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Alice Nkom. Screenshot via.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In 2011, a 30-year-old gay Cameroonian man, Jean-Claude, met someone he was interested in. The feeling was, apparently, reciprocated. They swapped numbers, agreeing to exchange text messages at a later date to arrange a meeting. Only, when Jean-Claude texted the man he thought was a potential partner, the message was read by the police.

This man had organized for the police to be present when Jean-Claude's text was received, then waited for him to arrive at the house where he believed an encounter was going to happen. Jean-Claude was arrested and taken to the police station. Here, he was stripped naked and given an anal examination. The officers decided he was gay because "his anus was too open," says human rights lawyer Alice Nkom. Her face shakes as she recalls the abuse her client suffered in the judicial system.

Nkom fought for Jean-Claude's release on the basis that there was no proof of intercourse: "If you are a good judge how can you condemn someone and convict them for homosexual acts on the basis of a text?"

Jean-Claude went to jail for three years. Nkom defended him and eventually secured bail. Following release he was diagnosed with testicular cancer and returned home to his family, but, because he was gay, the strict Catholic community shunned his medical needs. He died soon after.

"Cameroon is one of 38 African countries criminalizing homosexuality," Nkom tells me. "You can be jailed for five years. The country is one of the highest for arrests for homosexuality, but nobody knows that. Everybody is focused on Kenya and Uganda because they have introduced recent bills increasing penalties."

I meet Nkom in a central London hotel. She's here on one of her frequent visits to Europe, meeting other human rights activists, raising awareness and funding for her work. In 1969, she was the first black woman to be called to the bar in Cameroon. She spent the next several decades creating a formidable reputation for herself as a respected voice in its legal system. All that changed in 2003. A chance meeting with some young gay Cameroonian men who had been living in Paris opened her eyes to the human rights abuse the LGBT community was suffering in her native country.

"I wanted them to know that what they used to do easily and freely in Paris, they cannot do back home in Cameroon," she explains. "When they came out of the meeting they were sad, I could see it in their faces. I thought, 'What did I do?' Is it just enough for me to tell people, 'Please never show that you are happy, that you are in love'?"

She wanted to do more than just warn these men. "What about our kids when they travel to the USA, Paris, or Belgium to study, where homosexuality is not criminalized, and then they want to go home to Cameroon and show what they have learned? What should we then do? Do we ask them to go back because the only places we have kept for them are prisons?"

Her words are compelling. Not least because she's dedicated herself to a repressed community that she's not directly a part of and does not need to fight a battle for.

For more on LGBT issues, watch our doc on 'Gay Conversion Therapy':

"I used to tell people on the TV, 'I am gay.' But they cannot arrest me just because I say that I am gay," she says. Nkom has children and grandchildren and is heterosexual, but she says this to highlight the fact that the constitution in Cameroon is ratified with a human rights treaty, which inclusively protects all its citizens—including LGBTs. Technically, being homosexual is not a crime, however, a "provision" was added into the law in 1972 making homosexual acts illegal. Nkom uses this awareness of the more superior law—the original constitution—to get people out of jail.

"If you followed the law to the letter, none of these people should be in jail. It's only same-sex sexual conduct that is criminalized, not being gay. People are going to jail for sending a text. As such, the laws are being used illegally."

The police and judges in Cameroon rely on their victim's lack of education to prosecute them. "Ignorance is very bad, because [the victims] don't know their rights. This is why they don't arrest people in Doula, where I live there. The police don't want to face me. They know that if they arrest someone, they call me, and I go and we have a serious discussion."

After their experiences of prison, and following a long court battle where often the victims don't have the funds to pay for legal representation, people are entitled to compensation. "They never follow it up," says Nkom. "When they are freed, they just want to get away and be forgotten." Because Nkom finances her clients' trials, she can't "run after them and say we can continue," because she has "other cases to challenge."

"This is my own money and the money of my family," she advises. "But with what I have, I do what I can do." She founded ADEFHO (Association for the Defence of Homosexuality) in 2003 as a non-profit international organization that applies for funding. As she cannot fund the foundation from within Cameroon, she looks outside her home country for help. Past supporters have included the European Union, from which she received a €300,000 [$322,000] grant. She was later threatened with arrest by a representative of Cameroon's Ministry of Communication for accepting it. "I don't want to stop what I have decided to do. I want to show [the Cameroon government] that if you are determined to do something because it is right, because it is a good thing to do, they cannot stop me."

Despite its homophobic laws, Nkom tells me her homeland is "a very beautiful country."

"It is the heart of central Africa," she says warmly of her homeland that has been colonized twice before, by France and Great Britain. "We have deserts in the north, forests in the south, and seas. We have everything to be happy. We have enough oil, we produce cocoa. We are a very diverse country, but very united."

Nkom receiving an award at Amnesty International

The main problem she cites with Cameroon is how its controversial president, Paul Biya, has retained control since 1982. "He's been in power for 33 years. This is not good because we have a problem in setting up a democracy with the possibility for people to change, because everything is blocked."

Another worry for Nkom is the war with extremism that she sees looming, spreading slowly into Cameroon from Nigeria. "We are very afraid whether our president can face a war because we have always lived in a very peaceful place. Managing peace is not the same thing as managing a war. And when you have war, it's never a good place for human rights."

Nigeria is very rich in terms of oil, and Nkom says Cameroon's people are facing the same danger of Boko Haram "and we don't know how to deal with it." Nigeria also passed a bill to criminalize homosexuality just a year or so ago, she says, "but they also have a lot of states where they have established Sharia law, so this can spread and give a very bad example to Cameroon where, up to now, we were living in peace with Muslims, Christians, and Catholics everywhere. It was very harmonious."

Among the many cases Nkom is working on is the defense of a lesbian who has been jailed for five years. "She was alone, there was no other woman arrested. I'm trying to get her out, but it's a very long process to gain her freedom."

Such individual cases are upsetting, but Nkom does not believe homophobia to be widespread among the Cameroonian people. "Homophobic people used to say that the majority of Cameroon is against homosexuals, which I don't agree with. The problem is the people who disagree with homosexuality speak louder."

Her use of terminology in reference to LGBT people is interesting. What about life as lesbian or trans in Cameroon? "We have only one word for this: 'homosexuality.' You can be jailed if you are trans or lesbian as well. The trans community has to hide. They cannot live their life freely and openly as they do here."

The concept of individual LGBT identity is a luxury of Western culture; life in Cameroon for the non-heterosexual community, however people identify, is devoid of celebration. On top of this, the sexual health and HIV needs of the gay community in Cameroon are ignored because doctors cannot be trusted to deliver treatment as the medical profession sees it as giving aid to men who are involved in criminal acts. Nkom shakes her head again as she speaks. "The doctors say to me that they are being asked to treat sexual behavior that is prohibited by the law. I say to them, 'You are a doctor. What did you swear on? That if I am a criminal I don't deserve treatment?' Cameroon receives a lot of money from the global fund to eradicate HIV, but it doesn't go to the needs of gay men."

"Somebody has to do this work. I am black, I am a woman, and I am a lawyer, and I speak loud." – Alice Nkom

Nkom explains how religious factors also played their role in riling the anger of an uninformed population against homosexuality. "In 2006 the Archbishop of Yaoundé decided to point his finger at the gay community as the people responsible for issues like unemployment, which is when homophobia became aggressive." She identifies the Archbishop's comments as the turning point that saw national newspapers take it upon themselves to start publishing the names of gay people, which fueled homophobic hysteria. "Before that the population were living comfortably with gay people," Nkom recalls.

It's this warped injustice, coupled with a love for a country that was built on the basis of independence from colonialism and on the foundations of a recognized human rights charter, that spurs Nkom to continue her work.

I cite the words of fellow Cameroonian human rights activist Joël Gustave Nana Ngongang who said, "As Africans, we feel the vestiges of the long European colonial presence in our continent. We feel them when other—Western, European, 'international'—LGBT organizations speak on our behalf and we are left unheard. Only Africans can speak for Africans."

Nkom disapproves of this position. "I don't agree with him at all," she says, sighing heavily at his suggestion that the continent's former colonialist rulers should not interfere in the internal struggles of Africa. "We had independence in 1960. We had no criminalization of homosexuality then, we had no mass media, no television, nothing, and they never put homosexuality as a behavior that can be the cause of prejudice and barbarity to others."

She reiterates how colonial laws were rejected for a greater, more accepting human rights charter. "As sexual minorities defenders, we are accused of being agents of the West to exterminate African people so you can come and steal our natural resources. We are [accused of] receiving a lot of money from you to do this 'dirty' job because homosexuality is not African. Which is not true, homosexuality is human."

It's easy to view countries like Cameroon and their confused laws with sadness and fear. But people like Nkom prove that there is hope—even if its glimmer is faint. There's hope that, even as the homophobes and fear-mongers shout, there are brave people like her who are allies to the LGBT cause because they believe in justice for all. The question remains: When she could be comfortably retired as she approaches her 70th birthday, why does she continue this seemingly unending, lonely battle? "I knew I would be alone for a while. You cannot ask people to get into such risky work," she says. "They have all to lose. I face a lot of discrimination myself—many doors are locked behind me. This is a full-time job I do today and I cannot work like a normal lawyer who has a paying client. I don't have time for that. This work is huge and I want results before I leave this earth. I'm 70 and I want to reach the stage when I have a definitive decision in the Supreme Court."

Due to the situation of non-democracy, the parliament in Nkom's country cannot remove the anti-gay "provision" in the law held in place by President Biya's majority party. So she follows the "judiciary road to fight in the Supreme Court" to challenge the situation. "Somebody has to do this work. I am black, I am a woman, and I am a lawyer, and I speak loud. I am a result of the battle of former generations that engaged to free me today, and it's a very heavy debt I owe to new generations."

Follow Cliff on Twitter.

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Photo courtesy of Manuel Ocampo

In 1974, warplane engines arrived for repairs at a Rolls Royce factory in the Scottish town of East Kilbride, just outside Glasgow. Factory worker Bob Fulton recognized the engines as coming from the Hawker Hunters that attacked Chile's presidential palace during the coup of September 11, 1973. He refused to work on them on moral grounds. By the end of the day, all 4,000 factory workers had joined him in his act of solidarity.

The CIA-backed military coup was led by army chief Augusto Pinochet and toppled the democratically-elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. British-built Hawker Hunters bombarded La Moneda, the presidential palace where Allende, refusing to surrender or accept exile, made his final speech before taking his own life. Within hours, a military junta was sworn in and Allende's supporters and anyone against the coup were arrested, tortured, or forced into exile. Left-wing political activity was suppressed until Pinochet's dictatorship ended in 1990, but one of the most efficient acts against his rule took place, without violence, in Scotland.

The Rolls Royce factory workers refused to service the engines or to let them leave the factory, leaving them outside for years in the harsh Scottish weather. Four years later, the engines mysteriously disappeared in the middle of the night leaving the workers in the dark about what happened to them for decades. They eventually began to believe that their actions had been meaningless.

Last year, their story was told in a short film by Felipe Bustos Sierra, who was born in Belgium to exiled Chilean parents and has been based in Scotland for ten years. The film, Nae Pasaran,featured interviews with three of the surviving workers—Bob Fulton, Robert Somerville, and John Keenan.

Bustos Sierra gave some insight on the workers' motivations. "Scotland's working class at the time had two strong examples," he told me, "the stories of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War—which made the expression No Pasarán very popular—and the recent experiences of World War II." Bob Fulton had worked as an engine mechanic on tanks during World War II, and after surviving one of the worst battles in Italy, he says in the short film, dictatorship became "a nasty word." Robert Somerville and John Keenan, on the other hand, had political motives. "The trade unions had condemned the coup and so when Bob brought up that there were engines from Chile in the factory, I think they knew right away that they could support this," Bustos Sierra explained.

As a result of the short film, new information came to light that proved the action had, in fact, had serious implications. Now, Bustos Sierra is in the process of funding a feature film, through a Kickstarter campaign, that will tell the whole story, "following these three guys as they discover the impact of their action and what kind of power we have as individuals." I spoke to Bustos Sierra to find out more.

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VICE: How did you first hear about this story?
Felipe Bustos Sierra: Well, I am Chilean and I grew up in exile. My father was a Chilean journalist who was on the blacklist for 15 years. We used to go to lots of solidarity events in Brussels, and this was one of the tales we heard of international solidarity. It was one of those stories that was passed along for years and so I heard it years after it was all over. I had heard that at the time the planes were in Scotland, that the workers were refusing to let go of the planes, and that they had barricades and were fighting with the police every day—all quite overblown. So, when I got to Scotland, ten years ago, I started digging in.

How did news of the Scottish action get to people? Not just to those in exile, but I've read that even people in Chilean torture centers heard about it.
I have heard from a couple of people who were in prison at the time that they overheard the news on a guard's radio or from newly arrived prisoners. It was in the papers at the time and when I was in Chile I did find some very small articles on, like, pages 15 or 20, buried as much as possible.

Their achievement was that some of the Air Force was incapacitated because of the workers' action in Scotland. I heard from members of the Chilean Air Force who had refused to take part in the coup (and were imprisoned). A few of them managed to survive because of these engines, because they became part of a trade. The Chilean Air Force said, "If we get those engines back, we'll relax a little bit and release some of these prisoners." So [there] are the guys who benefited directly from this action.

Clearly, 40 years later, there's something still quite sensitive about this.

Did any of the workers in Scotland know this at the time?
No, they hadn't a clue.

They were told that basically their action meant nothing?
Yes, three months after the engines disappeared, the Rolls Royce management let them know that a General in the Chilean Air Force said that the engines were back in full operation and that was it.

That was a disappointment but they thought: Well, that's just not possible. They had left the engines for a year in the factory and three years [outdoors] in their crates with nothing to save them from corrosion. The idea that the engines could be back in operation so soon afterward just didn't make sense.

Your short film ends on a note of mystery, like no one really knows what happened to the engines. So, did you find out more after the film was made?
Yes, it was really when the short film premiered in Chile that our doors opened in an incredible way. All the information up to that point was from the National Archives in London, the Scottish National Archives, and the Rolls Royce archives. There's still loads of documents that are classified. Clearly, 40 years later, there's something still quite sensitive about this.

So, a lot of new information came from the Chilean side, and from meeting people who had their own connection with the story that helped me find more people and see the documents over there. But there's still so much that's either being held back or has been destroyed.

Deliberately destroyed?
It's hard to say. Definitely in the last year of Pinochet's government, he became quite paranoid about the information that was out there.

How exactly did the protest take shape?
It was very simple, which I think makes it so powerful. It was really Bob Fulton saying: "There's a Chilean engine on my desk. I'm not going to work on it. You can fire me, but I'm not going to touch this." The workers knew about the coup, they had condemned it on the day it happened. So, by the end of the day, they'd inventoried all the equipment from Chile and passed it on to each representative of each of the factory's sections and they all voted to say nobody would work on it.

For a whole year, all these bits and pieces were scattered across the factory. It blocked some assembly lines, [so] after a year Rolls Royce convinced them to move them so they just roughly assembled them, put them in crates, and put them outside.

They were such big pieces of equipment that professionals were needed to move them about, but they all decided they wouldn't do it. That's when the trade unions got involved. The transport trade union said, "None of our companies will assist with moving them out of the factory." That's what allowed the action to last for so long.

Related: VICE travels to Chilean Patagonia to meet Faustino Barrientos, a man who has lived alone in a house built from the remains of a shipwrecked fishing vessel since 1965.

What kind of pressure were they under?
It's hard to say. There was quite a bit of pressure but at the same time, they knew they had the backing of the whole factory. And the trade unions were still quite a formidable force at the time.

They made sure that the story stayed in the papers for as long as possible. It was a time when commitment to causes like that was much stronger so they received personal letters from people all over the country, saying: "I'm writing to my MP about this."

Post-Thatcher, now that the trade unions have been decimated in Britain, do you think something like that could happen today?
No. I asked the guys the same question and they just laughed. I think they'd be fired on the spot. Either that or day workers would be hired to do the work.

It doesn't seem to be a very well-known story.
One of things, I think, is that the engines left Scotland in 1978 and Thatcher came to power in 1979 and crippled the trade unions completely over the next few years. So, any stories like that just wouldn't be heard. Trade unions lost a huge part of their power—and then there was the bigger news of the miners' strikes.

In March, the three workers were honored by the Chilean government at a ceremony in Glasgow that was attended by former political prisoners and solidarity activists. Was there ever any prior recognition?
No. The only thing was when Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998, there were some stories about it coming out, but [they were] superficial. There was no effort to find out what actually went on.

It's been 40 years and many of the protagonists have passed away. Do you feel an urgency to get his film made?
Absolutely. The short film focused on Scotland but [with the feature] I am trying to connect with Chile. The story of the coup was so bleak, this is one of the few stories that have a positive ending. All these people are of a certain age [Fulton is 92] and so many documents have been destroyed, all the stuff that gives nuance to the story lives only in these people's heads.

The film will feature music from Victor Jara. Tell me about him.
Victor Jara was my point of entry to the whole story. I grew up with Jara's songs and there came a time, as a teenager, where I said I was sick of it. It's such a dark story, so I disconnected from it for a few years. Later, I found out more than what I had been told. Growing up in exile, you hear all these really colorful, overblown stories like: Victor Jara died while singing with a guitar in his hand and he just wouldn't stop singing. That wasn't true, but that was the propaganda that was carried at the time because it raised morale. It's like with this story [the story of Nae Pasaran, which had been exaggerated in its retellings]. I think, 40 years later, we need something better. We need the truth before it's completely lost. The dictatorship is over, there's no point pushing a direction, what is important is having a proper history.

This is a small story but people seem to get so much satisfaction, or relief, out of hearing that it is true. At the screening in Chile, I asked people to leave messages on camera afterward. People lined up for an hour to leave their messages. So many people said: "We heard about this, but we thought it was just a rumor. We thought it had just been made up to give us hope."

Nae Pasaran is being funded partly through a Kickstarter campaign, which you can support here.

Follow Karen Gardiner on Twitter.

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'WWF WrestleMania Challenge' image via

Take-Two Interactive's WWE 2K15 had everything going for it, except the wrestling. It boasted gorgeous graphics, a sizable roster of WWE superstars, various playable historical storylines, a career mode that allowed you to cut your teeth in the NXT, and plenty of match types. But it continued to perpetuate the silliest and basest of myths: That what mattered in all of this was overpowering your opponent, draining his energy, and then holding him down for a three-count victory.

In other words, WWE 2K15 refused to break "kayfabe," the age-old deception that the sport isn't fixed, even when some of its most successful superstars—CM Punk and "Loose Cannon" Brian Pillman, anyone?—have made names for themselves by doing just that. So what results is a game that, although somewhat distinct in its mechanics from the MMA and boxing games currently on the market, nevertheless operates on the same principle: You fight your opponent, batter him senseless, and advance in the rankings. WWE 2K16, the specifics of which remain mired in rumor and speculation, assuredly won't deviate from this time-tested approach.

You see, branded property has never broken kayfabe. All of the WWE games, which have varied widely in quality depending on which company developed them, have maintained these fictions. The WCW games, of which only the Nintendo Entertainment System's World Championship Wrestling (1990) and the Nintendo 64's WCW/nWo Revenge (1998) offered much in the way of replay value, did likewise. Even magnificent independent games like the Fire Pro Wrestling series, which offered the deepest move-sets and other character customization features, and Capcom's two installments of Saturday Night Slam Masters, arguably the most vivid and colorful in the genre, were premised on this winner-takes-all model.

But real wrestling, which is to say fake wrestling, doesn't follow this model. It is first and foremost a performance, a well-choreographed dance, between two athletic entertainers versed in the ritual moves and counter-moves that fit within various well-established frameworks: good guy versus bad guy, David versus Goliath, champion against challenger, brawler against technician, savage against blue-blood, and so forth. And second, as demonstrated by Dave Meltzer and other journalists who began reporting on backstage developments in the early 1980s, wrestling is a big business. WWE CEO Vince McMahon himself seized on these ideas in the late 1990s to remake his federation and eventually bankrupt the rival WCW, promoting himself as an unscrupulous, egomaniacal owner who sought to suppress the rising talents in his company.

Related: Ultimate Fighting

For most diehard fans, this conjunction of business and performance is where wrestling's true appeal lies. It's certainly not in the in-ring action, the actual winning and losing; McMahon himself seems determined to keep mentions of the word "wrestling" off broadcasts in lieu of his preferred term "sports entertainment," and talented wrestlers who can't speak or attract significant crowd support, such as the preternaturally gifted Cesaro, find themselves left out of the main event picture.

However, few video games have attempted to render this state of affairs with any degree of fidelity, and those that have were hamstrung by budgetary limitations and the resulting diminished production values. Developer Adam Ryland's text-based Total Extreme Wrestling series allows you to oversee all facets of a wrestling federation, but contains little in the way of graphical content and forces you to navigate numerous sub-menus as well as simulation times that, even in the game's 2013 iteration, remain nigh-interminable. His related Wrestling Spirit releases, which use the Total Extreme engine to allow you to manage the career of a single wrestler, suffer from similar limitations. Both series are deep and ambitious, but like Markus Heinsohn's extremely complex Out of the Park Baseball franchise, aren't for the weak of heart.

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Some of the wrestlers featured in 'WWE 2K15'

MDickie's Wrestling Revolution 3D for iOS and Android moves us a bit closer to the ideal. The game combines a minimalist franchise interface, which allows you to hire and interact with your wrestlers while competing against other promotions in a battle for television ratings and pay-per-view dollars. There's a lot to like here: The franchise management isn't the least bit taxing yet still contains a lot of depth, such as wrestlers who develop drug problems or exercise the creative control clauses in their contracts before make-or-break bouts. However, the actual in-game product, in which you compete against a computer opponent in the hopes of staging a five-star match (a nod to Dave Meltzer's match-rating system), plays like an early, untested version of Fire Pro Wrestling. It's clunky and repetitive, with much of the match quality derived from wrestler ratings and not the player's efforts. On top of that, though the game has a wide variety of historical wrestlers and regional promotions from which to choose, there's nothing as expansive or appealing as the "30 Years of WrestleMania" historical mode in WWE 2K14.

It seems that MDickie, having accomplished a great deal on a shoestring budget, has taken Wrestling Revolution as far as it can go. It has charted the way forward, but the next hundred or so miles will require far more time and money to traverse. Take-Two Interactive, which has incorporated incredibly sophisticated financial and player development models in its NBA 2K series (Bird rights, people! They've got Bird rights!), certainly has the wherewithal to accomplish this. But do they have the will? And, more importantly, what would such a game even look like?

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A screen from 'Wrestling Revolution 3D', via

In an ideal world, which isn't the one we live in, WWE 2K16 would fuse the NBA 2K management model with some sort of Dance Dance Revolution-type choreographic challenge. Backstage politics, online rumors, character development, and other role-playing elements would all inform the player's experience. The game would centre on the single most compelling aspect of the sport: somehow managing to become "the best" (to borrow a line from CM Punk's famous "worked shoot") even as one's ultimate fate rests in the hands of unpredictable co-workers and indifferent, bottom line-oriented executives.

The life of an itinerant wrestler, performing in spite of injuries and infidelities and outright inadequacies, might not be as enjoyable for long-time players of THQ and Take-Two wrestling games. But those games are more closely akin to WWE Immortals, a pure chop-socky fighter in the of Mortal Kombat, built around wins and losses and patterns of attacks that bear no aesthetic relationship to the activity supposedly being simulated. This alternative-world WWE 2K16 would surely have its demerits, but not being a wrestling game wouldn't be one of them.

Follow Oliver on Twitter.

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City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito. Photo via the MTA Flickr account

Between 2001 and 2013, according to an analysis by the New York Daily News, nearly 2.7 million New Yorkers were issued criminal summonses for publicly consuming alcohol, urinating in public, riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, being in a park after dark, failing to obey a park sign, littering, or making unreasonable noise. Hundreds of thousands of them had to appear in court for these seven minor offenses, waiting on a line that can stretch the length of a city block just to stand in front of a judge, plead guilty, and pay a fine. Yes, your honor, I pissed outside.

But if City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito has her way, this dreary, daily routine of the New York criminal justice system may be a thing of the past. On Monday, the Daily News and other local outlets reported her office is busy scripting a proposal that would decriminalize those seven offenses, which according to the News, have made up roughly 42 percent of all summonses issued between 2001 and 2013. A City Council spokesperson said the category of offenses would essentially shift from criminal to civil—an idea put forward in the Speaker's State of the City address in February.

People who are caught drinking outside or pissing in an inappropriate place are currently allowed to mail in a guilty plea and a fine, but under Mark-Viverito's plan, you'll also be able to pay fines for five other minor offenses that way. Also, failure to pay won't result in a warrant being issued for your arrest; rather, you'd be hit with a default monetary judgment. That's a big deal, given that there are reportedly 510,000 open arrest warrants related to these crimes. (Jumping a subway turnstile, which the Council Speaker spokesperson said the office is also looking into, led to over 25,000 arrests last year, making it one of the city's leading causes of jail time.)

The Speaker's proposal caps off what has been a week's worth of reform news from New York, as Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced that he is seeking a citywide summons reform package too. But while his proposal is focused on fixing what happens inside the courthouse—the way you're notified of your court date, how long it takes to resolve a case, etc.—the Speaker's proposal goes beyond that by seeking to cut down on the number of arrests, which disproportionately affect minorities.

"The repercussions are severe," Mark-Viverito wrote in an op-ed for VICE News last month. "A criminal record often amounts to an almost insurmountable barrier to full participation in society, making it far more difficult to find a job or rent an apartment. Committing a low-level offense should not mark you for the rest of your life, but all too often that is the case."

Related: Watch our documentary on our prison correspondent's efforts to rehabilitate himself:

The Speaker's proposal is a direct challenge the controversial theory of " broken windows," which holds that prosecuting these minor offenses prevents more serious forms of crime.

It's worth noting that despite de Blasio's appointment of Bill Bratton, a leading proponent of broken windows, as police commissioner, in the mayor's first year in office summonses dropped from 8,468 to 5,709, according to a review of NYPD data by Capital. So far this year, 67,144 summonses have been handed out—a 29 percent drop compared to this same time in 2014, and half of what it was five years ago.

But more important than the raw numbers is the racial disparity in who gets nabbed by the police—according to the Daily News, 81 percent of the people who were given tickets for violations between 2001 and 2013 were black and Hispanic men. In 2014, the cops continued to disproportionately arrest people of color, upsetting many of de Blasio's progressive supporters.

It's unlikely that Bratton will support Mark-Viverito's proposal. At a City Council hearing in March, the Commissioner made his position clear. "I'm not supportive of the idea of civil summonses for these offenses because I think that they'd be basically totally ignored, that they don't have any bite to them, if you will," he said then. With civil offenses, New Yorkers would still be penalized, but they wouldn't be required to show an ID to officers.

Limiting the cops' power is precisely the point for activists like Alyssa Aguilera of criminal justice reform group VOCAL-NY. "If you follow any New Yorker throughout the day, you can bust them for so many crimes. Jaywalking, spitting, walking through a park at night," Aguilera told me. "These are offenses that pose no safety threat whatsoever, yet are devastating for people's lives and family."

"We are involving the police in behavior that, yes, people may find annoying," she continued. "But do we really need to go through the criminal justice system for this?"

I have reached out to the mayor's and the NYPD for this story, but have yet to hear back. An administration spokesperson told the Daily News that the "the Speaker's proposal is under review in consultation with the NYPD." An NYPD spokesperson said that the Department is in "ongoing negotiations" with the City Council.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

Over the years, Native American tribes have used their sovereign status to provide some of America's most beloved vices—cigarettes, fireworks and gambling—free from the pernicious taxes and regulations of the federal government. Now some tribes are wondering if legal marijuana could be their next big business venture.

In December, the Justice Department released a memo giving Native American tribes the green light to grow and sell marijuana on their lands, provided they follow the same conditions the department has placed on states where weed is now legal. The memo sparked interest among some of the 556 Indian tribes recognized by the US government, and several are now exploring the possibility of allowing marijuana businesses to operate on their lands.

"A lot of the tribes are in the discovery phase right now," said Allyson Doctor, one of the founders of the National Indian Cannabis Coalition. "There's been a lot of conferences and marijuana has been a subject that's come up at every one."

The coalition, the first marijuana trade group focused on tribal lands, launched in March at the Reservation Economic Summit in Nevada, which included a standing-room only discussion on the potential marijuana market. "We recognized that there was no one in Indian Country that had stepped into this arena," Doctor said. "It was a space that hadn't been filled. My husband and I are both Native. We already had some experience in the industry, and we recognized there needed to be good information out there."

For now, everything is still very much in the exploratory phase—how the regulatory mechanisms would work between tribes and the states surrounding them, especially on reservations that straddle more than one state, is uncharted territory—but tribes and the marijuana industry see big potential benefits from a mutual partnership.

In February, roughly 200 tribal leaders gathered at the National Congress of American Indians, which included a closed-to-the-press panel discussion with Justice Department officials on marijuana legalization, according the Associated Press. And earlier this year, the Pinoleville Pomo Nation in northern California inked a contract with Foxbarry Farms, a management firm, to build the first marijuana cultivation center on tribal lands. FoxBarry CEO Barry Brautman toldThe Huffington Post that more than 100 other tribes have contacted his firm, expressing interest in similar deals.

Partnering with established outside firms may be attractive for tribes as they look to enter the new industry. And for businesses, tribal land is alluring for several reasons. "It's very difficult to find space in California to cultivate outdoor or indoor," Derek Peterson, the CEO of the TerraTech, a company that builds and runs medical marijuana dispensaries, cultivation and production facilities, said in an interview with VICE. "You have to deal with safety, landlords, and any number of other problems."

Leslie Bocskor, a co-founder of Electrum Partners, a consulting firm that advises marijuana businesses, said in an interview with VICE that marijuana businesses on tribal land could also potentially escape the steep tax rates levied on the industry by the federal government. Because of IRS rules enacted in the 1980s, which prohibit legal weed purveyors from deducting regular business expenses, some marijuana companies have claimed that they face tax rates as high as 70 percent on their profits.

Tribes, on the other hand, pay no federal income tax. "If you can get around that tax rate, that's a hell of a margin from a business perspective," Bocskor said. He added that there's also a potential opportunity for tribes to legally import marijuana seeds and act as quality assurance. "When you go buy a bottle of Malbec from the supermarket, you never doubt the grape used for that wine. But nobody is guaranteeing quality in the marijuana industry yet."

Finally, the Justice Department's current stance on marijuana is by no means assured to remain in place when a new administration takes over in 2017. Marijuana businesses on tribal lands might be better positioned to weather changes in political winds than those in states where marijuana has been legalized, Peterson said, due to federal reluctance over interfering with tribal sovereignty.

"We don't know how that will shake out," Peterson said. "We think Pandora's box has mostly been opened and can't be closed, but you can't be sure."

Still, many tribes are wary of the social and environmental costs of opening their lands to marijuana, especially considering the substance abuse problems many reservations already face. According to a 2009 survey, Native American youth have higher rates of illicit drug use than any other ethnic group in the U.S—18 percent compared to 9.6 percent for blacks, 8.8 percent for whites, and 7.9 percent for Latinos.

In Washington, the Yakama Nation banned marijuana on its reservation and has sought to block hundreds of applications for pot businesses on 12 million acres of land where it holds hunting and fishing rights. "Citizens of the state of Washington don't get to vote on what happens" on those lands, Yakima tribe attorney George Colby told TIME last year. "The federal government wasn't supposed to let alcohol come on the Yakama reservation, and thousands of people have died. We're not going to let that happen again."

The Hoopa Valley Tribe in California is also fighting illegal marijuana grows on its reservation. The tribe will vote sometime this month on whether to repeal its ban on marijuana. A 2012 news investigation of substance abuse on the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation found that "meth abuse rates have reached 30 percent on some rural Indian reservations, and in some Indian communities as many as 65 percent of all documented cases involving child neglect and placement of children in foster care can be traced back to parental involvement with methamphetamine."

But tribes, especially larger ones, are not monolithic. Although the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council in South Dakota rejected a proposal last year to allow marijuana on its lands, the Wounded Knee district of the Oglala Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation passed a motion last Wednesday to legalize the sale of medical and recreational marijuana.

Whether it's possible to untangle the legal knot of running a marijuana business on sovereign tribal land—and whether tribes will go for it—remains unclear. But the revenue potential has piqued interest.

Jeff Doctor, of the National Indian Cannabis Coalition, compared the potential to that of Indian gaming, which started as humble bingo halls in the '70s and over the next three decades slowly flourished into large casino operations.

"It could be a very big opportunity if its done properly," Doctor said in an interview with VICE. "It almost coincides with what's happened with Indian gaming over the years. It's something that cannot be rushed into. There's a lot to consider."

Follow CJ Ciaramella on Twitter.

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Brighton Beach this morning. Image: Amnesty International.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Today, on Brighton Beach in the United Kingdom, 200 hundred body bags lay across the pebbles, representing the corpses of the thousands who drowned in the Mediterranean this year. It was a stunt, by Amnesty International, to draw attention to the Don't Let Them Drown campaign. The bags, filled with local Amnesty volunteers, balloons, and pebbles, slowly roasted under the hot glare of the sun and, of course, the international press. The stunt was the perfect embodiment of what Amnesty International does best—they use the powerful tools of art, advertising, and theater to wrench our attention towards the gross injustices facing disempowered people across the globe.

By contrast, today, on the Southbank of the Thames, a giant edible gingerbread house was erected beside the river to advertise the multimedia experience Shrek's Adventures. Both pictures popped up on my Twitter feed within minutes. Never before has an image so visceral, so striking, so likely to make your stomach drop into your shoes, been followed by something so crass.

But that is the media landscape in which modern charities must operate; and it is a landscape Amnesty understands only too well. From sending a woman in a clear plastic suitcase around the baggage carousel of Munich Airport to protest against human trafficking to staging an impromptu display of Swan Lake outside the Russian Embassy during the Sochi Winter Olympics, Amnesty understand the power of an image to stop, to shock, and to make us want to act.

And they're not the only ones, of course. Greenpeace marched a three-ton polar bear through central London to highlight the threat posed by climate change; The Eclectic Electric Collective's Floating Cobblestones turned street riots into an absurdist party game between police and protestors; Pussy Riot used a balaclava-clad gig in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior to draw international attention to Russia's crackdown on dissent. In each case, the aesthetic, approach, and creativity of visual art was used to communicate a political message.

For more on immigration, watch our doc 'Walking into Europe':

"We have a lot of people who really understand the issues we're dealing with and how to communicate those most simply and clearly," says Amnesty's Press and PR Officer Naomi Westland. "Not with legal jargon or academic jargon—through words and pictures." The process, according to Westland, is to think what kind of images get conjured in the minds of the public when confronted with an issue like the torture of prisoners, migrants drowning out at sea, or adulterers getting stoned to death. Amnesty then take those images and translate them into a stunt, a poster, a campaign video, to force us into facing the very situations that makes us most uneasy; that we'd prefer to ignore.

"When you get a disaster on this scale—two massive shipwrecks and over 1,000 people having drowned in just one week—it cannot be ignored," says Westland. "It's imperative that the media step up and realize their capability to hold leaders to account on things like this. There's an emergency meeting of EU leaders tomorrow and we must demand that David Cameron goes into that meeting committed to a wide-ranging search and rescue operation in the Mediterranean. Because it will save lives."

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Image: Amnesty International

Last year, Italy ended its search and rescue operation in the Mediterranean, replacing it with a border control operation that, by its very nature, does not extend into the international waters where many of these shipwrecks happen. As a result, 50 times as many people have died since the beginning of 2015, compared to the same period last year. According to Amnesty, the situation is likely to only worsen as the violence in Libya (where many of the fleeing Syrians who have drowned are trying to reach) continues. If the sight of 200 body bags roasting on one of our own beaches shocks people into taking action on the issue, by signing the Amnesty petition for instance, then the stunt will have done its job.

"You never know if a stunt of this kind is going to make it in the media," says Westland. "Journalists may have to cover other stories. But with social media, those pictures can be spread incredibly widely. It's really powerful when you see one of these images and it really works."

This one does work. The hot, claustrophobic horror of the body bags and the shocking realization that people are dying just beyond our own horizon will fill all but the most fascistic viewer with a mix of guilt, unease, and a desire to do something. It made me feel sick.

"I just hope that in this it translates into a good result at this EU leaders' meeting tomorrow," adds Westland, finally. "Otherwise we're going to hear more and more stories of people drowning out at sea."

Follow Nell on Twitter.

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Artwork from the European NES release of 'Super Mario Bros.'

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The use of the damsel in distress trope in video games has been much maligned for portraying women as merely the kindling that make the glory of manhood burn bright. Imaginary men have been rescuing make-believe princesses from evil kings and dragons since the age of mythology, when Perseus put the kibosh on a sea monster.

But why are men so endlessly enamored with saving the girl and slaying the beast? You can explain it as a power fantasy, but why use this particular formula to play it out? Since the parable of boyish hero, kidnapped damsel, and evil tyrant originates from folklore and fairy tales, that's a good place to start asking questions.

From a psychoanalytical point of view, the fairy tales featuring the triad of hero-damsel-villain are essentially Oedipal in nature. Meaning, in Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, respectively, Peach and Zelda are symbolic mothers to the male protagonist heroes of Mario and Link, with tyrant kings Bowser and Gannon standing in as fathers who repeatedly attempt to take the mother's affection away from the hero. As the late Freudian psychologist Bruno Bettelheim put it in his book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales: "Oedipal fantasies of glory are given body in tales where heroes slay dragons and rescue maidens."

University of California professor Allen Johnson, a man who holds one PhD in psychoanalysis and another one in anthropology, studied hundreds of folk stories around the world for his book Oedipus Ubiquitous: The Family Complex in World Folk Literature. I speak to him over the phone, and he tells me: "When you are looking at a story or a mythical thing, like a computer game, they are trying to tap into some of these mythical tropes, these mythical key stories that show up again and again around the world."

Johnson says that while in the West the Oedipal story is usually told symbolically, he found that in "forager and marginal" societies around the world it often plays out plainly and literally, with no resorting to subtext. "[The hero] gets his mother," Johnson says, "and the mother is really happy about it and they have great sex."

More technologically advanced societies tend to hide the uncomfortable seed of the story, according to this line of thinking, but there's still enough there for the unconscious to intuit, and that's what gets its hook into males, even very young boys for whom the sexual element isn't a factor.

"The boy will say, 'I want to marry mommy,' and everybody laughs, but the feelings, in this theory, don't go away." –Allen Johnson

"You could say it's not sexual [at that stage], and I'd buy that," Johnson tells me. "It's too primitive, too early to be sexual. But if you're a boy, you want the mother all to yourself when you're about three or four years old. The boy will say, 'I want to marry mommy,' and everybody laughs. And then he grows up and he doesn't marry mommy, but the feelings, in this theory, don't go away. We grow up and the feelings stay in some place inside of us."

When we get to a certain age, Johnson explains, the idea of your father hugging and kissing your mother becomes alarming. That's when the urge to destroy Bowser or Gannon might come into the picture. "When we play a game in which some of these situations are symbolically created, we can have some of those old feelings safely. We can have those feelings and just get very excited about the game: 'Hey, I won!'"

For more on gender, watch our doc 'The Women of the Men's Rights Movement':

I tell Johnson that the damsel in distress trope has come under substantial fire in gaming culture for its depiction of women. "We may be reinforcing images of femininity that emphasize their vulnerability," he says, "and how they need strong men to protect them, and those kinds of things are open to criticism, I think."

One of the last things Johnson tells me is that, indeed, "Oedipus is ubiquitous"—a comment in stark contrast to what Dr. Jack Zipes, who's written extensively on fairy tales and folklore and someone I also contacted to discuss the Oedipus complex, tells me.

"There is no scientific evidence that there's any type of complex like that," he tells me, frankly. "We cannot prove anything that's extremely gender-specific. It's a question of nurture and nature. That's why the Oedipus complex for me, and other things that Freud wrote, about hysteria and so on, has turned out to be very questionable."

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Artwork from the NES release of 'The Legend of Zelda.'

But then, what is our reason for compulsively repeating the damsel in distress stories? Zipes says that, first of all, folklorists don't use the "damsel in distress" term. To them, it's the story of the Persecuted Heroine, a "tale type," he explains. He then surprises me with a darker reasoning as to why humanity seems obsessed with repeating these stories of kidnapped, persecuted women:

"Unfortunately, it's because for thousands of years men have been raping and violating women, who are weaker biologically than men, and they take advantage of women in all sorts of dastardly ways. You can use the term Oedipus complex or Electra complex, but the fact is that we humans have brutal sides to ourselves. We do all sorts of things to one another. And to try to categorize these drives that we have, that are based on desire and lust, all of us, seems to me limiting. All the Jungian categories of archetypes are totally ridiculous, and do not apply to the particular instances that human beings experience in their lives. You can impose, if you want, psychoanalytical theory or Jungian theory on fairy tales but it doesn't shed light really on what these stories are about."

Zipes goes into further detail, about our inhumane past: "When cavemen went raiding, and found women somewhere, they raped them. They violated them. They killed them for food, who knows? Women have to do all sorts of things to protect themselves from their families, within their families and also outside their families. And young boys, too, have to protect themselves from being exploited by their parents."

"We continue to develop notions about sex that put women at a certain disadvantage." –Jack Zipes

Zipes has never actually played Super Mario Bros., so I explain that there was essentially no story to the game other than a princess getting kidnapped by a monster, and a hero that needed to save her. Was there a rape subtext in this tale type?

"Definitely," he says, before naming several other fairy tales with rape subtexts, such as Little Red Riding Hood. "We have not, in our civilizing periods, managed to deal with the unfair way we treat weaker people, in particular women, and we continue to develop notions about sex that put women at a certain disadvantage. As long as we have this problem we're going to have all types of versions and variants of this same type of tale."

These games are traditionally aimed at boys, so what about the heroes such as Mario or Link, who set out to save the damsel? How do they fit into this perspective?

"We still live in a patriarchal society," Zipes says. "We control the film industry—'we' being, basically, white males, at least in America and other places like Europe. We dominate in businesses, corporations, cultural views, and so on, and we want to see ourselves as heroes, as saving, as protective, and we want to also posit ourselves in a very positive way. We want to demonstrate that there's something good about us, and that we will defend our women, who 'can't defend themselves,' and we want to save our countries. So you get these dashing heroes who are able to do these amazing things."

Perhaps there are uncomfortable psychological elements to these tales from classic video games that relate to the unconscious mind of, at least, young, straight men. And maybe these quintessential stories, evolved from fairy tales and myths and repeatedly depicted in games, tell of the historical sexual evils of men that echo back to prehistory.

Either way, there might be more than just fetch quests and boss battles for you to ponder the next time you raise your Master Sword on your way to murder a king.

Follow Jagger on Twitter.

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Geoff White (left) and Glenn Wilkinson (right). Photo by James Snell.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Most of us don't think twice when we connect to a WiFi network or download a new app. I didn't. I trusted, to some extent, that the relationship between me and my phone was exclusive.

Turns out my phone was lying to me. My data, my network, my searches—they weren't just between the phone and me but instead between me and several thousand companies I've never heard of in countries I've never been to.

To help people understand what's really going on with their smartphones, tech journalist Geoff White and ethical hacker Glenn Wilkinson have teamed up to create The Secret Life of Your Mobile Phone —a one-hour performance on interception technologies. I met up with Geoff and Glenn to find out what my phone has been playing at.

VICE: Tell me about what happens in The Secret Life of Your Mobile Phone.
Geoff White: Effectively, we take an audience of people and, with their authorization, we hack their phones. Glenn's software tricks the phones into connecting to our network. We then start seeing all the information that's flowing off those phones. We stick it up on a screen, then we start pulling it apart.

Which companies are you sending information to? Here's a list. Where are they in the world? Here's a map. What's actually in those packages of information? And so on. It's basically showing people the places their phones are communicating with in real time.

What kind of software do you use?
Glenn Wilkinson: "Snoopy" runs on any Linux type computer—my laptop or my phone, for example—and it passively listens for WiFi signals.

Basically, we have two levels of interaction with the software. One is passive, where it just listens and your device has no idea that it's listening to you. That gives us two bits of information: the WiFi network you're looking for and also a unique serial number for your device that's called a MAC address. And then by looking at the names of the networks, I can figure out certain information about the individual. So it kind of puts you into an immediate demographic.

That's all fairly passive, but the final bit is really interesting. It's possible sometimes to geo-locate the names and networks you're looking for. So if your device is looking for something fairly unique, like a BT Home Hub, we've got a method using this database from a website called wigle.net to figure out where you've previously been and whether you're a high roller or a low roller.

Geoff: And that's basically listening to what the phone is willingly giving out. Phones are programmed to give out all sorts of information. Listening out for that and receiving it is perfectly legal.

"Phones are programmed to give out all sorts of information. Listening out for that and receiving it is perfectly legal."

Is it really?
Geoff: Passively listening is one thing. If you then start taking those signals and effectively tricking the phone into connecting to what it thinks is a friendly network then you're intercepting traffic. And if you don't do that with the authorization of the person who owns the phone, you've broken the law. So in the show, we tell people specifically what we've done, how it works, and then we check that they're OK with it.

How did "Snoopy" lead to you both creating and developing the show?
Geoff: At the time I was working on a project for Channel 4 News which was all about how personal data is used and manipulated, and I saw this software and I thought it was fantastic; you could do so much with it.

We went to Latitude music festival and wanted to do a demo of the kind of stuff we'd been working on and people were just fascinated by it. The penny dropped—I thought we could not only do this to people's phones, we could do it live, and we could actually start answering some of the questions about where this data is going and how it's being used. And that's when we set up The Secret Life of Your Mobile Phone.

For more on advertising, watch our doc "The Real 'Mad Men'?":

Who actually collects all this information and what do they do with it?
Geoff: The great thing about WiFi is that it's an open technology. Anyone can set up a WiFi network, anyone can connect. But what that means is that lots of people, without any special kind of authority, can start hoovering up signals.

This technology is already being used in the real world. Shopping centers use it, city councils use it. But all this information flies off from your phone all around the world. So you're not just communicating with Facebook or Google, your information is going off to advertising companies you haven't heard of and in countries that you never knew you were communicating with.

When you use the internet via your phone, as many companies as possible are trying to harness bits of your information. They want to know which websites you visited, how long you stayed, whether you bought anything. They're basically trying to build up a picture of you so that they can better serve you with advertising. So you start to get this situation where people are being sectioned off and categorized without their knowledge.

"You're not just communicating with Facebook or Google, your information is going off to advertising companies you haven't heard of and in countries that you never knew you were communicating with."

Some of the figures from the Channel 4 News project you mention are pretty mind blowing—over a 24-hour period it sent out more than 144,000 packets of information which flowed to and from over 315 computer servers around the world. Does this mean that our phones can be exploited even when idle?
Glenn: Yeah, absolutely. The first example I can think of is the smart dustbins around London. It turned out there was a WiFi device inside each dustbin that was doing exactly what "Snoopy" does—detects which WiFi networks you're looking for, identifies you uniquely, and figures out what advert to display for you. Depending on your point of view, that's not as invasive as other possibilities, but I think those were shut down after a public outcry.

The more invasive stuff? The company I work at is an information security company, which boils down to hackers for hire. Companies pay us to look for weaknesses in their systems and we actively use these techniques in our engagements. So if a bank says, "Please come break into us so we know what our weaknesses are," this type of attack is one of the first ones we do because it's really easy. I don't even need to go through the front door.

Geoff: If you look at the way these kinds of technologies shape up, they're quite expensive and difficult at first. Not a lot of people understand them. But as the technology gets easier to use, it starts to get down to the cybercrime level. You get this trickle-down effect. And in the end you have almost a 'plug and play' situation where you can, with very little skill, download this stuff and get cracking.

Practically, what can we do about the fact that our smartphones are essentially tracking our behavior? Like, what button can we press?
Geoff: The off button!

Glenn: I think there are two or three places on the planet where there's zero electromagnetic or radio frequencies. Somewhere deep in the Amazon is one spot where there's no cell, no satellite, no coverage at all. But in general there are practical things you can do. For example, be vigilant of which networks you connect to and understand that once you've connected to a network, your phone will remember that network and keep shouting its name out. It's a good idea occasionally to just flush all of them.

Possibly the biggest piece of advice for deterring local attackers is to use a VPN, which allows you to make a connection from your phone to some secure server, maybe in a different country. And there are lots of apps that allow you to filter cookies and block adverts and that kind of thing.

The overarching problem we've found is that it always boils down to convenience versus security. And most people, myself included oftentimes, would rather have convenience. So I can flush all the networks and I can use a VPN and I can put on my tin foil hat and be super safe, but that's a lot of effort.

"The overarching problem is that it always boils down to convenience versus security. And most people would rather have convenience."

So what's more important—convenience or security?
Geoff: Here's the question—if you could be guaranteed that you were never going to be mugged again, but in order to do that you'd have to wear a head cam that was filming you at all times, would you do it?

I wouldn't.
Glenn: Me neither.

Geoff: But this is the basis on which a lot of technology is being rolled out. It makes you more secure, it's more convenient, and it will give you better advertising. Personally, I think taking your own security into your own hands is a better solution than that. So doing the things Glenn says and trying to put up some walls between some of these services.

It's not easy or comfortable or fun to be told this, but you're getting a great deal. Fundamentally, we have access now to technology that's just way more advanced than anything we could have even comprehended 15 years ago. That's great, it's amazing, but the cost of that is you have to take responsibility for it.

If you want any functionality beyond texts and calls, you sign up for the whole deal; for every bit of information being gathered from you. And the terms and conditions are astonishingly wide. And nobody reads them.

The present is already feeling kind of dystopian. What do you think the future holds in terms of data collection and tracking?
Glenn: The thing is, we're very early in this technological revolution, and it's happening at such an accelerated pace that the technology's gone far faster than the human capacity to understand where we are or why we're going there. But I hope we get to a point in the future where we realign our values and understand that this kind of tracking and advertising is maybe a bad idea.

I'd like to see a different revenue model where we don't need advertising at all. Maybe I'm on kind of an extreme, but I just don't like advertising and I would be much happier if I could pay in some other way—like financially. I use Spotify for example and I'm very happy to pay every month and have no adverts.

"I hope we get to a point in the future where we realign our values and understand that this kind of tracking and advertising is maybe a bad idea."

It sounds strange to say, "I'll pay you not to track me."
Glenn: Yeah, it does. I guess it comes down to how the companies want to make money. At the moment people don't really care. Occasionally you have big revelations like Snowden-type stuff where people get all angry, but usually that wains to some degree.

What do you hope your audience will take away from The Secret Life Of Your Mobile Phone?
Geoff: I hope they'll go home understanding a lot more about their phones and how they work and what they do. It's easy for people to hold their hands up and go, "Oh, I'll never understand it." And that worries me because there's a lot going on in the background that we should be aware of and that we can do something about. That "let's not bother" response is exactly what the technology companies are trading off. So I hope people make just a few more clued up decisions each day.

Glenn: And hopefully they'll go away feeling a bit more curious. If you have a greater understanding of how things work, it's easier to question them. We want people to sit up and say, "Hey, that's not OK, I want to have a choice in this matter."

Follow Rose on Twitter.

Geoff White is a Channel 4 News technology journalist. Follow him @geoffwhite247

Glenn Wilkinson is a senior security analyst at SensePost. Follow him @glennzw

The next performance of the The Secret Life of Your Mobile Phone is on April 22 at Cybersalon in London.

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These RCMP officers may not look scary in their red uniforms, but those horses are powerful. Photo via Flickr user Jamie McCaffrey

There's $293 million in new money for Canada's cops and spies to tackle terrorism. $12 million for the oversight committee keeping tabs on their investigations.

That's a big take-away from Tuesday's federal budget, as the Harper government prepares to usher in a golden age of Canada's intelligence services.

The Conservatives' final budget before the fall election, an otherwise austere exercise in showing off the freshly-balanced books, commits more than $2 billion in security and defence spending.

The ballooning offensive and defensive spending is thanks in large part to the military mission against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and new counter-terrorism measures being taken here at home.

One of the biggest pots of money is split between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), and the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA). Those three departments will have their mandates and missions broadly expanded by the Conservatives' new anti-terrorism legislation, C-51, which is expected to be passed into law within a month.

The legislation will give CSIS new powers to disrupt threats worldwide, the RCMP more authority to detain suspects and go after online propaganda, and the CBSA more powers to search and investigate people and packages at the border.

The three agencies will be receiving the $293 million in new cash over the next five years. That's an increase of $18 million this year, with the funding jumping to $44 million the year after, and steadily rising to $92 million by 2020.

All-in-all, the new money will mean about a roughly two percent increase in the combined budget of all three agencies by 2020.

While the budget offers no indication as to just how that money will be split, it's quite likely the money will mostly be directed at CSIS, who will be facing the largest growing pains because of C-51. Their budget for the 2015-2016 fiscal year stood at just shy of $540 million.

The budget carries some good news for those security and intelligence experts who have criticized the Harper government for affording huge new powers to Canada's intelligence services without introducing any corresponding oversight or review.

The under-staffed and under-funded review bodies that currently exist—the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC) for CSIS and the Commissioner for the signals intelligence agency, the Communications and Security Establishment (CSE)—have been asking for more money and authority from Ottawa.

They may not be getting any new powers—they still, for example, have no power to subpoena CSIS for information—but one of them is getting new money.

This budget will be nearly doubling SIRC's current budget—a paltry $2.8 million—within a year. That funding increase will be frozen over four years.

While doubling their cash flow might seem like a huge jump, worth considering that SIRC's transfers from the federal government have actually gone down in recent years. In 2012, they received $2.9 million.

Conspicuously missing from the budget, however, is any mention of CSE.

The budget does commit $58 million to "enhancing the security of Government of Canada networks and cyber systems."

That money will almost certainly go into the coffers of CSE. While the agency is most known for its implication in NSA mass-spying regimes unveiled by Edward Snowden, it also manages Canada's cyber-defence positions and secures some aspects of Canadian technology infrastructure.

No new money was included for the CSE commissioner, nor any indication that the CBSA would be getting any kind of oversight body (they currently have none) nor was any money committed for the commissioners for privacy or information.

No new money was kicked in for privacy protections whatsoever. What was included, however, was a commitment that privacy protections would begin to apply to "organizations such as the World Anti-Doping Agency, an international, independent organization headquartered in Montreal."

An entire subhead—"Protecting the Privacy of Personal Information"—and two paragraphs, are dedicated to the groundbreaking decision to apply the federal government's privacy regulations to the steroid-fighting organization.

Security spending will be upped for security around Parliament Hill, inside court rooms, and on military bases as an obvious response to October's terrorist attacks. All together, that's worth about $44 million over five years.

But one of the biggest chunks of Tuesday's new spending is going towards the Canadian Forces. The budget contains $360 million in previously-announced money to pay for the expanded mission against the Islamic State, and another $7 million for the Canadian training mission for Ukrainian soldiers.

With an eye to the likelihood that the scraps in Ukraine and the Middle East won't be the only ones the Canadian military gets into in the near future, the Harper government is also hiking defence spending over the next five years.

The rate at which Canadian defence spending increases will be hiked a full percentage point in 2017, meaning there'll be about $11 billion added to the defence budget over a decade.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

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Incoming police chief Mark Saunders. Photo via Toronto Police

When Toronto's police services board formally announced Mark Saunders, a deputy police chief and 32-year veteran of the force, as the city's new chief on Monday, police association leader Mike McCormack hailed him as a "cop's cop." News networks and commentators dutifully parroted this description of Saunders—it served as a useful catchphrase for a man without a large media or community profile.

The message behind McCormack's "cop's cop" moniker is clear; he means that Saunders relates with rank-and-file officers and, more importantly, that he will be loyal to them and to the dominant policing culture in Toronto. Given how thoroughly our police have eroded public trust in recent years through their aggressive tactics, secretive decision-making, and resistance to civilian oversight, a cop's cop may well be the last thing Toronto needs now.

The trajectory of outgoing chief Bill Blair's career is helpful in understanding a chief's relationship with his force. A decade ago, Blair took over as top cop with an ambitious agenda, including a pledge to address racial bias among his officers. "The only way to fight the problem of racism in our service is by addressing it as part of the organizational culture," Blair said in 2005.

Blair, a highly educated veteran who started his career as a beat cop, spoke back then of his appreciation for urban writer and activist Jane Jacobs. He promised not to ask the police board for more money until he had conducted a spending review. Blair specifically rejected the idea that racism within his force was the result of a few bad apples. No one would have mistaken him for a "cop's cop"—a Globe and Mail reporter described then-police association head Dave Wilson as "cautiously optimistic" about Blair's appointment.

In the ensuing years, Blair and Wilson clashed frequently. Blair punished officers who staged a protest while wearing their weapons and uniforms, a move Wilson defended. The chief also came to power with a promise to make name tags mandatory for all officers. Although Blair eventually softened his position, the civilian board followed his lead and implemented the tags. When Wilson resigned in 2009, his successor McCormack was asked about Blair and replied bluntly, "I have questions about the police leadership."

Although bad blood between the police union and the chief may not seem ideal, it can be necessary when police resist public demands for reform and accountability. But Blair, who might rightly have been hailed as the "people's cop" in his early years, seemed to lose his edge as time wore on. The police brutality and misconduct now synonymous with Toronto's G20 summit in 2010 marked a turning point in Blair's reformist and stolid style.

When at least 90 local officers removed their name tags while on duty during the G20 protests, Blair's response was a token gesture of one day's loss of pay. Blair repeatedly cited the "criminal intent" of protesters—over a thousand of whom were arrested during the weekend and then released without charges—as the reason his officers used unprecedented force and brutal tactics against the public. He said nothing of the criminal intent of officers, who hid their identities in a climate where police were beating, tear-gassing, and arresting peaceful demonstrators.

When police faced criticism over their rampant use of strip searches—Toronto cops strip-searched a third of all the people they arrested in 2013—Blair countered that in 43 percent of cases, police found objects that could harm police or be used to escape police custody. A Toronto Star editorial noted that "[a]ccording to police, those objects included marijuana, cocaine, chains, belts, earrings, lighters, watches, hair ties, money and lip balm," and wondered why Blair would defend strip searches to find items that a less invasive pat down could uncover.

As Blair's public reputation deteriorated, his collaboration with McCormack and the police association seemed to increase. When the board recently received a damning report describing residents' outrage at "carding"—the dubious practice of stopping and documenting civilians who are not suspected of a crime—Blair stormed out of the meeting to address the media. McCormack conveniently appeared in the corridors of police headquarters to back up Blair, and to cast doubt on a report that confirmed police have been disproportionately carding residents with black and brown skin.

Blair may not have started out as a cop's cop, but he became one over time. As he has paid more heed to McCormack and the association, public confidence in him and in his force has increasingly been called into question. McCormack's comments about the incoming Saunders should serve as a warning that the chief designate is as susceptible to union pressure as Blair was. In order to restore the trust Blair and the force have lost, Saunders must demonstrate his loyalty not to his officers, but to the public he serves.

Follow Desmond Cole on Twitter.

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Janet Keeping. Photo via Facebook

The teen with the polished white Ford truck in the driveway—although that describes nearly every home in this monoculture affectionately dubbed a "suburb"—takes the brochure without a word.

"My name is Janet, Janet Keeping, and I'm the Green Party candidate in this riding for the provincial election," says the 65-year-old party leader while passing the material to the bro-ish teen. "Are you a voter?"

"No," the constituent replies. Keeping promptly asks: "Is that because you're not old enough? I'm just curious."

The kid says he just chooses not to vote (close to two thirds of the riding's eligible voters also abstained in the last by-election). Keeping asks if there's anything she can do to convince him otherwise, to which he retorts, "No, it's fine, thank you," and swiftly shuts the door to go play Battlefield or whatever.

A few doors down, a blond youngster in Superman pyjamas standing behind a fence demands to know, "Why are you coming here?" as we walk up his driveway, sprinting from the backyard to his mother's side to resume his rapid interrogation: "Who are these strange people?" he continues rhetorically.

This kid is the most engaged person we meet in Calgary all day.

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Janet Keeping campaigning in Calgary. Photo via Alberta Green Party.

I've been skeptical of democracy for a long time and not just in the regular "politics is run by billionaires" sense.

There's the larger, unresolved issue of how voters (myself included) are meant to amalgamate all the pressing societal issues—emissions regulations, health care governance, long-term care facilities, and taxation frameworks, to name just a few—into a singular vote. Such talk makes one sound like a fascist. An elitist, at the very least. I'd prefer to think I'm neither of those things.

So for some inspiration, I went door-knocking on a Sunday afternoon with Keeping, who's running to be the Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) for Calgary-Foothills, the very conservative suburban riding for which Jim Prentice—leader of the Progressive Conservative Party and premier of the province up until he called a $23.5-million election 300 days before it was required—is also vying.

The two of us wander up and down Edgemont, a well-off suburb in the city's northwest. Keeping's an absurdly qualified candidate: she boasts a background as the former president of a prominent ethics think-tank and a research associate at a resource law organization, and holds degrees in law, philosophy, and architecture.

But that means little in this riding. Not because people dislike the thoughtful policies forwarded by the Green Party. I could get over that. Hell, I'd welcome a rabid neo-conservative getting into a spat with Keeping about the party's propositions to raise corporate taxes by one-half (from ten percent to 15) or placing a moratorium on future investments into the tar sands until stringent environmental regulations are implemented.

Instead, constituents who crack open their doors accept party brochures without asking any questions. Two agree to lawn signs, with one stating: "That's fine, I don't care." Others simply say "anything but conservatives" without explaining what that means on a policy front. One dude tells us that Keeping has won his vote because she was the first politician to offer literature.

There's a staggering number of pressing issues in this province: cuts to healthcare and education, public-sector wage freezes, a lack of action on renewable energy, sketchy nomination processes, and bribery in elections. Little of this seems to register. Blank stares abound, save for the Superman kid. It kind of makes sense. Legislation is indisputably boring. The idea that someone who works a full-time job, has kids, and needs to catch up on Game of Thrones would take hours to analyze dense party platforms is totally ludicrous.

But unfortunately, that's what this entire electoral system is predicated on.

The last time Keeping ran for MLA, she scored 198 votes, or just over one percent of the vote. She certainly doesn't expect to win this time. But she takes democracy "very seriously," at one point ignoring a "no fliers or papers" sign in order to place a pamphlet because "we're doing democracy work, you can't opt out." It's an admirable approach. Her ideas should certainly contend in the "marketplace of ideas," and probably have a shot at winning. But since the election was called far before it was expected, the Greens didn't have time to get their resources and personnel together.

As I ride the bus down the hill, passing the spot where I may have assisted in the sabotaging of PC signage last election, I spot a yet another Ford truck—this one is black—pulled over on the opposite site of the road. It's filled with Prentice signs. Volunteers are nailing them into the grass.

All I can think is, at least somebody cares.

Follow James Wilt on Twitter.

I became a historian because I was obsessed with forgetting. What social and cultural forces cause things—mentalities, people, and even landscapes—to slowly dislodge themselves from our shared memories? And, against the claims of those distinguished historians who argue that such disappearances occur slowly, over the longue durée, has this process accelerated in the 21st century? Weighty questions, to be sure, and ones that weren't exactly at the forefront of my mind when procrastination from important late-night research brought me to the official website for the movie Space Jam, which hasn't been updated since 1996.

The landing page is a visual disasterpiece, with seven unhelpfully named graphical buttons forming a corona around the film's logo. As I clicked through the curious headings on these buttons, trying to discern how the category "jump station" differed from "planet b-ball," it occurred to me that I could no longer read the page. Where, for example, was the HD trailer? Where were links to all of the social media on which I could "follow" the film or the characters and actors who appeared in it? Where were the product tie-ins I could purchase to enhance my experience, such as an iPhone game or a 50/50 cotton-poly t-shirt with an ironic picture of Bugs Bunny hanging out with Bill Murray on it?

Alas, the Web 1.0 literacy that I possessed in 1996, when I was but a callow Warcraft 2 -obsessed youth, had been lost. My browsing tendencies were rooted so firmly in the now that I no longer had any way of processing the contents of this outdated site. A panicked thought occurred to me: my social life from 1994 to at least 2004 had been mediated through the internet, and I could remember the particulars of almost none of it.

In spite of the fact that ours has been an age of comprehensive electronic surveillance, my past had disappeared. And, worse still, I had no easy way to recover it. How on earth did this happen?

It happened because the internet is the eternal present, the fast-rushing stream you can step in once and only once. Granted, all life occurs in this eternal present in some extremely general sense, but it's an eternal present surrounded by innumerable traces of the past: eroded escarpments, abandoned strip malls, and even the scars on our own bodies all tell stories that, though forgettable, aren't easily forgotten. But the internet, a vast desert waste where server-stashed bits of data shift like sands while leaving the dunes undisturbed, consists exclusively of the present. It is immediate and overpowering, immersing you in a welter of 24/7 images that are as unavoidable as they are fleeting. In other words, the story of Kim Kardashian's baby bump is so completely and totally here until the precise moment it becomes her, nude, on the cover of Paper Magazine.

Each generation claims that it's in the throes of a communications revolution, whether it's cheap pamphlet printing in the 17th century, telegraphy in the 19th, radio and television connectivity in the 20th. In reality, the effects of all these revolutions are overstated: not everybody was publishing anti-Catholic tracts in the 1600s, most people went to their graves in the 1800s without ever receiving a telegraph, and television ownership was far from universal even by 1999. But each subsequent technological advance has undoubtedly increased the speed at which cultural history is made, with 15 minutes of fame during Andy Warhol's lifetime collapsing into five during Kim Kardashian's.

Related: Kim Dotcom, the Man Behind Mega

Though not quite two decades old, the Space Jam website was harder for me to parse than medieval blackletter script. The intentions of its creators, who undoubtedly received ample compensation for their (at the time) cutting-edge work, today strike us as incomprehensible. The page was meant to sit on the World Wide Web, a term people actually typed out/actually used back then, and serve as a speed bump for those intrepid souls who "surfed" cyberspace with the aid of 33.6k modems and those CompuServ and AOL clients that arrived on CDs later repurposed as coasters. It had all the bells and whistles we "netizens" then demanded: an interactive "trivia quiz," .wav audio files that would load easily on our slow connections, downloaded pictures we could set as our Windows 95 wallpaper, a description of the R. Kelly-fronted soundtrack, and a listing of the various NBA stars and aliens that appear in the film (Mugsy Bogues! Shawn Kemp!).

Today, of course, the page seems sad and amateurish—a quaint, GeoCities-looking remnant of a benighted time. Such a knee-jerk response, which admittedly was my response as well, is troubling. It suggests that, unlike more timeless examples of human ingenuity such as Murnau's silent films or William Blake's poetry, this work is nothing but forgettable trash. And here I don't just mean Space Jam, because although campy and nostalgia-inducing it's mostly garbage, but rather every single thing that appeared on the internet during this period. Because today's technology is "better," and always in the process of improving and updating itself, everything that preceded it must have sucked. The same goes for other fields overwhelmed by technological efflorescence: try explaining the merits of Eric B. and Rakim's debut album Paid in Full, which featured clever lyrics rapped matter-of-factly over samples and turntable distortion, to teenagers reared on the otherworldly, auto-tuned vocal contortions of Young Thug over the complicated sonic mollywhop of a Metro Boomin beat.

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Image via Flickr user Jason Persse.

What all this means, then, is that the considerable portion of my adolescence that transpired on the Web 1.0 amounted to a lot of sucky garbage: the AOL and mIRC chatrooms, in which I shared intimate secrets with best friends I'd never met or swapped "a/s/l" greetings with random lurkers; the message boards where I argued passionately in favor of Bret "the Hitman" Hart over all other contenders to the WWE title; the websites where I produced elaborate wrestling fan fiction alongside middle-aged men and other pimply-faced teens; and even the ICQ chats in which I told a string of long-distance partners that I "loved" them, whatever that might have meant at the time. The great online figures of this time, idols of mine like the long-retired rock critic Mark Prindle, have not so much passed into history as oblivion, their outdated, still-standing websites existing today not as vehicles for introducing their work to new readers but as sepulchers housing it until those servers crash.

Other weeds remain, abandoned in distant corners of a vast and insubstantial field. You can still support the Dole/Kemp '96 campaign, keep up with CNN's coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial, and tour what remains of the Klingon Language Institute. Yet there is no systematic way to appreciate it all, much less any serious accounts of how everyday people's lives were shaped through their navigation of this older infrastructure. The need for such research, even DIY work by aging "netizens" eager to reconstruct their lived-and-loved-and-lost pasts, is a compelling one. Those thousands of hours devoted to WarCraft 2, rec.sports.pro-wrestling.fantasy, and Yahoo! Personals couldn't have been for nothing, could they? At a certain point, those trivial activities that consumed the best years of our lives have to matter. By rediscovering and reevaluating them, we can learn something about the world in which we lived, about how who we were has led us to become who we are. Something more than we would learn, at any rate, merely by sharing a handful of nostalgic fragments more or less at random on our tumblrs, hoping that these contributions evoke a fleeting feeling or two, the origins for which have been obscured by the mists of history.

However, the internet's design—it's better described as an enormous billboard than as a postmodern Library of Alexandria—makes this difficult. Even dumpster dives into the distant past via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine https://archive.org/ may fail to return serviceable images of lost blogs and LiveJournals. Millions of old Hotmail and Yahoo! accounts, which likely contained spam and childish profundity in equal measure, are hidden behind unrecoverable passwords. The philosopher Walter Benjamin's angel of history, who perceives the past as "one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet," would clearly grasp the significance of a world in which public opinion flares briefly over the death of guitar pioneer Les Paul, careens from there into a discussion of racism on HBO's Girls, and now appears to be focused on taking Alec Baldwin down a peg or two. But while Benjamin's angel is propelled involuntarily into the future and thus cannot pause to unearth these sedimentary strata of past-ness, we have the option of slowing down and attempting to make sense of it all. To do otherwise is to leave us in thrall to a Panglossian future that, thanks to the heroic work of our top software designers, always has better load times and refresh rates than the forgettable present in which we now find ourselves. Such an act of remembrance is the least we can do, because we must.

Follow Oliver Lee Bateman on Twitter.

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Guido (right) in Guatemala. Photo by Noah Dailey-McIlrath

Guido is my 75-year-old family friend. He's been a lot of things in his life—a vigilante, a medicine man, a world-renowned visual artist. He used to come over to my parents' house when I was a kid with a loaded pistol in the waistband of his shorts. He used to live in Guatemala but recently moved off his land to chill out in Arizona. I went to visit him, and he told me about the time he died.

—River Donaghey

I died on August 19, 2011, near my house in Mesa, Arizona. I was fully engulfed by the blackness. That's all there was. I was not in my body, I was not with my body, I was not part of my body, but for a while I was still somehow aware of it all. It was black and pleasant and nothing. I was dead. And that was it.

I had been working out at a park on Hobson Street and collapsed on my way home. I managed to stand and get myself to a picnic table. I put my head down to see if the wooziness would pass. And I woke up to the sound of sirens.

I thought, Somebody saw you fall and pass out and thinks you're a drunk. They must have called an ambulance or the fire department. I knew it was best to avoid all of that shit. I assumed that whatever was wrong with me, maybe a subdural hematoma, I could deal with at home. I stood up and set off.

I remember crossing Hobson, the street that separates the park from my block. I reached my street and thinking, I got this covered just fine. I don't remember collapsing again.

My next memory was that I was an animal outside of my body. I was looking for a nesting place to leave my limp corpse, so I decided to drag it behind a billboard for safekeeping. Doing that brought some confusion in my mind, since there are no billboards on Hobson Street. Nevertheless, I remember tucking my old body away behind an imagined advertisement sign. I felt safe and relaxed as everything went black. It was comfortable and dark and sweet. It was almost as good as pleasuring a woman, and there's hardly anything better than that.

A long time later, from the depths of this blackness I realized that someone had unearthed my body from its hiding place. They were dragging it out from behind the sign. Then I went back into the blackness and didn't notice anything for a long time.

Suddenly I became aware that someone was puncturing my body. I recognized it as what felt like a sharpened stick, jabbed under my ribcage. It was an ugly feeling, particularly compared to the blackness.

I thought, Jesus Christ, these are some savage motherfuckers. Who the fuck would do something like this? But it got worse. Someone had begun wire brushing my chest. I could feel the scrape of skin pulling off. There was another sharpened stick through my ribcage on the other side, and another in my thigh. I thought, What are these savage fuckers up to? Can't they leave my body where I left it?

I kept going back into the black, able to ignore the clawing and stabbing. But it finally became so frequent, all the sticking and brushing and agitating the body I believed I had safely hidden, I thought, I need to go back for a second and sort this thing out. Then I'll get back to the blackness .

Related: The Guardian Angel of Guatemala

I opened my eyes and recognized the man leaning over me as a first responder because of the insignia on his shirt. I've been a first responder in the past, so I knew what he was doing. He shouted, "Stay with me buddy, stay with me, your pulse is still only 13." He began a barrage of questioning. He wanted to know my address and my phone number. He told me if I close my eyes he'll have to hit me with the electricity again. I remembered my time as a first responder—I knew that the only way to stop his torture was to do what he said.

They went and got my girlfriend from my house down the street. I hoped that she would say, "He has a lot of medical experience. He knows what he's doing. Let him go home." I hoped they would all leave me alone so I could go back to the black place. But no, she told them to get my ass out of there and we went to the hospital.

People who talk about seeing the light are full of shit. I think they're making it up. Maybe they didn't even really die. Me? I died. My kidneys were full of blood. My pants were full of shit and piss. My heart wasn't pumping. No blood was getting to my brain. They had been shooting atropine into me, those sharp sticks in my side, trying to hit my kidneys. The wire brush sensation turned out to be the defibrillator, which they were using to force my heart to pump the atropine through my system and shuttle blood back up to my brain.

I know I was dead because, since I've come back, life hasn't been the same. I lost something in the death process. Not all of me came back from the blackness. The people around me can't tell, but I can. I'm not as aggressive or passionate as I used to be about anything, anymore. Something essential is gone. I don't know if I will find again or if it's just lost forever.

It's a small thing, but it's enough for me to now carry an orange "Do Not Resuscitate" card in my wallet. I don't go out of the house without it. I know that the first thing that emergency responders do is establish an airway. The second thing they do is go through your wallet to find out who you are. I want to be sure as hell they find that DNR card. Next time, I want them to leave me in the blackness. Maybe can I get back that part of me I lost.

Follow River on Twitter.

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A still from Speed Sisters.

Brenda Myers-Powell runs an after-school program for teenage girls. At one of her weekly sessions, she tries to emphasize how important it is for girls to say "no" if they're not ready to have sex.

"It already did happen," one girl interjects. She says she was only 11 years old when an older man raped her at a friend's house. She didn't tell anyone for years.

A few seats away, another girl speaks up, saying she was "a lot older" when it happened to her. She was 14 when a friend of the family first raped her. He raped her almost every night, but when she told her mother, she said her mother didn't believe her.

Another student was nine when she was raped by her 19-year-old cousin.

One girl was raped from the age of nine to 14. She says her sister was only four years old when someone tried to abuse her. She did everything she could to make sure that didn't happen—and she has scars to prove it.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/PMPXhevhw0U' width='640' height='360']

It's an incredibly upsetting scene and one that's all caught by Kim Longinotto in her documentary feature Dreamcatcher.

"The thing is, Brenda's been with those girls for a whole year and none of them had spoken about it. And she's been saying, 'I'm going to help you not have sex with boys until you're ready,' and then they go, 'We've all had to have sex; we've all been raped'," Longinotto explains.

"I thought that was extraordinary and that they chose to do it when we were there with them, I think that's no coincidence. I think they thought 'At last, here are some people [who] are going to listen to us. There's a point in telling our stories.'"

When moments like this are captured on film, it's made incredibly clear just how vital it is to give women the opportunity to tell their stories.

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Kim Longinotto 's Dreamcatcher.

But the fact is, we don't do that enough. There are not enough stories about women on our screens. There are not enough films with women characters. I could spell this out with stats (like this one: women comprised just 12 percent of protagonists in the top 100 grossing films of 2014), but, let's be real, we all knowthis.

For every Angelina Jolie-led action flick, there are three starring Tom Cruise.For every The Heat there's 1,000 other buddy cop movies that don't star women. For every Batman, Superman, Iron Man and Spiderman film there's...well, Catwoman and Elektra happened.

Documentary films are often praised for having better female representation—and in a lot of ways this is true. Women are more likely to direct documentaries than narrative films, for example. (One study looked at all the independent documentary and narrative features screened at 23 US film festivals in 2013/14 and found that women accounted for 28 percent of directors working on documentaries, and only 18 percent of directors working on narrative features. While nowhere near parity, both figures become more impressive when you learn that only six percent of the top 250 grossing films in 2013 were directed by women.) But even in the documentary field, more stories about women need to be made.

If you look at the Academy Award winners for Best Documentary Feature for a sample of what's on offer, you'll find a long list of films by men that are largely about men. In the past 10 years, we've seen four features about men take home the Oscar (CitizenFour, the only winner directed by a woman; Searching for Sugarman; Undefeated and Man on Wire), three issue-based films (Inside Job, about the global economic crisis; Taxi to the Darkside, about the U.S. Army's use of torture; and An Inconvenient Truth, which follows Al Gore as he lectures about climate change), two about animals (The Cove and March of the Penguins) and only one that could be considered about women (2013's 20 Feet From Stardom, which puts the spotlight on back-up singers, most of whom were women).

A large segment of the population is drastically underrepresented in film today. Women, and especially women from diverse backgrounds, have to look way too hard to see themselves on screen. That's not okay.

At the 2015 Hot Docs film festival, 40 percent of filmmakers are women. It's a stat that Hot Docs is excited to share, and rightly so. More women behind the camera is obviously a good thing. But that doesn't mean that 40 percent of films at the festival are about women, star women, or have anything to do with women.VICE spoke with some of the women directors who have films with female leads screening at the festival and asked them why it's important to tell women's stories.

"I find it so sad that we even have to even ask these questions, really—that there's not enough films with strong female characters," says Amber Fares, director of Speed Sisters, a film about an all-woman car racing team in Palestine. (It's as amazing as it sounds.)

Fares' film follows five women in Palestine as they train together and then compete against one another throughout the course of two racing seasons. It's Palestine as you've never seen it before, and it's certainly not the image of Middle Eastern women presented in mainstream Western media.

"Every place has more than one story," says Fares, a Canadian director with Lebanese heritage who has lived in Ramallah. "In the Middle East, there tends to be one particular viewpoint that comes through and that's usually women being extremely oppressed and shown as being covered, and it's religious and it's very particular.

"It's not like that doesn't exist—it definitely does exist—but just like everywhere else in the world, it doesn't define an entire region."

For Fares, it was important that her film confront gender stereotypes, but also stereotypes about life in the Middle East.

"We need to see a spectrum of possibilities," she says.

That's precisely what all of these documentaries present.

[body_image width='5315' height='2868' path='images/content-images/2015/04/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/22/' filename='forgot-hollywood-watch-documentaries-if-you-care-about-women-197-body-image-1429728339.jpg' id='48718']Violeta Ayala'sThe Bolivian Case.

In Violeta Ayala's film, The Bolivian Case, we learn about three Norwegian teenage girls who are charged with drug trafficking. Instead of asking us to question the guilt or innocence of these women, Ayala asks us to confront how gender—and also race and class—affects how we assign guilt. Kim Longinotto's Dreamcatcher introduces us to Brenda, a former sex worker (and all-around powerhouse of a human) who now helps other sex workers stay safe and get off the streets if they so choose. Sophie Deraspe's The Amina Profile tells Sandra Bagaria's story. She was in an intense online relationship with "A Gay Girl in Damascus" blogger, Amina Arraf, until Amina disappeared. The film recounts Sandra's journey to find Amina, and also to find out exactly who Amina really is.

All of these films present audiences with images of women that challenge us, and they provide us different perspectives on the world. Women can and should make films about whatever they want, of course, but if they choose to make films about women, well frankly, their perspective is needed.

"If the image is more complex, if it comes from many angles, or many perspectives—not only a man's perspective—maybe then women can be more comfortable with their differences...as well as their motivation, the way they see their body, but also their role in society," says Deraspe.

Then there's the fact that films about women just make for great stories.

"Lots of stories that inspire me are centred around women. I'm not just thinking, Oh, I'll go and make a film about a woman. I'm thinking, where's a story that will really inspire me and will make me feel excited? Recently, they've been about women," says Longinotto.

Longinotto has actually spent the better part of her more than 25-year career telling stories with women at the centre. So what's the appeal?

"I think if men were shot in the head for going to school, or [if] men were locked up from 11 years-old and got married off to 60-year-old women, you know, if you turn it around, I think probably more of us would be making films about poor men," she says. "It does seem that, on the whole, these things are happening to women. And, actually, it makes more interesting women, because the people [who] seem to change things and [who] are at the forefront of change are women, in my experience."

And in case you'd forgotten, or if mainstream movies have you confused, women actually make up a pretty significant portion of this planet's population. If we're looking for reasons to make more films about women, that's a good one too.

"The idea of not having strong female stories when they make up at least half of the population, if not more, is just insanity," says Charlotte Cook, director of programming at Hot Docs.

When choosing which films will screen at the festival, Cook says that Hot Docs takes female representation both behind the scenes and on screen very seriously. It's really important, but, as she says, "so [is] making sure we have very diverse filmmakers too, and also diversity on screen and in tone and craft and style."

Of the 210 films screening at Hot Docs, 99 are either directed or co-directed by a woman—that's actually 47 percent of films with a woman behind the camera.

We know that if a woman works behind the scenes, there's an increased likelihood that we'll see women on screens. In a study of the top 100 grossing films of 2014 (excluding foreign films), researchers found that in movies with exclusively male directors and writers, women accounted for just four percent of protagonists, while men made up 87 percent of protagonists and male/female ensembles accounted for the remaining nine percent. In films with at least one woman director and/or writer, however, women made up 39 percent of protagonists, men made up 35 percent of protagonists and ensembles accounted for 26 percent.

So the fact that 40 percent of filmmakers at Hot Docs are women is, again, really great. But until we actually see a more equal representation of women on screen—at festivals, in movie theatres and on our TVs— there's still work to be done.

"We can say let's get more women filmmakers, that's not the point. The point is to have more films that are actually about change and that women can relate to, that have different parts played in them by women. It's not just getting more women to make films," says Longinotto.

That's only one step. We need to start taking leaps.

"I think things are changing. Today we are discussing that there is no representation of women in film. Ten years ago there wasn't even a discussion about it. So we are progressing," says The Bolivian Case director Violeta Ayala. She adds: "I don't think it's happening fast enough, of course.

"I think little by little we're making things happen."

Follow Regan Reid on Twitter.

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Amy Schumer is a comedic genius; she's probably one of the greatest comedians of our time. No, I will not back that statement up with any sort of evidence, because if you're familiar with her work you already agree, and if you're not familiar with her work, that's your problem. The third season of Schumer's often-sex-and-gender-skewering sketch show Inside Amy Schumer premiered last night, and as usual, it expertly pulled apart some of the worst and weirdest aspects of modern life.

One good example is the sketch "Hello M'Lady," which advertises an app that keeps women updated on the lonely, quietly pining men nearby, who can be relied on for compliments and gifts. As a bonus, the app lets women know when their "hello m'ladies" are about to angrily turn on them. I would love to be able to use that particular feature of this app. Someone please give seed money to a company willing to create that.

By far the most-talked-about sketch from last night's show was a parody of Friday Night Lights in which Josh Charles plays a new high school football coach with one simple motto: Clear eyes, full hearts, don't rape. Charles throws his team and, indeed, the entire town for a loop with his unheard-of anti-rape policy, and Schumer's tipsy wife (complete with increasingly large white wine glass) stands by her husband and his unorthodox ways.

So far, most of the praise for the sketch has gone to the two things mentioned above: Charles' demand his players not rape anyone, and Schumer's goofy wine glasses. And while those things are obviously very funny, one piece of satire seems to have eluded the many people singing the sketch's praises. In Charles' climactic half-time speech, he gets upset with his team for allowing their constant interest in rape to get in the way of the game.

"How do I get through to you boys that football isn't about rape?" he asks the dumbfounded team. "It's about violently dominating anyone that stands between you and what you want. Now you gotta get yourselves into the mindset that you are gods, and you are entitled to this! That other team, they ain't just gonna lay down and give it to you! You gotta go out there and take it!"

In just 66 words, the writers at Inside Amy Schumer manage to distill the essence of the link between sports stars and sexual aggression, one reason why so many athletic heroes at all ages and levels of sport are also sexual predators. The entire sketch is a clear poke at the connection between sports and sexual violence, of course, but this speech is one of those satirical moments that could easily go over someone's head if they're not aware of the issue at hand; the rest of the sketch is much more upfront.

This particular scene struck me as the best in the sketch, but it hasn't been getting as much attention as, say, the wine-glass gag (which deserves attention, to be sure). Why is that? Maybe because it's easier to make fun of specific groups of people, like small-town yokels and sexually transgressive athletes, than to consider that an entire, very common mindset might be conducive to sexual violence.

The other objects of mockery in this sketch aren't safe, necessarily, but there's a big difference between recognizing that some discernible aspects of the world around us are problematic and accepting that violating others is so deeply pervasive in our way of viewing the world that a simple sport is basically perfectly analogous to rape.

On the other hand, it's entirely possible people just want to laugh when they're watching comedy.

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.

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Tonight, tune into City at midnight to catch up on a depressing but vital issue that hasn't been in the news nearly as much as it should be: the infamous American-controlled prison in Cuba, Guantanamo Bay, is still open and still holding prisoners.

Almost 800 men have been held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility since it was established in 2002. Today, fewer than 150 remain. Despite the fact that more than half of current detainees have been cleared for transfer from the base, and in spite of the executive order signed by President Barack Obama in 2009 ordering the closure of the prison within one year, there's no indication it will be shuttered anytime soon.

VICE News traveled to Guantanamo to find out what the hell is going on. After a tightly controlled yet bizarre tour of the facility, we sought out a former detainee in Sarajevo and a former guard in Phoenix to get their unfiltered impressions of what life is like at Gitmo.

Today's video - Big money in the federal budget for police, intelligence, and defence, Montreal students occupy everything, the short list of Canada's nuclear waste candidate towns and part three of your first look at the new Canadian Cannabis episode.

Exclusive: Canadian Cannabis: Cash Crop, Part 3

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