Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 1021

'Ungrateful' Unpaid Interns Sue Gawker and Nick Denton

Three former interns are suing Gawker and publisher Nick Denton over their time spent writing, editing and doing things that would otherwise be compensated in cold, hard cash for the New York blog empire. The three interns, identified by the New York Post, claim they spent at least 15 hours a week working for Denton's network in the lawsuit filed Friday in a Manhattan federal court.

Aulistar Mark, Andrew Hudson and Hanchen Lu held Summer internships within the Gawker network between 2008 and 2010. Mark and Hudson worked for Kotaku and i09, respectively, but Lu has no detectable presence on any Gawker sites that we could find. (If you find evidence of his work, please forward it to us.) All three claim they wrote, edited, did social media and were even forced to moderate Gawker's notoriously miserable comment sections during their internship and were "not paid a single cent," the lawsuit says, according to Bloomberg:

“Gawker employs numerous other ‘interns’ in the same way, paying them nothing or underpaying them and utilizing their services to publish its content on the Internet, an enterprise that generates significant amounts of revenue for Gawker,” the plaintiffs said in the complaint, which was filed on behalf of all of the company’s unpaid interns.

Of course, this is all coming on the heels of a judge validating Eric Glatt and Alex Footman's claim claim that Fox Searchlight should have paid them as production interns on Black Swan. The internship lawsuits have since been popping up all over town, obviously, by disgruntled former interns looking for late-game compensation for their work. Editorial employees seem more rankled about the ruling than others; Condé Nast was also sued within the last week. 

Gawker just recently started paying their interns with real money. As recently as August 2012, Gawker was offering college credit for their fall interns. In January, a cold call for new "editorial fellows" said they were "paid, hourly employees." When writing about the Glatt and Footman case, Gawker writer Adrian Chen called the two "ungrateful" after they were privileged enough to fetch Natalie Portman's coffee. It really should be mentioned (because no one else is saying it) that Chen was being tongue in cheek. "This is America, where exploiting young people via unpaid internships, thus cutting out anyone who isn't rich or well-connected, is a time-honored tradition," he wrote. Gawker reps told The Hollywood Reporter they haven't been served yet. They aren't commenting at this time. 

       

The Government Files Espionage Charges Against Edward Snowden

Late on a Friday afternoon before the first weekend of summer, some news out of the Department of Justice: Edward Snowden has been formally charged with espionage. Moreover, the United States government has asked Hong Kong to detain Snowden, the first step in the process to extradite him to face charges. Not a pleasant 30th birthday present for the NSA leaker.

The Washington Post reports on the announcement.

Snowden was charged with espionage, theft and conversion of government property, the officials said.

The complaint was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, a jurisdiction where Snowden’s former employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, is headquartered, and a district with a long track record in prosecuting cases with national security implications.

The New York Times' Charlie Savage obtained a copy of the first page of the complaint which at first was under seal. (It no longer is.) The relevant section is shown below. It was filed on June 14.

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Depending on the number of counts for each charge in the complaint, Snowden faces a wide array of possible punishments. Under certain conditions, espionage convictions could result in the death penalty, though that's highly unlikely. The espionage charge, the last listed above, may not necessarily mean that the government believes Snowden was spying for another country (like China). The law states:

Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States or for the benefit of any foreign government to the detriment of the United States any classified information ... concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government.

That's from the third listed charge. The theft charges (legal language) certainly relate to Snowden taking files from the NSA. Such charges also vary in possible punishment, but are usually felonies. "Unauthorized communication of national defense information" is described here.

NBC News reports that "the United States and authorities in Hong Kong have been going back and forth to make certain that whatever charges the U.S. filed would conform to the extradition treaty with Hong Kong." If Snowden faced capital charges, for example, he would not be eligible for extradition.

Which is clearly the next step. Now that the complaint has been filed, the U.S. government has 60 days to file an indictment with the court in Hong Kong to ask that Snowden be extradited for trial. (We outlined the full process earlier this week.) A court in Hong Kong would then have to agree to the extradition, but Snowden has the right to appeal. In a separate Post article, the paper reported that Snowden could be jailed "at the Lai Chi Kok maximum-security facility in Kowloon, where conditions are harsh."

Snowden's final option is to apply for asylum from either Hong Kong or another country, like Iceland. Earlier today, an Icelandic businessman said he had a plane waiting at the Hong Kong airport to take Snowden to that country. He might want to get the engine running.

Update: In an email to Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing, Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg noted that he faced the same set of charges.

And all of the media attention is proving to be a surprising boon for Iceland's tourism bureau.

haha the ad on this WaPo article about Snowden being charged with espionage is for Iceland. pic.twitter.com/mxIICyjpLQ

— Adrian Chen (@AdrianChen) June 21, 2013

       

This Week's News, by Height

With the president's announcement that he'd tapped James Comey to run the FBI, the United States government has a new tallest member of the executive branch (at least whose name you might know). In fact, it's been quite a week for people of various heights in the news. Here are our favorites.

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From shortest to tallest:

Kim Kardashian, new        

Can Modern Poetry Be Saved?

The world of poetry is facing an insurrection. "Friday morning, America’s great poets will wake up to find that someone has TP-ed their trees and scrawled 'COWARD' on the door," warned Ron Charles in The Washington Post on Thursday. The occasion for this imagined vandalism? On Friday, the July issue of Harper's appeared on newsstands, delivering readers a lengthy essay (currently quarantined behind a paywall) by Virginia professor Mark Edmundson concerning the "decline of American verse" — the flagging ambition, that is, of our nation's most decorated poets. Compared to the members of the postwar canon and their muscular, transporting poems, Edmundson says, today's rhymesters "write in a much blander, more circumscribed mode ... It's palpably the case that the poets who now get the balance of public attention and esteem are casting unambitious spells." Edmundson spends the rest of his essay attempting to figure out why, citing the increased professionalism of the literary arts (evidenced by the proliferation of M.F.A. programs across the country) and the literary community's aversion to facing political and social issues.

The responses so far have been either skeptical or overwrought. Charles is somewhat dismissive: "Could this essay in Harper’s spark a real literary wrestling match? Possibly, although poets are pretty inured to these well-worn grievances. Edmundson admits early on that Ralph Waldo Emerson preached essentially the same complaint 170 years ago." At The Huffington Post, meanwhile, the poet Seth Abramson published a 2,500 word sermon against the idea of poetic decline. "Contemporary American poetry nourishes and enlivens and congregates and educates and in some cases even saves us the very same way poetry has always done for those with the willingness to stop speaking and listen," he writes. Edmundson clearly touched a nerve among those invested in preserving poetry's stature.

At the same time, Edmundson's premise requires some scrutiny. He focuses primarily on the species of poet whose work appears in organs like The New Yorker, where verse is treated, much like the magazine's infamous cartoons, as page filler, utterly subordinate to the long-form journalism and fiction that dominates the magazine's feature well. "Many of the poems published in, say, The New Yorker feel just like the linguistic equivalent of a vanilla-scented candle," the author Courtney Queeney noted in 2009. A year later, Slate observed that New Yorker poems tend to obsess over the craft of poetry itself. By design, New Yorker poems don't distract or tantalize. They don't grasp for what lies beyond, much less the reality before us. They don't question authority. Of course, this may concern members of the literati like Mark Edmundson. But it is not exactly proof of a decaying form.

By the same token, Edmundson's strict focus on the country's most famous poets — Paul Muldoon, Anne Carson, John Ashbery, Charles Simic, and on and on — seems to suggest that our systems of awards and fame are far more flawed than the bulging corpus of American poetry. If your media diet comprises The New Yorker, The New York Times, and (presumably) Harper's — and the books these publications endorse — it seems a little silly to be shocked at the lack of poems that attempt to seriously challenge arrangements of power or revolutionize the way humans think. Remember: Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass! It's not unimaginable to think that the most potent verse resides in a digital file on the servers of CreateSpace. Fame, even literary fame, is still simply fame, not a categorical claim on a work's quality or impact.

Discussing John Ashbery and Seamus Heaney, Edmundson laments:

What troubles me is the fact that their contemporaries have made them central poets of our time. It is they whom young writes are to look up to, they who set the standard—and the standard is all for inwardness and evasion, hermeticism and self-regard: beautiful, accomplished, abstract poetry that refuses to the poetry of our climate.

Nonsense. No one is forced to acknowledge Ashbery and Heaney — or anyone else — as the upper limits of American poetry. There are other poets, there are always other poems. Edmundson has described not the decline of the form, but the mechanics of celebrity, and the flawed institutions dedicated to administering them.

Photo by V.H. Hammer via Flickr.

       

'Into the Woods' Has Its Jack

Today in show business: The youngest cast member of Into the Woods has been found, a crazy new production of Chicago is in the works, and NBC sets up its fall for you.

The Rob Marshall-directed movie adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's brilliant fractured fairytale musical Into the Woods lurches ever closer to production. They've just cast one of the major parts, Jack. As in the Beanstalk. Typically this role is played by a guy in his late teens or early twenties, so who could they have gotten for this pivotal role? Singin' dancin' Zac Efron? Mop-topped bro-bander Nick Jonas? You know, someone who all the girls (and boys -- it's a musical, people) can scream for? Well, no. They've cast a small child. Remember Gavroche from the Les Misérables movie, the little boy who [SPOILER ALERT] gets beaned with a bullet on the barricade? The kid who played him, wee Daniel Huttlestone, will be playing Jack. The 13-year-old showed moxie and pluck in Les Mis, but it's a weird choice to make Jack such a young kid. It's not like he has a love interest or anything, but it changes the dynamic a little bit. Ah well. The movie is not going to be the stage show, we must remind ourselves that. This is something different. Something with Chris Pine. And Johnny Depp. Grumble. [Deadline]

While we're talking about theater-y things, the cast for this summer's three-night Hollywood Bowl production of Chicago has been announced and it is a doozy! Let's start with Drew Carey, who will play Amos, the poor schlub who sings "Mr. Cellophane." Then there's Samantha Barks, from Les Mis, who will be sultry nightclub femme fatale Velma. All at the age of 22. Stephen Moyer, aka Vampire Bill from True Blood, is going to play Billy Flynn. And Lucy Lawless is going to be Mama Morton. Hatchi matchi. Oh, and Brooke Shields is directing. Good grief is that a motley crew, huh? Roxie hasn't been announced yet, but I'm pretty sure it's got to be, like, Jennie Garth or something, right? I mean, as long as we're doing random, we may as well do random. Either her or Abigail Breslin. Do your worst/best, Shields. [The Hollywood Reporter]

NBC has announced the premiere dates of its fall shows, which will be thrown from the boxcar as the tattered, runaway NBC train rumbles through various depressed towns. The Blacklist, the James Spader thriller about a master criminal helping to catch other master criminals, will premiere on September 22. Chicago Fire and Law & Order: SVU (thank god) premiere that same week. The comedies, too. But here's the terrible news, folks. You're going to have to wait until freaking October 25 for more episodes of Grimm. And I know how much you all love Grimm. Nobody can stop watching Grimm. It's Grimm this and Grimm that from you people all the time. And now you'll have to endure your wait for another four months. I don't know how we're going to do it. [Entertainment Weekly]

Whoopi Goldberg has signed up for a rare (these days) acting gig. The View frowner and bus-rider will star in a Lifetime movie based on Terry McMillan's A Day Late and a Dollar Short. The story is about a woman "who after learning that her next asthma attack is likely to kill her, sets out to fix her fractured family." So... that sounds cheery. I'm sure it'll be funny and heartwarming, but it's going to be depressing at the end, like The Family Stone or something. Ah well. I'm just glad that Whoopi's acting again. She should do another movie. Like a feature movie, not just a Lifetime thing. Remember The Associate? Man, I like that movie. I know I'm not really supposed to, but I do. Make another thing like that, Whoops! For me? [The Hollywood Reporter]

Spike Jonze has a new movie, Her, coming out this November, but there's been a cast shakeup, which is worrisome. The movie is about a guy who falls in love with the computer voice of his operating system, like Siri or something I guess, and that voice was played by Samantha Morton. She did a great job, as Samantha Morton always does, but then apparently in post-production Jonze began to realize that her voice wasn't exactly working. Who knows what exactly was wrong about it, but it wasn't doing it. So, he cast Scarlett Johansson instead. Jonze just had her rerecord everything I guess? Seems drastic. But oh well. Whatever's best for the movie. Which we should all be very excited to see. And I'm sure Samantha Morton will be fine. [Vulture]

       

America Just Can't Ditch Its Anti-Heroes

James Gandolfini has been memorialized in countless essays about his greatest role—the role that revolutionized television, the role that paved the way for so many other troubled men who served as microcosms of the American experience for viewers and critics. Under tragic circumstances, this week brought a renewed focus upon Tony Soprano, and what that violent, complicated character meant, and not just to us—to TV and how we watch it. But as summer officially arrives, we find ourselves thinking about other violent, complicated characters whose stories are due to end very soon, and oh-so-dramatically. Men like Don Draper and Walter White. When Mad Men and Breaking Bad are over, is the television anti-hero here to stay? 

[image error]The heavy, heavy shows that feature these men—and, yes, they are almost always men—are labeled brilliant because they are able to say something about the American condition through despicable guys who are somehow watchable and also somehow representative. Heather Havrilesky wrote in Salon: "No TV character captured the longing and melancholy of American life better than Tony Soprano, and no actor could bring those emotions to the surface better than Gandolfini." At Vulture, Margaret Lyons called Tony "the mobster, Willy Loman." But of course Arthur Miller's salesman never did anything nearly as horrible as the crimes that Tony committed. Nor was he a meth dealer. Nor did he steal a dead man's life. He was a small man, trying to do right by his sons, and failing miserably. 

Of course Willy existed in a simpler time. Tony Soprano was a result of his. "As our social life became reduced to considerations of the bottom line, the violence and humiliation Tony wrought in the name of 'just business' — to quote the famous line from 'The Godfather,' a movie that haunts Tony’s imagination — spoke to Americans in upheaval," Lee Siegel wrote in The New York Times. "Here was a sociopath who now seemed like the guy next door, a Ward Cleaver for the 21st century." In the new issue of The Atlantic, James Parker writes of Walter White in similar terms. "At one level, Breaking Bad is the story of a business," he says. "From their little start-up in the rumbling RV, Walter and Jesse push out into the meth market, widening and narrowing, gaining and losing personnel."

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But we also like these characters because they are entertaining, to a point. Don Draper's inner demons this year became tedious. He became a character that never seemed to grow or change. Andy Greenwald at Grantland wrote: "In 1968, Don Draper is an empty Jaguar with tinted windows: great to look at it, but a disaster under the hood." He's a man not in an inherently evil position, but he acts inherently evil. At the end of the most recent episode Peggy Olson called him a "monster." 

When Don and Walter finally leave the air—likely, in death—there will be other anti-heroes left. They might not be quite as lauded, but they're not going anywhere. Boardwalk Empire has Nucky Thompson. Homeland has Nicholas Brody coming back more than you'd expect, and it has that rare female example in Carrie Mathison. (Mathison almost doesn't count since her complication is rendered as a disease rather than a tendency for evil.) In two weekends, Showtime brings us Ray Donavan. The anti-hero as representation of the American male is still very much with us—even our superheroes are now, in some ways, anti-heroes—but they are perhaps starting to feel repetitive. Perhaps we need a character who doesn't expose just how dark we really are. Where's Coach Taylor when you need him?

       

The Hater's Guide to Dealing with the Jubilant, Bottle-Popping Miami Heat

[image error]The extremely inevitable end of another NBA season has arrived, with the bad guys Miami Heat winning it all again and LeBron James cementing his place in basketball history in a "triumph of evil." The Heat's victory last night was easier than in their Game 6 overtime classic, but nothing will come easy this weekend of the haters of the most hated man in basketball. Indeed, the morning-after reaction — from ESPN to Nate Silver, from Cleveland to the club — was not unlike the classic five stages of grief. True to form, here's how to cope, complete with LeBron, D-Wade, Drake, and their champagne parade.

Denial

Displayed by: ESPN's Skip Bayless

Example (a):

In the end, the Spurs lost these Finals more than the Heat won.

— Skip Bayless (@RealSkipBayless) June 21, 2013

Example (b): 

Congratulations to the Spurs, heavy underdogs who w/ 48 secs left in G7 had an easy shot by their best player to tie in Miami.

— Skip Bayless (@RealSkipBayless) June 21, 2013

So it's pretty obvious who this particular ESPN commentator was rooting for in this series — unlike pretty much everyone else at the Worldwide Leader in LeBron love. And we suppose there's a kind of moral victory in Tim Duncan blowing it. But come on, guys: Watching your favorite team lose over and over again is unhealthy. Admit that LeBron did his thing. Embrace it. Hug it out.

Anger

Displayed by: People in Cleveland

There is only one place where people are taking this loss harder than in San Antonio, and that is most certainly Cleveland, Ohio — the city LeBron left behind to go to Miami and get his championships. WKYC-TV caught up with Cavaliers fans who still feel the sting:

The station also took note of some choice comments from Cavs fans on their Facebook page. One fan wrote: "I hate him more than anyone in the world. When he took his 'talents to South Beach' he could have taken them straight to hell!" Another added: "After the way he did the Cavs and the city of Cleveland, he needs to shut up and never utter another syllable about Ohio. OHIO is over him." The hate remain strong, but... but... at least they have Kyrie Irving.

Bargaining

Displayed by: ESPN (and Drake)

"Fine, this terrible team won again." That's a pretty hard sentence to come to terms with. A better alternative is: "Fine, this terrible team won again, but they party with the Michael Bublé of the rap world." Yes, folks, the Heat celebrated with Drake. As ESPN showed us, though, this wonderful meeting of the minds almost didn't happen, because Drake was initially turned down when he tried to get into the Heat locker room for post-game bubbly:

But the former DeGrassi star did make it out to the club Story until 5:30 in the morning — TMZ has a lot of video footage from inside, including untouchable poses like these:

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Depression

Displayed by: Bayless, and Spurs fans.

LeBron and the Heat's win isn't just about them. Someone had to lose, and on Thursday night it was the San Antonio Spurs — one of the classiest (and perhaps one of the more boring) teams in all of sports. And in San Antonio, the anger about LeBron's second championship takes a back seat to the fact that the Spurs were thisclose to winning the championship themselves. Twice.

Indeed, Spurs fans were already nursing hangovers from that Game 6 loss on Tuesday night. "Depressed About the Spurs Loss? That's Perfectly Normal" read the headline to a story from San Antonio's WOAI radio station on Thursday. The station interviewed "a prominent local psychiatrist" to tell them that being depressed is okay. 

And seriously, someone go check on Mr. Bayless. Maybe tell him to watch the Gregg Popovich comedy show from before Game 7, back when things were still okay:

Acceptance

Displayed by: Andre Iguodala, Nate Silver 

The Denver Nuggets all-star tweeted some advice for people who haven't accepted that truth about LeBron James:

If you still hate Lebron you really need a life coach... And I'll sponsor you...

— Andre Iguodala (@andre) June 21, 2013

[image error]If Iguodala made good on his offer on giving everyone life coaches, he would probably see his $14.9 million salary evaporate pretty quickly. But, yes, this is the final stage of grief, the last bitter pill. And part of acceptance means the inevitable comparing of LeBron to Michael Jordan. The same thing happened, and is still happening, with Kobe Bryant

That said, if you want to satisfy your acceptance with the voodoo that is statistics, Nate Silver has got you covered. The elections number genie has come to the conclusion that the best chance for LeBron to get his next championship is next year (obviously?), but that decreases over the next couple seasons. Silver writes:

 

So LeBron’s chances of winning a third title next season in Miami are probably about one in three. After that, his odds begin to decline. For one thing, it is less certain that James will be surrounded by strong teammates ...

More important, players in team sports typically see their skills peak in their mid-to-late 20s, meaning that James’s game might also begin to wane.

LeBron James is 28 years old — the peak of his career, according to Silver. And, yes, haters, Nate Silver said wane, as in: it gets worse. So there's a slight possibility (though, let's remind you that LeBron is anything but "typical") that you won't have to go through all these stages again next year. 

       

The UK Tempora Program Captures Vast Amounts of Data — and Shares with NSA

The British Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, maintains taps on fiber optic systems in the United Kingdom, according to the latest Guardian report from the Edward Snowden leaks. The scale of the operation and the centrality of the UK to global network traffic are one concern. How that data is used by the NSA is another.

Working closely with America's National Security Agency, the GCHQ is about halfway done implementing "Project Tempora." Comprised of two parts, suggestively dubbed "Mastering the Internet" and "Global Telecoms Exploitation," the project aims to eventually allow the agency (and its partner) to survey over 90 percent of the cables that route through the United Kingdom, pulling data from 400 at once. "As of last year," the Guardian reports, "the agency had gone half way, attaching probes to 200 fibre-optic cables each with a capacity of 10 gigabits per second. In theory, that gave GCHQ access to a flow of 21.6 petabytes in a day, equivalent to 192 times the British Library's entire book collection." Full content of transmissions is preserved for three days and metadata for 30. Between them, the GCHQ and NSA have 550 analysts poring over the data — and 850,000 people with top secret clearance can access it. We've known for weeks that the NSA shares its PRISM data with the UK; now we know it also goes in reverse.

But Tempora deals only with traffic in the United Kingdom, right? Well, no. Consider a highway, like Interstate 80 that runs from New York to San Francisco. It also runs through Des Moines. So if Des Moines decided to stop everyone passing on Route 80 to search their cars, they'd end up searching a lot of people who'd never planned on being Des Moines at all.

In the GCHQ example, Interstate 80 would be one of the many fiber optic throughputs crossing the globe. You can see them all on SubmarineCableMap.com's interactive graphic. When GCHQ wanted to get Tempora running, it first had to pick its Des Moines.

As the probes began to generate data, GCHQ set up a three-year trial at the GCHQ station in Bude, Cornwall. By the summer of 2011, GCHQ had probes attached to more than 200 internet links, each carrying data at 10 gigabits a second. "This is a massive amount of data!" as one internal slideshow put it. That summer, it brought NSA analysts into the Bude trials.

This is what the cables coming into the UK look like. Many of the lines that continue on to Northern Europe stop over in the UK first, waystations from which the GCHQ can take a sniff.

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But there's one waystation in particular that plays host to incoming traffic — especially from the United States.

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Which raises a key question. By law, the NSA is only able to collect data on American citizens if it gets the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — and only as long as the agency is targeting a foreigner. But can it use data collected on Americans by foreign countries? The Atlantic Wire spoke with Alex Abdo, staff attorney at the ACLU's National Security Project. "I don't know the answer," he indicated, "but I suspect there are few" limitations to doing so.

The NSA has repeatedly assured members of Congress that its safeguards protect American privacy. The GCHQ has made no such assurances. And the Guardian reports, their intelligence agencies are pleased with the extent to which they can operate in the shadows.

In confidential briefings, one of [GCHQ]'s senior legal advisers, whom the Guardian will not name, made a note to tell his guests: "We have a light oversight regime compared with the US".

The parliamentary intelligence and security committee, which scrutinises the work of the agencies, was sympathetic to the agencies' difficulties, he suggested.

And American oversight mechanisms, of course, play no role at all. "When it came to judging the necessity and proportionality of what they were allowed to look for," the Guardian reports, "would-be American users were told it was "your call"."

Photo: GCHQ headquarters in Cheltenham, via Wikipedia.

       

The 'Jobs' Trailer Is Everything and Nothing

What is the most ridiculous part of the trailer for the long awaited, highly anticipated Steve Jobs movie starring Ashton Kutcher now titled Jobs and not jOBS? Is it the use of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis' "Can't Hold Us?" Is it Kutcher, as Jobs, lashing out at an employee who thinks typeface "isn't a pressing issue?" Is it Kutcher standing in a sun drenched field and raising his arms to the sky? Is it Kutcher donning the famous turtleneck? Is it just Kutcher? Is it the clichéd tortured yelling? Is it Josh Gad as Woz? Is it Woz meeting North West—oh wait. 

Maybe we're being unfair, but it just seems like there's no way this movie can win. With the ridiculous casting, that early title, and the knowledge that a biopic based on Walter Isaacson's biography penned by Aaron Sorkin is on its way, Jobs just comes off as a stepping stone good for a laugh. The trailer is formulaic, but really, what were we expecting? 

       

The FBI's Fake KKK Death Ray Attack on Andrew Cuomo, Debunked

Glendon Scott Crawford allegedly wanted to use a death ray to hurt New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. If that makes Cuomo nervous, he should blame the FBI, because it seems highly unlikely Crawford would have had much success if undercover agents hadn't supplied him with x-ray parts, money, plans, and assembly. "These extreme right wing nutsies think of everything," Cuomo said Friday, in response to the New York Daily News' report that he was the target of the nefarious plot. He shouldn't give the nutsies so much credit.

"This case demonstrates how we must remain vigilant to detect and stop potential terrorists, who so often harbor hatred toward people they deem undesirable," U.S. Attorney Richard Hartunian said in a statement. Hartunian must adopt a very loose definition of "potential." There are several reasons to be skeptical that the FBI has saved the nation from a great menace.

[image error]First, the plan allegedly crafted by Crawford and alleged co-conspirator Eric J. Feight was ridiculous — the death ray would't work. The plan involved mounting a remote-control operated x-ray laser on top of a truck to kill people without them noticing. Yes, you can aim radiation, but it requires a ton of electricity, and the target has to stand still for a long time and be close to the source. "There is no instant death ray... It's not feasible. It's the stuff of comic books," Dr. Frederic Mis, radiation safety officer at the University of Rochester Medical Center, told the Associated Press. Think how the machines that deliver radiation for cancer treatment take up whole rooms, Peter Caracappa, a lecturer in nuclear engineering program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, told All Over Albany. "The idea of it might be theoretically possible, but is extremely infeasible because of the tremendous amount of power and or cooling that would be required to deliver a lethal radiation dose in a short period of time," Caracappa said.

Second, the death ray was inoperable. Crawford and Feight never got a real radiation source.

Third, the death ray was built with the help of the FBI. The undercover FBI agents or informants gave Crawford the tools to build his death ray — x-ray tubes — and technical specs on how to use it. (The specs were altered to change their output capacity.) Crawford had some engineering experience, and was trying to figure out how to make them more powerful. An FBI informant also financed the plot, giving Feight $1,000 to built the remote control device. Undercover agents told Feight they'd get him access to an x-ray assembly facility.

Fourth, Crawford appears to have had minimal technical expertise — he relied on Wikipedia. "During a meeting with that source on May 30, 2012, Crawford allegedly gave that confidential source a webpage printout of the specs of the radiation emitting device, a printout of the Wikipedia page on Acute Radiation Sickness, a two page hand-written sketch of a radiation emitting device, and a business card for the United Northern and Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan," Talking Points Memo reports.

Fifth, they couldn't sell the death ray without the FBI. Crawford was unable to find a a group that would use the weapon — the synagogue he approached called the cops. It was after Crawford approached the synagogue in April 2012 that the FBI put an informant in place, and two months later was offering him x-ray tubes. A member of the KKK affiliate Crawford talked to was working with the FBI. 

Sixth, Feight expressed unease about participating in the plot. He allegedly told undercover agents, "So, I mean, I, I, I have to admit having never been involved in anything like this before, you know, at first it made me a little bit nervous and, I’m like, okay, well, you know, as long as I still have some, you know, real good separation, plausible deniability, you know."

Seventh, the men expressed reluctance to actually kill people multiple times. "I figured you were going to have the business. Um, I was just going to be your technical advisor and let you turn him loose with it," he told an FBI agent and informant in June. "The only difference is I don't know — I don't know if I would be capable of doing it," he said in July. In November, Feight said he "would prefer not to know" who was going to operate the death ray.

If the allegations are true, Crawford and Feight are idiots, bigots, and immoral. But would they have posed any risk to anyone without the aid of the FBI?