoiding extradition then yes, this is possible and indeed likely, says Thomas Garner, a partner at Fladgate law firm who specializes in extradition law.

There are countless high-profile fugitives living abroad, including Julian Assange, Mike Lynch and Edward Snowden. Probably the longest-standing high-profile fugitive would be Roman Polanski. Hes been on the run from the US since 1978 and has managed to live a comfortable and productive life on the lam in France thanks to his French nationality and the fact that France wont extradite its own nationals.

Logan was also lucky to have been able to escape the country in luxury, on one of a fleet of private planes. While not involving the US, the case of Carlos Ghosn was probably the most spectacular recent example of a determined high-net-worth individual planning and executing an escape which involved him being smuggled out of Japan in a box on a private jet, Garner said. Hes now in Lebanon, where he is safe from extradition to Japan.

Things are not that simple for Logan: just because Bosnia doesnt have an extradition treaty doesnt mean it wouldnt extradite him if the US wanted Logan to return.

The US is a relentless and notoriously aggressive extradition partner. Its prosecutors have a famously long reach, says Garner. People often talk about non-extradition countries in reality the lack of a treaty is no barrier to extradition if a country wishes to cooperate with the US. It is relatively common for countries to enter into bespoke one-off agreements with states in order to secure the extradition of a high-profile target. However, there are also several regimes who are opposed to the US or who may see political capital in shielding a fugitive. The issue with this sort of strategy is that you are at the mercy of the state who is protecting you. If Putin decides there is political capital in handing over Snowden to the US, then it is game over, and when Ecuador tired of Assange, he was soon out of the embassy and in Wandsworth prison.

The episode also shows Logan battling with his son over who will retain the services of the lawyer Lisa Arthur (a fictional stand-in for Gloria Allred, one may assume) in order to fight the cover-up of allegations. However, when it comes to his personal liability, Logan might have to return to the US to fight any case brought against him.

One peculiar feature of the US justice system is something called the fugitive disentitlement doctrine, explains Garner. This means that an individual is barred from fighting his case remotely in practice, this hinders substantive applications being made in respect of the allegations or case until they return to the US.

Ive seen this manifest itself in particularly unfair ways. One client had what appeared to be a knockout blow to the allegations but a judge refused to consider an application to dismiss the proceedings until he returned to the US, where he would inevitably have been detained for months pending the resolution of the matter. The US authorities are very aggressive and determined when it comes to pursuing defendants overseas. They proactively build cases against individuals, using informants and cooperating witnesses.

One remaining mystery is why Logan would choose to head to the Balkans rather than somewhere with warmer weather and more six-star hotel suites: neither the Maldives nor Indonesia has an extradition treaty with the US. And in the real world, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the US have some historical agreements.

The decision might have been an artistic one. Sarajevo is where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated and more recently the site of one of the bloodiest civil wars in recent history.

As Logan spends most of the episode shouting Its war! and Well fucking beast em!, the location might be more of a nod to the beginning of a vicious and drawn-out battle.

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The US has a long reach: a legal expert on how Successions Logan Roy could avoid extradition - The Guardian

Nearly 150,000 Tesla cars are using the company's new "safety score," a tool rolled out last month to determine whether owners can access the beta version of its Full Self-Driving software, executives said during its third quarter earnings call.

While 150,000 cars are now part of the Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta enrollment program, a fraction of drivers have been given access to the software. Only 2,000 drivers have been able to test the FSD program over the past year. Earlier this month, Tesla rolled out version 10.2 to around 1,000 additional owners with perfect safety scores.

Tesla charges $10,000 for the FSD software, which CEO Elon Musk has promised for years will one day deliver full autonomous driving capabilities. However, Tesla vehicles equipped with FSD are not self-driving. FSD is an advanced driver assistance system that includes a number of automated features, including its parking tool Summon as well as Navigate on Autopilot, an active guidance system that navigates a car from a highway on-ramp to off-ramp, including interchanges and making lane changes.

The latest FSD Beta is supposed to automate driving on highways and city streets. This is still a Level 2 driver assistance system that requires the driver to pay attention, have their hands on the wheel and take control at all times.

Story continues

While the safety score, which must be a perfect 100 to gain access to the beta software, is being used to meter out access to FSD, Tesla has other uses in mind. The company wants to use the feature to better inform its blossoming telematics insurance product, which just launched in Texas in early October. The safety score takes into account things like braking, turning, tailgating, forward collision warnings and forced autopilot disengagements in order to predict the probability of a collision.

So far, Tesla has gathered over 100 million miles of driving data, analysis of which showed that the probability of a collision for a customer using a safety score versus someone who is not using the safety score is 30% lower, according to Zachary Kirkhorn, chief financial officer of Tesla.

"It means the product is working and customers are responding to it," he said.

Because Tesla cars are connected, the company has been able to use enormous amounts of data to assess the attributes of drivers and whether those attributes correlate with safety, said Kirkhorn. Tesla has used this driving history data to create the model that's able to predict the probability of a collision over a period of time.

"The model is not perfect; the model is a function of the data we have available," said Kirkhorn. "As that data set continues to grow, we continue to experiment with new variables and from that model being able to predict the frequency of collision, we can then align that against a price curve."

This allows Tesla to offer individualized pricing that's "integrated into the car, integrated into the app, integrated into that customer's experience," complete with a feedback loop that communicates to the driver what driving adjustments need to be made to decrease the probability of a collision after every drive.

When Tesla began researching insurance, the company found that traditional insurance companies calculate premiums based on static and existing data, like accident history, marital status, age or other demographic information. Kirkhorn said the result is low-risk customers end up overpaying on their insurance and that overpayment then goes to subsidize the riskier customers.

"As we looked at this and we looked at the data, we thought, this just doesn't seem like it's fair," said Kirkhorn.

Tesla has offered insurance in California for about two years, but Texas is the first state where those premiums will be dictated by safety scores. The company has a roadmap of additional states to launch its insurance as it receives regulatory approvals, and its goal is to be in every major market in which Tesla cars exist, Kirkhorn said.

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Tesla has 150,000 cars using its safety score tool - Yahoo Tech

FESTIVAL of Brexit? No way. Festival of Creativity and Innovation? Tell me more . Everything about the beginning of my engagement as an R&D consultant to Unboxed2022, previously Festival UK*2022, and vernacularly Festival of Brexit, was creative-class to the max.

The first meeting, in February 2020, was in a Soho bakers called Princi, all marble walls, communal slabs of table and Milanese flakiness. My companion was the cultural producer Sam Hunt, who a year before had asked me to host some sessions on possible futures at the Bluedot festival in Cheshire.

Bluedot mixes anthemic bands and hardcore science tents, under the immense, rusted shadow of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope. What a geektastic day it was: I thought Id died and was about to empirically prove the afterlife. Sam, his bearded coolness equally verifiable, wanted to explore something with me.

Yes, this was the festival proposed by Jacob Rees-Mogg and Theresa May, intended to be a post-Brexit booster for British-national spirits, with 120m ring-fenced for the celebrations. But what Sam presented to me was the opportunity for something quite different: a festival of creativity and innovation.

As Sam had written to me: Politics is continually reduced to the binary. We want to try to celebrate the complexity of places and the people who chose to call them home.

Does that remind you of the spirit of the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony? No surprise much of that team (including the producer Martin Green) is also in charge of this project. This weeks flurry of outraged Tory MPs, complaining that Unboxed2022 is trendy and politically correct, displaying no Spitfire flypasts or Proms-like flaggery (or even one mention of the word Brexit), were always fated to be disappointed.

Yet I had a proper struggle before saying yes. The 2022 team couldnt have made it clearer this was going to be the opposite of jack-waving patriotism. But a long-standing (and irreversible) Scottish independence supporter has to ask himself how and why hes getting involved in an explicitly UK-defined cultural project.

READ MORE: 'Brexit festival' and Queen's jubilee handed millions by Tory Government

I think I have a good working theory of Britishness. Which is that its a Scandinavian/Nordic identity in waiting, where separate states with entangled histories can resonate both along and across their borders, cooperating relaxedly and authentically when necessary. The political break-up of Britain might be one route to such an expansive, subtle British feel.

But what else might prepare the way? What would create a popular well of vibrant fellow-feeling, friendly towards transformation across these islands? Capacious towards all forms of change, constitutional or otherwise?

One part of my mind mulled over that a Festival of Creativity might be that kind of preparation. From the get-go, a four nations framework was assumed and bolted into place (and despite the resistance to such a framing by some UK ministers recently, four nations has persisted into the launch).

But the other part of my mind was equally enthralled by the idea of a massive collective celebration of human creativity, in and of itself. This has been the theme of my adult life, by means of music, media, technology and activism.

I wrote a tome about these matters in 2004, titled The Play Ethic. The book has left me with a multi-disciplinary interest in how human nature keeps our options open, by means of joyful experimentation and exploration (in other words, play).

READ MORE:Festival of Brexit's awful rebrand at least has the Brexiteers chittering

From that interest, the clincher for me was that the Festival was taking a STEAM approach standing for science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics. And that all of these creative commissions had to touch on most or all of these fields. (We also took the A of STEAM, and slotted SHAPE into it vertically standing for social science, humanities, arts, philosophy and environment).

My curation of FutureFest since 2012 (a London-sited festival of the future, powered by the innovation foundation Nesta) had been all about the collision and fusion of artists, transformers and radicals from Edward Snowden to Deep Mind, from Brian Eno to (indeed) Nicola Sturgeon. All on the basis of the old Alan Kay slogan, the best way to predict the future is to invent it.

So I was raring to go, thinking furiously as to what conditions, structures, practices and concepts would be required to make this R&D process hum. What sociable set-ups could allow coders to talk to dancers, land activists to work with mobile engineers, dance musicians to co-create with neuroscientists? When would they move together, where would they hang out, how would they play around?

And then, along with everyone else from March 2020, everything shut down. Posing the question: how do you prepare an islands-wide festival of creativity from behind screens, in domestic back-rooms, fiddling with untested shareware and virtual whiteboards? Well, how?

Im immensely proud that I played my small part, embedded with the brilliant 2022 team, in answering that question. In the decisive online creative sessions we designed in November 2021, I got to interview Pussy Riots Nadya Tolokonnikova and polymath Malcolm Gladwell (below), and was privileged to summarise the insights of each day, along with a young poet whod hung out during all the ideation.

ALL very utopian, you say? Well, how else are you supposed to be, when Gaia is giving humanity a necessary lesson, chasing you off the street?

When I look at the ten final commissions, narrowed down from a shortlist of 30, taken from over 300 submissions, I cant help but connect the nature of their visions to the context in which they were birthed.

From one little roome, an everywhere, as the Elizabethan poet John Donne (of no man is an island fame) once wrote. And from the online forums and platforms that we devised, the projects have literally gone everywhere.

Green Place, Dark Skies uses GPS and light tech to reclaim community authority over the land. Our Place In Space deploys the same island landscape to look at our current divisions from a cosmic perspective.

Dreamachine will ask communities to commit themselves to a brand-new, drug-free psychedelic experience, traversing new inner worlds. While See Monster planks an entire North Sea oil rig in the middle of a fairground in Weston Super-Mare, urging us to consider what to do with the relics of a fossil-fuel age we must leave behind.

And a special mention for Scotlands lead entry Dandelion, which reimagines the harvest festival as a platform for food growth anywhere in the country. Its led by one of our great Scottish imagineers, Angus Farquhar, bouncing back from his failed attempt to turn St. Peters Seminary into a requiem for modernist ambitions.

So, yes, I would say that Covid (and other planetary disruptions) hung over the coruscating creativity of all the participants, in the process that resulted in Unboxed.

But its creativity, initiative, and adaptiveness drawing on all resources, deploying all knowledges and practices, artistic, scientific and participatory which is the most valuable human response to these systemic challenges. Unboxed2022, probably to a fault, aims to prove the truth of this response.

As an indy-minded Scot, with an interest in meaning, mastery and autonomy however it manifests for a human community I am proud to have played my small part in setting these sparks flying. The point is not to douse it all with water, but to fan these flames, in whatever locality or polity they catch light. I wish good luck to them all; may they avoid all the boxes.

More on Unboxed2022 at http://www.unboxed2022.uk

Read the rest here:
Pat Kane: How I was convinced to help out with the 'Festival of Brexit' - The National

Following Mondays Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram outage, people sought out alternative ways of staying in touch.

The outage, caused by a faulty configuration change, was flagged around 5pm (GMT+1) on Monday with the issues being patched up by 3:30am the following day. Naturally, the outage inspired plenty of memes on Twitter as well as its fair share of conspiracy theories.

In that time, millions of people flocked to alternative private messaging apps such as Signal, Discord and Telegram.

On Twitter, Signal welcomed the millions of new signups it garnered during the six-hour outage.

Telegram reported that 70 million new users joined their platform during the outage. The app jumped 51 places on the iTunes US charts and reached fifth place on Monday, overtaking the likes of YouTube, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger.

Amid the outage news, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen told a senate subcommittee that left alone, Facebook will continue to make choices that go against the common good our common good.

What is Signal?

Signal is an independent messaging app. Privacy is central to Signals offering, promising end-to-end encryption and no creepy tracking.

Signal is just like WhatsApp in that you can make voice calls, video calls, send messages, pictures, and stickers. On Signal, you can even create group chats with up to 1,000 participants.

One of the key differences between Signal and WhatsApp is that Signal is an independent non-profit. The app isnt tied to any large tech companies, whereas WhatsApp was bought up by Facebook in 2014.

Signal is free to download and easy to use, and can be used on mobile devices and desktops, including Linux.

Signal has also received glowing reviews. For an app that prides itself on privacy, word-of-mouth advertising doesnt get much better than nabbing an endorsement from whistleblower and privacy advocate Edward Snowden.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is also a fan of the app and yesterday replied to Snowdens tweet saying Signal is WhatsUp and included a link to the apps website.

Signal was started by WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton in 2018. After quitting Facebook, he sent a tweet reading: It is time. #deletefacebook.

The tweet came at a time when the Cambridge Analytica scandal was beginning to unfold.

Speaking to Forbes about his resignation from Facebook, Acton said: At the end of the day, I sold my company [WhatsApp]. I sold my users privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day.

To hammer home, the point on privacy, earlier this year Signal tried to raise awareness about the amount of data Instagram and its parent company Facebook gathers on its users by attempting to launch their own ad campaign on Instagram.

An example of an advert they tried to run reads: You got this ad because youre a goth barista and youre single. This ad used your location to see youre in Clinton Hill. And youre either vegan or lactose intolerant and youre really feeling that yoga lately.

However, Facebook reportedly dismissed the campaign as a stunt and claimed Signal didnt even try to run the ads.

In a blog post in May, Signals head of growth and communication Jun Harada wrote: Companies like Facebook arent building technology for you, theyre building technology for your data. They collect everything they can from FB, Instagram, and WhatsApp in order to sell visibility into people and their lives.

After the advertising beef, venture capitalist Bill Gurley tweeted: The Signal vs Facebook story is remarkable. The biggest threat to Facebook is a non-profit funded by WhatsApp founders! Such a great story.

To stay up to date on the latest news on Mondays outage, follow The Independents live blog.

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What is Signal? The messaging app Edward Snowden suggests we all join - indy100