Bernie Sanders draws big crowds in a West Coast swing, a roundtable on hacking, Marielle Heller talks about her film, "Diary of a Teenage Girl."
Bernie Sanders comes to LA
'Berniemania' is at a fever pitch in SoCal today.
Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders will speak this evening at the LA Memorial Sports Arena. The trip comes on the heels of weekend campaign events in Seattle and Portland.
Sanders plans to speak about income inequality, climate change and affordable college tuition.
Take Two spoke with LA Times reporter Seema Mehta about what Sanders hopes to get from California.
Press the play button above to hear more.
The strategy behind Hillary Clinton's college tuition plan
Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton will be in New Hampshire today to announce a proposal for roughly $175 billion in federal grants to help undergraduates pay tuition at public colleges.
As a campaign move, it may have broad appeal, considering Americans currently carry $1.2 trillion in student loan debt.
Political journalist
joins Take Two to discuss the political strategy behind these kinds of announcements.
To hear the full interview, click the link above.
The unseen enemy: A cyber security roundtable
For many, the term ‘hacker’ conjures images of basement-dwelling teens, sipping Mountain Dew and launching their attacks on underprotected computers.
For others, the word conjures memories of this guy.
But Shuman Ghosemajumder with Shape Security in Mountain View, California, says the modern hacker is exponentially more dangerous: think of them as members of a digital mafia:
“We’ve seen organized crime getting involved in data breaches for a number of years now,” Ghosemajumder explains. “Now, it really has reached a scale that it wasn’t operating at five or ten years ago. That’s where you have folks that are well-funded that are developing technology that is custom-built to be able to create these types of large scale harm.”
Dan Guido, founder of computer security company Trail of Bits, says the cyber security game changed about ten years ago, when hackers began leasing their skills and packaging kits to help others launch attacks. “[Around] that time period is when you could buy things like exploit kits and different pieces of malware on the internet that would let somebody that doesn’t really know what they’re doing perform much more sophisticated attacks,” he says.
Ghosemajumder says most hackers are motivated by the same thing: “In the vast majority of cases, the goal is money,” he says. “For criminal organizations, they have always been interested in money and it turns out that computers are now the most effective means of getting money out of other organizations.”
Compromised credit card and social security numbers are a hot commodity on the ‘Deep Web,’ a special version of the internet that requires a special browser to access. Criminals use cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin to pay for illegal services. It’s fast, it’s secret, and it’s virtually untraceable. With such a formidable force of hackers active online, many wonder why companies aren’t doing more to protect consumer information. CNN’s Tal Kopan says it’s possible that many companies don’t see enough financial incentive:
“Even the banking sector, where cyber security is arguably one of the most important things to their business model, [when] you put the percentage of money they spend on cyber security next to their total budgets, it’s a relative drop in the the bucket for a lot of them, and it’s not clear what it would take necessarily to get a company to recognize that this is going to take a serious investment.”
Kopan contends that consumers and businesses alike should make it a point to better understand the threats that are out there:
“When people hear ‘cyber security,’ their eyes may glaze over a little bit. It may sound too scary, but there’s a lot that’s quite understandable. [It’s] really important to make yourself understand, as a business and as a consumer, what those basics are.”
Press the play button above to hear Take Two’s cyber security roundtable.
On the Lot: Not so Fantastic Four, Bill Murray back in 'lady' Ghostbusters
20th Century Fox had high hopes for it's reboot of Fantastic Four, but the film opened well below expectations, got bad critical reviews, and its director even tweeted it was not the film he wanted to make.
What went wrong with that movie, a definition of the difference between a reboot and a remake, and news that Bill Murray will join the cast of the, yes, reboot of Ghostbusters. Rebecca Keegan of the LA Times has the latest and most interesting news from the business of film.
'Diary of a Teenage Girl' director Marielle Heller on her 'risky' feature film directorial debut
The new film “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” is based on a novel of the same name.
The story is set in San Francisco in 1976 and focuses on 15-year-old Minnie Goetz, whose life is turned upside down when she has an affair with a much older man— her mother’s boyfriend, Monroe.
The film marks the directorial debut of Marielle Heller, who’s had a long-running, close relationship with the story— first adapting it into a stage play, playing Minnie in an off-Broadway production, writing the screenplay, and now directing the feature film.
On what drew her to the story
"I think you sometimes don't realize how much you have missed something until it appears to you, you don't realize you've had a void for something. When I read this book by Phoebe Gloeckner, I realized I had never felt like my teenage years had been properly represented in a way that felt honest to me, and it was such a revelation. I felt like 'Oh my God, that's me, that's how I felt, those are the feelings I had when I was fifteen, lying in bed awake at night thinking about boys and wondering if anybody loved me that I didn't know about.'
I was just so moved by this character and so moved by this story, and I felt like part of what drew me to it was that it was risky, that it was a story I had never heard, and it felt really relatable. Even though it wasn't my story, it wasn't what happened to me as a teenager, but I still felt like I was this girl... I just found it to be really compelling and interesting and I wanted to tell the story without judgement."
To hear the full interview with Marielle Heller, click the link above.
Ferguson residents turn to video to document police stops
Over the past year residents in Ferguson, Missouri have started using small video cameras to film police in the neighborhood.
The efforts began after a white police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, 18, near Canfield Green Apartments last August.
"It's about establishing a network in order to combat this," said resident David Whitt, who helped train others on how to use the cameras. He's the founder of a group called Canfield Watchmen. "We have to do this as a group and not as an individual."
Whitt says the program gave out about 200 cameras to residents following Brown's shooting and conducted workshops to teach people how to record police interactions without interfering.
It's also supported by a California-based group called WeCopwatch, which has worked with people in other cities, including Detroit, Baltimore and Charleston.
Jacob Crawford, one of the co-founders of WeCopwatch, said the use of cameras by residents in Ferguson has had an impact throughout the area.
"These neighborhoods are compact around here, so when you train 50 or 100 people in another neighobrhood or the next neighborhood over, that consciousness carries over," said Crawford. "A lot of that stuff that happens in Canfield, takes place in other neighborhoods as well."
Former Police Chief Tom Jackson expressed support for the program last year.
In March, the Justice Department released a report which said that African Americans made up a disproportionate share of arrests in Ferguson and that police were motivated by "unlawful bias."
Both Crawford and Whitt say police relations are still tense in the area, but now residents have a tool they feel can bring some light to their communities.
One year later: Ezell Ford case highlights challenges in police reforms
This Tuesday marks one year since 25-year-old Ezell Ford was killed in a confrontation with police officers in South L.A.
Earlier this year, an investigation by the police commission found fault with the officers involved, though to different degrees. LAPD Chief Charlie Beck has said that the officers acted appropriately.
Over the weekend, Ford's family held a memorial for the 25-year-old, who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
Cheryl Dorsey is a retired officer with the Los Angeles Police Department. She's been closely following the developments in the Ezell Ford case and is author of the book, "The Creation of a Manifesto: Black and Blue."
William Finnegan explores his past in his new memoir 'Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life'
Most people, if they ever ran into a shark might not get back into the ocean… for at least a few weeks. The video of pro surfer Mick Fanning's encounter with a shark July 19 went viral but ten days later there he was back in the water… and he saw another shark. And Fanning just went to another beach and kept on surfing.
Yeah, surfers are a different breed.
They chase waves like the rest of chase love and even when those waves come close to killing them, they start flirting with the next one that looks good. Journalist William Finnegan is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He's traveled around the world reporting on conflicts and surfing spots that local Malibu kooks could only dream of.
He joins A Martinez to talk about his new memoir "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life."
To hear the full interview click on the audio embedded above.