Photographs by Nick Sethi from 600 Broadway, NYC. 

Nick Sethi's first solo gallery exhibition in New York, titled "FOR YOUR EYES ONLY Vol 1",  opens this Friday night, March 21st, at Ed. Varie.

Highland jacket, Rascals top; aNYthing Jacket, the Good Co. sweatshirt

PHOTOS BY BOBBY VITERI
STYLIST: MIYAKO BELLIZZI

Nails: Holly Lynn-Falcone
Models: Nathaniel Matthews, Joe Rushe, and Holly Lynn-Falcone

Alife top, Supreme T-shirt, vintage necklaces; Jack Henry top, Fred Perry pants, vintage necklace

Alife sweatsuit, New Balance shoes, Highland backpack, vintage necklaces; Folk top, Fuct shorts, Uniqlo socks, Pony shoes, vintage necklace

Vintage lingerie, vintage tights, YSL shoes, vintage jewelry; Hanes top, Uniqlo underwear and socks, vintage shoes, vintage necklace

Supreme top, vintage necklace; Fuct top, vintage necklaces

Officine Generale Jacket, Fred Perry top, vintage pins

Rascals top, the Good Co. T-shirt, Uniqlo pants, vintage necklace and bracelet; Fred Perry cardigan, Folk top, Fuct pants

Hanes top, vintage necklace; Rascals top, Hanes tank, vintage necklace

KTOO top and skirt, vintage jewelry and belt; Alife jacket, vintage bracelet; Fersher jacket

Exterme normcore image via YouTube.

It is impossible to write about normcore without sounding like a graduate student, and as we all know: graduate students are the worst. I first discovered “normcore” by reading Fiona Duncan’s well-parsed essay in New York Magazine about a class of Brooklynites and Parsons students prone to dressing in Patagonia fleece vests and the most basic of Uniqlo staples. Instead of emulating a trendy art student look, they dress for mom and dad (and middle American tourist conspicuous in New York) identities. Style icons of normcore include Larry David, Steve Jobs (guhh, turtlenecks!) and Blood Orange singer Devonte Hynes. There are no female style icons of normcore, although I’d hazard to mention Rosanne Barr, Sharon Stone in her Gap turtleneck at the Oscars, and the 90s iconography of Calvin Klein models. The aesthetic of “normcore” seems deliberately situated in the 90s, perhaps because that is an era that its wearers are most nostalgic for. It is also really easy to pick up a “trendy” Kathy Ireland mock ribbed turtleneck at a Value Village right now.  

I figured Duncan’s piece was just another one of those fashion trend pieces that are my linkbait kryptonite. Like when the New York Times Magazine convinced me that all the hottest girls in Williamsburg were dressing like Elaine Benes and I went around carrying a leather suitcase for a week. Or just plain “seapunk.” Remember “seapunk?” I bought chalk for my hair to make it blue like a dolphin. It was depressing.

Now I believe normcore might be the first brilliant meme of 2014 because it dares to talk about a touchy subject for mainstream hipster culture—class. The ironic appropriation (although with “normcore,” the most interesting/existential aspect of it is that it is not ironic, but meant as a spiritual quest towards owning your identity, not your body, which is also kind of why people do MDMA) of wealthy arts students wearing Ralph Lauren CHAPS pullovers, “I Heart NYC” tourist ball caps and white New Balance sneakers is a desire to emulate the “normal person," and be seen as recognizable to them, although you can’t help but see them as “othered.” To simply look like other people, that is. “Normcore” was pioneered by the artistic New York “trend forecasting group” K-hole, who function as enlightened cool hunters. Emily Segal of K-Hole says that the movement is based on cultural empathy, “seeing that as an opportunity for connection, instead of as evidence that your identity has dissolved.” Where are your Jeffrey Campbell Litas now, bitch?!

After what feels like an eon of street style, I’m starting to think that the new fetish object of 2014 is the normie. This year on Reflektor, The Arcade Fire wrote a sleazy, 80s-period Rolling Stones-indebted song called “Normal Person,” in which Win Butler opines, “Is anything as strange as a normal person? Is anyone as cruel as a normal person?”

Television, as innovative and thrilling as it is, still hadn’t captured the plight of the normal person until Breaking Bad, (still, it wasn’t until Walter White wore his freaky pork pie from Goorin Bros. that he really let out his inner Heisenberg). Even the twats on Girls (I mean that lovingly) are a combination of Urban Outfitters separates who think they’re special—normal, boring, hateful young girls desperately trying to be considered individuals. It’s kind of what makes the show work. I really hope Jessa tries to rock what my mom used to call a “fluff fluff” next season.

But Arcade Fire is for very normal people, relationships are maintained on DVD box sets of critically acclaimed television, and the biggest Kreayshawn-indebted diss to call someone on Twitter is “basic.” There is too much individualism in the world (I can’t keep holding conversations about artisanal jams and oil pulling anymore) that I understand the need to take back “the new normal.” As K-Hole wrote in a marketing document/brand anxiety thesis statement: “The job of the advanced consumer is managing anxiety, period.”

To start my identity over, blank slate 90s Kate Moss-style, in a t-shirt and a pair of Sears jeans, even if that will actually just make me look like a fat mom, or a non-violent offender out on parole. To go back to the womb, the grade 5 classroom, where everyone just wore novelty Northern Getaway sweatshirts and neon slush pants. To live inside your parents’ closet forever. Would it make me whole again?

No matter what I wear, I always feel like a hopeless individual trying to fit in and conceal what I consider to be my flaws (an improbably large ass, stretch marks I like to call “lightning bolts”). Still I don’t think erasing my identity in a pair of stirrup pants “curated” from Value Village is the answer. Because that kind of tokenistic dressing isn’t fair to Middle America. It’s actually insulting to hold a mirror up to the normal person in hopes that it will free your art student mind. It reminds me of a story I love about Harmony Korine filming Gummo in Nashville and finding a piece of a human shoulder in a pillowcase. “Look at all we have access to here,” he supposedly told his terrified P.A.

Gummo is a brilliant movie but it comes with all kinds of shitty hipster artistic baggage—you have to be careful of appropriating white trash culture just as much. A tokenistic nod to the onion blossom tourists of Times Square won’t find artists new forms of beauty and truth. Because when your style icon is Larry David, but you’re a 22 year old video installation artist living in Bed-Stuy, what are you trying to achieve?

A couple months ago I was asked to be an emcee at a wedding for a childhood friend in Brantford, Ontario. I wore by all accounts what is considered a “weird dress.” The ceremony was held next to the pool, so it smelled like chlorine. The bride and groom danced to an *NSYNC song. There were carrot sticks dipped in ranch dressing and a weird old man bought me a Crown Royal with Sprite in a hotel bar called “Addison’s.” I came with my parents so I had to dance with my mom and a reverend’s wife to “Blurred Lines.” One of the bridesmaids drank too many Smirnoff Ices and passed out under a table. It was by all accounts, a totally “normal wedding.”

Except the bride and groom are total freaks. He makes bone art out of the decorative arrangements of leftover chicken wings. She has watched the entire box set of Charmed multiple times—when she finishes, she’ll start it over in an infinite loop of Shannen Doherty, Rose McGowan and Alyssa Milano, the trifecta of faux-Wiccans with hair extensions, practicing magic. The weird obsessive dedication she has for a vaguely popular show on the WB Network is the same love she has for her bone collector husband. I watched them slow dance to a song I hadn’t heard since Carson Daly announced it on TRL and teared up, thinking: “I gotta make some changes in my life.” Everything good is normative. 

@clevack

Hitler on a visit to Washington, DC

Hitler Cigarruista is the director of The Capital, Panama's largest financial newspaper. He's also, you'll notice named Hitler, which is partly because he was born in the village of La Villa de Los Santos, where parents are fond of naming their children after brutal, murderous dictators.

Names like Caesar Augustus and Julius Caesar used to be popular, but somewhere along the way the ancient historical figures gave way to more recent warmongers and strongmen, and people began naming their kids Hitler, Lenin, Fidel, and Stalin.

I visited Hitler in his office to talk about the naming tradition in his hometown.

VICE: How did this naming tradition begin in your village?
Hitler Cigarruista: I really don’t know. The tradition used to be naming people after the saint whose day it was on the day they were born. So I think the idea was that, by being named after such great people, somehow you could also inherit their qualities and be successful. I guess it was also about showing one’s political or ideological affiliations.

There is certain amount of racism in Los Santos—despite the African origin of many of our traditions and folk dances—and it's expressed through names like Hitler. My best friend’s father, for example, who was a member of the Communist Party, named his youngest daughter Lenia [Lenin], and we even dated! Our relationship didn't succeed, but we’re good friends today.

Hitler with some bananas.

How has being named Hitler affected your life?
Being named Hitler hasn't been easy. Everyone who meets me for the first time says the same thing: "I hope you’re not as bad as the German Hitler!"

I don’t recall having any problems as a kid. People joked about it or criticized my father, but I wasn’t aware of it until I turned eight and was baptized. The priest refused to name me Hitler and demanded that a Christian name be used. Since my father didn’t accept that, the priest chose the name José, so my baptismal name is José Hitler Cigarruista.

In secondary school, my main extracurricular activity was sports—I did gymnastics and became the national champion in the children’s category, junior national coach, and absolute national coach. Names weren't important in that world. However, my father’s ideological views became obvious when I was granted a sports scholarship to practice gymnastics in Cuba and he rejected it, arguing that if I travelled to Cuba, I could end up becoming a communist.

So your father was a fascist?
My father always said that he chose that name to show people there could be someone named Hitler who was a good person. I often heard him say the world would have been a better place if the Germans had won the war, since there would be “order and discipline.”

Trouble began for me when I became interested in politics. I studied at Panama’s National Institute, a.k.a. “the Eagle’s Nest” [a reference to Hitler’s refuge in the Alps], because of its permanent struggle to regain national sovereignty. As a response to that, I joined a radical leftist political student organization. My education and thinking evolved quickly and I soon became a leader. The organization was called Movimiento Estudiantil Revolucionario (Revolutionary Student Movement).

You mentioned that most digital platforms won’t let you use your real name. Have you ever tried to submit a complaint about that, or have you just given up?
On Google, for example, I can’t write my real name, so I have to use José or Carlos, which are the ones I normally use to introduce myself. The newspaper I direct, though, features my real name—Hitler Cigarruista.

There are some more people from your village named Hitler, and others named Stalin. Do they ever fight like their namesakes did?
They’re the closest of friends. There’s no conflict between Coca-Cola and Pepsi or Nero and Caligula in La Villa de Los Santos—everyone gets along.

Are people aware of their names? Or do they just assume it's normal?
People are aware of their names, but also nowadays assume it's normal. They don’t really worry or feel ashamed about it.

Photo via Flickr user anatancoins.

Yesterday, news broke that a Canadian Bitcoin exchange, simply known as “Canadian Bitcoins,” was robbed of nearly $100,000 worth of cryptocurrency. Luckily, the business model of Canadian Bitcoins is such that none of the company’s customers lost any of their own money—because Canadian Bitcoins is not a trading platform where customers hold balances with the service, they simply buy bitcoins and go on their way.

Despite the crypto-fortunes of the company’s customers remaining intact, the method that Canada’s newly crowned most successful bitcoin thief used has exposed a massive (but by no means new) gap in computer security: human beings. All this thief did was open up a chat window with the data centre that hosts the Canadian Bitcoins website and pretend to be its CEO, James Grant. Given that at no point did Granite Networks—the company that hosted Canadian Bitcoins—ever speak with the thief, the cyber-burglar could have been a 12-year old girl with an advanced knowledge of server systems and deception (the company has since switched facilities). We just don’t know.

Anyway, over the course of a two hour conversation, during which there was ostensibly little-to-no authentication of James’s identity by the data centre representative, the thief was able to convince the data centre to reboot the Canadian Bitcoins server, enter a physically locked “server pen” where the company’s servers were stored, and give this thief access to the servers itself, which then allowed him to extract 149.94BTC from one of the company’s Bitcoin wallets—a sum that at as of 11:30AM EST this morning, is worth $102,800 CAD.

Comically enough, Rogers, which owns Granite, responded to this facepalm-worthy social engineering heist by releasing the following statement: “Rogers Data Centres provides the highest level of security in the Canadian data centre industry. Its security protocol is operationally certified and in accordance with industry best practices. We have reviewed our security processes and continue to work with our customers to make sure they take advantage of all of our security features.”

Really? The highest grade of security in Canada doesn’t mandate thorough identity verification checks, when someone claiming to be the CEO of said company opens up a chat window and essentially requests full access to the company’s servers? I’m sure that’s providing a ton of reassurance to tech companies across the country that are following this story. To make matters worse, James Grant told the Ottawa Citizen that were he to request the same kind of access in person, he would have had to use “a key card to enter the building” which would then be followed by a retina scan, two sets of locked doors, then another door leading into the server pen that can only be opened by entering a private numeric code.

Social engineering has been one of the primary tools for hacking since hacking was invented. Kevin Mitnick, one of the planet’s most infamous hackers, wrote extensively about social engineering in 2002 in his book The Art of Deception, which outlines various tricks that social engineers can use to get access to “secure” systems. For example: “a person gains access to a company's internal computer system, guarded by a password that changes daily, by waiting for a snowstorm and then calling the network center posing as a snowed-in employee who wants to work from home, tricking the operator into revealing today's password and access through duplicity,” or “a person gains access to a restricted area by approaching the door carrying a large box of books, and relying on people's propensity to hold the door open for others in that situation.”

In a report written by Cameron Winklevoss after the collapse of Mt. Gox, the largest collapse of a Bitcoin exchange to date, Cam Winks theorized that a “janitor attack” could have potentially brought down the company: “whereby a infiltrator posing as cleaning personnel is able to carry out a USB attack to place malware on a development machine and successfully corrupt random number generator MtGox used to generate internal bitcoin accounts…. Yes it might seem extreme, but very possible given how comparatively soft a target Mt.Gox appears to have been. An engineer could, for example, simply apply for an interview. A bank or art gallery heist is arguably much harder to pull off. There is plenty of historical precedent for elaborate multi-million dollar heists in the past.”

To learn more about the ways in which major companies are susceptible to social engineering attacks, I called Robert Masse, co-founder of the internet security firm Swipe Identity, whose personal Twitter bio boasts: “I'm the guy you call when you get hacked or if you want something to get hacked.” Regarding the Canadian Bitcoins heist, Robert told me he was impressed with the balls it would have taken to pull off such a brazen theft. He assumes it must have been an inside job, pulled off by someone who would know the specific weaknesses of Granite Networks.

Even more interesting, however, was Robert’s description of a recent security breach he was hired to execute on an unnamed telecom company that was looking to increase its security, by testing its own weaknesses. Robert gets hired to do speaking gigs, where he gives a talk called “How to Breach a Data Centre for $50.” In his words: “I was hired to break into a data centre. Just to prove the point, I went to RONA/Home Depot and I bought a white construction helmet, then I went to a flea market and paid $10 to make a logo of the phone company [that hired me] and I put it on the side of the construction helmet. Then I kicked the helmet around my garage for five minutes… I was able to walk into the data centre and plant a backdoor into the network.

[The back door] is inside a box the size of cigarette pack. On one side you plug the network cable into the LAN port, and then the other interface is a USB port. In the USB port I plug in a cellular rocket stick, and that dials up an IP connection back to my office. As soon as I plug it in, it calls my office, through cellular modem,” thus giving Robert complete access to the company’s data centre.

Robert even told me he was followed by a security guard during the entire process, and when he was asked what the backdoor device was for, Robert muttered something like: “to test the fiber optics level” to which the security guard replied, “Oh that’s interesting.”

According to Robert, it’s “super simple” for a company to provide the correct “training and awareness” so that someone, with one conversation, isn’t able to contact your data centre and steal $100,000. As Robert explained, Granite Networks had “millions of dollars of infrastructure that were completely taken apart. Was there a procedure? If there was, it wasn’t solid… It’s called people hacking… I don’t need to hack your firewall and infrastructure. I’ll just call someone and get it done. I’ll break one of your procedures.”

@patrickmcguire

The highest concentration of one of the most poisonous snakes in the world is located about 90 miles off the coast of Santos, Brazil, on a small, craggy chunk of otherwise uninhabitable land. It’s known as Ilha da Queimada Grande, or Snake Island, and it’s the only place you will find 2,000 or so of the wholly unique golden lancehead viper, or Bothrops insularis.

When you step ashore, with a keen eye you spot one of these snakes roughly every 10 to 15 minutes after clearing the base of the island, and as many as one every six square yards in other parts of the island. This means, as you are walking through the waist-high brush, even with some good boots on, it’s like walking through a minefield that moves and, instead of blowing you into chunks, slowly paralyzes you and liquefies your insides, as the golden lancehead does to the migrating birds it feeds on in the treetops.

Well, “liquefying your insides” may be a stretch, but no one knows for sure because no one bitten has lived long enough even to be admitted to a hospital, or at least none of the researchers who accompanied VICE on their journey to Snake Island owned up to that fact. Nor did the Brazilian Navy, who allowed VICE exclusive access to document their annual maintenance inspection of Snake Island’s lighthouse—which has been automated ever since the 1920s, after the old lighthouse keeper ran out of food and disappeared while picking wild bananas in a small grove near the shore. According to legend, he and the members of his rescue party died one by one, all alone and in search of one another after each had been missing for some time.

The golden lancehead is so unique and its venom so potent that specimens procured by snake-smuggling “biopirates” can fetch up to $30,000 apiece on the black market (with prices going much higher depending on the location of the rich weirdo snake collector or, some have speculated, the black-market biopharmaceutical chemists attempting to beat Brazil on a patent).

Is that the craziest fucking description of a documentary you’ve ever heard? The answer is yes. So of course VICE’s editor-in-chief, Rocco Castoro, and senior producer, Jackson Fager, had to go there and nose around for themselves. On their return they said things like: 

“It was like a David Lynch movie through the prism of Satan’s asshole. The anti-Galápagos. Darwin in reverse." 

"[It's] cut off from the mainland and perhaps the land of a long-buried pirate treasure, according to the stories from local fishermen. But they also told us there were aliens on the island, so pretty much anything goes. It’s scorched earth. It's where I would send my worst enemies to live, and I look forward to setting up a business with the Brazilian government to do just that. After the World Cup, of course."

“What I can tell you is that there are stone fucking steps hand-carved into the face of one of the prominent cliffs, all the way up. But you can’t dock anywhere near there. There’s also the possibility that [the venom] could be used for an anti-cancer drug, or perhaps anti-aging. Maybe it could save mankind. Whatever. They wouldn't have saved my ass." 

"There are blue locusts and so many of these weird, prehistoric-looking cockroaches on the ground at night that it crunches when you walk. Place is fucked. No one is allowed there for a reason. Don't ever go." 

"All that said, great shoot. Great diving, too."

A few weeks ago, Lucille McAleese was opening her beloved Kells, an Irish-themed pub and restaurant in Portland’s Old Town Chinatown. Mornings can make or break your day, and that morning, someone took a big shit right in front of Kells’ front door. Lucille’s retching and gagging soon turned to anger, so she called the local news, and camera crews swooped in.

Almost everyone who lives, works, or ventures into Old Town Chinatown has stories of routinely having to avoid stepping in coils of human shit. Lucille says that during the summer she finds poop in the parking lot behind Kells almost every night.

“Cleaning it up is something you can’t ask the staff to do. My husband, Gerard, usually has to do it,” Lucille told me. “When I see it, I want to throw up. It’s a very visceral reaction.”

Flanked by the pseudo-cultured Pearl district to the west, Downtown to the south, and the broad Willamette River to the east, Old Town Chinatown houses some of the most iconic parts of the city.

Whenever tourists visit, most of them need to see the White Stag sign, Union Station, and the remnants of the underground tunnels that were used for Shanghaiing unwitting sailors, according to legend.

Ten years ago, Portland was nothing more than the second-biggest city in the drab Pacific Northwest, but it seems like every day some national publication has it atop some internet click-through best-of list. Many out-of-town visitors I talked to in Old Town said they were shocked by the state of the district. Few imagined that waiting in line for a doughnut, or taking a picture under the neon Portland sign, would mean tiptoeing over turds on skid row.

Most of the city’s social services are on or around West Burnside Street, the main artery cutting through Old Town Chinatown. With shelters, missions, and soup kitchens come areas of vagrancy, drug use, and overall shadiness. Everybody poops, but not everybody has a private place to slink away and drop a deuce, so the human shit piles up in alleyways, under bridges, and in public parks. 

A dump outside Kells, courtesy of Lucille McAleese's low-quality camera phone

On any given weekday, Old Town Chinatown’s homeless issue is painfully obvious. The barren streets are dotted with transients lining the blocks. Alcoves are filled with bedrolls, shopping carts, and drooling junkies. But reconciling residents’ frustration with vagrancy and their proud progressivism is nearly impossible. Every year, Portland spends about $30 million on homeless resources, making it a mecca for transients. According to a 2013 report issued by the city, almost a third of people on the streets have been in Portland for less than two years, and 60 percent of that group were homeless when they arrived. 

“This is what people see when they visit our city. It’s the first impression for out-of-towners. Friends say they won’t come down,” Lucille told me. “And we’re touting Portland as one of the most livable cities in America?”

Carl Bruins knows all about folks who crap on the sidewalk. He’s been living in Portland on-and-off for some 47 years. After laboring for decades as a carnie and working up a good meth habit, Carl gave up on traditional employment and took to panhandling and living on the streets. Deep grooves run down his cheeks and across his forehead, cobbwebbed furrows surround his eyes, and a single tooth juts out of his lower gums. At 55, Carl looks closer to a man in his 70s.

Last week, I ran into Carl panhandling downtown. I gave him some change and asked if we could talk about all the poop in Old Town Chinatown. After he rambled in his semi-coherent drawl, we took a walk to the Pioneer Square Mall so he could take a dump.

“You go wherever you can. There are bathrooms in the parks, but junkies use them. There’s no way you can get in there,” he said.

He also told me about trying to dip into businesses in the area, but nine times out of ten, he’s bounced before he takes a second step inside.

But Carl told me he always finds a clean bathroom to shit in. He said most people on the streets know all the best spots. Those who go on the sidewalk or in alleys are likely too far gone on drugs or booze. Or maybe they just want to give a good fuck you to the city.

Either way, Carl said that a small segment of people are ruining it for everyone else.

Carl has an endless collection of stories about the sad and savage state of the Old Town Chinatown scene. He used to wait for meals and sometimes a bed at the missions, but now he won’t go near the place.

“There weren’t that many homeless when I moved here. Now people are fighting, attacking each other, stealing each other’s stuff,” he said, shaking his head. “They get drunk and ruin it for everyone else.”

City officials have heard peoples’ frustrations with Old Town Chinatown. Recently, news broke that Mayor Charlie Hales may grant subsidies to big developers to come in and build fancy high-rise apartments. The Portland Development Commission has also been working to lure more tech companies to Old Town Chinatown. Recently, Hales announced San Francisco startup Airbnb would be opening its North American headquarters in the neighborhood this summer.

The city’s plan is reminiscent of an aggressive urban renewal-project that revitalized the nearby Pearl District fewer than 20 years ago. The Pearl used to be a struggling industrial area with little to offer in the way of restaurants and nightlife. Today, it’s the chic part of town where Portland’s well-to-do come and dump their cash at fancy wine bars, galleries, and boutiques.

Voodoo Doughnut in Old Town Chinatown

Perhaps the most iconic part of Old Town Chinatown, though, is Voodoo Doughnut. The renowned bakery sits a block off West Burnside, seconds from the Portland Rescue Mission and within sight of Kells. On any given day or night, a long line stretches down Southwest Third Avenue, filled with people eager to buy pink boxes filled with Cock ‘n’ Balls, Voodoo Dolls, or doughnuts covered in Cap’n Crunch.

Tres Shannon, Voodoo’s founder and CEO, isn’t so keen on the moves City Hall has made in recent years to transform Portland. He’s been in Old Town Chinatown in some regard since 1990, and he's nostalgic for a time before Portland was the self-proclaimed “City That Works.”

“I liked it more in the 90s. It was sketchier and more dangerous,” he told me.

Even though Tres can testify to finding human poop in alleyways around Voodoo Doughnut, the vagrancy issue is way down on his lists of troubles in the area.

A much more glaring problem, he said, is the people who come to Old Town Chinatown on the weekends. Axe-soaked dudes and spray-tanned women file in from outlying suburbs like Gresham, Vancouver, and Beaverton, and pile into the douchey weekend nightclubs. With the weekend crowds come drunken rowdiness, fighting, and arrests.

“I’m way more scared of the Girls Gone Wild fight-and-fuck crowds spilling out of bars now. I avoid going downtown on weekends,” Tres said.

Over the past few years, the weekend Old Town Chinatown crowds have become absurd. The city has even had to start closing off major streets to cars, and extra police swarm in on Friday and Saturday nights to make sure the bros play nicely.

Aside from the debauchery, weekend nights provide a positive glimpse of what skid row could become if more Portlanders lived, worked, or hung out in the area. Maybe then the human dumps on the sidewalks wouldn’t be so glaring.

Tres thinks the vagrants and drug dealers are as much a part of Portland’s iconography as his shop, which is flanked by a porno theater on one side, a titty bar on the other, and Section 8 housing one floor up.

“We don’t want to change anything. This is what Portland always was,” he said. “People think our motto is ‘Keep Portland Weird,’ but we just stole that from Austin. I think it should be ‘Keep Portland Sketchy.’”

And if sketchy means stepping over piles of man shit, so be it.

This shirt straddles the line between microaggression and straight-up aggressive racism. Photo via Flickr user Timothy J. Carroll

“So where are you from?” It's innocent enough, that question—a way to break the ice when no more can be said about the weather. But if you aren't White, there's a good chance it will be followed by one of the most cringe-inducing sentences in the White lexicon: “No, I mean originally.”

That's never asked of me, mind you. No one ever wants to know where I came from, since I'm pale enough and sufficiently boring-looking to appear to other White people as a born-and-raised American, which I often lament that I am. That question, when I've heard it, is always posed to a friend of mine, who always responds the same way: “Ca-li-for-ni-a.” This always comes out sounding a bit like “Fuck. You.” It inevitably causes offense, this matter-of-fact response. It isn't what people—White people—want to hear. They feel cheated.

“Oh, you know what I meant,” they always groan, the word asshole on the tip of their tongue.

The problem is apparently my friend, who isn’t White and looks “exotic” to people whose idea of exotic is a beer with a lime. My friend isn't pale like me, which means he's a walking zoo exhibit from the coasts to the country, always expected to respond to strangers’ interrogations about his native land with a smile and a careful recounting of his family tree.

Oh, but these people always mean well. They mean so fucking well that they act all offended if anyone ever calls them out on their insensitivity. That's because, as a big dumb pack, we White people can’t stand when anyone complains about our doing or saying offensive things when, gosh, we didn’t mean to cause offense—which we take as license to cause any offense we like. We White men are the worst when it comes to this and the most loath to learn and liable to go all angry-talk-radio on anyone who has the temerity to point out that we're acting racist or sexist or just gerally shitty. “Don't be so sensitive!” we say, doggedly determined to make things worse, though of course the pasty White dudes of America are some of the most overly sensitive people on the planet (go ahead, just try making a joke at our expense).

Some call not being a jerk “political correctness,” a pejorative term that brings to mind some ivory-tower prick in a cardigan who believes we ought to outlaw testosterone and the right to call a spade a spade. They imply that referring to racial minorities or sexual preferences or intellectual abilities requires a reference manual—and the latest edition at that—lest we be subjected to a sensitivity tribunal and sentenced to six months of hard feminist theory.

But complaining about political correctness is about as fresh as a loaf of white bread from the 90s. And so, according to the National Review, the “trendy new complaint on college campuses”—or rather, the trendy new thing for assholes to complain about—is something called “microaggression,” with the conservative magazine's use of “trendy” and “college” telling us all we need to know: This is some serious liberal bullshit.

Dr. Derald Sue, a psychology professor at Columbia University, is trotted out as the liberal caricature asked to do the impossible: defend the concept of microaggression in a publication whose readers stopped taking him seriously as soon as he was introducd as a professor at Columbia named “Derald.” But Dr. Sue does the best he can, informing the National Review's smirking readers that a “microaggression” is an “everyday slight, putdown, indignity, or invalidation unintentionally directed toward a marginalized group.”

This sounds altogether reasonable, the idea that somewhere between lynching and saying “hello” there can lie something that causes offense. Indeed, even the National Review's own examples of microaggression fail to persuade otherwise, suggesting it is in fact a real, rather ugly phenomenon: a White person telling an Asian student that he can “probably” solve a hard math problem because, obviously, he's Asian; a White woman clutching her purse when Black men walk by because, obviously, they're dangerous; a teacher assigning books almost exclusively by White dudes because, obviously, they're the only ones who matter.

Telling a Black person he or she is “basically White” or asking a lesbian if she has ever had “real” sex are other examples of micoaggressions that aren't imagined offenses dreamed up by some liberal jerk-off but real, and really offensive, things that real people say. But those who are hurt are presented as whiners; on its Facebook page, the National Review even links to its piece on microaggresions with a photo of a crying baby—though the baby is White, which serves as reminder of who's really doing all the whining.

Now, can concern for others sometimes be taken too far? Sure, I guess. Earlier this month, the New Republic, an arguably liberal magazine, ran a piece bemoaning the spread of “trigger warnings”—basically a heads-up that the content about to be discussed could trigger a negative reaction in those suffering post-traumatic stress—from social-justice Tumblrs to college classrooms. Some schools, it seems, are telling students ahead of time when a class will be dealing with subjects like rape and domestic violence. This practice could conceivably be taken too far—and the New Republic assures us with scant evidence that it has been—but that some people might be overly concerned about the emotional well-being of those who have suffered trauma is not high up on my daily list of things to get upset about.

But we have a narrative of overly sensitive women and minorities to maintain, and both liberal and conservative publications seem set on maintaining it. So when Dr. Sue tells the National Review it's “best to believe the one who perceives the bias,” rather than defer to the judgment of the but-I-didn't-mean-it offender, the reader is meant to scoff. That people may be “unknowingly making racist remarks or unintentionally engaging in sexist and homophobic behaviors” is cast as a ridiculous. And when the professor goes on to suggest that a “truly multicultural” education for the young might help address subconscious prejudice, that's taken as code for Soviet-style totalitarianism, and the author even suggests to his better-dead-than-considerate readers that what will happen next is “reeducation for the rest.”

Sadly, no one is talking about “reeducation” camps where the last of the Real Men will be forced to sit around campfires singing songs about feelings while a big-government bureaucrat monitors their body language for signs of masculine aggression (that part got dropped from Obamacare). But also, let's remember, no one is saying that committing a microaggression is the worst thing in the world—that's why the word micro is there. Nor does inadvertently triggering someone make you a monster. What people are suggesting is merely that there are things we can all probably do to make sure we don’t go around inadvertently offending and triggering people. If it helps, you don't even need to use the word “microaggression”—you can call it “being an asshole.”

You don’t need a reference manual to not make people feel bad; you just need to listen every once in a while, learn a thing or two, and try to be more considerate, particularly around people you just met. Since when did stopping to think before you open your stupid mouth become such a bad thing? We can all be insensitive—no one is perfect, and no one expects perfection—but maybe we can avoid lashing out and getting defensive when people point that out. If you were being an asshole without being aware of it, wouldn't you want someone to point that out?

“Look, I know you didn’t mean it, but can you please not do it again?” is really not too much to ask. On the other hand, asking someone whose name you just learned where he's from—no, where he's really from—just because he doesn't look like you is a shitty thing to do as it makes that person feel he's not at home in his own country. That some people righteously refuse to consider why they may be causing offense, or just don't care that they are, says more about them than it does about the excesses of “political correctness.” It says some people are just dicks.

Charles Davis is a writer and producer in Los Angeles. His work has been published by outlets including Al Jazeera, the New Inquiry, and Salon.

A prostitute (not Elizabet) in Amsterdam. Photo by Thom Lynch

With Hungarian youth unemployment at 25 percent, it's not exactly easy to find work in the land of goulash and Gabors. But if you happen to be of Roma blood, it's apparently even harder. "I'm a Gypsy, and people see me and don't want to give me a job," said Elizabet, a 24-year-old Hungarian with Roma heritage. "Hungarians don't like Gypsies."

After failing to find a job in Budapest, Elizabet decided to head west to Amsterdam—the land of opportunity for any young, attractive girl who's prepared to rent her body out to a succession of strangers. "I came to Amsterdam last year to work as a prostitute because I can't find a job anywhere else," she told me. "If I have no money, I die."

Yesterday, VICE ran an interview with a guy who writes a blog entry every time he has sex with one of Amsterdam's prostitutes. He made it out like the city's sex workers are pulling in hundreds of dollars a session doing a job they love, but—speaking to Elizabet—it seems his experiences may have been a little unrepresentative. In her current line of work, money dominates Elizabet's entire thought process. She pays €100 ($140) a day to hire the small room and window she occupies down one of the smaller side streets in Amsterdam's De Wallen district, and she charges €50 ($70) for a 20 minute "suck-and fuck"–but will often drop the price down to €40 ($55) on a quiet day. 

A good day could net Elizabet anything between €300 ($418) to €400 ($557), but good days are increasingly rare, and the reality of living as a prostitute doesn't quite match up to what she'd heard about the lives of some of the city's high-end escorts, who supposedly live the Rockefeller life for just a few hours of work a day. "I'm still poor, but it's not as bad as it was back in Hungary," she said. "Any spare money I have, I save."

She continued, telling me that it can often be hard just to break even: “Sometimes I only make enough for the room. But sometimes I don’t, and sometimes I don’t get any customers at all."

Elizabet normally starts her shift at around ten in the morning and finishes at about 6PM. She tries to avoid the night shift, for fear of drunken tourists and whatever other dangers the red-light district has to offer once the gangs are out and about, trying to hawk bags of teething powder to Australian tourists. Unlike a number of Amsterdam's sex workers, she doesn't have any protection in the form of private bodyguards or pimps, so she chooses her clientele carefully.

"I can read people, but not always,” she told me. “Sometimes I'm definitely scared, because I have no one to help me."

Regardless of her admission policy, Elizabet always spends her shifts trying to score as many jobs as possible. "I dance in the window and make kissing faces to the men who walk past, trying anything to get them to come in," she started. "Sometimes it works; sometimes not. Then they come in, I ask for their money straightaway, and I lock it up—I can't trust nobody. Then they take their clothes off and jump on the bed."

Elizabet's workplace consists of a small lime-green mattress, her gray locker, and just enough space for a sink and a chair, all of it lit by a dull green lightbulb and sound-tracked with off-brand 90s Europop compilations. The lack of anything resembling romance doesn't worry Elizabet. She told me that she's definitely not trying to be a "hired girlfriend"—a sex worker who offers the "girlfriend experience" service—and that there generally isn't enough time for small talk or sensuality anyway.

"I don’t make any faces or noises. I just lie there during sex," she explained. “I’m not enjoying it, so why would I pretend I am? I normally just look up at the clock to see when their time is up. I think that's why a lot of men don’t orgasm when they come in."

Another prostitute, Madella—who moved to Amsterdam from Peru with her two teenage children—said she'd do whatever the client asks, as long as she gets paid. "They sometimes get a bit too emotional, but to be honest, I don’t care at all.

"I mainly get regular Dutch people," she continued. "Sometimes they smell really bad, and if they smell too bad I tell them to fuck off. I don't accept just anyone." When asked if she's ever had any negative reactions after turning people away—and whether she's had customers flip out on her mid-session—she said, "Not really. As long as they pay, I’m fine with it."  

Continuing, she said, "The work here is good. Sometimes hardly anyone shows up—those nights are terrible. I don’t enjoy those. But other nights, it’s fine. You can make good money." I asked Elizabet if she enjoys her job, and wasn't surprised by her answer: "I like the money," she said, smiling. "Sometimes I get sad about the job itself, but what can I do?"

A large number of Amsterdam's estimated 7,000 prostitutes aren't Dutch nationals, with Elizabet guessing that around 80 percent of the city's sex workers are from Eastern Europe. In fact, the overwhelming presence of Eastern Europeans working on Elizabet's street—most of them from Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, or Russia—has led to it being dubbed "Hungarystraat."

It was Elizabet's decision to move from Hungary to Amsterdam and start working in the red-light district, but she's heard stories about women from her home country—and others from all across Eastern Europe—being forced into the sex trade by pimps and criminal organizations. "The gangs take their passports and control their lives," she told me. "They cannot escape. I feel terrible for them."

Not everyone is so sympathetic to the plight of trafficked women. Metje Blaak—a retired prostitute who now works as a spokeswoman for prostitutes in the Netherlands—lamented the fact that restrictions introduced to cut down on human trafficking have resulted in more bureaucracy for those who choose to work in the sex trade. "There are many women who choose to be prostitutes," she wrote in an email. "But the so-called 'help' for women who are forced into the job makes it impossible for free women to work, with those stupid rules and idiotic regulations." 

Regardless of your views on the rules and regulations, from speaking to Elizabet, it doesn't look like they're working particularly well. Women from poor backgrounds are shipped over with the promise of work, before being forced into sex work and prevented from leaving.

Elizabet is also trapped, but only by the prospect of going home and ending up unemployed again. She dreams of returning to Hungary and starting a family, but she has no idea when she'll be able to do so. "I want to have kids and get married, but I won't find anybody here—I'm always working," she sighed. "So I don't know if it will ever happen."

Shockingly, Elizabet didn't grow up hoping to forge a career in prostitution. "When I was a kid, I wanted to be a shop mannequin, being dressed up in all of the clothes," she laughed. "My mom used to say, 'You can't do that—mannequins aren't real.' We all thought it was very funny. But now, I'm a prostitute," she said.

Elizabet seems to shares similar aspirations to anyone her age. But obviously her circumstances have forced her to follow a different career path from most of her peers'—something she's managed to keep quiet among her friends and family at home. In fact, the only person who knows about her profession is her mother. Everyone else thinks she's working in a hotel.

"My mother is the only one who knows," she told me. "She says I shouldn't do it, but I need the money, and I send the money back home to my family. I don't want the rest of my family to know; I don't think I could go back if they found out."

Madella told a similar story, saying that she spends all the money she makes on her family. "I stacked shelves in a supermarket for a few days when I first moved here," she said, "but I switched jobs soon after, because the money in prostitution is better. Really, I'm just working to make money for my family."

Despite Elizabet's apprehensions, it's not all bad—she told me she enjoys some aspects of her life in Amsterdam. "It's nice here," she said. "The people are nice, and the police, and the landlord—they're all very respectful." Ultimately, however, she's still desperate to get home to her friends and family. "I want to stop, but I can’t," she said. "I've always got money on my mind."

Additional reporting by Elko Born

Photo by Davis Turner/Getty Images

The accuser’s testimony was gut-wrenching, and she sobbed as she recounted how her three-year relationship with a superior officer, a man she thought she might have loved, fell apart. Brigadier General Jeffrey Sinclair, a 51-year-old rising star of the United States’ military command, allegedly forced the accuser, herself an ambitious Army intelligence captain, to give him oral sex in her office in Afghanistan. They had been lovers for a few years. He was married and she was his Arabic-speaking adviser, but he would often be more forceful in his advances than she was comfortable with. The second time he forced oral sex on her, according to the accuser’s testimony, she tried to resist by pushing away, telling him, "If you... touch me again I’ll scream, and I don’t care who hears." But the general, who was the deputy commander of the 82nd Airborne Division and of American forces in southern Afghanistan, pushed on. The captain couldn’t scream.

Then there was the military convoy plane they took together from Iraq to Kuwait, where General Sinclair allegedly fondled the accuser’s breasts and crotch against her will in plain sight of other soldiers.

Years earlier in Iraq, the general allegedly warned the accuser that if she ever told anyone about their affair, he would kill her and her whole family, and he would "do it in a way no one would ever know." He went on: "You need to know what you’re dealing with." The affair continued, but to the accuser it no longer felt consensual.  "I didn’t know how I could tell him I didn’t want to be with him anymore. I was scared to death of how that would go," she said to a jury (composed of all male officers) at a court martial at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, last week. According to rules of the trial, the identity of the accuser will remain anonymous.

Based on these accusations and more, the government charged Sinclair with sexual assault, sodomy (oral sex is included in the military's definition of sodomy), groping and fondling, having sex in public, and abusing his government credit card in 2010. If convicted, the general would spend the rest of his life in military prison. Sinclair is believed to be the highest-ranking military official ever put on trial for accusations of sexual assault, reported instances of which have risen over the years in the US armed forces but remain perhaps the military’s best-kept secret.

According to the military’s count, between July 1, 2012, and June 30, 2013, there were 3,553 reported sexual assaults, up 46 percent from the same period the previous year. That sharp uptick in reported cases could mean more victims are coming forward, and having a general stand trial might signal that a culture of impunity no longer exists, even for top brass. 

But the prosecution’s case fell apart last week, when it was revealed that a cell phone containing texts between the two was in fact found weeks before the accuser had previously said. It seemed a minor point, but it undermined the credibility of the accuser to such a degree that the presiding judge suspended the trial and let General Sinclair work out a deal with prosecutors.

According to Stars and Stripes, the Army’s official newspaper:

Her credibility is central to the case. Is she a woman whose affair with a charismatic and approachable superior ended with him forcing her to perform oral sex and threatening to kill her and her family? Or is she, as Sinclair's lawyers have portrayed, a jilted lover who fabricated allegations of sexual assault when Sinclair refused to leave his wife?

General Sinclair agreed to plead guilty to reduced charges Monday, including disobeying a commander’s order, misusing his government credit card, and mistreating the accuser—but not sexual assault. Sentencing hearings are happening this week, and so far they've revealed even more tawdry detail. Yesterday, a witness claimed that Sinclair’s philandering was so well known to his comrades that a roast in his honor, in 2010, featured a skit in which a soldier portraying the general received pantomimed oral sex from a subordinate female officer. The general will likely be dishonorably discharged but may avoid jail time.

Whether this constitutes justice is hard to gauge, but pretty much everyone agrees the system in military courts is stacked against the accuser in cases of sexual assault.

To learn more about sexual assault in the military, I called up Helen Benedict, a professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and the author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, as well as Sand Queen, a novel about the subject of military rape. Helen has also written a play, called The Lonely Soldier, that’s based on her reporting on the subject. It premiered this Sunday, at the History Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota.

VICE: How big of a problem is sexual assault in the military?
Helen Benedict: It’s of epidemic proportions. Studies have shown that 30 percent of women are sexually assaulted by their own comrades while serving, which is almost a third—and about 12 percent of men, likewise. That means that in actual numbers, more men than women [are attacked] because there are so many more men in the military. Women only make up like something like 15 percent of the forces. But, proportionately, women are one-in-three, and that’s twice as many in the lifetime of a woman in civilian life.

In this case, it seems like there was a consensual relationship between Brigadier General Sinclair and his accuser that might have descended into a sexual assault situation. Is that something that studies have shown happens very often? What is the nature of these sexual assaults writ large?
Writ large, it’s about the abuse of power, which is true in this case. Actually, among the military justices, among their own statutes, is a ruling that says anybody that uses his superior rank to either bribe or threaten junior officers into sexual favors is guilty of rape. So when you’ve got a dynamic like with General Sinclair, it’s already questionable whether it’s consensual. Likewise, on campuses and relationships between a professor and a student, it’s long been recognized that the idea of a consensual relationship when one person has so much more power over the other is questionable to begin with.

It does seem, from what the accuser says in this case, that it was originally consensual, and then it turned abusive. But more often than not, most of the cases that come up are more just straight-up sexual assaults in the midst of a party or drinking. Rape is a crime of opportunity, so just grabbing a moment when the victim is alone and defenseless, like in the shower or asleep or drunk or otherwise easily overpowered. There’s a lot of gang rape in the military too.

What are the stats on reported instances of sexual assault versus instances that actually happened? What are those numbers, and how does it differ from civilian life?
The Department of Defense itself estimates 86 percent of sexual assaults are not reported. So that means the numbers they're giving are just a tiny slice. Among civilians, I think it’s also extremely high, somewhere around 80 percent. Because the rape victims are treated by law enforcement, by friends, by lawyers, by the courts. There's so much victim blaming and [the process is] so grueling that many victims say that it’s worse than the actual assault.

And then within the culture of the military, there are all kinds of added stigmas. It’s a “blame the victim” culture. You’re told you failed as a soldier or a Marine because you didn’t protect yourself. You’re called a traitor because you’re complaining about one of your so-called brothers in arms. You’re told that you must have brought it on by drinking too much or taking a risk or flirting. Or, and this is one of the arguments that’s being used in the Sinclair case—it’s an argument that’s always used—you wanted this guy and you felt rejected, and so you’re having revenge by accusing him of sexual assault. That’s a very, very common weapon used against victims, which misses the point that victims go through hell when they report. So why anybody thinks they gain anything by doing this is pretty extraordinary. But that’s a very common defense.

Are there any other specific aspects of the psychology of soldiering that either promote this kind of culture or detract from a more civil relationship?
Yes, it’s an extremely macho culture. Being a soldier or Marine is the most macho job in America, probably in the world. And it’s a misogynist culture. It’s a culture that’s been traditionally male, has seen women as loot or booty. That’s where the word booty came from. So there’s a very deep-seated, historical idea that soldiers have a right to women’s body as a kind of reward for their sacrifices and bravery and so on. And that attitude goes back to the first armies ever. You see it in the Greeks, in the Bible, in the old epics. And so, it really is deep in the military culture to not take women seriously as comrades, but to see them as objects. As prey.

Is the situation any worse in the US military than it is in other militaries around the world?
No one really knows, because other countries haven’t studied it the way we have, but there are beginning to be some reports now that Britain has a problem. Italy has a problem. In Israel, it’s interesting. There, from what I understand, the problem with sexual assault is about the same as it is in civilian life and in office life or the workplace.

What do you think this case demonstrates about the issue of military rape? Sinclair is one of the highest-ranking officers to face trial, but the case has fallen apart.
Well, it demonstrates a few things right now. It’s put a retrospective spotlight on the defeat of New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s bill, which proposed to take military sexual assault trials out of the chain of command. Some people have said that if that had gone through, this case would have gone even worse for the victim. That, I think, is utterly untrue, because there is an enormous difference between the way women or victims are treated within the military justice system and out. The fact that she is named, that she is out there in court and in public, that she has to face her accuser. That she’s had to go through all these grueling examination. The fact that she is called an accuser in words.

In civilian life, she’s actually a witness in a rape case; it’s the state versus the accused, and she is named as a witness. She is not actually an accuser, and she’s much more protected in the civilian system. So I think it would have gone better for her. I don’t know about the verdict. Rape is an incredibly hard—it’s probably the hardest crime to prove because there’s often very little or no evidence and it turns out to be his word against hers. But she would have been treated with more respect, and she would have been less vilified, at least theoretically. So I think everybody is looking at that, but it just highlights how very hard it is to prove this and how hard it is to find justice for victims.

What are the arguments for keeping the decision to prosecute in the chain of command rather than having it in civilian court?
There argument is just they don’t want anybody taking any of their power away from them. They say it undermines their authority as commanders, even though England and Canada have been doing it this way for 20 years. Israel does it this way. There are many of our allies that take sexual assault cases into civilian courts and out of the hands of commanders to avoid the conflict—the glaring, obvious, conflict of interest—and none of them have complained about their command being undermined. So Missouri senator Claire McCaskill, who is from a military background herself, has fallen into that in the bill she’s passed through the Senate. I think she’s deeply wrong and I think it’s tragic.

In fact, I think the commanders would actually be relieved to have this taken away from them because then they wouldn’t be in this horrible position of having to turn against their comrades and friends—some of them who might have saved their lives for all we know—and having to prosecute them. Units in the military are close-knit. Everybody knows everybody, especially platoons. And so you inevitably end up with people making decisions to prosecute their friends, and that should not happen in a system of justice.

Is there anything else you want to add? Rather, is there something that's missing from the conversation around this case?
One of the things I see happening in this case is a tragedy I see happening in all rape cases. Every tiny slip-up of memory a victim makes is held as evidence that she’s lying. It forgets the fact that when people are traumatized, their memories mix a lot of things up. Also, none of us can remember every little detail about the past correctly anyway. It all becomes magnified and used against her in a way that is just so unfair. It’s heartbreaking. Also, there’s an underlying assumption in so many articles that somehow the victim has something to gain from doing this. That she’s going to make money or that she’s going to get famous. This is just not true. No victim comes out well. Even if the guy is prosecuted—even if he is convicted—the victim is still regarded with suspicion. She’s still had her sex life spread all over the place for everybody to gloat over, and it’s still deeply traumatic for her.

Follow Krishna Andavolu on Twitter

Though I can’t speak for everyone, I can speak for myself and I will just say this: I am sick and tired of all of Quebec’s political shit. The zoo that is our political system functions as an entertainment special for the rest of the country while Quebec waits and watches to see if Pauline Marois will add some sort of valuable contribution to the province.

With the upcoming election, the province is even more mired in political turmoil than it is on the usual English-hating day. David Shaw takes the political posters plastered around Montreal and makes them, well, bearable. He gives Marois a facelift and exposes the aliens hiding under the PQ’s skin.

We decided to ask him about his hilarious posters and what they’re all about.

VICE: Where did you get the idea to start doing this?
David Shaw: I think it was the grimacing face of Thomas Mulcair on this poster that looked like it was made with construction paper and a pair of safety scissors. I thought, aww, look at that little vampire hunter. I’ll make him a real campaign.

How do you choose what poster you’re going to do next and what you’re going to do to them?
Like the artist Carrot Top, I have a folder of props I collect for the project, but it’s mostly what strikes me when I see the poster. I’ll make a mental note, like, this guy should be holding a bag of Cheetos, or have someone in a headlock.  I try to keep the net wide, so nobody’s singled out.

Why do you do this? Just for fun?
It’s definitely fun, but I also think everyone wishes they had more control over what is being pushed in their face as soon as they leave the house. Advertising has creeped so far into our personal space, it’s not unreasonable to want to push back. And it’s just so much waste and pollution, using this "cover-every-surface" tactic to promote a political candidate. It’s about as advanced as rave flyering. 

Are you really invested in Montreal politics?
I vote, but I’m as fed up with the shit as the average person. I’d say there’s pretty low return on that investment. I see actual change coming from a bottom-up, community-based direction, but this has been a pretty revealing year for politics on every level. What a world. 

Have you ever put these up in Montreal?
We’ve done art parties where we grab a big bundle of posters and alter them, then put them up again. It’s more exciting, but it’s messy, and they get taken down pretty quickly. Using a computer is more open ended, and a lot of people believe these are real signs for Quebec politicians, which says... something?

What are your thoughts on the PQ?
I think they’re pretty tiring. It’s tempting to say they’ve just got their heads up their asses and are clinging on to a myopic and antiquated world view, but at the same time they’re running a pretty thoughtful game of misdirection and obfuscation, in terms of having to address anything approaching a serious issue. 

David doesn't have a website but you can check out his Youtube channel here.

@MPearson9

Do you need to have sex appeal to serve? Photo via Flickr user zoetnet

When going out for a meal at a restaurant, do you really give a shit if your server is attractive or average-looking? Is it imperative that she have large breasts that jiggle as she scribbles down your order, or that he’s so handsome you’ll force yourself to eat something healthy?

Do you enjoy bossing good-looking people around? If the answer is yes, please enjoy eating a TV dinner at home on your sofa, because you’re an asshole, and you shouldn't be dining out. Anywhere.

There are only three things that matter in a restaurant: the food, the drinks, and the service. These three elements can trump almost any situation, and everything else should be considered a minor factor. Your server, host, bartender, or back waiter’s appearance—unless he or she has a racist tattoo or is commiting some sort of health-code violation with an open sore—is completely irrelevant to the outcome of how your food will taste.  

In order to succeed in the restaurant world, you don’t have to hire “sexy” waiters, but certain restaurants and bars—in New York and nationwide—require head shots from job applicants. And that’s straight-up illegal. These establishments range from accolade-winning fine-dining venues to vegetarian joints and tourist traps. Instead of worrying about their customers being served by aesthetically pleasing people, these restaurateurs should focus on making sure that their food is legit and the service staff is competent. 

Unless the job is an acting or modeling gig, no business has the legal right to ask for a photo of anyone applying to work for them. According to David Helbraun, Esq., one of the managing partners at the esteemed Helbraun Levey & O’Donoghue, doing so is in direct violation of anti-discrimination laws like the NYS Human Rights Law, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “The implication is that an employer may use the photograph in discriminating against an applicant for impermissible reasons such as age, race, gender, or perhaps religion (if a visible symbol is worn in the picture),” says Helbraun.

Then throw in the personal partialities and preferences of restaurant management, and you’re looking at a big bowl of discrimination stew. 

A screenshot of a recent job posting on Craigslist for an East Village restaurant.

The food industry employs ten 10 percent of the American workforce. These 13.5 million workers come from a vast array of backgrounds and are at very different points in their lives. But whether they’re college students working part-time or are close to retirement after spending their entire life in the office workforce, exuding sex appeal to customers while carrying a heavy tray of piping hot food to unnattractive customers is the last priority when they clock-in for their shift. 

But there is another facet to this issue, as many job-seekers unsolicitedly send photos with their résumés. A word of advice for all of you that do so: stop.

No, seriously: stop.

Submitting a photo when you’re applying for a restaurant job only does a huge disservice to your sense of self-worth and (possibly) your chances of getting hired. If a company didn’t ask for your photo, having one unexpectedly pop-up in an email with your application is neither welcomed nor appreciated. Yes, we are living in the age of the selfie, but leave the shameless picture-taking out of your job search. If your prospective employer was really that curious about how you looked, I’m sure he could always just find your drunken party photos on the multitude of social media accounts you've joined. 

In 2014, we all witness the shitshow of the digital footprint people leave behind, choosing to provide misleading thumbnail photos of themselves for your next Google search. Unless you want to know what the face of disappointment looks like when your interviewers calls you in for a meeting, don’t get their hopes up.

Follow Tae Yoon on Twitter.

For a visual artist, getting a gallery show is usually the end goal after months or years of effort, but for the last decade, painter James B. Hunt has been giving the middle finger to art venues. He prefers to set up his own hidden exhibits in not-so-public places, concealing his artwork across Phoenix, Arizona, and surrounding cities. Hunt stows away detailed line drawings and watercolors of mutants, burn victims, and esoteric religious icons in back alleys, behind dumpsters, and down storm drains. Then, he posts clues online—whoever finds his garish, twisted works can freely take them home.

A lot of work goes into these malformed images, so I asked why Hunt just discards them in the street. He said he feels they’re not given away but earned. More importantly, he told me that there are really two cities in this sprawling desert metropolis, one visible and one hidden. Stashing his works is what makes him feel a part of the underground.

There's what you see on the evening news—all the over-hyped art events funded by downtown arts commissions, occasionally throwing artists a bone by convincing them to build hideous sculptures for the light-rail station—and "then,” Hunt told me, “there's the secret Phoenix.”

“This is the Phoenix built by artists and musicians who've been burned by our city enough times to know that no good can come of the 'progress' the city council has in store for us,” he continued. “We watched as they turned Mill Avenue—which was once the closest thing we had to a cultural jewel—into a nightmarish coagulation of chain restaurants and douchebag bars. We stood by as they forced us out of our legitimately affordable Tempe homes with the intention of tearing them down in favor of ‘modern, affordable loft spaces for the metropolitan artist’ that no local artist we knew of could afford. This was part of the reason we all began fleeing Tempe for Phoenix, and now it's beginning to happen [again].”

Hunt, who refused to be photographed, has never let anyone join him when hiding his art, but eventually he relented and let me tag along for one of his latest searches, 23 Birds for Tempe. The “show” fell on February 23, a date that holds mystical meaning for the artist. Birds are also a strange choice for Hunt, as he told me in no uncertain terms that he “fucking hates them.” But he does like watching them. “They're apocalyptic,” he said as we cruised down Apache Boulevard. “Whenever a bird shows up in the Bible or any holy document, it's not a good sign. Unless they're feeding Elijah, which is fucking insane, it's not a good sign. I like that.”

One of Hunt's biggest projects from last year was the Ova Concilium Scroll, a bunch of sketches and drawings that he taped, stapled, and glued together until it reached almost 95 feet. It wouldn’t even fit in a gallery if he tried, so instead he dismantled it and hid the artwork. Hunt also likes to scavenge, going out to the desert to collect things like rocks, rusty metal objects, and the bones of small animals.

“There's something about a found object that means more to me than something you buy. It feels earned,” Hunt explained. “I like the idea of somebody coming across a painting during an evening walk. I also like that it may never be found. Secret, hidden worlds are much more interesting to me than the ones that are out in the open for all to see… There's nothing quite like watching swarms of people turn over rocks and stick their heads down storm drains in hopes of finding something I made. It means more to me than if somebody were to just stare uninterested at one of my paintings on a wall for five minutes and move on to the next one. With the art hunts, the people participating become a part of the project.”

Because Hunt doesn’t have a driver’s license, for “moral reasons,” he rides his bike everywhere. This is how he discovers these hidden worlds, and as we cruised around Tempe squirreling away paintings, he pointed out the many bizarre, unmapped landmarks he’s all too familiar with.

We stopped behind a paramilitary complex not far from the train tracks—complete with camo netting, barbed wire, and old military ambulances. While Hunt buried a painting in the tall grass, a homeless dude stopped to talk to himself and stare at the structure before wandering away.

Later, Hunt helped me find an area of Phoenix just off of 32nd Street and Thomas Avenue where wild peacocks, guinea hens, and chickens have roamed free for decades after a nearby farm was flattened into suburbs. Some neighbors wanted the birds gone, but the city told the suburbanites to go fuck themselves—the birds were there first.

It’s scenes like this that make up the "secret Phoenix" Hunt would rather be a part of. Altogether, Hunt and I hid 23 watercolors, small canvases, and medium-size boards in bushes, on backstreets, and beside train tracks. A few hours after Hunt posted clues online to the paintings’ whereabouts, about 300 people would go out on a scavenger hunt.

But not everyone is a fan of Hunt and what he does. For the last seven years, the painter has had a kind of nemesis, an elusive man named David Syndrome, who apparently seeks out Hunt's work so he can throw it away. I spoke to David via email, and he insisted on referring to himself in the third person, describing his anti-art campaign as “a spiritual and aesthetic crusade against the psychic tyranny of the man-made image controlled by society's elite.”

“James B. Hunt is one cog in a gigantic mechanism of control David Syndrome wishes to free mankind from,” he said in the email. “The images Mr. Hunt and other agents distribute aren't destroyed as much as they are cleansed. Remains are kept until they have been deemed innocuous and no possibility of the cabal's influence can hurt the general population. It's important that civic-minded people take action in a totalitarian regime to reclaim our reality for future generations. I implore any and all people working on the side of goodness to do what needs to be done.”

David Syndrome is a kind of symbol of the darker side of the secret Phoenix, but even that opposing force won't stop Hunt from doing all he can to hold onto what's left of the city's eccentric soul. I was left with his stinging refrain: "There's a lesson we keep learning, which is that if you're an artist, this city is not your friend."

Follow Troy Farah on Twitter.

Illustrations by Love Gerard

We sat together on her couch, her small, eight-year-old hands clutching a photo of her father, Yassin Aref.  “My daddy only held me twice before I was five,” Dilnia told me. For the first five years of her life, she only knew him as the man on the other side of a plexiglass window in a communication management unit in an Indiana federal penitentiary.

Prisoners describe the communication management units, or CMUs, as “Little Guantánamos.” In 2006, the Bureau of Prisons created two of these units to isolate and segregate specific prisoners, the majority of them convicted of crimes related to terrorism. The bureau secretly opened these units without informing the public and without allowing anyone an opportunity to comment on their creation, as required by law. By September 2009, about 70 percent of the CMU prisoners were Muslim, more than 1,000 to 1,200 percent more than the federal prison average of Muslim inmates.

In the CMUs, prisoners are subject to much stricter rules than in general population. They are limited to two 15-minute telephone calls per week, both scheduled and monitored. Visits are rarely permitted, and when family members are allowed to visit, they are banned from physical contact, limited to phone conversations between a plexiglass window. This differs from the general population, where prisoners can spend time with their visitors in the same room. To further the isolation, some of the CMU prisoners are held in solitary confinement, with only one hour out of their cells each day.

After nearly three years of imprisonment in two CMUs, one in Indiana and one in Illinois, Aref and four other inmates decided to take action. On April 1, 2010, Aref, Daniel McGowan, Avon Twitty, Royal Jones, and Kifah Jayyousi filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit with the Center for Constitutional Rights against the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons. The lawsuit, Aref et al. v. Holder, ignited the first attempt to expose the unconstitutionality of the CMUs. The prisoners argue in their complaint that the CMUs violate the First, Fifth, and Eighth amendments of the United States Constitution, as well as the Administrative Procedures Act. After nearly four years, and to the surprise of many involved, the case continues on and will go to trial or into settlement this year. The attorney for the prisoners is hopeful that the case will be settled with a summary judgment in March, vindicating their claims.

Since the original filing, the government has pushed hard to invalidate their case, successfully dismissing three of the original five plaintiffs. After the filing of the lawsuit in 2010, all five plaintiffs were transferred out of the CMUs. Because they were no longer in the CMUs, the specific complaints of three of the plaintiffs were invalidated. Yet Aref’s and Jayyousi’s complaints challenged more than just their own imprisonment in the CMU. They disputed the constitutionality of the CMUs as a government facility.

Although many advocates expected their case to be dismissed in its entirety, Judge Barbara Rothstein of the Western District of Washington allowed the case to continue. If a judge rules in favor of the prisoners later this year, the CMUs will be required to fit current prison standards, and some believe that they could ultimately be closed down.

As an eight-year old, Dilnia doesn’t understand any of the implications of her father’s lawsuit. Like the rest of her family, she just wants him home.

* * *

Although Aref is the one behind bars, his family also feels imprisoned and under constant surveillance. His wife, Zuhur Jalal, 42, doesn’t work and stays at home, raising their four kids and waiting for news about her husband’s case. She longs for familiar people and things, especially her homeland, Iraq. Following the Kurdish genocide in Iraq in the late 1980s, Aref and his family fled to Syria, and in 1999, the United Nations offered them asylum in the United States. They came to America looking for the freedom and basic human rights that they never had under Saddam Hussein’s regime.

They settled in Albany, New York, and when the city’s first mosque opened, in July 2000, Aref became its first imam. He viewed the members of his mosque as his family, regardless of how well he knew them or what their background was. His commitment to the mosque quickly became the beacon of Albany’s Muslim community. 

Yet his accepting nature led to trouble when the FBI sent an undercover paid informant into the mosque. Instead of being skeptical, Aref took in the outsider without question. Within a few months, the informant had become close with Aref’s friends, including one of his closest friends, Mohammed Hossain. Hossain owned a failing pizza parlor, and the informant offered him a large loan, requesting Aref to witness the loan transaction, a common role for an imam. Aref did not hesitate. He counted the money and signed off on the agreement, as any notary public would have done. Neither he nor Hossain realized they were the objects of an FBI sting.

A few months later, the FBI arrested Aref and Hossain, raided their homes and the mosque, and interrogated their families. The informant had previously mentioned to Hossain that the money he had loaned him had been made from selling a surface-to-air missile, but Hossain had no involvement with the missile deal. And Aref says he had no knowledge of the deal at all. After a controversial trial, both men were convicted of conspiring to aid a terrorist group and money laundering. They were sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Judge Thomas J. McAvoy of the Northern District of New York requested that Aref be assigned to a local prison near his family because he had a newborn daughter. The Bureau of Prisons ignored this recommendation along with his status as “low security,” and sent him to the CMU in Terre Haute, Indiana. The bureau wrote a letter to the judge, explaining that it had denied the request because of unspecified “security reasons.”

When Aref was first arrested and made his one permitted phone call to his family to tell them that he was in jail, his 12-year-old daughter, Alaa, asked, “Why are you gone?” He told her that he didn’t know why, but he promised her that one day he would find out. While he was inside the CMU, his daughter’s question haunted him. He was depressed and anxious, and according to court documents, he became “obsessed about why he had been singled out for such restrictive confinement, and why he is perceived as dangerous.” He had fled his country because of Saddam Hussein, America’s main adversary during the Iraq War. Aref saw himself as an ally of the United States. He came to the United States with dreams of freedom and democracy. But soon after, in the post-9/11 counterterrorism haze, he was persecuted.

While inside the CMU, the obstructive nature of the facility restricted not only Aref but his family as well. Telephone calls, their main permitted form of communication, were so difficult to organize that it would often discourage his family from calling. All calls had to be scheduled one week in advance and could only be made between 8 AM and 3 PM during the week. Because the children were in school during this time, the family had to make the calls in the principal’s office of the school. Zuhur and her four children would gather around the speakerphone, trying to share the limited time. They never felt that it was enough.

During the first two years of Aref’s imprisonment, his family was only able to visit four times. They didn’t own a car, so for each trip, a close family friend would volunteer to drive them the nearly 1,000 miles to Indiana. Although the trip took 14 hours, the family was only allowed to have one four-hour visit per month. Steve Downs, a close friend of Aref’s, took the family on two of the trips. He tried to make it fun for the children and would let them pick out a motel, which they always chose for the best pool and restaurant. “It’s actually where they learned to swim,” he said. But these moments of fun were overshadowed by the distressing visits into the CMU. Several guards monitored their short visits, waiting for any violation of the seemingly arbitrary rules. During one visit, Downs pulled a pen out of his pocket to take notes, and immediately the guards stopped the visit and removed the family, stating that they had violated CMU code by using a “recording device.”

The visits were also emotionally draining. The children became upset with the sight of their father on the other side of the plexiglass. They would often cry. Aref and Zuhur also found these visits unbearably painful. They could see each other through the blurry window, but they could not touch or hug each other. And Aref could not hold Dilnia, a daughter he barely knew.

After four visits, Zuhur refused to bring the children to the CMUs anymore, believing they were too traumatic. Aref agreed, and for the last two years of his placement inside the CMUs, Aref did not see his family. Only after he was transferred to the general prison population was he able to see his children again.

In 2011, New York magazine profiled Aref’s case and his time spent in the CMUs. In one of the first email exchanges that he had with press, he told journalist Christopher Stewart, “I am not spending my time, time is spending me.”

* * *

On a cold Saturday morning last November, Downs and I visited Zuhur’s apartment in a working-class neighborhood in Albany. He hadn’t stopped by in a while, and Zuhur seemed surprised, yet pleased, to see him. Children's shoes and textbooks littered the floor. An aged pizza box and a bottle of flat soda sat on a wooden table against the wall. A bare lightbulb lit the small living room, illuminating scuffed lime-green walls and hanging prayer tapestries.

“Zuhur, your husband is taking on the government and, if he succeeds, could stop the CMUs,” said Downs.

She barely showed a reaction to his words, except for her brow, which folded in deep lines of sorrow. “Does that mean he’ll come home?” she asked.

Downs looked away from her. His voice became softer. “I don’t know, Zuhur. But he could help a lot of people.”

“How can he help other people if he can’t even help himself?” she replied bitterly, brushing away tears from the corners of her eyes.

While in prison, Aref refused to resign himself to losing his family or his sense of self. He published a memoir about his life in Kurdistan, his trial, and the CMUs. He reached out to journalists to share his story. And largely, he worked with his fellow inmates and attorneys to prepare their lawsuit.

The lawsuit challenges the CMUs on two fronts: first, how the prisoners were selected for the CMUs, a due-process challenge; and second, why they were selected, a First Amendment challenge. The Bureau of Prisons classified the CMUs as control units (the same category as supermax prisons) defined by heavy communication restrictions. Prison authorities must tell inmates why and when they are being transferred to control units. They must also give the prisoners a chance to protest their designation to such a unit in a hearing. Once in a control unit, the Bureau of Prisons is required to provide regular reviews of prisoners’ placement in the unit.

“The CMU doesn’t have any of this,” said Alexis Agathocleous, one of lead attorneys, from the Center for Constitutional Rights. “All of our clients and everyone that we know of in the CMU sort of get picked up and taken to the CMU, and then get a piece of paper that says, ‘You’ve been sent to a CMU, and here are the reasons.’ It’s a short, perfunctory paragraph, and often the information is inaccurate and unfounded. There is no disclosure of what the underlying allegations are.”

When inmates arrive at the CMUs, prison authorities are supposed to tell them that they can challenge their placement through an Administrative Remedy Process. But during the first few years of the CMUs, neither a review of placement nor a process took place. Many prisoners tried to uncover why they were there and how they could get transferred out, but no inmate or attorney figured it out.

“No one was transferred out of the CMU until we filed our lawsuit,” said Agathocleous. Only four years after the opening of the CMUs did the Bureau of Prisons begin to review cases for transferring out of the facility.

The lawsuit also contends that the protected religious and political speech of prisoners was used as a rationale to send them to the CMUs. “Perfectly legitimate, First Amendment–protected speech is the reason that the Bureau of Prisons is saying we need to put this person in the CMU,” said Agathocleous. Since the CMUs have 1,000 to 1,200 percent more Muslim inmates than the federal prison average, it is difficult to ignore the idea that the CMUs might have been created to segregate and restrict Muslim prisoners, whom the Bureau of Prisons saw as a greater security risk than non-Muslim prisoners. “Religious speech and religious identity have been used as a proxy for security risk,” said Agathocleous.

Aref’s lawsuit is not the first complaint against the creation of the CMUs. When the Bureau of Prisons first announced its plans to create CMUs with a new rule in the federal register in April 2006, the ACLU, the Legal Aid Society, and 16 other civil-liberty organizations came together to protest the development of the new institutions. The rule introduced heightened restrictions on the communication of inmates charged with, convicted of, or detained in connection with terrorism. Anyone the Bureau of Prisons deemed a risk to public and prison security could be transferred to these new units. The civil-liberty groups saw the suggested blanket ban on communication as unprecedented and unconstitutional, and infringing on First Amendment rights. They demanded that the rule be withdrawn.

The Bureau of Prisons ignored their demands. In September 2006, the inspector general of the Department of Justice reported that the Bureau of Prisons had moved forward on “several ongoing and proposed initiatives to improve the monitoring of communications for terrorist and other high-risk inmates.” Yet no one knew if the CMUs existed until the first prisoners were transferred to the CMU in Terre Haute, Indiana, in December 2006. They were transferred without any notice, hearing, or explanation. A few months later, the Bureau of Prisons created another CMU in Marion, Illinois, and more prisoners were transferred into this unit without notice or sufficient explanation. 

Not only are the prisoners kept in the dark about the CMUs; the American public is as well. For the past 18 months, Human Rights Watch and the Human Rights Institute at Columbia University have been investigating human-rights abuses in the federal prosecutions of American Muslims since September 11, 2001. Much of their research revolves around the secretive CMUs. In August 2012, Human Rights Watch requested further information from the Bureau of Prisons, in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act. After months of waiting for the Bureau of Prisons to relinquish the information, Human Rights Watch and the Human Rights Institute filed a lawsuit in October 2013, to impel the government to provide the requested documents and data necessary for understanding the covert treatment of convicted citizens. They still have not received the requested information.

* * *

“I think that the Bureau of Prisons has been secretive in nature because, if this kind of information were to be widespread, there would be an outcry,” said Noor Elashi. Her father had been imprisoned in a CMU with Aref. But unlike Aref, who was transferred to a low-security prison, her father still remains in a CMU.

Elashi and I talked about her father in a small café in Manhattan as rain clouds haunted the November sky. She spoke slowly, choosing her words carefully as she recalled his stories from inside the CMU: how he lost visitation rights for putting his name on a yoga mat, how she rarely speaks with him because of his limited permitted phone calls, and how her relationship with her father has suffered because she cannot touch, hug, or smell him.

Elashi’s father, Ghassan, was charged under the ambiguous Material Support Statute for sending humanitarian aid, such as books and backpacks, to a Palestinian charity committee in Gaza. The prosecution claimed these committees were front organizations for Hamas, a US-designated terrorist organization, even though USAID and other international organizations had donated to the same committees. He was convicted and sentenced to 65 years in prison.

Elashi believes that what happened to her father and the other defendants in his case exemplify the prosecutorial bias against American Muslims after 9/11. His placement in a CMU furthers her belief that her father and many others like him were targeted, charged, and imprisoned for their religious beliefs. “Every aspect of today’s post-9/11 prosecutions echoes the political persecutions that existed during the civil-rights movement and during World War II against the Japanese Americans,” she said. “I think things will change, but it’s an uphill battle. The truth will slowly unpeel itself as we continue to investigate, document, and witness.”

* * *

Under media scrutiny in 2009, the Bureau of Prisons increased the percentage of non-Muslims in the CMUs. Many inmates now believe that the non-Muslim prisoners were placed in the CMUs to balance the population and make the units appear less religiously segregated and secret. 

One of the original plaintiffs in Aref’s lawsuit, Daniel McGowan, was one of these “balancers.” In 2007, McGowan was sentenced to seven years in prison on multiple counts of conspiracy and arson related to the destruction of two lumberyards. Originally, he was sent to a low-security prison and spent the majority of his time writing political articles on prisoners’ rights and environmental issues. Within a year, he was sent to a CMU.

“They claim that it’s not an isolation unit, and it’s not a punishment unit, but the way they treat you? It’s like you’re a killer,” McGowan told me. McGowan’s been out of prison for almost a year. Living in Brooklyn with his wife, he is waiting out his period of supervised release, which will be done in 2016.

He met me during his lunch break a couple weeks after he gave his witness deposition for the lawsuit against the CMUs. “It’s a horrible place. You’re under constant surveillance, and you’re in a tiny area. It feels like you’re being sat on,” he said. The only place he didn’t feel the eyes of the authorities was in the shower. Other than that, he always felt that he was being monitored: when he was alone in his cell, on the phone, in the yard, eating lunch, or even getting his teeth cleaned. There were extra eyes on the inmates of the CMUs; there was a sense of surveillance that he had never experienced in the standard prison system.

The 18th-century social theorist Jeremy Bentham envisioned a new model for incarceration. Prisons of the future would be shaped like a cylinder, with cells lining the curved walls and stacked on top of each other. In the center of the prison would stand a single watchtower, with windows that would allow prison guards to look out without prisoners looking in.

Bentham created this prison design to maximize the visibility of prisoners, while isolating them in individual cells, so they could never be sure when they were being watched and when they weren’t. The design, which he called the Panopticon, allowed a minimal number of prison wardens to watch over a large number of prisoners.

French philosopher and theorist Michel Foucault took the metaphor of the Panopticon one step further. In Discipline and Punishment, he wrote that the major effect of the Panopticon was “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” In other words, under constant surveillance in the Panopticon, the inmates would internalize the monitoring and would begin to monitor themselves. Indeed, it was of little importance whether the prisoners were actually being watched—what mattered was that they thought they were.

McGowan hesitated when I asked him how the CMU’s surveillance had changed him. “You start surveilling yourself. You police your own behavior because you are aware that you are being watched all the time.”

Aside from the constant surveillance, McGowan rarely received any information on why he had been sent there and how he could appeal his transfer. A few days after the Bureau of Prisons had transferred him to the CMU without warning or reason, they gave him a one-page memo that stated in a short five-sentence paragraph why he had been transferred. Yet the memo only listed a summary of his conviction, with some of the details incorrect. Why he had been transferred to the CMU was still a mystery to him. “Even if you feel like there’s a reason to open up one of these units, you have to do it legally. You can’t just open it up and jack people in there.”

Before the judge dismissed McGowan as a plaintiff, the courts impelled the Bureau of Prisons to release new information on why he had been sent to a CMU. In a previously unseen memo, the chief of the Bureau of Prison’s Counter Terrorism Unit, Leslie Smith, said that McGowan had been sent to the CMU due to some of his outspoken political views. In April 2013, McGowan wrote about the new document on the Huffington Post:

It is becoming increasingly clear that the BOP is using these units to silence people, and to crack down on unpopular political speech. They have become units where the BOP can dump prisoners they have issues with or whose political beliefs they find anathema. In the months that come, with CCR's help, I hope to prove that in court and show what is happening at the CMUs. This needs to be dragged into the sunlight.

Less than three days after McGowan published his article on the Huffington Post, the Bureau of Prisons remanded him into custody for “publishing under his own byline,” a violation of his probation. Although McGowan was released after one evening and was not charged with anything, the detention deeply troubled him. It was a reminder of the bureau’s ability to curtail his freedom of speech. It was a reminder of the lack of transparent rationale or process. As in the CMU, it seemed to McGowan that the bureau was making up the rules and regulations as it went along.

Although details about the CMUs remain elusive, one notion about the CMUs is concrete for McGowan and the other inmates: The CMUs represent relentless surveillance and monitoring.

* * *

“I know this mosque is under surveillance,” said Shamshad Ahmad, president of Masjid As-Salam, where Aref was the imam. Ahmad, Downs, and I were sitting in the backroom of the mosque, in the classroom where Aref used to teach. Toy trucks and coloring books were strewn across the carpeted floor, and the walls were covered with children's drawings of their families. The door handle was still broken from the FBI raid years before.

When Ahmad had originally bought the building to convert it into a mosque, Aref volunteered to help him renovate it. He asked for no money but worked nightly on the mosque after he came home from work. Once the mosque was complete, Ahmad knew the only person who could lead the community was Aref, and chose him to be its imam. They were close friends. Ahmad called Aref his brother. After Aref’s conviction, Ahmad wrote a book defending the innocence and dignity of his good friend.

The Muslim community of Albany was deeply shell-shocked after Aref’s arrest. One third of the worshipers of Masjid As-Salam stopped going to the mosque to pray. Ahmad says that they were afraid of being too visible in his or any mosque.

“Later on, they considered this a punishment for being Muslim,” said Ahmad. “If you are a Muslim living in this society after 9/11, you expect your mosque will be under surveillance. You will be under surveillance. The government will try to entrap you. You cannot do anything about it.”

“It’s like Niemöller said,” interjected Downs. He leaned back in his chair, reciting from memory: “'First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Ahmad nodded and laughed, although the words seemed hardly humorous. “We live our life knowing that we are watched and under surveillance,” Ahmad concluded.

* * *

Many of the inmates in the CMU and their families hope that Aref’s lawsuit will create a formal process for the facilities and lighten their heavy communication restrictions. With depositions for the trial complete, Aref and Jayyousi’s attorneys expect the case to go to trial or reach a settlement in early 2014. At this time, both the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the Department of Justice have declined to comment on the case. Even if the case does not succeed in changing the system, some of the inmates hope that the case will illuminate concealed information, as in McGowan’s case. But until the lawsuit is settled, the CMUs will remain open—and opaque.