Other footage from the scene turns up here and there and becomes fodder for documentaries (like this new one disproving the “second shooter” theory). But Zapruder’s film is still the canonical text of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the most complete and most chilling visual record. In many ways, it prefigured all sorts of American pastimes, from widespread paranoia about government to a loss of faith in photographic truth and the news media, from the acceptance of graphic violence to newer concerns about copyright. Don Delillo once said that the little film “could probably fuel college courses in a dozen subjects from history to physics.” Without the 486 frames of Kodachrome II 8mm safety film, our understanding of JFK’s assassination would likely be an even greater carnival of conspiracy theories than it already is. Well, maybe.

In the numb, confused hour that started with the gunshots, Zapruder — a Russian-Jew whose parents had immigrated to Brooklyn in 1906 and who had moved his family to Dallas, where he ran his own sportswear company — would connect with Forrest Sorrels, an agent of the Secret Service’s Dallas office. After securing a promise from Sorrels that the footage would only be used for an official investigation, the two of them began a feverish rush to develop the film.

Together, they drove to the television station WFAA for help, but their equipment wasn’t sufficient. In the late afternoon, the film was taken to Eastman Kodak’s Dallas processing plant where it was immediately developed, and, at 6:30 p.m., driven to the Jamieson Film Company, where three additional copies were exposed. By 8:00 p.m. Zapruder had the original and a copy, and handed the other two copies to Sorrels, who sent them to Washington.

That left him with one extra copy of history’s most famous home movie. By evening, the rush to acquire the footage was on, and it was as feverish as it might be today. At its center were titans of both old and new media: the august editors of Life and the bulldog producers at CBS News. At that time, television news hadn’t yet become a serious focal point for most Americans, though that was about to change.

The accidental film almost didn’t happen at all. Zapruder admired the president, but he hadn’t thought about taking his new camera along to watch the motorcade until his assistant, Lillian Rogers, insisted. An 8mm Bell & Howell Zoomatic Director Series Model 414 PD, the camera was top of the line when Zapruder purchased it the previous year. While he stood atop a concrete pedestal along Elm Street, he steadied himself with the help of Marilyn Sitzman, his receptionist, who held him from behind while he began filming. The president’s limousine turned onto Elm Street in front of the Book Depository, and for the next 26.6 seconds the camera captured 486 frames that would become a kind of national monument.

Dan Rather, a very young Dan Rather, whose career was about to be minted, was CBS’s Dallas bureau chief at the time. He called New York, asked for Don Hewitt, and told him that “a guy named Zapruder was supposed to have film of the assassination and was going to put it up for sale.” Exactly how interested was Walter Cronkite’s evening news program? Hewitt, the show’s executive producer — and the long-time producer of 60 Minutes — insisted it was very interested, and quickly decided the best approach would require a bit of, well, courage.

“In my desire to get a hold of what was probably the most dramatic piece of news footage ever shot,” Hewett wrote, "I told Rather to go to Zapruder’s house, sock him in the jaw, take his film to our affiliate in Dallas, copy it onto videotape, and let the CBS lawyers decide whether it could be sold or whether it was in the public domain. And then take the film back to Zapruder’s house and give it back to him. That way, the only thing they could get him for was assault because he would have returned Zapruder’s property. Rather said, ‘Great idea. I’ll do it.’

But then something dawned on Hewitt. “I hadn’t hung up the phone maybe ten seconds when it hit me: What in the hell did you just do? Are you out of your mind? So I called Rather back. Luckily, he was still there, and I said to him, ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t do what I just told you to. I think this day has gotten to me and thank God I caught you before you left.’ Knowing Dan to be as competitive as I am, I had the feeling that he wished he’d left before the second phone call.”

Possibly. The next morning Zapruder passed on CBS News’s lower bid and sold the print rights of the film to Life magazine for a total of $150,000, equivalent to over $1 million in today’s money. Even then, this sum wasn’t unheard of: just a few years earlier, the magazine had paid $500,000 for the exclusive story of the Gemini astronauts and their wives. The next day, TV news would earn another big coup: while being transferred from police headquarters to the county jail, suspected shooter Lee Harvey Oswald would be shot by nightclub owner Jack Ruby, in front of live television cameras. The Zapruder film, meanwhile, would almost never be seen on television.

Still, a few days later, Rather, who claims to be the first journalist to have seen the film, described it for a national audience on the evening news.

Rather’s was a sober, chilling but dignified description of the events, from the gentle roll of the limousine to the second shot that hit Texas Governor John Connally to the desperate crawl of the First Lady, “on all fours,” across the car’s trunk, toward the nearest bodyguard, after the final fatal head shot. But it was, in forensic terms, grossly inaccurate. Kennedy’s head did not thrash “violently forward,” but backward. When this discrepancy emerged later, a thousand conspiracy theories—involving the CIA, the Russian mob, the KGB, Malcolm, Martin, RFK, and various shooters—were born.

But even without the film itself and only Rather’s flawed description, Zapruder’s footage had already begun to affix itself to the national brain.

The film’s ambiguous impact was felt first and foremost inside the Zapruder home. The night after the assassination, he claimed to have had a nightmare in which he saw a booth in Times Square declaring, “See the president’s head explode!” After his nightmare, Zapruder decided that one frame would never appear in print. Fearing the public’s reaction to the gruesome fatal shot that killed JFK, and perhaps some karmic retribution, Zapruder insisted that frame 313 be withheld from publication. He also chose to give the first $25,000 of his Life payment to the widow of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit, who had been killed confronting Lee Harvey Oswald after the assassination.

The following week, Life would publish 30 frames of the Zapruder film in black and white. Frames were also published in color in the December 6, 1963 special “John F. Kennedy Memorial Edition,” and in three other issues over the next few years.

Makori and her soon-to-be
colleagues had come to China to learn about CCTV America from their new
employers, who had plucked them from other networks to develop another peculiar
headquarters: a roughly 100-person bureau in the center of Washington, D.C.,
producing a slick news channel aimed at delivering China-centric news to a U.S.
audience. "China has a place in the world economy, so it's only befitting that
China has a place in the global media platform," a senior CCTV executive
told them, according to Makori. "The reason you people are before us is
because we want to be recognized as a legitimate, objective journalistic
force," he continued. "The idea is for this to be not a Chinese
mouthpiece, not a Chinese propaganda tool, but a global channel produced with a
Chinese flair.'"

Nearly a year later, that vision is coming into focus, and it offers a curious
indication of China's search for soft power. Despite the promise of wider
editorial latitude, CCTV America's coverage of China is largely scrubbed of
controversy and upbeat in tone, with a heavy emphasis on business and cultural
stories in places where Beijing hopes to gain influence. Reporting on topics
sensitive to Beijing, like unrest in Tibetan regions of China or the Tiananmen
Square Massacre is off limits. Coverage of scandals involving disgraced
Chongqing Party chief Bo Xilai and dissident legal
activist Chen Guangcheng -- topics that
dominated U.S. and European headlines over the summer -- were confined to
reports that echoed official government statements. (CCTV America broadcast a stern-faced anchor
in Beijing reading the statement "China has called on the United States to
apologize over the issue of a Chinese citizen entering the U.S. embassy here in
Beijing in late April," after Chen escaped to the U.S. embassy there.)

"Foreign audiences
expect to hear stories about China from Chinese media, and CCTV has nothing to
say about the two most important stories of the year?" asked Michael Anti,
a Chinese blogger and free speech advocate. "Why would an American
audience want to listen?"

Since the U.S. bureau began
broadcasting in February, CCTV's fresh cast of reporters and producers have
been struggling to answer that question. Based out of a sparkling new office in
Washington, the service comprises a block of news on CCTV News, the network's recently-revamped
24/7 English-language channel, and covers a range of U.S. and international stories
with a cast of 60 reporters, producers, and technicians who have experience at
established news organizations like CNN, CBS, and the BBC. Long news pieces,
Western accents, slick graphics, live stand-ups in foreign locales, and
prominent guests (the likes of Thomas
Friedman and Tom
Brokaw have appeared on a weekend evening
talk show called The Heat), emanate a
feel of credibility that has long been absent in CCTV's dull, starchy news
coverage. "They were saying 'we want you to be doing breaking news and
investigative pieces' and this was the first time a lot of the senior people in
China had heard this," Barbara Dury, a former 60 Minutes producer who now runs CCTV's Sunday newsmagazine program
Americas Now, said of initial discussions
with top CCTV officials. "And they were asking, 'how's this all going to
play out?'"

It’s a gas. Methane to be exact. By harvesting the stuff that’s slowly belching out of what was once the largest garbage dump in history, the Sanitation Department is producing enough energy to heat approximately 22,000 homes. That energy will be sold to National Grid until the gas has been depleted, at which point it will be burned off at flare stations across the park.

We’ve drawn energy from the land for millennia. But these days, that land is often far away – coal mountains, nuclear plants, offshore turbines. And it’s usually not the kind of land that we like to luxuriate on. Freshkills is the opposite: it’s a place for playing, for hiking and birdwatching and biking and horseback riding. Kayaking even. And also for producing energy.

That’s because underneath the new grass and the soil and the “impermeable plastic liner” is 50 years of trash produced by five boroughs. Everything from paper pizza plates and “Thank You Come Again” cups to encyclopedias and orange peels decays into methane, and the park, which is three times the size of Central Park, has plenty of it: the mound of trash stretches across 2,200 acres, rises as high as 150 feet, or as high as a 15-story building. This is ecological regeneration at its finest, and strangest.

Turning landfills into parks isn’t new. Thanks to a 1930 decision by legendary Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, the giant salt marsh turned ash dump in Flushing, Queens that was immortalized by F. Scott Fitzgerald as The Great Gatsby‘s “Valley of Ashes” is now Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, home to a sprawling public park that hosted the World’s Fair of 1939, a UFO crash landing site in Men in Black, and today, the New York Hall of Science.

The Parks Department is sincere about transforming a symbol of ecological devastation into an example of environmental redemption. Even three years before its initial public debut, the park – designed by the landscape architect James Corner and his firm Field Operations – is exuberantly bucolic, with its generous vistas, scenic walking paths and a bird watching tower atop a swath of wetlands, where dragonflies and swallows and perhaps, still, the occasional pigeon, can be seen amidst the trees and tall grasses. There’s a new international competition for land art (“Renewable energy can be beautiful” is the tagline for the Land Art Generator Initiative).

And in a subtle bit of rebranding, Fresh Kills has been renamed “Freshkills.” “‘Kills’ is a Dutch word for stream or estuary, but the specific words "Fresh Kills" were maybe a little harsh sounding,” says Raj Kottamasu, former community coordinator for the Parks Department. Apart from the Sanitation depots around the site and the occasional truck, there’s little indication of the hulking trash heap below.

“What do you think this is about?” was the question that bounced back when I asked the same of Sruly, a smiling, bespectacled twenty-something Hasidic student and erstwhile packer and shipper from Williamsburg. We were on the G train, on our way to what may have been the largest “anti-Internet” rally in history, held last Sunday at Citi Field in Queens, home to the Mets. It wasn’t hard to detect his skepticism about talking to a journalist, especially given how the asifa, organized by Ichud HaKehillos LeTohar HaMachane, or the Unification of the Communities for the Purification of the Camp, had been portrayed in the media: as a backwards rally against the future, a farcical and confused debate over an unavoidable technology, a sign of the olden days’ fear of the new, a call to put an end to Internet masturbation, a giant meet-up for the Haredi patriarchy (only men were invited, as providing a separate section for women would have been too problematic).

Sruly was getting a feel for an outsider — the sort of person who, admittedly, browses the Internet wantonly, without any filters, on his cell phone even, getting distracted this way and that by an unending stream of links that are full of schmutz and have nothing to do with the only valid reason for the Internet: strictly business, of course.

“Distractions, Jewish, non-Jewish, that’s for everyone,” Sruly says. “But the problem is that whatever a person sees goes into his body, goes into his brain. Whatever you see, you comprehend something you’re allowed to do. You can see the worst of the worst. Whoever doesn’t need it shouldn’t have it and whomever does need it should use it as little possible.”

Television, with all of its pop culture lewdness had already been banned, he pointed out; but using the Internet was necessary for business, and therein lied the rub, and, he said, the reason for this rally — not a protest, not an anti-Internet event — just a coming-together of various sects within Ultra-Orthodox Judaism to discuss one of the biggest bugaboos of its time: how to ensure the Internet is kept kosher, and only used for business — not for gossip, not for learning, not for, ahem, pleasure. “Sure, sometimes friends will send me jokes by text message, but I have to write back and tell them, ‘sorry, this isn’t why I have a phone.’”

By the time we squeezed into the above-ground train car, Sruly already had his phone out and slid open, so he could find out where his friends were on their own trips to the stadium. A bus broke down on the BQE, he reported, and a busload full of Hasidic Jews were now marching along the highway, hoping to get picked up by one of the other hundreds of buses ferrying some 50,000 attendees to the home of the Mets. An older man nearby me pulled a phone from his coat to survey Twitter for news; people were gathering in parts of Brooklyn and New Jersey and Israel to watch the event on simulcast, streaming via Internet.

The event had already become the butt of jokes and the target of ridicule — on the Internet of course — and so concern about outsiders had transmuted into a kind of low-level paranoia.

^{Photo: Getty Images}

Sruly, however, was happy to talk about the dangers of the Internet and the need for restrictions — he doesn’t own a computer, relying instead on the computers at the local library, where you have 30 minutes of use time and are surrounded by others who can see what you’re looking at. We happily walked and talked up to the stadium entrance, where we were suddenly interrupted by a spokesman who noticed I was of the media and, speaking rapidly, insisted that I put any questions I had to him. We outsiders — a reporter from The New York Times, the Awl, even the Jewish Daily Forward — may as well have been the Internet.

Because of “homeland security,” the media was not permitted inside the stadium, and the event’s 40,000 tickets, along with those for a simulcast at Arthur Ashe stadium nearby, were sold-out. In the crowd outside the stadium entrance, men were handing out fliers about the risks of the Internet, while others were taking the opportunity to gather petitions for Jacob Ostreicher, an Orthodox Jew who had been sentenced to prison in Bolivia. Scalpers were few, and prices were hovering around $40. I managed to buy a ticket at face value of $10 from another reporter but, when I tried to enter, the ticket scanner rejected it.

The spokesman looked exhausted as he declaimed the problems of the Internet to a group of reporters and attendees. I introduced myself to a man named Yakov, who wore a kippa but no beard and had been speaking animatedly in Yiddish to a couple of other men. He said he didn’t want to speak on camera, but he had a familiar question for me: what did I think was really going on here? I told him something reasonable and honest — the Internet is a new force, a source of distraction, and it deserved some kind of public discussion, though I had never heard of anything like this — and he shook his head no. The Internet, he explained, is full of “wrong” and misleading information that could harm the community, echoing the event’s refrain. He knew: “I began using it in the days of AOL and Compuserve.”

The best approach, he said, was the one he practiced: white labeling — effectively blocking the web but for only a certain list of sites. Along with “Internet accountability” – giving your rabbi access to your web history – web and phone filters were a popular tool among attendees I spoke to. Indeed, rumors had circulated that the rabbinical group behind the event has links to a software company that sells filtering software. Also awkward: the speculation, circulating online, that one of the largest donors for the $1.5 million event was the owner of B&H Photo and Video, one of the city’s largest electronics retailers. A planned exhibition of products was cancelled at the last minute.

In an article published online in early May, the organizing group said they had opened technology offices in various Ultra-Orthodox communities as well as a hotline that will “enable locals to obtain advice on specific devices and filters or modify them to block undesired material, at no cost.”

At one point, as thousands of men were streaming into the stadium and a police helicopter hovered overhead, we were interrupted by an older man in a long coat and scraggly beard who began singing, in a loud, comic baritone, “we are Jewwwwwwwwws!” Our camera captured this. Yakov stared at the man, then at Josh, the Motherboard cameraman, then back at me. He shook his head again, this time more sternly. “This is a misrepresentation of what we’re doing here! This is not what this is about!”

But that's also what this was about: not just a fear of pornography, but a concern about presentation and perception -- the creeping suspicion that information could not be controlled, that the Internet was importing, copying and pasting, all sorts of things from the outside world that the community had spent so many decades trying to keep at bay. This was understandable. And it wasn’t hard to agree with the most basic message: the Internet is an always-on firehose of misinformation, useless information and distraction, a phantom-vibrating font of knowledge that parents, religious and non-religious, should allow their kids to see only in measured doses, and should probably wrangle in for their own media diets too.

The Internet was a distraction from the Torah, but it also threw open the door to the outside world, where lewdness and heresy abound. “I heard quite a few times this wishful thinking from Haredim,” a Jewish man I met at the rally told me, “that once you start talking frivolously to a shiksa, 15 minutes later you’ll end up having sex with her.”

"We're leveraged in so many ways, it's like, our economy is leveraged to produce more than it can in order for it to survive," he says. "It's leveraged to grow. Human beings are financially leveraged now. So how do you roll that back and say, well, you know, 'this is it'?" Or, rather, "How do you get the good of a zombie apocalypse without the zombies? That's sort of what I'm trying to help people with."

Enter Occupy. Rushkoff has watched the movement with cautious optimism, penning editorials on CNN and organizing November's Contact Con, a powwow of net roots activists and open source hackers working to foster new civic-minded apps and hardware. To include prizes, Rushkoff enlisted the help of Pepsi, which ultimately granted $10,000 to the Free Network Foundation, the hackers profiled in "Free the Network," our recent documentary.

This video is subject to a copyright claim by EMI publishing.

Then, in 1999, a judge in Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. v. CBS, Inc. determined that the speech was a performance distributed to the news media and not the public, making it a “limited” as opposed to a “general” publication. That meant the speech, like other “performances” on CBS, was not in the public domain. That meant the King estate had the right to claim copyright and had standing to sue CBS, which had used a portion of the speech in a 1994 documentary, “The 20th Century with Mike Wallace.”

The claim had been made before. In 1994, USA Today had paid the King estate $10,000 in attorney's fees and court costs plus a $1,700 licensing fee after publishing the full speech without permission; the estate also sued the documentary producer Henry Hampton, alleging the unauthorized use of Dr. King's image and words in the landmark 1987 public television series Eyes on the Prize.

“Martin Luther King, Jr. vs. Mister Maestro, Inc. and Twentieth Century-Fox Record Company,” page one

Also crucial in the estate’s copyright claims: though King himself claimed copyright of the speech a whole month after he delivered it, his claim was seen as valid because no “tangible” copy of the speech had been distributed before he made his claim. (The ruling was based on previous copyright law, from 1909, not the 1975 law we use today.)

And yet, because CBS settled with the family out of court for an undisclosed sum, the law never fully considered the matter of the speech’s copyright. Today, the audio version of the speech can be hard to come by, and unabridged film footage of it has escaped the cultural memory banks of YouTube. The single unabridged video that had been floating around YouTube is now unplayable, thanks to a copyright claim by EMI.

Excerpts from the speech can still be used under “fair use,” of course, like in this analysis of King’s rhetoric and various remixes. (My favorite MLK remix is not of the “I have a dream” speech but of the ’I’ve been to the mountaintop’ speech. But no one knows what the limits of “fair use” are, at least not until they receive a letter from the King family’s lawyers.

The practice of putting what seems like public domain material into private ownership didn’t start here. The family of Richard Nixon sold his papers to the U.S. government for $18 million. And the infamous, definitive home movie of President Kennedy’s assassination by Abraham Zapruder was subject to a long, hellish copyright dispute between his family and Time, Inc.

Joseph Beck, an expert in intellectual property and an attorney for the King family, which was left without much money after MLK’s death, told the Washington Post in 2006 that, “The King family has always supported providing access to the speech and to the video for educational purchases and encourages interested persons to contact the King Center in Atlanta.”

At the family’s Web site, videotapes and audiotapes of the speech can be purchased for $10 a piece. The family controls the copyright of the speech for 70 years after King’s death, in 2038.

Until then, you’ll most likely have an easier finding ABBA’s version of “I Have a Dream” than King’s.

It was also by considerable chance that Morris happened upon the story of Joyce McKinney, the truth-tangled former beauty queen at the center of his latest you-couldn’t-make-this-up-but-maybe-someone-else-did story. She flew to England, rescued her fiance from the Mormons, and absconded with him to a Devon cottage for a weekend of sex before he decided to return to his missionary friends with the sordid tale. Or so she says. (He says he was kidnapped, and the British tabloids, if not the government, accused her of rape.)

Thirty years later, Morris happened to read an AP wire story in the Boston Globe about a woman who had her dogs cloned in Korea; the last paragraph mentioned the possibility that she was McKinney. He and his crew packed the interrotron – the whimsical face-to-face interview machine for which he’s become famous – and headed for Van Nuys to get one of documentary’s greatest, weirdest interviews.

This wasn’t by total chance of course: as a documentary filmmaker – and one-time private detective – Morris has spent his adult life looking for and then, very carefully, at tabloid stories. This doesn’t mean just the sensationalized supermarket-line fodder, of course. He’s trained his sharp, uncanny eye on serious crimes (The Thin Blue Line, Standard Operating Procedure ) as often as he has on unlikely characters (Mr. Death, Vernon, Florida). His next film, his first real feature, is an adaptation of a fascinating story on This American Life about one of the first attempts at cryogenics. His interests he said were informed by his aunt, an erstwhile resident of mental hospitals.

“I've never had any problem with crazy people, I like crazy people, I probably am a crazy person myself,” he told me. “It's made me able to listen and enjoy stories. I like to think that I'm nonjudgmental, that I can listen and be engaged by almost anything. My crazy aunt used to take me to science fiction movies and really, really, really scare me horribly. The ’50’s was sort of the high point of American science fiction, with these movies like This Island Earth and The Incredible Shrinking Man, Them. She scared me silly but I really loved her and I really loved those movies.”

Morris’ stranger-than-fiction movies aren’t just examinations of fascinating people but the strange ways that the facts circulate around them. Ways that, he wants to remind you, are affected by the telling of the story itself, by the medium in which they are told. “From the very very very beginning, probably from the first attempt at journalism, whatever that was, in Cro-Magnon times, there was a tension, and that tension remains between storytelling, wanting to entertain, wanting to drag in an audience and keep their attention... and the truth. It's always there,” he said.

Like all stories, his are onion-like, shedding layers to reveal new ones underneath. To wit, some little known Errol trivium:

• Morris is credited as a director of one feature film, 1992’s Dark Wind, but he had a creative disagreement with producer Robert Redford.

• Before it was a quiet down-home Americana portrait, Morris originally intended Vernon, Florida to be about the townspeople’s predeliction for insurance fraud – until he starrted receiving death threats.

• Errol’s son, Hamilton, is a correspondent for Vice and produces a geeky show about psychedelic drugs (although I work for Vice, I did not know this until after setting up our interview)

• Randall Dale Adams, whose death row conviction was overturned thanks in part to A Thin Blue Line, later sued Morris to control rights to his story. (Morris gladly handed them over.)

This tension in his films between fact and fiction, their concern with objectivity, is why I asked Morris about his relationship with Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science whom Morris had as a professor while briefly pursuing a PhD at Princeton in the 1970s. Kuhn is famous for his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and his notion about the way that scientific discovery proceeds, through a series of paradigm shifts that prove that there is no definite reality to grasp onto. Morris was not taken with Kuhn’s idea. In the midst of an argument over a 30-page paper Morris had written about James Clerk Maxwell (Kuhn's comments, typed on unlined yellow paper, were also 30 pages, single-spaced), Kuhn threw an ash-tray at Morris’s 24-year-old head. It missed, but it signaled the end of Morris’ career as a student and the beginning of his film life. (He made a little film of the ash-tray in flight for his popular New York Times blog; we used it in the video above.)

Thomas Kuhn (Photo by Bill Pierce / Time Life Pictures / Getty Images)

Despite their argument, Kuhn’s prevailing concept of a truth that is forever elusive seems borne out in part by Morris’ own kaleidoscopic investigations. Standard Operating Procedure fractured the widely-held premises of the photographs of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison. Tabloid goes out of its way to offer no definitive claims about what Joyce did, though it does offer lots of great title effects and copious photographs of Joyce, both clothed and unclothed. (She claims unconvincingly that these are fake.)

“I believe it was probably less than ten minutes that went by from the invention of photography to the point where people realized that they could lie with photographs. I think it's part of the whole photographic idea from the very very very beginning, it didn't just happen yesterday with Photoshop or some such nonsense,” he was nearly shouting at this point, in his own charming way. “People lie, and they always are very very creative in finding new ways to lie.”

That aside, Morris is certainly bothered by the post-modern suggestion that nothing is true – after all, he helped free a man from death row, after an examination of the facts – and was perplexed at my suggestion that maybe he and Kuhn had more in common than it may appear. “Do you really see similiarites between me and Kuhn?” he asked later. I explained why, and then a publicist showed up. Morris then began recounting a line he had misremembered from the 1977 film Bad, by Jed Johnson and Andy Warhol, in which two characters are planning a murder: “I don’t want premeditated, I want crazy.”

“In the movie she says the exact opposite. But I always accepted it as a principle for filmmaking,” he said. “We want things to be out of control. We want things set loose in some way. Uncertain. Unconstrained. Chaotic.”

“I’m sorry,” interrupted Charlie, the publicist, “but I have to get you on the phone with this one person….”

Morris turned to me, looking fatigued but still smiling. “Nice to meet you.”

This is a movie about the news industry: of course it’s messy. Director Andrew Rossi leads his audience across the wasted media landscape, with stops along the way, writes Kinsley, at “WikiLeaks; the Pentagon Papers; more WikiLeaks; the survival issue; Gay Talese and his famous book on The Times, 'The Kingdom and the Power;' Comcast's purchase of NBC Universal; the impact of Twitter; the danger of not sending reporters on trips with the president; how ABC has had to lay off 400 people.”

Apart from the messiness of the story itself, there’s something nice about a sprawling approach, especially when our stories so often come in the form of Tweets, updates and headlines designed to be clicked on. It’s satisfying to see a fly-on-the-wall account of the business (and one of its epicenters) at a moment when transparency is king, but it’s also nice to be reminded about how good stories can be told. It can be hard to remember in the chaotic ecology of the Internet, where we follow links down their rabbit holes towards not wisdom, not opinion, not reporting – but information that’s crowd-sourced, aggregated, liked, and thus given a stamp of “relevant,” “important.”

By Kinsley’s account, the movie, with its impressionistic, rambling portrait of the news business, sounds a lot like the Internet too, born of a style that “keeps things moving but requires some discipline.” Discipline is what serious journalism has, and this, he’s clear, is not it: “It flits from topic to topic, character to character, explaining almost nothing.”

But the movie is a portrait of chaos, and a compelling one at that. It’s not a newspaper article or a well-structured op-ed. It’s a testament to the sort of journalism that still matters, that still separates Page One from the Internet’s homepages. It’s proof that in whatever medium you’re working – and there are a lot to choose from now – stories matter, and so do their sources and their subtleties. “Page One” may explain almost nothing, but some things aren’t so easily explained. Some times they have to be seen, and thought about, and discussed.

Kinsley’s bitter assessment then serves as proof of precisely the kind of journalism that the movie documents. In the interest of avoiding a “conflict of interest,” here’s the Times striving for as much distance as it can on a documentary about its own newsroom. Kinsley (who works for Bloomberg) goes out of his way at the start to indicate there is no conflict here, which was presumably why he was asked to write it (despite not being a film critic at all) and why he sounds nearly indignant at the film’s emphasis on “a media columnist and reporter named David Carr,” who is guilty, apparently, of loving the Times.

Given all of its (defensive) sense of self-importance – one stoked now more than ever, by, for instance, what some indignant Times partisans in the movie call “stupid” rumors of the newspaper’s demise – it’s not surprising to see a writer in the Times flaunting the paper’s concerns over integrity, like the righteous golden boy that new media expects it to be. “The Times deserves a better movie,” writes Kinsey imperiously, before adding the exortation, “and so do you. See ‘His Girl Friday’ again.”

Nerves have been touched clearly, and Kinsley’s review is only further proof, again, of a point that the movie is trying to make: if it’s not fighting for its life, good, level-headed journalism is on a mission to prove itself worthy in the heady, loud age of the Internet.

Carr is a fantastic spokesperson for that mission (and for the paper in general) and for the meta concerns at the heart of a shrinking newsroom. “There was just this sort of decades of organizational hubris about, you know, our own excellence and our own dominance,” he tells the camera early on in the film. “And then in a matter of like 18 months, all of a sudden…everybody started like asking a question: could The New York Times, like, go out of business?”

In an effort to remain balanced and fair and critical, papers like the Times aren’t competing against a “new media” boogeyman. They’re already deeply and often smartly embedded in the Internet themselves, and that’s where things get messy. Struggling with new modes of reporting, Internet economics and increasingly fuzzy lines between the demands of advertising and the demands of editorial, the corporate structure of news – “the muscles of the institution,” as Carr calls them – presents its own challenges to the newsroom. Through the collapse of the Tribune company and the Comcast NBC merger, the film points at these challenges, without making any claims. The story is still developing is the point, and it’s complicated.

Read the rest of this piece at Motherboard

For more on the media, technology and science, follow us on Twitter and Facebook, and get our weekly newsletter.

It was the days of dialup, and on America Online itself, the ruse was already a popular one among wannabe preteen hackers looking for no-cost access to the internet: pose as an AOL employee, ask enough users for their passwords, and rack up accounts you could use, instead of getting your own. It wasn't victimless — users whose passwords were stolen would often lose their accounts. But there was an ideological component: if you thought the internet should be free, this was your way of sticking it to the man.

By aiming for credit card numbers en masse, the attack through IID represented a sick mutation of what would come to be known as phishing, in the phasion of hacker speak. However absurd it sounds, this basic social engineering hack would become the favorite trick of spammers the world over, resulting in billions of dollars worth of theft, and further besmirching the name of the famous stoner band.

Rasmussen caught the attempt as it was happening, noticed that over 300 unsuspecting AOL users had responded with their credit card information, warned them of the scam, and resolved to change his company's course. Now IID is one of the web's leading security companies, focused on things like large-scale phishing and abuse of the domain name system, a tactic that phishers use today to make malicious websites look like legitimate ones. The company’s latest report finds that phishing is up 12-percent year-over-year in the first quarter of 2011. And large-scale now means something as disturbing as a recently detected phishing scheme originating in China that targeted U.S. government officials, Chinese activists, and more.

Rasmussen, who co-chairs the Anti-Phishing Working Group's Internet Policy Committee, knows more than anyone should have to about the awful underworld that's trying to get your personal data, your money, and worse, so we exchanged some emails with him. They were probably woefully under-encrypted.

Why should we be concerned about the rise in phishing?

Phishing can hit anyone, and with serious consequences. In this report, we reported three areas that are of concern. One, that phishing was on the rise in general. Second, that the typical phishing site was active longer, meaning that there’s a better chance of getting caught in the phishers’ nets. Finally we noticed that cyber-criminals were targeting services people may not suspect, like online gaming sites, and thus potential victims may not have their guard up. This last point is particularly relevant given the recent attacks against Sony’s PlayStation Network, which exposed tens of millions of people’s vital data like addresses and passwords.

Who are these phishers, and how is their profile changing? And who tends to get targeted by them most?

There are a wide variety of phishers, from the stereotypical 'lone geek' to criminal syndicates. Most are young males. The changes we’ve seen are those you’d see in any industry or field that is beginning to mature, from individual pioneers to experienced teams working together, even if competitively. Targeting has remained fairly constant — wherever there’s money to be made the phishers will go.

But beyond going directly after access credentials, we’re also seeing targeting of intellectual property, infrastructure like the domain name system, and non-traditional assets like online gaming. We are also seeing small business owners targeted specifically, as phishers have learned how to extract large amounts of money via the Automated Clearing House (ACH) and other business-to-business payment systems.

What happens once one of these lone geeks manages to get someone’s personal or financial information? And what can a victim do, once they realize what’s happened?

Phishers often sell their information to people who specialize in turning those credentials into money. Small-time operations or newer ones tend to try to cash victims out themselves (with some notable exceptions). If a phisher gets an individual’s information, they’ll try to cash out a bank account via fake ATM cards or transfers to another account they control, sell off online gaming assets, buy goods online for reshipment, or use the credentials they got in one place to try to access another service the victim may use since many people use the same login information for multiple services.

If they capture a small business’s banking credentials, they’ll attempt to move large amounts of money via the ACH system — either directly overseas or in payments to 'money mule' accounts (as in the individual case, just at larger scale). The money mule will transfer the money to another bank account, or more frequently, take out the cash and wire it overseas using Western Union or MoneyGram. Some mule networks have even been set-up to physically ship cash out of the country, but that’s pretty rare.

Victims should treat theft of credentials the same whether on-line or off — report it to the companies involved, get new credentials issued, update passwords, watch their credit reports — the same precautions you’d expect if someone stole your wallet.

How is the business of phishing changing? Are phishers so ahead of capture or law enforcement that their tactics have stayed relatively similar over the past few years?

The shift to targeting small business is a new phenomenon. However, newbie phishers still employ 'traditional' phishing methods. There are a number of public-private partnerships that have emerged to combat phishing. But we are seeing criminals adapting to measures employed by law enforcement and security companies as well — it’s a cat-and-mouse game.

Why are so many phishing sites based at co.cc or on the .tk domain?

CO.CC is actually a subdomain service, while TK is the country code for the tiny atolls known as Tokelau. In the latter case, this New Zealand territory has leased their delegated top level domain (TLD) to a company that sells or gives away domains under the .TK TLD.

Subdomain services do essentially the same thing, but on a domain name they registered with an 'official' domain registrar — you can think of it as buying a huge piece of unsettled wilderness within a bigger territory and then dividing it up for people to use. We’ve identified hundreds of organizations providing similar services over the years — they are typically used for individuals for blogs, photo sites, personal websites, personal email or other internet content services. These sites offer the consumer a low-to-no cost service and lots of control over an internet presence that you may not get with a traditional domain name.

We’ve seen large amounts of other types of abuse on these and similar services, and they often seem powerless to stop the abuse. This is usually said to be because of low margins (free services tend to have low margins of course) and lack of personnel to combat this abuse up front. We find these arguments to usually be spurious or at least misinformed, as these problems have been solved many times at relatively low-cost for some basic protection, and we even pointed out that a Russian service, pochta.ru had addressed their abuse problems quite well during the same time period. It’s more about will and commitment to reducing abuse than it is about adopting something with exorbitant costs.

What’s the non-phishing threat that we need to be paying attention to?

Well, we’re already paying plenty of attention to malicious software (malware) and botnets (a collection of infected computers), but they are the biggest threats today. Tomorrow’s big threats — and we’re already seeing it — are Internet infrastructure take-overs. If you can’t rob the customers of a bank, just steal the whole darn bank! That’s actually pretty easy to do in the online world since the underpinnings of the Internet itself — specifically the domain name system and routing, like border gateway protocol — aren’t well authenticated or protected.

Sorry, did you say that the underpinnings of the internet are not protected?

They are not well protected, but not completely defenseless. Two of the main protocols that make Internet possible, DNS (domain name system) and BGP (border gateway protocol) have fairly large security holes in them and were not designed at the time of implementation with the kind of adversarial landscape we have in mind today. Nearly all domain names are accessed through registrars that have only simple username/password protection only.

We already know how flawed that model is, especially when social engineering comes into play, and several high-profile hijackings bear that out (CheckFree, Twitter, Baidu, etc). Furthermore, several pieces of the DNS ecosystem are not well hardened to attacks and have seen hacking events that allow for wholesale take-over of domains. These range from single DNS servers to domain registrars to entire domain registries.

BGP has a different set of issues, as it has no authentication mechanisms built in at all today, and is almost entirely a trust-your-neighbors system. If someone advertises that they are routing a chunk of IP space, there are little, if any safeguards in-place to validate that, and those are typically only local to the legitimate holder of IP space. Thus, anyone with access to the BGP routing system (which can be easily obtained) can claim to be almost anyone they want to on the internet, and if done specifically enough, everyone on the Internet will believe them.

There is no built-in authentication at all, so I could advertise that I’m a service or bank or government or whatever, and traffic intended for those destinations will come to me instead of the intended recipient. We saw that last year in a big way, when a Chinese ISP managed to route almost 20-percent of the internet’s routes for several minutes, and it didn’t even slow down a lick.

What do you make of the Obama administration's efforts at cyber-security?

With all the recommendations and language for potential legislation that has just come out it is hard to get too specific. However, having the framework to work with is important to get things done. There has clearly been a lot of good work done in putting these together, but based on the initial feedback, there’s quite a bit more work to do in order to make effective change.

How would you carry out an "Internet infrastructure takeover"?

If I really wanted to wreck things, I’d do some BGP injections for the various time servers out there like network time protocol (NTP) and tell a huge chunk of critical servers out there that rely on precise timing (including stock exchanges, air-traffic controllers, critical infrastructure support, etc.) that it was a far different time than it was — or maybe just off by a bit. If you think about it, if time for any of those pieces of critical infrastructure are off, it could result in the crash of major stock exchanges, a major disruption in air travel, etc. That could generate a little real Y2K kind of chaos that could have some pretty gnarly affects on things.

Some other things you can do with DNS or BGP take-overs: you can intercept requests for major websites and drop malware on tons of computers, get access credentials on a grand scale (people will think they’re logging into their normal site), or intercept all the email for a company, government or other organization. Warning bells will go off on many of these scenarios, but we’re not really well postured to 'fix' these kinds of problems quickly and universally. Most registrars and registries are not staffed 24/7 with folks who can respond to these kinds of DNS take-overs quickly, and if I’m a clever bad guy, I set TTLs (time to live) really high on my bogus entries so they get cached for a long time around the net even after the hijacking is fixed. With BGP, there are literally hundreds of major carriers that would have to respond to a major route-hijacking event, though some of the big ones could probably implement a hack to undercut the bad guys in a major event scenario, but again, we’re not well set-up today to do that.

This article originally appeared on Motherboard. For penetrating technology and science commentary, follow us on Twitter and Facebook, and get our weekly newsletter.

To those who've witnessed it first-hand, it's the spectacle of a lifetime. People come to Florida from as far away as Michigan or Alaska or England or Italy, arriving in droves by car and motor home, toting binoculars, blankets and American flags. They line up along a worn river bank in the towns near the launch pad on Cape Canaveral, waiting for days, then nail-biting hours, to see a group of people embark on a completely different kind of journey, this one powered by rockets that do zero to 17,000 mph in 8.5 minutes.To the fans, this is the Super Bowl, NASCAR, the World Cup and Independence Day rolled into one. The astronauts strapped into the massive Space Transportation System aren't just rocket jockeys. They're rock stars.

Last year, when Space Shuttle Endeavor was scheduled to leave the Earth at night for the last time on its way to the space station, Motherboard.tv producer David Feinberg and I joined those throngs of space pilgrims. Inspired in part by films like "The Right Stuff" and the underground '80s documentary "Heavy Metal Parking Lot," we traversed Cape Canaveral and nearby Titusville in an attempt to capture the launch from multiple angles. We spent time behind the scenes with some folks at NASA, but our main focus was on the excitement of the fans who had come from far and wide for a grueling space shuttle tailgate party.

Watch "Shuttle Launch Parking Lot" at Motherboard.tv

The long waits, cold weather, and even a 24-hour delay be damned. As the wait built among the dedicated campers who had assembled around campfires, on lawn chairs and behind cameras, their energy and excitement was infectious. Eventually, the lively camaraderie of the crowd and the anxious anticipation of watching mankind's most complex vehicle perched on a launch pad under flood lights miles away gives way to the breathtaking sight and sound of a shuttle igniting the placid dark of a Florida night, pounding its way into space and shaking every bone in your body.

It wasn't just fireworks. This, the fifth-to-the-last shuttle launch, was another bittersweet milestone at the end of a chapter in America's space story, an epic saga that began with the heady experiments of the space race and even now, on the eve of the space shuttle's final two launches, still extends into the future, towards dreams of heavy-lift rockets, asteroid landings and Martian colonies.

Lately, those dreams have smashed against the reality of the Obama administration's trimmed-down NASA budget, a new emphasis on commercial crews, and emerging doubts about the cost and relevance of manned spaceflight. Across the Space Coast, these shifts threaten to rock not only imaginations but livelihoods too. Locals worry about the deadening effect that the end of the shuttle program will have on an already depressed economy, and fans of spaceflight are left anxiously wondering where the country and humankind goes next. After next week's scheduled final launch of Endeavour, the final and 135th shuttle flight is set to launch in June. The shuttles will be packed up and shipped to museums, quiet testaments to a deafening dream of flight.

For now, there's simply no better place to see the awe, the excitement, and occasional frustration surrounding America's space project in its moment of twilight than from the crowded parking lots around Cape Canaveral -- the place where that dream, for a few moments, becomes an overwhelming, tear-jerking, mind-elevating reality.

Watch the documentary I produced, "Space Shuttle Parking Lot," and get tips for watching a launch, at Motherboard.tv or at CNN.com.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.844510 2011-04-04T15:59:01-04:00 2011-06-04T05:12:01-04:00

The conference as bloatware

And then they do. In Egypt, at precisely 12:34 a.m. EET (22:34 UTC) on Friday morning, the government apparently shut down Internet access not just from but into Egypt. That is, Egypt didn’t lose Internet access: the Internet lost Egypt.

Governments like this don’t explain how they do these things, so it’s unclear exactly how this might have happened. Sending Egyptian police around to manually smash everyone’s routers wouldn’t have been practical. Nor would the government have the ability to simply shut down all addresses with an .eg domain, which they do not own. But the government does own the country’s two major ISPs. In all likelihood, reports GigaOM’s Bobby Johnson, officials closed down the major routers which direct traffic over the border, shutting the country out from the world, and switched off routers at individual ISPs to prevent access for most users inside.

"It looks like they're taking action at two levels," Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro told me. "First at the DNS level, so any attempt to resolve any address in .eg will fail -- but also, in case you're trying to get directly to an address, they are also using the Border Gateway Protocol, the system through which ISPs advertise their Internet protocol addresses to the network. Many ISPs have basically stopped advertising any internet addresses at all."

Essentially, we're talking about a system that no longer knows where anything is. Outsiders can't find Egyptian websites, and insiders can't find anything at all. It's as if the postal system suddenly erased every address inside America -- and forgot that it was even called America in the first place.

A complete border shutdown might have been easier, but Egypt has made sure that there should be no downstream impact, no loss of traffic in countries further down the cables. That will ease the diplomatic and economic pressure from other nations, and make it harder for protesters inside the country to get information in and out.

Shutting off access to websites like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, as Tunisia recently did, and as countries like Iran and China consistently do, is a terrible restriction on a country’s citizens and an insult to the idea of the web. (Fortunately, it doesn’t prevent citizens from finding ingenious ways out – even if that means dial-up.) But to shut down the rest of the world’s ability to access your country online is a different kind of offense, one that insults the dignity of a modern country and affects Internet-going people anywhere. It’s not easily fixable either: you can’t find an alternate route to something that isn’t there. It’s one thing to close your doors and windows; it’s quite another thing to light your house on fire.

Of course, this virtual suicide might aptly symbolize Cairo’s desperate attempt to maintain power. But the prospect should also be a scary wake-up call for anyone who considers the Internet to be an open network undefined by borders, controlled by no one, available to all, a world-changing vehicle for free speech that’s been designed to persist even through a nuclear war.

Of course, to believe that description of the Internet now would be a techno-optimist’s delusion. But the gap between the medium’s potential and its sudden disappearance in Egypt is a vivid reminder of its susceptibility to both government and corporate power. Here is why net neutrality is such a precious principle. The war over it is just getting started in the U.S., thanks to the FCC’s burgeoning framework; Egypt’s webicide sits in another theater of war.

But the Internet, at least as we like to think of it, transcends borders, functions as a vital transnational conduit. As Egypt’s case illustrates, even when a battle is waged in one country, it can effect everyone else. We don’t yet have a set of principles, much less a set of laws, for dealing with this information chaos. (What role might the enfeebled United Nations play on the Web? What if the legal framework that, for instance, could allow the U.S. to prosecute a European who uses the Internet to spread secret information were applied to the entire medium itself?)

Though rumors about Syria following suit turned out to be inaccurate (only the usual suspects suffered outages), it’s not hard to imagine other nervous governments following suit. Maybe, someday, even the United States.

He’s reminded us of our terrible political discourse and gun control policies, but the insane 22-year-old who shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed six bystanders on Saturday isn’t a representative of Tea Party vitriol. A believer in government slavery and hologram worlds, a lover of Alice in Wonderland and Mein Kampf who claimed to know how to fly, Jared Lee Loughner is a testament to the darker, more deranged corners of the country that flourish on the Internet. Before bullets, his main weapon against the system wasn’t just a cache of weird YouTube videos -- it was weird grammar.

At a campaign event in 2007, Loughner had a chance to ask Giffords a question: ‘What is government if words have no meaning?’" However she answered, it didn’t satisfy him. He subsequently told a friend that Giffords was ‘a fake’ — a term perhaps resonant with other conspiracy theorists’ views of the world as a series of “fictions.”

His interest in “conscience dreaming” could point to the influence of David Icke, the British conspiracy theorist who says the world is controlled by a race of reptilian aliens, and urges “conscious dreaming” as a way of stepping out of our Matrix-like existence.

But Loughner’s grammar instructor, via the web of course, may have been an anti-government activist named David Wynn Miller, a self-professed genius with an IQ of 200 who travels the country preaching to people in the Sovereign Citizen anti-tax movement. His claim to fame, and insanity, is a linguistic remix he created in 1988, the year he discovered “the mathematical interface in the truth that certifies all 5,000 languages, frontwards and backwards.”

Use strange punctuation and you can alter your legal status as a person, making you impervious to legal prosecution and capable of tax evasion, argues Miller. For instance, David Wynn Miller can be taxed, but :David-Wynn: Miller cannot be. (Meanwhile, the U.S. government contends, in everyday English, that Mieller owes income taxes back to 1993.)

More specifically, as he explained at the Homeland Security Expo in Georgia in 2003:

The reason I use a full colon and a hyphen in my name, the first full colon, which is full colon David, it means for the David hyphen Wynn. That’s my given name, and it’s also a noun, because it uses a prepositional phrase. … Because I use prepositional phrases, through punctuation, which is classified as hieroglyphics, which makes me a life, l-i-f-e. Now, when you don’t punctuate your name … David is an adjective, Wynn is an adjective, Miller is a pronoun. Two adjectives are a condition of modification, opinion, presumption, which modifies the pronoun, pro means no on noun. So therefore, I’m not a fact. I’m a fiction.

This is far from mainstream, and even on the far right, reports the Anti-Defamation League, few people have any idea what he’s talking about. It’s also not clear that Loughner was influenced by Miller – although Miller’s theories are typical of the bizarre internet where the loner shooter apparently spent much of his time. And their deranged philosophies of language echo each other.

“The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar,” Loughner writes in one video, adding that “words don’t have meaning.” His hypnotic, tautological claims seem to prove that point:

If I teach a mentally capable 8 year old for 20 consecutive minutes to replace an alphabet letter with a new letter and pronunciation then the mentally capable 8 year old writes and pronounces the new letter and pronunciation that’s replacing an alphabet letter in 20 consecutive minutes.

Don’t spend too much time trying to dissect that with your Warriner’s.

For his part, Miller, contacted by the Daily Beast, suspects that Loughner is a victim of an Air Force program on mind control – or at least a victim television crime shows. "Murder is taught every day, one hundred times a week on crime shows," he says. "They've been brainwashing this child for twenty years. It's a wonder everyone isn't walking around insane." It sounds like a rare moment of sanity for a man with a long list of beliefs that could make the Unabomber sound like a tenured professor.

Like Loughner, he makes no push for violence in his rants. But in imaginary worlds, the line between deranged action and deranged language can wear thin. That’s what this was about – not divisive politics but sound and fury, signifying nothing. Meanwhile, Congresswoman Giffords, who was shot in the head and remains in critical condition, still has yet to speak.

A version of this article originally appeared at Motherboard.

]]>