US Spy Programs May Break the Internet

You own your data. And the government needs to start respecting that.

This was the assertion made today by Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith at a Silicon Valley panel discussion on NSA surveillance. Until the US recognizes and restores the fundamental right of ownership you have in your data, he continued, the U.S. cannot hope to rebuild trust lost through the NSA’s widespread surveillance programs. (...)

The panel discussion was organized by Senator Ron Wyden (D – Oregon) to address the effects the NSA surveillance programs have had on the tech industry. It included Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, and the top legal counsels for several tech companies—Colin Stretch of Facebook, Ramsey Homsany of Dropbox and Smith from Microsoft. Also participating was John Lilly, a partner with Greylock Partners an investment firm.

Wyden opened the panel by noting that until the Snowden revelations he never once heard a US official express concern about the potential impact of the government’s mass surveillance programs on the digital economy.

“When the actions of a foreign government threaten red-white-and-blue jobs, Washington gets up at arms,” he said. “But, even today, almost no one in Washington is talking about how overly broad surveillance is hurting the US economy.”

The panelists all agreed that the surveillance has had detrimental affects on the industry, not only in terms of the erosion of trust from consumers but also in terms of the potential economic, social and educational impacts that would occur if countries follow through on their threats to keep data local. Some twenty countries have already proposed or stated intentions to propose domestic laws requiring local data to remain local as a result of the spying revelations. If this occurs, Google’s Schmidt warned, “the simplest outcome is we’re going to end up breaking the internet.”

Governments, he said, will eventually just say, “we want our own internet…and we don’t want other people in it.” The cost will be huge in terms of shared knowledge, discoveries, and science. It will also be expensive, since the cost of running data centers in every country where they have customers may be too much for some firms to handle.

“We’re screwing around with those kinds of concepts without understanding that that is a national industry,” Schmidt said.

Data localization also makes data potentially more accessible to foreign regimes that don’t respect the rule of law or even have a rule of law governing how or if they can access data. “More access points around the world make your network hard to secure [and] in a practical matter it makes us more vulnerable,” said Facebook’s Colin Stretch.

Homsany noted that the burden of regaining trust shouldn’t lay just with companies; the government needs to lead and repair the trust that’s been damaged “to show the world that we are a country that respects these values,” he said. “We have built this incredible economic engine in this region of the country . . . and trust is the one thing that starts to rot it from the inside out. I think it is really that serious. We need to see the government also starting to do its part.”

Silicon Valley vs. the Government

In a year of profoundly disturbing disclosures, Schmidt said the one that struck companies the hardest were reports about the tapping of undersea cables used to transmit data between the overseas data centers of U.S. companies. To put it in simple terms, Schmidt said, this was essentially hacking—the same kind of state-sponsored hacking the US has condemned in other countries, and it rallied companies to take action. “I think that put the relationship between the industry and the government on profoundly different footing,” he said. “The disclosure brought to light that there was this effort outside of what we all thought of as the appropriate legal process to obtain user data.”

The effect has led companies to play essentially a game of whack-a-mole with the government, working to find technological solutions that “force the government to come to us through the legal means [that are] the product of a democratic process,” he said. By “investing as heavily as we are through security, we’re forcing that access through those laws to be the only way in.”

by Kim Zetter, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Eric Schmidt by Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Surf and Turf Catalan-Style

[ed. Sounds pretty good. And easy.]

I prefer the simple complexity 
of Pep’s clams with ham—in 
Catalan, cloïses amb pernil. It is, in its way, a profound thing. The two different salty-sweetnesses, of cured ham and clams, combine to make something bigger than their parents—especially with some parsley, a little chilli, a glass of cold fino and good white bread for blotting those complicated juices.

The secret, Pep says, is sautéing just for a minute or two, using the best Iberico ham and the little bivalves known as quahogs in North America and carpet clams in Britain. But they must, Pep says, be baby clams—whether it’s tiny fish or the youngest meat and veg, Iberians are dreadful infanticides when it comes to ingredients. It’s a crime that is not hard to tolerate.

by Alex Renton, More Intelligent Life |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

My Daughter, Myself

Suzanne Braun Levine, the original editor of Ms. magazine and now a midlife guru, invokes the phrase ‘second adulthood’ to describe a phase of ‘existential bewilderment’ that afflicts women in midlife and is every bit as traumatic as adolescence. As we enter it, we wobble. We question everything we once took for granted. We experiment, re‑evaluate, take risks, confront our fears, ask ourselves who we are and where we think we’re going. Our metaphysical, practical and emotional concerns collapse together as they are brought to bear on a single question: our suddenly malleable identity. This evaluative project suggests that there’s more to mother-daughter mirroring than either biology or chronology can account for. But Braun Levine is merely a populariser: the key to that more is to be found in the work of the German-born developmental psychologist Erik Erikson.

Erikson, who died in 1994 at the age of 91, coined the term ‘identity crisis’. (...)

Each Eriksonian stage brings with it a form of enrichment, or ‘virtue’. For example, stage six, or young adulthood (roughly, ages 20-40), sees the individual forging solid relationships and lifelong partnerships by negotiating a psychosocial crisis that pits the needs of intimacy against those of isolation; its associated virtue is love. The succeeding midlife crisis (in stage seven, adulthood, ages 40-65) demands that we embrace ‘generativity’ over self-absorption and go on to embody the virtue of ‘care’. If we fail to do so, we run the risk of stagnating and of sliding into unhappy narcissism. (...)

In the self-help model, you are your ‘Youniverse’. By contrast, generativity suggests that midlife’s rewards are the end products of hard work that displaces ‘you’ from the centre of your world. In other words, generativity is not something you can achieve in isolation. It is a process in which some kind of mirror is essential. Braun Levine seems to grasp this, putting family dynamics into the mix when arguing that women empower themselves by channeling the midlife storm. Viewed this way, development is relational, negotiated, a trade-off of one thing over another. But even Braun Levine, at the sophisticated end of the self-help movement, does not want to acknowledge that, before any kind of development (let alone re-birth) can occur, a process of mourning or grieving is essential. This mourning takes varied and complex forms: but among them is self-burial. (...)

These days, I am practically infected with sentiment. But it has taken a new form – a nostalgia in which my own remembered (and now lost) youth has become entangled.

At the opposite end of the reproductive spectrum, I am acutely aware of the threshold at which my daughter stands today. I want to wave at her in sympathy and recognition, and assure her it will turn out well. I want to tell her that on the other side of this difficult transition there will be freedoms and experiences she’s never dreamt of, as well as new heights of confidence and competence. There will be deep friendships and deeper loves, the rollercoaster of university life and first jobs, independent travel, opportunities at every turn. I want to tell her that her dreams will become tangible. That her fears will drift into obscurity. That she will feel invincible.

But then I am overcome by a terrible sadness for my own lost opportunities, and by an ersatz nostalgia for paths not taken – a missing, if you like, of what I never had, and a misplaced anxiety about all the future paths I shall never take, because with middle age comes a shrinking sense of the possible. Since half of me is lost in undifferentiated yearning for what might have been, I’m often unable to reassure my daughter with the right level of conviction. If I am to succeed in this task, I must first let go of my ghostly younger selves – the grown-up version of putting away childish things.

by Marina Benjamin, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Mother and her Daughter by Henri-François Riesener

Attilio Alfieri
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Sex is Sex, But Money is Money

His son didn’t get into Dartmouth and that makes him sad, because he loves his son and he knows how much pressure the boy puts on himself. I understand.

His wife won’t let him have his late-night bowls of mint chocolate chip ice cream anymore and she nags him about the Sunday afternoons he spends watching golf on television. I frown.

His doctor says he needs more vitamin D, and maybe he should consider anti-depressants, too, but he’s sure if he could just find something meaningful to do with his life, he would feel better. I make a little tsk-ing noise, widen my eyes. I am close to crying.

I tell him he’s sweet for caring about his son so much. I tell him if I were with him, I would let him eat all the ice cream he wanted, and Sunday afternoons would be set aside for watching golf, because why shouldn’t people do what makes them happy? Then I tell him I don’t know about vitamin D and anti-depressants (that’s the truest thing I’ll say all week), but he seems very healthy and, as I say this, I gently touch his thigh and dip my head a little and look at him so my eyes are half hidden — I’ve practiced in the mirror. I smile without showing my teeth — I’ve practiced that, too — and wait for him to reach for me. But he’s not ready for that; he wants to tell me about how he hit a triple for his softball team last weekend, how it was “magical,” how he wishes he could feel that good all the time.

I’ve had men like him before, and they’re sweet, but they can be tricky, too. I don’t know what a triple is, and I have no idea what it has to do with magic, but I do know we’ve been talking for 15 minutes. I know it’s important that he feel like we have all day, that we have forever. Time can’t exist for us. But I know exactly how much time we do have. I kick off my shoes (simple, beige $600 Louboutins that I got on sale for $250) that I wore specially for him because he told me he’s “not a fancy guy.” (If he were fancy, I’d wear my black Louboutins.)

He’s still talking about triples and magic and meaning. We have 35 minutes. It’s plenty of time, but I don’t want to take any unnecessary risks. My job is all about minimizing risk. I move closer, tell him I have an idea that would make him feel good. I tell him it would make me feel good, too. I tell him I’ve been thinking about it since he texted me two days ago. I gently claw his thigh with my fresh, red (any other color, you’re taking a risk) manicure. I moisten my lips, flash just a little tooth. He’s shy, but he’s a man. He stops talking.

The tricky part of my job is over. Now it’s time for sex. (...)

Clients knew me as Angelina or Anna. Angelina was “sweet, intelligent, fun and playful… a devoted pleasure seeker who takes enjoying life very seriously indeed.”

Anna was more shy, a “European companion who adores luxury travel… often passionate, sometimes hilarious but rarely forgettable.”

Angelina cost $800 an hour, $4,000 for the night; Anna ran $900 and $5,000. According to rankings in The Erotic Review (TER), the Yelp of the commercial sex world, each rated in the top 1 percent of all escorts.

But there are lots of young, pretty girls in my business. What got me to the top — and what kept me there — was my work ethic and attention to detail. I was successful because I learned some hard, valuable lessons about making it in the sex-for-money business.

Here are some of them:

by Svetlana Z, Medium | Read more:
Image:Pascal Perich

Songs of Emptiness

[ed. Highlighting one of the links in this essay: Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.]

As with all advertisements, there are a few deceptions at the heart of Apple’s commercial for U2’s newly released Songs of Innocence. The most immediate is that it ends with the tagline “free on iTunes now.”

Given that the album was delivered — without permission — into the digital libraries of over five hundred million iTunes users, implying any kind of choice in the matter seems at the very least misleading. A better version of the ad might read “yours whether you like it or not.”

The move to upload Songs of Innocence without the consent of hundreds of millions of music fans has been so strongly criticized that within days Apple posted a standalone webpage with instructions on how to permanently delete the album. Meanwhile, lead-singer Bono has been lashing out at critics as “haters,” calling the Internet commentary “enough to put you off democracy.” It’s a rather odd rebuttal, which is to say nothing of the rather unsettling implications such a marketing strategy brings with it in a post-Snowden world.

A much more subtle deception is embedded in the ad’s content, which features old footage of live performances from the Ramones, the Clash, and Patti Smith. But what about U2? They are relegated to empty blue-violet avatars, singing and performing the album’s lead single while images of Patti, Joey and Johnny, Joe and Mick are projected onto them.

It’s surely intended as an homage of sorts, an attempt to paint the band as following in the footsteps of punk rock’s greatest. But the resulting imagery only underlines the Washington Post’s Chris Richards’description of the iTunes scheme: “rock-and-roll as dystopian junk mail.” This is the artist as a hollow vessel, a blank commodity for the sake of another commodity, ready-made for the transmission of whatever concept is deemed worthy at the time.

To be sure, Bono has viewed himself in such a way for some time now. He has famously spent the past twenty-five years glad-handing Clintonian economists and former World Bank honchos, heads of state, bigoted congressmen, and outright war criminals. He has penned asinine columns for the New York Times touting the benefits of the free market that make Thomas Friedman look positively eloquent. And then there’s his charitable work: providing money for AIDS research in Africa by teaming up with some of the very same Western companies that have profited so highly from the ongoing pillage of the continent.

Bono’s mission isn’t simply to provide capitalism with a human face. Whether he acknowledges it or not, it’s an attempt at constructing a full-spectrum artistic cocoon for Margaret Thatcher’s notorious dictum “There Is No Alternative.” Songs of Innocence — both its ham-handed aesthetics and its crass economics — fits right in.

by Alexander Billet, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: Phil Romans / Flickr

[ed. The old home town... nice weather, but a little chilly.]
photo: markk

Civil Forfeiture

[ed. I knew it was bad, but not this bad. See also: Stop and Seize.]

Pejac, Ants 
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This Is What Happens to Your Bike After It’s Stolen

To the prepared thief, every bike rack is a buffet. You think a cable lock will keep your beloved wheels in your life. The thief knows a simple pair of aviation snips cuts through that cable like butter. You’re convinced a locker-style combination lock will outsmart a crook. He pops it in seconds with a shim—just slides it in between the body of the lock and its fishhook tip, and your bike is his. (A good bandit can make a shim in about five minutes with nothing more than a beer can and a pair of scissors.) U-locks? Routinely opened with a Bic pen jammed into the keyhole. Even with that rare unbreakable lock, a bike is no safer than its anchor; outside Guthrie Hall at the University of Washington sits a metal rack that bike thieves have sawed straight through.

The components, meanwhile—the lights, seats, handlebars, derailleurs, and brakes that turn a frame into a ridable bike—can go for hundreds of dollars each on the black market. With no serial numbers, these parts, unlike frames, are untraceable. “As long as you’ve got the proper tools,” Justin, a University Avenue fixture who has swapped stories with more than one bike thief and asked that his last name be withheld, explained, “you can just walk up to a bike and be like, ‘I want those rims, I want those handlebars, I want that seat.’ ” A buffet.

Not that your bike is safe indoors. Whitney Rosa, a customer service manager at a medical firm and self-described “avid bike commuter,” thought the locked communal storage room of the Capitol Hill condo building where she rented an apartment was secure until her $8,300 Seven Mudhoney disappeared on December 31, 2011.

Her ride, with its custom titanium frame painted like a pair of blue and brown argyle socks, became one of 824 reported stolen bikes in Seattle that year, according to city data (by 2013 the number rose to an annual 1,121, three per day on average). Had police given it to her straight, Rosa would have learned that only 1 percent of stolen bikes make it back to their owners. And thieves rarely get caught in the act. Someone leaning over a bike to unlock it looks pretty much the same to passersby as someone leaning over a bike to hack or cut its lock. And as Rosa now realized, inside storage isn’t necessarily better.

“The garages are such a soft target, and they’re typically [easy] to get into and chock-full of stuff you can steal,” says Bryan Hance, who runs the online antitheft database bikeindex.org. “One idiot with [the right tools] can get in and get a lot of valuables really fast, really quietly.”

Still, Rosa filed a police report and waited for the cops to solve the caper. And waited. It would be nine months before she received word of her bike’s fate. When she did, it wouldn’t be from the Seattle police. (...)

Justin, our University Ave source—twentysomething, buzzed reddish hair, a valiant attempt at a goatee—recalls once finding an apparently abandoned bike stashed behind a bush in the U District. After waiting for an hour to see if its owner would return—“I boarded around a little bit, smoked some weed”—he said to himself, “Fuck it.” He grabbed the bike and started rolling downhill. Before he’d gone more than a few blocks, a guy on the sidewalk waved at him to pull over. “And this guy’s like, ‘Hey, you wanna sell that bike? How much you want for it?’ And I’m like, ‘Twenty bucks and like a bag of weed right now.’ ” The buyer counteroffered $10 and a gram of marijuana. “Deal.”

“It’s all drugs,” says Hance of bikeindex.org. “Bikes become a sort of currency. You can rip off a bike and trade it for a $50 bag of drugs pretty easily, and then that guy turns around and trades it to another guy, and so on.” One UW police report describes the arrest of a man busted for selling stolen bicycles via Craigslist. A search of his sedan revealed clothes, toiletries, cellphones, and tools for stealing bikes. An utterly spartan existence—save the meth pipe in the glove box.

by Casey Jaywork, Seattle Met |  Read more:

Image: Todd McLellan

The Power of Grace

[ed. Gilead is one of my favorite books. See also: 'Lila': an exquisite novel of spiritual redemption and love.]

Marilynne Robinson tracks the movements of grace as if it were a wild animal, appearing for fleeting intervals and then disappearing past the range of vision, emerging again where we least expect to find it. Her novels are interested in what makes grace necessary at all—shame and its afterlife, loss and its residue, the limits and betrayals of intimacy.

In Lila, her brilliant and deeply affecting new novel, even her description of sunlight in a St. Louis bordello holds a kind of heartbreak: “When a house is shut up like that in the middle of a summer day the light that comes in through any crack is as sharp as a blade.” The notion that light might hurt—that illumination doesn’t always arrive as salvation, or that salvation might ache before it heals—echoes the novel’s articulation of a more personal kind of pain. “That was loneliness. When you’re scalded, touch hurts, it makes no difference if it’s kindly meant.”

Except it does make a difference, or it can. Witness a woman who has just been baptized by the man who will become her husband: “That was what made her cry. Just the touch of his hand.” Lila explores what that crying expresses—joy and scalding at once. In these pages, Robinson resists the notion of love as an easy antidote to a lifetime of suffering or solitude, suggesting that intimacy can’t intrude on loneliness without some measure of pain.

The novel, Robinson’s fourth, returns to the small-town world and church-steeped characters of its predecessors Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). Both of these novels examine the lifelong friendship between two Iowa preachers and the entwining of their families. Lila tells the story of the second wife of one of those ministers, John Ames, offering a portrait of a woman whose brutal, itinerant past makes it difficult for her to accept domesticity and love when they come. (...)

The premise of Lila is just that: a marriage catches husband and wife by surprise—both of them stunned not merely that they would love each other but that they would love anyone, that life still holds this for them. Ames, long entrenched in his identity as an aging widower, finds himself unexpectedly drawn to Lila—a much younger woman who appears in his small town of Gilead after years adrift, fending for herself. “I don’t trust nobody,” she tells him. To which he replies, aptly enough, “No wonder you’re tired.” (...)

Lila takes as its core concern what might have constituted, in another narrative, a happy ending: two lonely souls who never expected happiness somehow finding it. But Robinson’s quest is to illuminate how fraught this happiness is, shadowed by fears of its dissolution and the perverse urge to hasten that dissolution before it arrives unbidden.

by Leslie Jamison, Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Clay Rodery

George Adams, Don Pullen, John Scofield, Dannie Richmond

Christopher Morris
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Borondo, Les Trois Ages

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Stop and Seize

[ed. See also: The Washington Post Regains Its Place at the Table.]

After the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the government called on police to become the eyes and ears of homeland security on America’s highways.

Local officers, county deputies and state troopers were encouraged to act more aggressively in searching for suspicious people, drugs and other contraband. The departments of Homeland Security and Justice spent millions on police training.

The effort succeeded, but it had an impact that has been largely hidden from public view: the spread of an aggressive brand of policing that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes, a Washington Post investigation found. Thousands of people have been forced to fight legal battles that can last more than a year to get their money back.

Behind the rise in seizures is a little-known cottage industry of private police-training firms that teach the techniques of “highway interdiction” to departments across the country.

One of those firms created a private intelligence network known as Black Asphalt Electronic Networking & Notification System that enabled police nationwide to share detailed reports about American motorists — criminals and the innocent alike — including their Social Security numbers, addresses and identifying tattoos, as well as hunches about which drivers to stop.

Many of the reports have been funneled to federal agencies and fusion centers as part of the government’s burgeoning law enforcement intelligence systems — despite warnings from state and federal authorities that the information could violate privacy and constitutional protections.

A thriving subculture of road officers on the network now competes to see who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network’s chat rooms and sharing “trophy shots” of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities.

“All of our home towns are sitting on a tax-liberating gold mine,” Deputy Ron Hain of Kane County, Ill., wrote in a self-published book under a pseudonym. Hain is a marketing specialist for Desert Snow, a leading interdiction training firm based in Guthrie, Okla., whose founders also created Black Asphalt.

Hain’s book calls for “turning our police forces into present-day Robin Hoods.”

Cash seizures can be made under state or federal civil law. One of the primary ways police departments are able to seize money and share in the proceeds at the federal level is through a long-standing Justice Department civil asset forfeiture program known as Equitable Sharing. Asset forfeiture is an extraordinarily powerful law enforcement tool that allows the government to take cash and property without pressing criminal charges and then requires the owners to prove their possessions were legally acquired.

The practice has been controversial since its inception at the height of the drug war more than three decades ago, and its abuses have been the subject of journalistic exposés and congressional hearings. But unexplored until now is the role of the federal government and the private police trainers in encouraging officers to target cash on the nation’s highways since 9/11.

“Those laws were meant to take a guy out for selling $1 million in cocaine or who was trying to launder large amounts of money,” said Mark Overton, the police chief in Bal Harbour, Fla., who once oversaw a federal drug task force in South Florida. “It was never meant for a street cop to take a few thousand dollars from a driver by the side of the road.”

To examine the scope of asset forfeiture since the terror attacks, The Post analyzed a database of hundreds of thousands of seizure records at the Justice Department, reviewed hundreds of federal court cases, obtained internal records from training firms and interviewed scores of police officers, prosecutors and motorists.

by Michael Sallah, Robert O’Harrow Jr., Steven Rich, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: InRoadsBook, YouTube

Drones and Everything After

Drones are a different kind of new technology from what we’re used to. The communications breakthroughs of the past two decades have multiplied the connections within society, but drones offer something else: the conquest of physical space, the extension of society’s compass, the ability to be anywhere and see anything. This physical presence can be creepy when seen from the ground, in ways that echo the imaginings of science fiction. “Flying,” says Illah Nourbakhsh, who ran the robotics program at NASA’s Ames facility, “creates this dynamic where people are no longer on top.” And yet to the drone pilot, maneuvering through the air, it is liberating. (...)

Lost in the concern that the drone is an authoritarian instrument is the possibility that it might simultaneously be a democratizing tool, enlarging not just the capacities of the state but also the reach of the individual—the private drone operator, the boy in Cupertino—whose view is profoundly altered and whose abilities are enhanced. “The idea I’m trying to work out to simplify this whole thing—surveillance, drones, robots—has to do with superhero ethics,” says Patrick Lin, a technology ethicist at California Polytechnic State University. “It’s about what humans do when they have superpowers. What happens then?” (...)

It wasn’t too long ago that to operate an unmanned aircraft meant standing in the middle of a field with a radio controller in your hand and toggling the vehicle through the sky—back and forth, up and down—as if tied to it by a tether. That this now seems ancient is thanks in part to the smartphone revolution, which made many of the components needed for autonomous flight (computer processors, GPS, tiny cameras, and sensors) far smaller, smarter, and cheaper. Within the past five years, these technologies have helped to produce affordable drones that can fly on their own, stabilizing themselves when the winds shift, heading for a point specified on GPS. We are deep enough into the entrepreneurial era that everyone can see a gold rush coming; hobbyists in the obscure world of radio control trade stories about cold-call emails from investors or government agents. “I have these buddies who would drop off into darpa-land for a few years, and you’d never hear from them,” a Texan tinkerer named Gene Robinson says. “And then suddenly they reappear with a Ferrari, and they say, ‘I can’t tell you exactly what I’ve been working on. But it worked.’ ” (...)

The privilege of seeing this way, and this much—it exists simply because he has a drone. Should it? Clarifying where drones are allowed to fly and under what circumstances has proved challenging. There are no consistent laws about whether police need a warrant to fly a drone over your property, searching for drugs or evidence. (A few state legislatures have passed laws requiring police to secure warrants, others have decided that cops do not need to, and most have set no guidelines at all.) It is even less clear how private operators, hobbyists, or governments should operate. The airspace above 500 feet is reserved for planes and other aircraft, but below that line the rules are “irregular and inconsistent,” says Troy Rule, a law professor at Arizona State—there is little clarity, for instance, about whether a property owner can prevent her teenage neighbor from flying a drone over her house. Congress has asked the Federal Aviation Administration to regulate the commercial use of drones by next September, but an agency audit has signaled it will likely miss its deadline. One mark of exactly how conflicted the government is about drones is that Robinson is at once a frequent collaborator with state agencies and a recipient of cease-and-desist letters from the FAA. (...)

There is a four minute shot that opens Pretty Sweet, a short skateboarding film from 2012 co-directed by Spike Jonze, shot entirely from a drone. The lens starts tight on a skateboarder’s face—a gnarly and meaty face, the kind an Italian butcher might grab, cure, and slice. Then the camera begins to move, past him and across the street, tracking four new skaters as they jump out of a pickup truck and scale a fence, then following one skater razoring down a flight of stairs, then soaring past them and down to a bug’s-eye view, another skater leaping, a girl tumbling, each figure quickly exchanged for the next but the movement continuous, as if the camera were working in cursive, until it lifts higher and disappears into a cloud of confetti. Money shot. “Even now I watch that and I get chills,” says Randy Slavin, a commercial director who recently founded the first drone film festival. “There is literally no other way to get that shot. You can put a camera literally anywhere in three-dimensional space. You can design any shot.”

by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Spike Jonze

I'll be taking a short break (or not, depending on my wi-fi situation). Enjoy the archives.

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