This is the full text of the Stuart Hall Memorial Lecture delivered by the author at the Conway Hall on September 30, 2022.

Thank you for inviting me to speak here today in memory of Stuart Hall.

Weve been trying to make this happen for what seems like years. I will never ever again take for granted the pleasure of being in a room together with so many fellow human beings. The pandemic has faded somewhat, but many of us are still struggling to get the measure of the trauma it has left in its wake. I can hardly believe that I never met Stuart. But reading his work makes me feel we would have spent a lot of time laughing together about things.

The main title of this lecture, Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, is the title of a little book I wrote along with the actor John Cusack. It was about a trip that he and I made to Russia in December, 2013 to meet Edward Snowden in Moscow. Our other companion was Daniel Ellsberg for those of you who are too young to remember, he was the Snowden of his time; the whistleblower who made public the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam war.

Snowden, who warned us years ago that we were sleepwalking into a surveillance state, continues to live in exile in Moscow. And we have tumbled enthusiastically into the surveillance state he warned about, with our little phone-companions that have become as intimate and as indispensable as any vital organ in our bodies, spying on us, recording and transmitting our most personal information so that we can be tracked, controlled, standardised and domesticated. Not just by the state, but by each other too.

Imagine if your liver, or your gall bladder didnt have your best interests at heart, your doctor would tell you that you are terminally ill. Thats the sort of bind we find ourselves in. We cant do without it, but its doing us in.

The first section of my talk will be about things that can and cannot be said. The second, about the dismantling of the world as we knew it.

This has been a bad year for those who have said and done Things That Cannot Be Said. Or Done. In Iran, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was killed while she was in the custody of Irans moral police for the sin of not wearing her headscarf in the way that is officially mandated. In the protests that followed and are ongoing, several people have been killed.

Meanwhile, in India, in the southern state of Karnataka, Muslim schoolgirls who wanted to assert their identity as Muslim women in their classrooms by wearing hijabs were physically intimidated by right-wing Hindu men. This in a place where Hindus and Muslims have lived together for centuries but have recently become dangerously polarised.

Both instances strict hijab in Iran and the prohibition of hijab in India and other countries may appear to be antagonistic, but they arent really. Forcing a woman into a hijab, or forcing her out of one, isnt about the hijab. Its about the coercion. Robe her. Disrobe her. The age-old preoccupation of controlling and policing women.

In August, Salman Rushdie was savagely attacked in upstate New York by an Islamist zealot for his book, The Satanic Verses; a book that was first published in 1988. In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian Revolution and the first leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, issued an edict calling for Rushdies death. All these years later, just when it had begun to seem that the anger and passions his book aroused had abated and Rushdie gradually came out of hiding, came the attack.

Also read: How Salman Rushdie Has Been a Scapegoat for Complex Historical Differences

After the initial news of the 75-year-old Rushdie having survived the attack and being in good cheer, there is no news at all. One can only hope that he is recovering and will return to the world of literature with all his powers intact. Heads of state in Europe and the US have come out robustly in Rushdies support, some saying, a little self-servingly, His fight is our fight.

Meanwhile, Julian Assange, who published and exposed some of the more terrible war crimes committed by soldiers of those countries, wars in which hundreds of thousands died, is in terrible health and remains locked up in Belmarsh prison, awaiting extradition to the US, where he may face a death sentence or several life sentences.

So, we must pause before casting this horrifying attack on Rushdie in cliched terms such as a Clash of Civilisations or Democracy versus Darkness. Because millions have been killed in invasions led by these so-called free-speech evangelists, and among those, millions have been writers, poets and artists, too.

As for the news from India, in June, Nupur Sharma, spokesperson of the BJP, Indias ruling Hindu nationalist party, once a permanent, bullying presence on TV talk shows, made several intemperate comments against Prophet Mohammed in a provocative performance whose very purpose appeared to be to cause offence. There was an international uproar, and several death threats later, she has retreated from public life. But two Hindu men who supported her comments were brutally beheaded. In the days that followed, throngs of Muslim zealots have gathered to chant tan se sar juda (separate the head from the body) and call for the state to pass a blasphemy law. It doesnt seem to occur to them that nothing would make the state happier.

Theyre not the only ones who conflate censorship and assassination. Earlier this month I was in Bangalore to speak on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the assassination of my friend Gauri Lankesh, the journalist who was shot down outside her home by Hindu fanatics. Hers was one in a series of assassinations that appear to be connected to the same shadowy group: Dr Narendra Dabholkar, the physician and well-known rationalist thinker, was shot in 2013; comrade Govind Pansare, a writer and member of the Communist Party of India, was shot in February 2015, and the Kannada scholar professor M.M. Kalburgi in August that same year.

Assassination is of course, not the only form of censorship we experience. In the year 2022, India ranks 150th out of 180 on the World Press Freedom Index, below Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. We are policed not just by the government, but by mobs on the streets, by social media trolls and, ironically, by the media itself.

On the hundreds of 247 TV news channels we often refer to as Radio Rwanda, our baying TV anchors rage against Muslims and anti-nationals, call for dissenters to be arrested, sacked, punished. They have ruined lives and reputations with absolute impunity and no accountability. Activists, poets, intellectuals, lawyers and students are being arrested almost every day. As for Kashmir the Valley from which No News Can Come it is a giant prison. Soon there could be more soldiers there than citizens.

Also read: Communal Virus Injected into Diaspora, and the Culture is Growing

Every communication by Kashmiris, private as well as public, even the very rhythm of their breathing, is supervised. In schools, under the guise of learning to love Gandhi, Muslim children are being taught to sing Hindu bhajans. When I think of Kashmir these days, for some reason I think of how, in some parts of the world, watermelons are being trained to grow in square moulds so that they are cube-shaped and easier to stack. In the Kashmir valley, it looks as though the Indian government is running that experiment on humans instead of melons. At gun-point.

Down in the Gangetic plains the cow belt of North India, mobs of sword-wielding Hindus led by godmen, who the media for some reason calls seers, call for the genocide of Muslims and the rape of Muslim women with complete impunity.

We have witnessed daylight lynchings, and the genocidal killing of more than a thousand Muslims (non-government figures put that number at closer to two thousand) in Gujarat in 2002 and in hundreds in Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh in 2013. Not surprisingly, both massacres took place just before crucial elections.

We have watched the man under whose chief ministership the Gujarat massacre took place, Narendra Modi, consolidate his position as Hindu Hriday Samrat (the Emperor of Hindu Hearts) and rise to assume the highest office in the country. He has never expressed regret or apologised for what happened. We have watched him continue to amass political capital from his dangerous, sneering anti-Muslim rhetoric. We have watched the highest court in the land absolve him of all responsibility, legal as well as moral. We have watched, nauseated, as leaders of the so-called Free World embrace him as a statesman and a democrat.

Last month, India celebrated the 75th anniversary of independence from British Rule. From his elevated lectern in the Red Fort in Delhi, Modi thundered about his dream of empowering women in India. He spoke with passion, clenched his fist. He wore a turban flecked with the colours of the national flag.

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi waves at the audience during the 75th Independence Day function at the historic Red Fort, in New Delhi, Sunday, August 15, 2021. (PTI Photo/Kamal Singh) (PTI08_15_2021_000025B)

Empowering women in a society built on the Hindu caste system where privileged-caste men have for centuries exercised what they believe to be their ordained right to the bodies of Dalit and Adivasi women, is not a matter of policy alone. Its about a socialisation, and a belief system.

There is a rising graph of crimes against women in India, putting it on the map of amongst the most unsafe places in the world for women. It surprises no one these days to see how often the criminals belong to or are related to members of the current ruling dispensation. In such cases, we have seen public rallies in favour of rapists. In the most recent case in which a 19-year-old girl was raped and murdered, a local leader blamed her father for spreading raw milk before hungry cats.

Even as Modi was delivering his Independence Day speech, the Bharatiya Janata Party government in the state of Gujarat announced special amnesty for 11 men who were serving life-sentences for the 2002 gang rape of 19-year-old Bilkis Bano and the murder of 14 members of her family, including her mother, her sisters, her baby brothers, her aunts, her uncle, her cousins, her cousins one-day-old infant, and Saleha, Bilkiss three-year-old daughter, whose head was smashed against a rock.

This grisly crime, only one of several similar ones, was a part of the 2002 anti-Muslim Gujarat pogrom I mentioned earlier. The panel that approved their release had several members from the BJP, one of them an elected legislator who went on record later to say that, since some of the convicts were Brahmins with good sanskar (good upbringing), it was unlikely they were guilty at all.

In cases investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation, as this one was, it is legally mandated that any decision to give convicts amnesty has to be approved by the Central government, which is of course the government of Narendra Modi. So, we must assume that that permission was given.

When the convicts came out, they were greeted outside the prison walls as heroes they were garlanded with flowers, fed sweets and had their feet touched by members of Hindu groups loosely affiliated to the BJP (the looseness is to provide what is called plausible deniability) that make up the Sangh Parivar, the Joined Family. In a few months time, Gujarat goes to the polls.

In India, strange things happen just before our free and fair elections. Its always the most dangerous time.

As the rapist-mass murderers return to take their place as respected members of society, Teesta Setalvad, the activist whose organisation, Citizens for Justice and Peace, has meticulously compiled a tower of documentary evidence that points to the complicity of the Gujarat government in general and Narendra Modi in particular with the 2002 massacre, was arrested, accused of forgery, tutoring witnesses and attempting to keep the pot boiling.

These are the conditions in which we live and work. And say the things that cannot be said. In speech, as in everything else, the law is applied selectively depending on caste, religion, gender and class. A Muslim cannot say what Hindus can. A Kashmiri cannot say what everybody else can. Solidarity, speaking up for others is more important than ever. But that too has become a perilous activity.

In India as in other countries, the weaponisation of identity, in which identity is disaggregated and atomised into micro-categories, has turned the air itself into a sort of punitive heresy-hunting machine. Even these micro-identities have developed a power hierarchy. In his book Elite Capture, the philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo describes how certain individuals then become elevated from among these groups, individuals usually located in powerful countries, in big cities, in big universities, those with social capital on the internet, and then are given platforms by foundations, by media, by corporations to speak for and decide on behalf of the rest of their communities.

Also read: Even After a Century, Water Is Still the Marker of Indias Caste Society

Its an understandable response to historic pain and humiliation. But its not a revolutionary response. Micro-Elite Capture cannot be the only answer to Macro-Elite Capture. As some empirical research has shown, when we buy into a culture of proscription and censorship, it is the Right that benefits disproportionately. A recent study by PEN America of banned school textbooks shows that the overwhelming majority of proscribed textbooks contain progressive texts on gender and race.

Sealing in communities, reducing and flattening their identities into silos can be perilous and precludes solidarity. Ironically, that was and is the ultimate goal of the caste system in India divide a people into a hierarchy of unbreachable silos, and no one community will be able to feel the pain of another because they are in constant conflict. It works like a self-operating, intricate administrative/surveillance machine in which society administers/surveils itself, and in the process ensures that the overarching structures of oppression remain in place. Everyone except those at the very top and the very bottom (and these categories are minutely graded too) is oppressed by someone and has someone to be oppressed by.

Once this maze of tripwires has been laid, almost nobody can pass the test of purity and correctness. Certainly, almost nothing that was once thought of as good or great literature. Not Shakespeare, for sure. Not Tolstoy imagine presuming he could understand the mind of a woman called Anna Karenina. Not Dostoevsky, who only refers to older women as crones. By his standards, Id qualify as a crone for sure. But Id still like people to read him. It goes without saying that by these standards, every sacred book of every religion would not pass muster.

Amidst the apparent noise in public discourse, we are swiftly approaching a sort of intellectual gridlock. Solidarity can never be pristine. It should be challenged, debated, argued about, corrected. By precluding it, we reinforce the very thing we claim to be fighting against.

And now Id like to turn to the subheading of my talk the dismantling of the world as we knew it. Id like to speak a little about queens and their funerals.

When the Queen died, some British newspapers asked me to write a piece about her passing. I was a little puzzled by the request. Perhaps because Ive never lived in England, Queen Elizabeth II barely existed even on the peripheries of my imagination. So, I said sure, but it wont be about the queen that youre thinking about.

The queen I was thinking about was my mother, who founded and ran a high school, who died earlier this month. For good or for bad, she was the most singular, most profound influence in my life. We were dangerous foes and desperately good friends. She was the obstacle race that I structured myself around from the time I was very young. And now that shes gone, and left me not heart-broken, but heart-smashed, my rather odd shape and structure doesnt seem to make sense to me anymore. I was tempted to make this lecture about the politics of two funerals. One on the worlds stage and the other in a small town in South India. But I will resist that temptation.

Perhaps, nows time for me to say the first Thing that Should Not Be Said, at least not here in London, not now.

I couldnt believe the pomp and pageantry and the days of endless television coverage of the rites and rituals of her funeral. I was transfixed by the obsequious, reverential paying of respects by those darker folks who hold high office in her former colonies, now known as the Commonwealth. There was nothing common about that wealth. It was extractive. And it flowed in one direction. We in the colonies paid for those costumes, those furs, those jewels, those gold sceptres.

Theres much to say about colonies and colonialism and the Monarchs who reigned over that barbarous period in history. Who better than Start Hall to tell us that story? But hows this just as a piece of graffiti as the somber cavalry rides past? The historian Mike Davis estimates that in the last quarter of the 19th century, between 30 and 60 million people died of hunger in the mostly man-made famines in colonial India, China and Brazil. He calls it the Great Victorian Holocaust.

Why do we love and admire those who humiliate us? That could be the most pertinent political, as well as personal, question of our times.

I apologise if this sounds like an unnuanced commentary on colonialism. That is not my position. I dont count myself among those Indian intellectuals who rage against colonialism but choose to remain silent about the wrongs in our own societies. The Hindu caste system, for example, is one of the most brutal systems of social hierarchy the world has ever known. Many would call it a form of colonialism that pre-dates British colonialism and is prevalent even today. Caste remains the engine that runs modern India. It is remarkable how many Indian writers and intellectuals manage to completely elide the question of caste. To unsee something that stares us in the face almost every moment of every single day, they have to assume the literary or academic version of a very elaborate, tortuous yoga asana.

All this is the subject of much of my writing, so for now Id like to return to my bemusement about the Queens funeral. What was it really about? Someone please help me out here, because I dont understand.

It cant have been about the passing of a 96-year-old monarch of a small island country, which is having trouble even holding on to the sum of its parts Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Was it only a harking back, a nostalgic invocation, a paean to the ghost of the Empire on which the Sun Never Set? Or was it something more than that? Was it about the past, or is it about the future?

As the war in the Ukraine unfolds and the modern world as we know it comes apart at the seams, was all that pageantry actually a pantomime rally, a posturing, a parading of friends and allies, for a battle that is still to come?

It reminded me of the opening chapter of Barbara Tuchmans The Guns of August about the lead up to World War I.

So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled sashes flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queensand a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of the Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on historys clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying world of splendour never to be seen again

The dangerous brinkmanship being played out in the Ukraine is being somewhat obscured by the noise of propaganda on both sides. But historys clock could very well be racing towards sunset.

The various points of view on the war also involve some pretty tortuous yoga asanas some pretty drastic seeing and unseeing depending on where you have decided to place yourself. Many on the Left cannot find it in themselves to call out Russias invasion of the Ukraine. They believe that Ukrainian outrage against Russia has been entirely confected and cultivated by Western Imperialism. That the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s never happened. They deny that millions of Ukrainians the historian Timothy Snyder estimates five million died in the famine of the early 1930s under Stalins policy of forced collectivisation.

They see Russias invasion of Ukraine as a defensive war against an existential threat to itself by NATO. Thats not untrue. The fact that Russia does face a very serious threat is hard to deny. The hitch is that that the defensive war is being fought offensively on Ukrainian soil and against the Ukrainian people.

When the Cold War ended, demilitarisation and nuclear disarmament should have begun. Instead, NATO did the opposite. It amassed more weapons, fought more wars and used the territory of its allies and proxies for the aggressive and provocative forward deployment of troops and missiles. If Russia had done through proxies in Europe or the US what NATO is doing to it, there is little doubt that we would be seeing the moral arguments and western media coverage turned inside out.

None of this makes Vladimir Putin a revolutionary anti-imperialist or a democrat of any kind. None of it alters the fact that he believes in an overtly fascist, anti-Semitic, anti-Homosexual, Christian nationalist ideology (which ironically, he calls de-Nazification) propounded by his two favourite ideologues, Alexander Dugin and Alexander Prokhanov.

His claim about Ukraine, Crimea and Belarus being inseparable territories that made up Ancient Rus, a theory based on the millennial myth of the Christian baptism of its leader Volodymyr/Valdemar in Crimea in AD 988, has been (correctly) met with hilarity.

But we must ask why then is there less amusement in the same quarters when it comes to talk of Israels treatment of Palestinians and its claims of being the ancient Promised Land for the Jewish people, which translates in modern legalese as the Nation-State of the Jewish people.

Or in India, when the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu nationalist militia and cultural guild of which Prime Minister Modi is a member, calls for an Akhand Bharat, a sort of fantasy that is futuristic and ancient all at once a future ancient India that includes Pakistan and Bangladesh, which will be conquered and where all its people will be subjected to Hindu rule.

Ordinary people in Europe are gearing up to face the harsh winter that is nearly upon them, with very little or no heating, as Russia, in response to economic sanctions, threatens to shut off their gas supply. As Ukrainians fight on with relentless courage, and the chances of a negotiated settlement fade away, anxiety is building over the possibility of the war expanding and escalating. Putin has announced the partial mobilisation, whatever that means, of 300,000 military reservists. Perhaps for now the US is far away enough and safe enough, but all of Europe, Russia and much of Asia could become the theatre of a war unlike any the world has ever seen. A war in which there cant be a winner.

Isnt it time for everybody to step back? Isnt it time to begin a real conversation about complete nuclear disarmament?

God forbid, Russia resorts to using US logic for turning to nuclear weapons. In an article titled, If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Used, published in December 1946, Karl K. Compton, the physicist and former president of MIT, said that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved hundreds of thousands perhaps several millions of lives, both American and Japanese; that without its use the war would have continued for many months. His logic was that the Japanese, even though they had been defeated, would not have surrendered and, if not for the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of people, they would have fought to the last man standing.

Was the use of the atomic bomb inhuman? Compton asks himself. All war is inhuman, was his reassuring reply (to himself.) It was published in The Atlantic. President Truman wrote in to endorse this argument.

Years later, General William Westmoreland carried that logic a little further during the Vietnam war: The Oriental doesnt put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient. In other words, we Asians dont value our lives and so we force the White world to bear the burden of genocide.

And then theres Robert McNamara, of course, who had a successful career arc, first as the planner of the bombing of Tokyo in 1946, which killed more than 200,000 people in two separate raids, then as the president of Ford Motor Company, next as the US Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war, in which US soldiers were ordered to Kill Anything That Moves, as a result of which 3 million Vietnamese lost their lives.

McNamaras last job was to take care of world poverty as President of the World Bank. Towards the end of his life, in an Erroll Morris documentary called The Fog of War, he asks an anguished question: How much evil must we do in order to do good?

As you must have gathered, Im a collector of these gems. Lets not forget that President Obama had a Kill List. And that Madeline Albright, who President Joe Biden recently described as a force for goodness, grace, and decency and for freedom, when she was asked about the estimated half-a-million Iraqi children dying because of US economic sanctions, famously said, I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.

Where are we headed? Even those of us who stand squarely with the Ukrainian people against the Russian invasion of their country cannot help but marvel at the difference in tone and tenor of the Western Medias coverage of the war in Ukraine and the breathless admiration with which it covered the US and NATOs invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, which killed hundreds of thousands of people. This January, Tony Blair, the most passionate purveyor of the fake news about Iraqs non-existent weapons of mass destruction, which was used to justify the invasion, and President George Bush Jr.s most enthusiastic ally in the invasion, was ordered Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the senior most British order of chivalry.

Watching the funeral of the Queen the other day I nearly choked on whatever it was I was drinking as I heard one of the Bishops or Archbishops say that, unlike those who merely cling to wealth and power, Queen Elizabeth II would be loved and remembered for her life of service to the public. Her son, the new King of England, will inherit her wealth and station. His royal lifestyle will not be supported by his own private wealth, which reportedly amounts to about a billion dollars. It will be paid for with public money, by the British people, millions of whom, the Guardian reports, have begun to skip a meal every day just to keep the lights on.

Perhaps its hard for the rest of us to understand the mystery of the British peoples love and enthrallment with their monarchy. Perhaps it has to do with a national sense of identity and pride which cannot and certainly ought not to be reduced to vulgar economics. But allow me to indulge in some vulgarity for a minute or two.

A recent analysis in the Financial Times concludes that income inequality in the US and the UK is so great that they could be classed as poor societies with some very rich people. Theyre like us Third Worlders now, Banana Republics whose wealthy have seceded into outer space and whose poor are falling into the sea.

A 2022 Oxfam study says Indias 98 richest people own the equivalent of the combined wealth of the poorest 552 million people. For this impertinence, Oxfam offices in India have been raided by the Income Tax department and perhaps will soon be shut down, like Amnesty International and every other organisation that is critical of the Modi regime.

King Charles III, rich though he may be, is a pauper compared to Gautam Adani, the worlds third richest man, Gujarati corporate tycoon and friend to Narendra Modi. Adanis fortune is estimated to be $137 billion a sum that rapidly increased during the pandemic.

In 2014, when he was first elected Prime Minister of India, Modi made a point of flying from Ahmedabad, his home city in Gujarat, to Delhi in Adanis private jet his name and logo emblazoned across it. In the eight years of Modis rule, Adanis fortune has grown from $8 billion in 2014 to what it is now. Thats an accumulation of $129 billion. Im just saying. Please dont read deep meaning into it. Adanis money comes from coal mining and operating sea-ports and airports. Most recently, he was involved in the hostile takeover of NDTV, the only mainstream national TV news channel that dares to delicately criticise the Modi regime. Most of the rest of the media is already bought and paid for.

The corporations that are blasting mountain ranges, clear-felling forests and bleaching corral reefs also fund happiness conferences, sporting events, film and literature festivals. They provide courageous writers platforms on which to condemn attacks on Free Speech and make declarations about their commitment to peace, justice and human rights. And say Things Cannot Be Said, Done.

Capitalism is in its Endgame. Sadly, as it goes down, its taking our planet with it.

Between nuclear hawks and mining corporations, its a race to the bottom.

Meanwhile, for light entertainment, lets all fight about what gods to pray to, what flags to wave, what songs to sing. In case Ive left you feeling dejected, let me read you an email I wrote in response to a member of the audience who criticised me (gently) for sounding overly optimistic when I spoke in memory of Gauri Lankesh:

If we have no hope, lets all sit down and give up. There are millions of excellent reasons for us to be pessimistic. Thats why I suggested we should divorce Hope from Reason. Hope should be wild, irrational and unreasonable.

In every line I write, every word I speak, what Im really saying is, We are not Zero. You havent defeated us.

For millions in the world with their backs to the wall, these debates about hope and despair are a luxury. Even here, underneath the reek of wealth in the city of London, a visitor can sense a sort of tense, vibrating unease, like the rumble beneath your feet as a train approaches the platform.

None of this will matter in the event of a nuclear war. That will simply end us. Its time for the two sides to step back. And for the rest of the world to step in. Armageddon doesnt contain a clause for second chances.

Arundhati Royis a writer.

Featured image:From left to right: Edward Snowden, Vladimir Putin, Arundhati Roy, Narendra Modi and Teesta Setalvad. Photos: Reuters, PTI.

This article was first published on The Wire.

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Arundhati Roy on Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: The Dismantling of the World as We Know It - LiveWire

TikTok needs no introduction; with a billion monthly active users, the short-form video app is ubiquitous in modern culture. What fewer of these users seem to be aware of is TikToks ability to harvest massive quantities of their information, from biometric data to every keystroke in the in-app browser. That information is then sent to Chinese data servers, contrary to the claims of the apps developer ByteDance. This makes TikToks tremendous popularity a constant threat to both the personal privacy of its users and the national security of the United States.

In June, BuzzFeed News obtained leaked audio from discussions between third-party auditors and ByteDance that revealed that employees have constant access to the private data of American users. The discovery was ironically made as the auditors were ensuring that the data was stored on American servers as part of a prospective acquisition of TikToks U.S. division by Oracle. The company claims this process was completed, but that it retains backups of the information.

BuzzFeed also notes that much of the information will be stored on a server in Virginia that is still accessible to ByteDance, which is consistent with a habit of Oracle to grant the company significant leniency in how it carried out the transition. This is despite the fact the purpose of the acquisition was to prevent China from harvesting oceans of American data to use for potentially hostile purposes. Oracles lack of responsibility is unsurprising given it has recently been sued for tracking the nonpublic data of five billion people.

Even before the BuzzFeed investigation was released, numerous findings regarding the extent of the information TikTok collects already made the label spyware a fair evaluation. Felix Krause, a security researcher, found that the app tracks all inputs, including taps and keystrokes, in the in-app browser on Apple devices. Not only that, TikTok updated its privacy policy and openly revealed it would start collecting biometric information such as fingerprints and faceprints. As with every other official statement, the company claimed it was safely stored in U.S. data centers and that the information was only used to optimize the user experience. The former claim would turn out to be an outright lie, and the latter can be evaluated similarly through an examination of Chinas espionage habits.

Chinas mass information harvest has long posed a national security threat through consumer technology, and several of the biggest incidents still occupy no space in the American consciousness. An investigation by Bloomberg discovered that during a security evaluation for a prospective acquisition of a smaller company in 2015, Amazon found that servers built by Supermicro had an extremely small chip on the motherboard not in the blueprints. Further examination showed that the chips were sending secrets from the largest American technology corporations to servers owned by the Chinese government in an operation directed by its military. A foreign power infiltrated the most covert secrets of the most powerful companies in the world, yet few people seem to know.

Not content with the theft of American corporate secrets, Chinas activities reveal a pattern of harnessing the power of big data and artificial intelligence to construct an oppressive society. TikTok is one tool of many, a small part of a growing surveillance network intended to structure society to the ruling partys liking. A New York Times investigation found that Chinese authorities are linking physical and digital activity to create comprehensive profiles of its citizens. China is likely utilizing the information from foreigners in a similar manner, collected through apps like TikTok and enabled by American officials and corporate leaders who do not care enough to take action against it.

Dismissing these threats as merely paranoia or conspiracy theories is naive as evidence of Chinese encroachment on the American digital landscape grows exponentially. This does not mean the United States is not conducting mass surveillance, particularly considering what was revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013. However, we do not use it for ethnic cleansing or constructing a totalitarian state with a backbone of technology as China does with its social credit system.

Despite this track record, U.S. officials remain oblivious to the threat. As of this month, the Biden administration has begun to draft a deal with ByteDance to resolve information security concerns without selling TikToks American division, according to The New York Times. The report outlines preliminary terms that fail to address the core issues: review by Oracle of TikToks servers and algorithms, and a security board to set policies. Given Oracles apathy towards the entire ordeal, this deal gives little hope that ByteDances violation of Americans privacy will be solved any time soon.

Taking action against TikTok is only one step toward securing personal and national security against Chinas flagrant data harvest. The U.S. government and its contractors must have the will to create holistic approaches that acknowledge the gravity of the threat or risk handing our adversaries the information they desire on a silver platter. If both the American public and the government feign ignorance of the dangers of foreign espionage, we are only enabling Chinas plans for technological oppression.

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Billion Dollar Harvest: TikTok's Threat to National and Personal Security MARIST CIRCLE - Marist College The Circle

For director Laura Poitras, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed represents a departure of sorts. After centering films around people ranging from a former bodyguard for Osama bin Laden in The Oath to Edward Snowden in Citizenfour and Julian Assange in Risk, her latest documentary focuses on an artist: legendary photographer Nan Goldin. But theres still a strong political dimension to the film, since Goldin was a major force in bringing down the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma, one of the global pharmaceutical companies largely responsible for the opioid epidemic in the United States.

Its a deeply personal mission for Goldin, as someone who found herself addicted to OxyContin for a period of time until she nearly died from an overdose. Goldins activism, though, is, the film suggests, born out of not just her brush with the opioid crisis, but from a lifetime of dealing with mental illness, drug abuse, and untimely death to varying degrees. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed turns out to be as bifurcated a film as its title: Its half a biographical portrait of Goldin told in her own words, half a chronicle of her present-day activism in shining a light on the Sacklers ruthless pushing of these addictive drugs on an unsuspecting public.

Poitras has broken the film up into seven chapters, each devoting roughly half of each section to a period in Goldins life, the other half returning to contemporary times to depict an episode in her campaign against the Sacklers. The back-and-forth structure does make the film feel somewhat unwieldy, like two different movies coexisting uneasily in one. Poitras doesnt quite fully convince us that every single biographical detail that Goldin offers to us about her life necessarily ties to her direct actions against the Sacklers and her advocacy for harm reduction.

And yet, relevant or not, the details themselves are compelling, especially as Goldin narrates it to us in a slideshow format reminiscent of her own public presentations of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and other seminal photo series of hers. Goldin covers everything from her own hellish suburban upbringing, to the discovery of both a welcoming queer community in Provincetown and her own bisexuality, to her personal and professional difficulties while living in downtown NYC, to the ravages of the AIDS crisis to which she bore witness in the 1980s.

The warmth, ruefulness, and occasional anger with which Goldin recounts these experiences is moving in and of itself. In addition, hearing Goldin talk openly about not only her past but about how her experiences affected her frank, intimate, and vulnerable art offers an illuminating window into her photographic art, of which the film offers a generous on-screen sampling. As portraiture, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed accomplishes the goal of any documentary worthy of its genre by shining an insightful light onto what informs an artists vision.

Its during the scenes in the film detailing the Sacklers injustices and Goldins crusade against themfrom public demonstrations at art organizations still carrying the Sackler name to the formation of her organization P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now)that the film feels most like Poitrass previous work. Her firsthand access to the staging of, say, her groups 2018 protest at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at what had previously been known as the Sackler Wing exudes the life-or-death immediacy that The Oath and Citizenfour had in spades. So does a shorter passage in which various P.A.I.N. members, as well as New Yorker reporter Patrick Radden Keefe, find themselves being stalked by a mysterious figure that they believe has been sent by Purdue Pharma to spy on them (a claim Purdue has firmly denied, naturally).

But All the Beauty and the Bloodshed shows the intrepid Poitras pushing into new emotional terrain. The films title comes from a report that a doctor filed about Goldins sister, Barbara, who committed suicide at the age of 18 after many years in and out of psychiatric hospitals. To some degree it speaks to the wide-ranging, inclusive way that the rebellious Barbara viewed the world, a perspective that was wrongly deemed mental illness during the more repressive 60s, and one which Goldin has spent her whole life trying to honor. Based on this affectionate and powerful cinematic portrait, its a perspective to which Poitras feels a kinship, making this film arguably the closest to a personal manifesto that shes offered in her filmography to date.

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'All the Beauty and the Bloodshed' Review: Politics of the Personal - slantmagazine

Andrew Dominicks Blonde has begun playing in select theaters ahead of its upcoming streaming release, and responses have been strong. The Ana de Armas-led film about Marilyn Monroe courts controversy at every turn, from its excessive use of nudity to its questionable portrayal of abortion, so negative responses are hardly surprising. But to fans of Marilyn Monroe, its just another example of the late actress image continuing to be twisted against her will.

While Blonde never claims to be a biopic and is very open about the way it intentionally blends fact and fiction, it fits firmly within the tradition of films about real people that ended up offending fans of those figures. Sometimes movies are doomed by historical inaccuracies, others take a political slant and misinterpret the subjects life, and occasionally theyre just flat-out bad.

If Blonde doesnt scratch your itch for controversy, we have you covered. Keep reading for a list of 10 of the most controversial biopics ever made.

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The Most Controversial Biopics - IndieWire

Written by Tonya Riley Sep 15, 2022 | CYBERSCOOP

Customs and Border Protection is conducting warrantless searches of the phones and other electronic devices of up to 10,000 Americans each year and uploading information from those devices to a massive government database, according to information shared by the agency with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.

The database, which retains records for up to 15 years, includes text messages, call logs, contact lists, photos and other sensitive records, according to a letter from Wydens office to the agency Tuesday.

Innocent Americans should not be tricked into unlocking their phones and laptops, Wyden said in a press release accompanying the letter. CBP should not dump data obtained through thousands of warrantless phone searches into a central database, retain the data for fifteen years, and allow thousands of DHS employees to search through Americans personal data whenever they want.

CBP didnot detail the exact number of Americans included in the database, but said ina June briefing with Wydens office that it examines and saves data from less than 10,000 devices a year.

According to agency data, CBP processed more than 179 million travelers at U.S. ports of entry in fiscal year 2021. During that same period, CBP conducted approximately 37,000 border searches of electronic devices, representing less than 0.02 percent of international travelers.

At this time, no additional statistics have been publicly available due to law enforcement sensitivities and national security implications, CBP spokesperson Lawrence Payne wrote in an email to CyberScoop. CBP is currently reviewing whether additional information specific to border searches of electronic devices, may be made publicly available without negative impacts to law enforcement operations and national security.

Based on the information available, the database is easily one of the most significant sources of electronic surveillance for the U.S. government, says Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center of Democracy and Technologys Security and Surveillance Project. He compared it to the former National Security Agency surveillance program revealed by Edward Snowden that collected millions of Americans phone records each year.

Searches at the border have long been exempt from the warrant process, though agents are still expected to have reasonable suspicion before conducting the search. According to CBP guidelines, a device cannot be intentionally used to access information that is solely stored remotely.

According to Laperruque, the database is a clear abuse of a loophole for border searches. It really is just a clear example of how different the system is from the justification, he said. This is about creating a mass surveillance apparatus, not border security.

Other surveillance experts agreed the search exploits a lapse in oversight.

CBP is abusing this constitutional loophole to do an end-run around the 4th Amendment, Albert Fox Cahn, executive director for the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said in a statement. This sprawling database proves that CBPs searches were never about finding contraband, but were always just a way to avoid the Constitution. The Biden Administration and Congress must act to stop these searches and purge this database.

The Washington Post first reported the Wyden letter. CBPs director of field operations Aaron Bowker told the Post that other agencies do not have access to the data but can request information on a case-by-case basis. He put the number of CBP officials with access to the database at 3,000.

CBP has imposed certain policy requirements, above and beyond prevailing legal requirements, to ensure that the border search of electronic devices is exercised judiciously, responsibly, and consistent with public trust, CBPs Payne wrote.

Wyden has pushed for the passage of his legislation, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, which would require law enforcement to get a warrant to obtain Americans personal data. His letter requests a response from CBP no later than Oct. 31 with a plan for addressing the issues raised in the letter.

Updated 9/15/2022: To include additional information from CBP.

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Congressional inquiry reveals secret Customs and Border Protection database of U.S. phone records - CyberScoop

This news flash brought back the memories of the 2011 Operation Neptune Spear by the US Navy Seals that killed Osama Bin Laden, the founder of Al Qaeda.Zawahiri became the chief of this terror group after Laden was killed in 2011.

President Joe Biden has even more reasons to celebrate the recent operation as he was the Vice President back then in 2011, sitting in the Situation Control Room along with the then President Barack Obama and other officials, as they all watched the Laden hunt being live telecasted from Pakistan.The tweets by Biden and Obama posted after the recent operations also point towards this bonhomie. The recent operation draws on from the experiences of the CIA and the US military strikes in West Asia, global opinions, human right concerns and lessons learnt from the 2011 strike. This article analyzes the important elements of the change in Americas targeted killing strategy since 2011.

Ever since the 9/11 WTC attacks happened in New York, Bin Laden had become the face of global terror. From a mystical figure wandering across the Hindu-Kush, he now suddenly found himself to be the most sought after terrorist in the world and his name was at the top in wanted lists of many countries.The CIA and Pentagon effectively used the 9/11 incident to enhance their budgets and capabilities, the rationale behind doing so being justified by the horrendous attack that killed over 3000 people.

The CIA launched a massive intelligence gathering campaign, combining technical surveillance with extensive human intelligence gathering even resorting to inhuman methods of interrogation. The message was clear on Americas part as they declared the so called Global War on Terror with the famous axiom in this war , you are either with us or against us .

It was quite amusing to see Barack Obama saying in his recent tweet after the successful operation that killed Zawahiri: roots of terror can be destroyed, without declaring a war on terrorbut that was what he effectively did during his tenure at the White House, ordering almost 10 times more drone strikes than George Bush[1].

Way back in 2011, the CIA presented their assessments and plans to Barack Obama regarding the Abottabad compound that they doubted was Ladens safe house. CIA had inputs from many sources , including a ISI officer who tipped them off about the location of this compound. The CIA and other Americanagencies like the NSA and NGA had even bought a safe house in Abottabad to keep 24*7 surveillance on the suspected site.

The mandate from the leadership was said to be capture or kill Osama Bin Laden[2], which became controversial later with some sections saying Laden should have been captured alive while most others being in favor of shoot-at-sight:

The President was presented with multiple options like a drone strike (firing targeted missiles), a commando raid, bombing the compound by B-52 stealth bombers etc. Oneof the options to conduct a joint operation with Pakistan to kill Laden was ruled out, due to suspicions on Pakistans reliability. Barack Obama eventually ruled out the other options and confirmed the plan for a quiet midnight commando raid by Special Forces, who used modified Black Hawk helicopters, with mission specific arms and ammunitions. Joe Biden is said to have also advised Obama about the possible ramifications for Pakistan when the knowledge of this operation became public.

Possibilities of collateral damage, other civilian casualties in the area etc. were also factored in. The CIA said they were unsure if aerial bombing would work, incase there is an underground bunker lying there. Also it would have been impossible to verify if Laden was dead, since till last moment the CIA had no photograph of the white clothed man wandering in this compound, to be Bin Laden or someone else. It was only after the Navy Seals saw Laden and shot him, it was confirmed that he was dead.

A house intervention model of attack was followed with the Forces entering from the terrace and ground floor simultaneously, clearing out each room one by one. Laden was eventually discovered on the 3rd floor and as he tried to hide, a commando took 3 successive shots and killed him straight.A huge amount of hard drives, computers and whatever else the Seals could lay their hands on was taken away as evidence for further analysis.

One of the helicopters that had crashed in the compound was blown up by explosives to avoid reverse engineering attempts on the technology by Pakistan and China,and the remaining copters were used to carryLadens body back with the hit teams and the collected evidence. Laden was quietly buried in an unknown location in the Arabian Sea within 24 hours of the strike.During the raid other occupants of the housewho came in the way of the commandoes were also shot dead [3].

E) Kill confirmation and identification:

Facial identification confirmed that it was Osama Bin Laden. To be doubly sure, one of the Navy Seals was made to lie downnext to Ladens body-and the body length also matched (6 feet). You just blew up a $65 million helicopter and you dont have enough money to buy a tape measure?, Barack Obama is said to have remarked back then!

F) Public knowledge of the operation:

The White House issued a statement next day, saying the President will address the nation at around 10 pm local time, but some junior officer from the Navys intelligence department leaked out the news of Ladens death at around 9.45pm. The media was quick to pick this up, while the Presidential address happened around 11pm in the night.

G) Global responses

Pakistan was quite embarrassed, as it had always denied knowledge of existence of Laden on its land. Media reports mentioned that Pak allowed the Chinese to have a look at the wreckage of the damaged helicopter.

USA came in under huge criticism world over as more information about its detention centers, illegal interrogations and surveillances became public. Wikileaks and Edward Snowden also helped the world know about the CIAs excesses in trying to catch Bin Laden. This became all the more important after US announced withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014, that stretched to 2020 due to various reasons. The global opinion had been rising against Americas double standards and selective actions on terrorism as also its tacit support to Pakistan while being fully aware of Paks support to terrorism. This became a learning point for all future special operations wherein America relied on no one else to carry out a similar strike.

Its interesting to note that both Laden and Zawahiri carried a 25 million dollar bounty on their heads, as announced by USA and both were killed in official operations.Both were instrumental in planning the 9/11 attacks and that the leader of the violent jihadist group was in Afghanistan was not surprising: since the hard-line Islamist Taliban regained control in August, Al-Qaeda has felt more at home, analysts say. In the recent operations as well, this was an important consideration as the consequences of this operation on US-Taliban relationship was factored in, before giving the go ahead to kill Zawahiri no official bilateral relations exist as of now, so that was not so much a concern for USA.

The intelligence derived from the huge trove of information hard drives in 2011 was used effectively in tracking down AL Qaeda members and other suspects, planning drone strikes killing terror sympathisers in Syria, Yemen, Somalia etc. since 2011.The USA could now map, identify, and link bits and pieces of information to make a careful selection of their targets.As Zawahiri assumed the top post in Al Qaeda after Laden was killed, he was quite obviously on the CIAs hit list.

As was the case in 2011, the whole complex, its structure, material, surrounding buildings etc.were studied and it was decided to attack onlyZawahiri, ensuring no other civilian casualties and infrastructure damage.US officials presented the house model and a final attack plan to President Biden on July 1st 2022.Issues that may arise due to weather, structure of building, collateral risks etc. were discussed out.

The main points of departure from the 2011 case were:

This minimised the post operations risk for the USA as even the attacking weapon, time of assault and the transport vehicle were aptly chosen as per the mission requirements.Also, the operation was made public by the President of the USA himself, thereby giving no chance to other non state entities inside or outside USA to leak out the news.

Also, since just Zawahiri is said to have been eliminated there has been no counter response from human rights organisations and other sympathisers of the Al Qaeda.

The strike involved a US drone (most probably the Reaper), armed with two precision-guided Hellfire missiles (R9X version), which were launched at 6:18 am Kabul time on 31st July 2022 [1].Zawahiri was killed on the balconyan official told the western news agencies. But since then no pictures or other data confirming the death of Zawahiri has been made available in the public domain. The only reliable sources remain the official tweets, news reports and response by the Taliban government.

A normal version of HELLFIRE missile carries high explosives warheads that explode on impact and create area damage.But the R9X version deploys a series of six sharp knife-like blades from its fuselage and shreds its target but leaves nearby people and objects intact[2].Some people describe it as a falling anvil from the sky.

This has earned it a deadly reputation by names of flying ginsuor flying ninja [3] as this missile has been used many times by US forces to kill other jihadist group leaders without hurting people around them.

It has now become the go-to weapon for targeted killings of high value targets by the USA and as is the ritual in the intelligence community, the CIA never acknowledges the airstrikes it conducts. On previous occasions also, officials in USA have admitted to conducting such strikes, but on the usage of Hellfire missile neither any official, military contractor or the manufacturer of the original Hellfire series have responded to the use of this missile. The US government has never accepted or rejected the possession of this missile in its arsenal.

Thus, the counter terrorism strategies would further evolve in coming years as new technology increasingly has an influence on tactics and strategy, making them an important influencer in planning offensive operations. This would also mitigate the concerns on human rights, innocent killings and infrastructural losses. If carried out in complete secrecy, such operations ensure almostzero accountability for the attacking side and thats how new era warfare would be potent, stealthy and anonymous.

End Notes

Killing of Osama Bin Laden. In Wikipedia, August 18, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Killing_of_Osama_bin_Laden&oldid=1105175355.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (en-GB). Obamas Covert Drone War in Numbers: Ten Times More Strikes than Bush. Accessed August 30, 2022. https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/obamas-covert-drone-war-in-numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-bush.

Pakistans Sovereignty and the Killing of Osama Bin Laden | ASIL. Accessed August 30, 2022. https://www.asil.org/insights/volume/15/issue/11/pakistans-sovereignty-and-killing-osama-bin-laden.

U.S. Drone Strike Kills al-Qaida Leader in Kabul > U.S. Department of Defense > Defense Department News. Accessed August 30, 2022. https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3114362/us-drone-strike-kills-al-qaida-leader-in-kabul/.

US next Generation Drone Strikes: How AFADS Scan Targets Using AI Precision World News. Accessed August 30, 2022. https://www.wionews.com/photos/us-next-generation-drone-strikes-how-afads-scan-targets-using-ai-precision-503153.

Hindustan Times. US Used Flying Ginsu Missile to Kill al-Qaedas al-Zawahiri? 5 Details on Op, August 2, 2022. https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-used-flying-ginsu-missiles-to-kill-al-qaida-s-al-zawahiri-5-details-on-op-101659404012538.html.

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From Bin Laden to Al Zawahiri: The evolution of Americas targeted killing strategy - MyVoice

Priyanka Chopra (Priyanka Chopra) recently celebrated her husband Nick Jonas 30th birthday. For the anniversary celebration, the couple living in Los Angeles had a great anniversary vacation. Now, Priyanka has shown fans a preview of the birthday celebration. Both celebrated the anniversary in Arizona, America. Nicks birthday theme was golf. The couple played golf hard on the anniversary and threw a party. While sharing a video of this, Priyanka also wrote a wish note for Nick.

Nick Jonas birthday was September 16. Priyanka showed a preview of the birthday party on her Instagram account a few hours ago. They celebrated Nicks birthday until the weekend. He wrote: Happy birthday my love. May there always be happiness in your life and a smile on your face. I love you Nick It was a weekend that filled me with joy.

Priyanka Chopra added, It started with my husbands 30th birthday celebration, but in the end it just became too much. All of Nicks friends and family filled the room with love and happiness. . Scott Dale National (Golf Course) You are our home away from home. I cant thank you enough for helping you all get ready for Nicks birthday celebrations.

Priyanka Chopra also mentioned in her post the names of those who helped prepare for Nicks birthday celebrations. Nick Jonas also reacted immediately to this wish message from Priyanka. He wrote with a red heart emoji: An epic moment. You are amazing.

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Rather like his more than four decades worth of creative output, Munich-born, Berlin-based Thomas Demand is not an easy artist to pin down; unsurprisingly. A fascination with ephemerality and the innovative ways in which Demand explores the concept are the foundation of his robust international reputation.

House of Card, a new season-launching exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, the first major showing of his work in Canada, admirable on its own terms, is less a comprehensive Demand primer than a vivid glimpse of where the 58-year-old artists constantly evolving interests are leading him.

The exhibition, supervised by chief curator and associate director November Paynter, is what MOCA describes as an updated iteration of an exhibition originally presented two years ago in Belgium.

While Demands is the marquee name, House of Card also reflects the artists collaborative and interdisciplinary interests. In this case its Turner Prize-winning Scottish sculptor Martin Boyce whose commissioned, site-specific ceiling installation adorns the second level of this three-level show; and Argentinian-born, Toronto-trained conceptual artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who early in his career famously cooked and served food for visitors to his pad thai exhibition at New Yorks Paula Allen Gallery.

Most conspicuous is Demands recent collaboration with Caruso St John Architects, the London firm run by Montreal-born, McGill-trained Adam Caruso and British-trained Peter St John. Demand, in town for the MOCA exhibitions opening this week, jovially described it during an informative walk-through as a group show in disguise.

It was Caruso St John who executed Demands design for The Triple Folly, a newly opened event pavilion in Ebeltoft near Aarhus, Denmark, for the textile company Kvadrat. Demands model of the building is displayed on a large undulating platform, purpose-built with the aid of University of Toronto students, representing the areas rolling countryside.

Accompanying the model is a collection of postcards depicting tents of all sorts and vintages, a source of inspiration for one section of Demands triple folly, the name a reference to whimsical buildings, often made to look old or ruined, that were all the rage in 18th-century French and English landscape gardening.

In Demands design, a tent-like canopy roof is made of a folded sheet of office paper, complete with punch-hole. Another section of roof is created with a paper plate. The performance hall is encased in fibreglass walls evoking a soda jerks paper hat, the colours carefully chosen to blend with the surrounding flora.

In an instructive way, this part of the exhibition helps throw a retrospective light on Demands habit of making paper and cardboard models he initially trained as a sculptor based on found objects or environments, often themselves sourced from photographs, which he would in turn then photograph before destroying the models.

His career-long interest in photography, originally taken up as a practical way to record his model-making without cluttering up a small studio, grew into a way of investigating materiality and our perceptions and emotional reactions to the world of images that constantly bombard us in varied media.

The Triple Folly also speaks to Demands interest in models other than his own, particularly those usually unseen and discarded models many architects utilize in conceptualizing and developing their ideas. The walls of MOCAs second floor display Demands Model Studies, which feature mostly decontextualized photographs of models from Kazuyo Sejimas and Ryue Nishizawas Japanese firm, SANAA, and from the late American architect John Lautner. As with Demands photographs of cardboard templates from the fashion house of the late Tunisian-born couturier Azzedine Alaa, these images take on a new life as abstract art works.

Demand has been fully involved in the Toronto iteration of his earlier House of Card exhibition and was eager to ensure it sits sympathetically within MOCAs voluminous, massively pillared exhibition spaces in what was, until the museum moved to the Lower Junction in 2018, the former, long-abandoned Tower Automotive Building.

In an arresting stroke of genius, visually and conceptually, the first thing that greets visitors as they enter the museum is Tiravanijas untitled 2013 (thomas demands here). It is a to-scale reconstruction of Black Label, a karaoke bar in Japan that Demand discovered in 2008 while on a residency at the Center for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu in Kokura.

Demand, typically, took a series of photographs and made a model on view on the museums third floor that inspired Tiravanijas reconstruction, itself first shown at the centre in Japan. Meanwhile, as Demand explained, the actual bar has been shunted around amid waves of urban redevelopment, much as the urban context of MOCAs home, a century ago among the tallest buildings in Toronto, is being reframed by all the construction that noisily surrounds it.

Tiravanijas bar is no Potemkin facade. It will be fully functional, hosting karaoke and other artistic and social interventions art-speak for fun things in collaboration with local artists, musicians and bars.

On a more chilling note, the exhibition features the first North American showing of Demands 2021 installation Refuge. Demand became fascinated with what must have been the experience of Edward Snowden still high up the U.S. governments most wanted list after he sought asylum in Russia in 2013.

Landing at Moscows Sheremetyevo International Airport, Snowden was initially confined by Russian authorities to a stark, windowless room in an unfinished airport hotel where the famous whistle-blower was left to ponder his future. Through persistence and an element of albeit legal subterfuge, Demand gathered fairly accurate information about the rooms size and general appearance, right down to the simple bedding. He then made a cardboard and paper model, which Demand subsequently photographed. In a way, the fact that these are photographs of a model rather than the room itself make them more discomforting.

Imagine what it must have been like, said Demand, as he elaborated on the way hed managed to glean information on what looks like a cell in a medium-security jail for white-collar felons.

He had no contact with the outside world. He could not tell if he was being spied on or not. It must have been terrible.

Sometimes the not real can appear more real than reality.

MC

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At German artist Thomas Demands MOCA exhibit, finding the material in the ephemeral - Toronto Star

Bryan Fogels work was cut out for him when he chose to direct a follow-up to Icarus, his 2017 deep dive into sports doping and the elaborate system of cheating among Russian Olympians. That film closed with a cliff-hanger. Having turned whistleblower mid-film, Grigory Rodchenkov, the architect of the state-sanctioned doping program, fled Russia and was in hiding stateside. To continue to tell his story, the challenge for Fogel lay not just in the artistic shadow cast by his vividly told Oscar winner. Complicating the making of a sequel was a crucial constraint: To protect the safety of the documentarys central figure, Fogel wouldnt be able to interact with him directly.

The solution was to embed a single cameraperson, producer Jake Swantko, with Rodchenkov and his security team. Tracking his life on the lam for nearly five years, Icarus: The Aftermath is both more intimate and of broader scope than the earlier film. Its documentary as spy thriller, a portrait of institutional gaslighting, a legal nail-biter, an intimate look at the cost of refuting authoritarian doctrine, and, above all, an affecting character study.

The Bottom LineOrwellian chills, poignant twists and turns.

The Aftermath reteams Fogel with Swantko, writer-producer Mark Monroe (who has worked on some of the most high-profile nonfiction features in recent years, among them The Cove, Hooligan Sparrow and Lucy and Desi) and composer Adam Peters. For those who didnt see the earlier doc, the dexterous opening-credits recap tells you what you need to know, with a few helpful glances back during the film itself as well. With thriller lighting in law-office conference rooms and kinetic camerawork in temporary homes somewhere in the United States, the story unfolds with a fittingly unsettling rhythm (the editing is by Wyatt Rogowski and Lauren Brinkman), while Peters score shifts between percussive beats and dark, nerve-jangling chords.

Orwell is, understandably, near and dear to Rodchenkov. As the head of Russias Anti-Doping Center, his chief purpose was devising ways for the countrys Olympians to use performance-enhancing drugs and not get caught a more accurate name for the agency would have been the Anti-Doping-Evidence Center. Strategies were science-based and borderline-ludicrous, among them a secret laboratory on a luxury ship, a mandate for athletes to pee in their pants, and a Duchess cocktail that used scotch or vodka to mask the pharmaceuticals.

Rodchenkov is a compelling protagonist with a big personality brainy, gregarious, funny. His silences can be loaded with foreboding, and his effusiveness is childlike, especially when hes expressing his feelings for the people who are working to protect him. These include a legal team, led by Jim Walden, who have reason to believe that there are Russian operatives looking for him in the U.S. (During his years on the run, headlines announce the poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia Skripal, in England, and that of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.)

The affection between Rodchenkov and Fogel is especially strong, evidenced in the Zoom call that marks their first contact in two and a half years. They manage a couple of in-person meetings too, the first of these memorialized with an almost romantic mini-montage at one of the secret stops on Rodchenkovs underground travels.

Moving from place to place, often with little notice, the whistleblower monitors the official reaction back home, dyes his hair (with Swantkos assistance) and soothes his nerves with whiskey. Somewhere along the way, not explored in the film, he writes a book, 2020s The Rodchenkov Affair: How I Brought Down Russias Secret Doping Empire.In phone calls with his wife, Veronika, whos still in Russia, his attempts to put a hopeful spin on their predicament dont wash. This is just hell, she tells him. Why did you even venture into this hell?

As to who he is and how he got to this point, Fogel uses brisk animation (by Gary Breslins Office of Development & Design) to illustrate Rodchenkovs days as a young athlete, when his own doping began against his coachs policy, and with his mothers help. Swantko conducts a sit-down interview with him, in which he speaks of a persistent Soviet mentality in post-glasnost Russia. To that point, the doc includes footage of Putin disparaging him as a nutjob and calling treason the worst possible crime. A Russian TV commentator decries Rodchenkovs malicious intent toward our athletes.

It would be a simplistic reading of the film to say that its proof of a unique brand of evil in the world. In Rodchenkovs astute observation, Whistleblowers are the most hated from both sides. (Ask Julian Assange.) With the guidance of attorney Bo Cooper, Rodchenkov seeks asylum, and his case drags on for several years; at one point, a trade for Edward Snowden is considered. Russia doesnt have a monopoly on nationalist fervor and propaganda, but its particular brand of these, combined with shockingly old-school spycraft, sets it apart. Yuri Ganus, Rodchenkovs successor at the Anti-Doping Center, is a ray of reason and hope. Hes forthcoming and endorses the importance of whistleblowers in virtual interviews with Fogel that are both heartening and, concerning his safety, worrying.

In the grand geopolitical scheme of things, of course, there are far worse crimes than cheating at the Olympics. If anyone in 2022 still views the Games as a pure and holy endeavor and not a big business, they might also be shocked to learn that theres gambling going on in Ricks Caf. The Aftermath includes interviews with member of WADA, the Olympics-affiliated World Anti-Doping Agency, all of whom express quiet disbelief in the backtracking and reversals that have put Russian athletes back in competition after the 2017 revelations that initially led to Russia being banned.

On the basis of his directing debut, Jewtopia, no one could have predicted that Fogel would become a filmmaker focused on truth-tellers and iconoclasts (between Icarus and his new film, he made The Dissident, a doc about the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi). The Aftermath reflects his personal commitment and casts a penetrating light on the larger forces that shape all our lives and, in the case of courageous dissenters like Rodchenkov, turn lives inside out, irrevocably.

The focus of Rodchenkov, his legal team and the filmmakers shifts for a while to the diaries hes kept since he was a teenager, volumes that document his work for the Russian government. As to how the notebooks make it from Russia to the States, well probably never know. The triumph, of course, is bittersweet; the diaries are most certainly the only things from Rodchenkovs life in Russia that hell ever see again. Chronicling a leap into the unknown, Icarus: The Aftermath is a story of immense bravery and unspeakable sadness.

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Icarus: The Aftermath Review: A Tense and Affecting Real-Life Sequel - Hollywood Reporter

At the end of August, the FBI issued a public service announcement on the susceptibility for cybercrime in DeFi (decentralized finance), the growing crypto segment of financial applications backed by blockchain technology. Of the $1.3 billion stolen in cryptocurrencies in the first three months of 2022, 97% came from DeFi platforms.

The warning did nothing to deter cybercriminals, who launched flash loan attacks on the Avalanche blockchain and the New Free DAO protocol the following week that totaled nearly $2 million. According to data from investment platform DeFiYield, $211 million was lost in decentralized finance hacks just in August.

Cybersecurity experts say the timing of the FBI warningseveral years after DeFi exploits beganillustrates how slow governmental agencies and technological solutions have been to catch up to the vulnerabilities of the ecosystem.

Law enforcement is reactionary to whats happening out there, said Chris Tarbell, the co-founder of the cybersecurity firm NAXO and a former FBI special agent who was instrumental in taking down the notorious Silk Road marketplace. It takes time because its such an advanced technology.

As the apocryphal story goes, a reporter once asked Willie Sutton why he robbed banks. Because thats where the money is, he replied.

Michael Rosmer, cofounder of DeFiYield, said the same logic attracts cybercriminals to the world of decentralized finance, where transactions are irreversibleunlike in traditional bankingand law enforcement is still figuring out how the platforms work.

Where else can you go where you can steal really large amounts of money with no recourse? Rosmer told Fortune. That makes crypto a logical target until we can somehow turn around and come up with better systems for addressing this.

According to DeFiYields data, the $211 million lost last month still pales in comparison to August 2021, when cybercriminals stole an estimated $827 million. Rosmer clarified that the decrease does not mean there is any less of a threat, attributing the figure to the cryptocurrency industrys vastly lower market cap, as well as the shifting nature of DeFi hacks.

Previous exploits targeted lending protocolslike Binance Smart Chainbased protocol Meerkat Finance, which lost $31 million in user funds the day after it launched in 2021as well as other complex DeFi tools like liquidity pools and automated market makers.

Rosmer said that the main target in 2022 has been bridges, a type of technology that connects different blockchains, allowing users to move cryptocurrencies among chains. The biggest example from 2022 was the attack on popular play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, which lost an estimated $620 million in March when cybercriminals targeted the bridge to its Ethereum-linked sidechain.

The attacks have continued. Just last month, hackers exploited the Nomad bridgewhich connected blockchains such as Ethereum and Avalanchefor $190 million.

This is a challenging technical problem, Rosmer told Fortune. The more value that is being exchanged between two chains, the more attractive the pot exists to make it so that you would want to attack it.

Ryan Kalember, an executive vice president at cybersecurity firm Proofpoint, said that DeFi is in a tricky position where its attractive for cybercriminals to target, but not necessarily valuable enough for companies to develop sufficient defenses.

You could end up with this hell-state where its not worth enough to secure, but its still worth enough for cybercriminals to go after it, he said.

The problem is exacerbated by the international nature of cybercrime, which makes it difficult for U.S.-based law enforcement to act. If you cant get Edward Snowden in Russia, said Rosmer, how are you going to get some guy who just stole $10 million from a DeFi protocol in Russia?

Governmental agencies are starting to figure out new strategies, such as the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioning the open-source cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash, which cybercriminal organizations like North Koreas Lazarus Group have used to launder hundreds of millions of dollars, including from Augusts Nomad heist.

Even so, officials are just starting to wake up to the threat. Its complicated, its new, and its poorly understood, especially by law enforcement, Kalember said.

While Rosmer said that the FBI warning was a step in the right direction, he was skeptical it would have much of an impact. For him, the onus is on technology companies like DeFiYield to ramp up security.

This is like the jungle, he told Fortune. We are working on trying to make the jungle safe and turn it into a zoo.

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This is the jungle: Law enforcement slowly waking up to the threat of DeFi exploits - Fortune