So far, Will Tilston has had it pretty good. “My childhood has been great,” says the 10-year-old British actor. “Parents today have time for us, they look after us, and they really love us.” Sadly, the same cannot be said for the titular character he plays in this month’s stirring A.A. Milne biopic, Goodbye Christopher Robin. The story centers on the film’s namesake, the real-life son of the Winnie-the-Pooh creator whose woodland exploits inspired his father (Domhnall Gleeson) to turn from playwriting to children’s books. The wild success of the series did not induce positive Milne family relations; the son believed his childhood was stolen from him.
The 22-year-old British actor Alex Lawther plays Christopher Robin Milne as a teenager and young man, when his growing celebrity in England compelled him to enlist in the army simply to gain some anonymity and respect. “He did a radio interview later in life where he said to the presenter, ‘If anybody knows a desert island where I can go and just be by myself, let me know,’ ” Lawther says. “It broke my heart.”
For his part, Lawther seems prepared for fame. He made his big-screen debut in 2014 as the young Alan Turing in the Academy Award–winning drama The Imitation Game, with a performance that garnered him a London Critics’ Circle award. But Lawther is most often recognized for his starring role on an episode of last season’s Black Mirror, in which he played a young pedophile blackmailed by an online vigilante group. “People stop me and say, ‘Oh, you’re that guy,’ ” he says. “And I respond, ‘No, that’s not actually me. But thank you for saying hi!’ ” Early next year, Lawther will be seen alongside Bette Midler and Laverne Cox in Trudie Styler’s Freak Show, a comedy about a boy who runs for homecoming queen.
As for Tilston, an industry newcomer, the future is still up in the air. When not in school (“It’s all facts and exams,” he says with a sigh), he sings and dances at a local theater club. And though he’s auditioning for more film roles, he’s careful not to limit his career choices too soon. “I like expressing myself in different ways,” he says. “Acting is just one of the many things I love to do.”
GOODBYE CHRISTOPHER ROBIN HITS THEATERS OCTOBER 13, 2017.
Press: Jason Momoa dedicated his big ‘Dune’ fight scene to 'Khaleesi,’ Emilia Clarke
INSIDER: Jason Momoa dedicated one of his biggest fight scenes in the upcoming epic movie “Dune” to his former “Game of Thrones” Khaleesi, Emilia Clarke. Momoa posted a behind-the-scenes video to his YouTube channel, detailing how he prepared to play his “Dune” character Duncan Idaho, the swordmaster of House Atreides and one of the mentors […]
There’s just something about a library – its well-thumbed, plastic-sheathed bestsellers and dusty shelves of obscure treasures, all just waiting to be picked up and enjoyed by you. And then someone else, someone you may never meet. A library brings readers together into one space to share, exchange, and unlock the secrets of books. Oh, and it’s absolutely free to use. Alex Johnson, a journalist for the U.K.’s Independent and the author ofImprobable Libraries, agrees. But he’s also noticed that libraries don’t just operate out of drab brick municipal buildings or aged edifices with Gothic arches.
Unless you have been living in a cave without wifi for the last six months, you are probably aware that a little film called The Avengers: Age of Ultron is coming out this Friday. It’s kind of a big deal: the gang’s all back, the reviews are mostly good, and it’s set to make an actual bajillion dollars. So what could make this movie better? The same thing that makes everything better on the internet (no, not cats): Jane freaking Austen.
If I had, say, a tesseract, and could use it to open a portal into time and tear a hole in the fabric of reality, thus allowing me to cast a bunch of characters from nineteenth century novels as a bunch characters in a twenty-first century film, this would be my dream team. Austen Avengers Assemble!
Thousands of old books collected by King George III are preserved behind the magnificent UV-filter glass supporting environmental control system, maintaining appropriate book storage.
Two years ago, I sat across from someone in a light-filled, commercially decorated room in Inverness, Alabama and said “I’m going to do X, Y, and Z, and then I’m moving to New Orleans when my lease is up.” That someone looked at me with pride, and simply said, “that’s great.” ⇨ Read more on therisingcrescent.com.
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The largest undercover force the world has ever known is the one created by the Pentagon over the past decade. Some 60,000 people now belong to this secret army, many working under masked identities and in low profile, all part of a broad program called “signature reduction.” The force, more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA, carries out domestic and foreign assignments, both in military uniforms and under civilian cover, in real life and online, sometimes hiding in private businesses and consultancies, some of them household name companies.
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The explosion of Pentagon cyber warfare, moreover, has led to thousands of spies who carry out their day-to-day work in various made-up personas, the very type of nefarious operations the United States decries when Russian and Chinese spies do the same [editorial: lol]
Newsweek’s exclusive report on this secret world is the result of a two-year investigation involving the examination of over 600 resumes and 1,000 job postings, dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests, and scores of interviews with participants and defense decision-makers. What emerges is a window into not just a little-known sector of the American military, but also a completely unregulated practice. No one knows the program’s total size, and the explosion of signature reduction has never been examined for its impact on military policies and culture. Congress has never held a hearing on the subject. And yet the military developing this gigantic clandestine force challenges U.S. laws, the Geneva Conventions, the code of military conduct and basic accountability.
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The newest and fastest growing group is the clandestine army that never leaves their keyboards. These are the cutting-edge cyber fighters and intelligence collectors who assume false personas online, employing “nonattribution” and “misattribution” techniques to hide the who and the where of their online presence while they search for high-value targets and collect what is called “publicly accessible information”—or even engage in campaigns to influence and manipulate social media. Hundreds work in and for the NSA, but over the past five years, every military intelligence and special operations unit has developed some kind of “web” operations cell that both collects intelligence and tends to the operational security of its very activities.
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Signature reduction is thus at the center of not only counter-terrorism but is part of the Pentagon’s shift towards great power competition with Russia and China—competition, influence, and disruption “below the level of armed conflict,” or what the military calls warfare in the “Gray Zone,” a space “in the peace-conflict continuum.”
One recently retired senior officer responsible for overseeing signature reduction and super-secret “special access programs” that shield them from scrutiny and compromise says that no one is fully aware of the extent of the program, nor has much consideration been given to the implications for the military institution. “Everything from the status of the Geneva Conventions—were a soldier operating under false identity to be captured by an enemy—to Congressional oversight is problematic,” he says. He worries that the desire to become more invisible to the enemy not just obscures what the United States is doing around the world but also makes it more difficult to bring conflicts to a close. “Most people haven’t even heard of the term signature reduction let alone what it creates,” he says. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he is discussing highly classified matters.
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Every morning at 10:00 a.m., Jonathan Darby embarks on his weekly rounds of mail call. Darby is not his real name, but it is also not the fake name on his Missouri driver’s license that he uses to conduct his work. And the government car he drives, one of a fleet of over 200,000 federal vehicles owned by the General Services Administration, is also not registered in his real or his fake name, and nor are his magnetically attached Maryland state license plates really for his car, nor are they traceable back to him or his organization. Where Darby works and the locations he visits are also classified.
Darby’s retired from the Army, and he asks that neither his real nor his cover name be used. He served for 20 years in counterintelligence, including two African assignments where he operated in low profile in Ethiopia and Sudan, masquerading as an expat businessman. Now he works for a Maryland-based signature reduction contractor that he asked Newsweek not to identify.
As Darby makes his rounds to some 40 or so post offices and storefront mailbox stores in the DC Metropolitan area, he picks up a trunk full of letters and packages, mailing a similar number from rural addresses. Back at the office, he sorts through the take, delivering bills to the finance people and processing dozens of personal and business letters mailed from scores of overseas locations. But his main task is logging and forwarding the signature reduction “mechanisms” as they are called, passports and State driver’s licenses for people who don’t exist, and other papers—bills, tax documents, organization membership cards—that form the foundation of fake identities.
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For identity verification, Darby’s unit works with secret offices at Homeland Security and the State Department as well as almost all 50 states in enrolling authentic “mechanisms” under false names. A rare picture into this world came in April 2013 when an enterprising reporter at Northwest Public Broadcasting did a story suggesting the scale of this secret program. His report revealed that the state of Washington alone had provided hundreds of valid state driver licenses in fictitious names to the federal government. The existence of the “confidential driver license program,” as it was called, was unknown even to the governor.
Before the Internet, Darby says—before a local cop or a border guard was connected to central databases in real time—all an operative needed to be “undercover” was an ID with a genuine photo. These days, however, especially for those operating under deep cover, the so-called “legend” behind an identity has to match more than just a made-up name. Darby calls it “due diligence”: the creation of this trail of fake existence. Fake birthplaces and home addresses have to be carefully researched, fake email lives and social media accounts have to be created. And those existences need to have corresponding “friends.” Almost every individual unit that operates clandestinely—special operations, intelligence collections, or cyber—has a signature reduction section, mostly operated by small contractors, conducting due diligence. There they adhere to what Darby calls the six principles of signature reduction: credibility, compatibility, realism, supportability, verity and compliance.
Compliance is a big one, Darby says, especially because of the world that 9/11 created, where checkpoints are common and nefarious activity is more closely scrutinized. To keep someone covert for real, and to do so for any period of time, requires a time consuming dance that not only has to tend to someone’s operational identity but also maintain their real life back home. As Darby explains it, this includes clandestine bill paying but also working with banks and credit card security departments to look the other way as they search for identity fraud or money laundering. And then, signature reduction technicians need to ensure that real credit scores are maintained—and even real taxes and Social Security payments are kept up to date—so that people can go back to their dormant lives when their signature reduction assignments cease.
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Another senior former intelligence official, someone who ran an entire agency and asks not to be named because he is not authorized to speak about clandestine operations, says that signature reduction exists in a “twilight” between covert and undercover.
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In May 2013, in an almost comical incident more reminiscent of “Get Smart” than skilled spying, Moscow ordered a U.S. embassy “third secretary” by the name of Ryan Fogle to leave the country, releasing photos of Fogle wearing an ill-fitting blond wig and carrying an odd collection of seemingly amateurish paraphernalia—four pairs of sunglasses, a street map, a compass, a flashlight, a Swiss Army knife and a cell phone—so old, one article said, it looked like it had “been on this earth for at least a decade.”
The international news media had a field day, many retired CIA people decrying the decline of tradecraft, most of the commentary opining how we’d moved on from the old world of wigs and fake rocks, a reference to Great Britain admitting just a year earlier that indeed it was the owner of a fake rock and its hidden communications device, another discovery of Russian intelligence in Moscow.
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But then Internet cafes and online backdoors became the clandestine channels of choice for covert communications, largely replacing shortwave—until the surveillance technologies (especially in autocratic countries) caught up and intelligence agencies acquired an ability not only to detect and intercept internet activity but also to intercept every keystroke of activity on a remote keyboard. That ushered in today’s world of covert communications or COVCOMM, as insiders call it. These are very special encryption devices seen in the Fogle and Mallory cases, but also dozens of different “burst mode” transmitters and receivers secreted in everyday objects like fake rocks. All an agent or operator needs to activate communications with these COVCOMMs in some cases is to simply walk by a target receiver (a building or fake rock) and the clandestine messages are encrypted and transmitted back to special watch centers.
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Connolly talks about heated fabrics that make soldiers invisible to thermal detection, electric motorcycles that can silently operate in the roughest terrain, even how tens of feet of wires are sown into “native” clothing, the South Asian shalwar kameez, the soldiers themselves then becoming walking receivers, able to intercept nearby low-power radios and even cell phone signals.
Wigs. Covert communications devices. Fake rocks. In our world of electronic everything, where everything becomes a matter of record, where you can’t enter a parking garage without the license plate being recorded, where you can’t check in for a flight or a hotel without a government issued ID, where you can’t use a credit card without the location being captured, how can biometrics can be defeated? How can someone get past fingerprint readers?
In 99 out of 100 cases, the answer is: there is no need to. Most signature reduction soldiers travel under real names, exchanging operational identities only once on the ground where they operate.
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For the one percent, though, for those who have to make it through passport control under false identities, there are various biometrics defeat systems, some physical and some electronic. One such program was alluded to in a little noticed document dump published by Wikileaks in early 2017 and called “Vault 7”: over 8,000 classified CIA tools used in the covert world of electronic spying and hacking. It is called ExpressLane, where U.S. intelligence has embedded malware into foreign biometrics and watchlist systems, allowing American cyber spies to steal foreign data.
An IT wizard working for Wikileaks in Berlin says the code with ExpressLane suggests that the United States can manipulate these databases. “Imagine for a moment that someone is going through passport control,” he says, hesitant to use his real name because of fear of indictment in the United States. “NSA or the CIA is tasked to corrupt—change—the data on the day the covert asset goes through. And then switch it back. It’s not impossible.”
Another source pointed to a small rural North Carolina company in the signature reduction industry, mostly in the clandestine collection and communications field. In the workshop and training facility where they teach operators how to fabricate secret listening devices into everyday objects, they are at the cutting edge, or so their promotional materials say, a repository for molding and casting, special painting, and sophisticated aging techniques.
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Then came the DNA scare, when Adm. John Richardson, then chief of naval operations, warned military personnel and their families to stop using at-home ancestry DNA test kits. “Be careful who you send your DNA to,” Richardson said, warning that scientific advancements would be able to exploit the information, creating more and more targeted biological weapons in the future. And indeed in 2019, the Pentagon officially advised military personnel to steer clear of popular DNA services. “Exposing sensitive genetic information to outside parties poses personal and operational risks to Service members,” said the memo, first reported by Yahoo news.
“We’re still in the infancy of our transparent world,” says the retired senior officer, cautioning against imagining that there is some “identity gap” similar to the “bomber gap” of the Cold War. “We’re winning this war, including on the cyber side, even if secrecy about what we are doing makes the media portrayal of the Russians again look like they are ten feet tall.”
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Still, the world of signature reduction keeps growing: evidence, says the retired officer, that modern life is not as transparent as most of us think.
Appearing remotely, the K-pop five-piece took to the stage wearing matching suits made of shiny, black latex-like material as they launched into the lead single off minisode 2: Thursday’s Child.
“Put that nail in the coffin over the word forever/ You completely changed me when I was fragile/ I spent hours in front of the mirror wanting to become you/ Scratching my face, swallowing my heart,” Beomgyu and Taehyun sang before HueningKai took over lead vocals to croon, “You kept dumping me/ My tail wagged at you that’s my past/ I just killed me with all that stress/ I just don’t care anymore.” (English lyrics courtesy of YouTube.)
Throughout the number, the idols effortlessly ran through non-stop choreography reminiscent of the track’s official music video, while the lighting changed from blue to red.
As Clarkson pointed out in her introduction, TOMORROW X TOGETHER have continued to blow up into “ginormous” K-pop stars since their 2019 debut. “Concept-wise, music-wise and performance-wise, this is something that we have never tried before. I think this is the darkest concept and theme that we have ever tried,” Taehyun recently told Billboard of the five-track EP, which just landed the boy band their third career No. 1 on the Top Album Sales chart. “I think this album can show people that even TOMORROW X TOGETHER can pull this off.”
Watch TOMORROW X TOGETHER’s fiery performance on The Kelly Clarkson Showbelow.
We appreciate the feature in South China Morning Post. It’s so important to have authentic LGBTQ representation and it’s heartening to know that there are those in Asia discovering communities and new ways of personal expression through digital channels.
We hope there can be more sincere discussion in regards to the dismantling of systems which further perpetuate the marginalization of LGBTQ in Asia and that queer expression and acceptance go beyond virtual spaces.
In the midst of Islamophobia Awareness Month and in the wake of violent attacks against muslim women, the director of a new documentary looks into the worrying state of Islamophobia today… READ
As Facebook fatigue sets in, we examine the ways in which millennials and Generation Z are finding fun offline, from co-living communes to phone bans. READ
![Alex Lawther’s interview with InStyle, as part of the BAFTA Rising Star portfolio [source]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/08e5d914f4006323aae5bab584e30e9a/tumblr_oldjugdAJy1u8mxm6o3_1280.jpg "Alex Lawther’s interview with InStyle, as part of the BAFTA Rising Star portfolio [source]")
![Alex Lawther’s interview with InStyle, as part of the BAFTA Rising Star portfolio [source]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/08322cb5a54b7c40e0c4fd3181c8c973/tumblr_oldjugdAJy1u8mxm6o1_1280.png "Alex Lawther’s interview with InStyle, as part of the BAFTA Rising Star portfolio [source]")
![Alex Lawther’s interview with InStyle, as part of the BAFTA Rising Star portfolio [source]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/b92b84534fef64d5eeec278d08610522/tumblr_oldjugdAJy1u8mxm6o2_1280.png "Alex Lawther’s interview with InStyle, as part of the BAFTA Rising Star portfolio [source]")
