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anais-ninja-bitch:runcibility:depsidase:[waving] Hi, hello, it’s me, the o...

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anais-ninja-bitch:

runcibility:

depsidase:

[waving] Hi, hello, it’s me, the old gen-x'er on your dash! How’s it going kids? [bad, it’s going bad, I know, sorry for asking]. Let me tell you a personal story of how I watched exactly this play out in my social circles.

Anecdotally, my fellow cohort of gen-x'ers were convinced this was going to be the solution, the ticket, the fucking way. Inevitably, all we had to do was outlive these old mayonnaise white devils, because that’s where the racism was societally stored - like a big racism appendix that would get removed someday.

We thought we knew what was up because we were cool white kids who listened to Public Enemy. And because we thought we were largely inoculated against racism, it was just a long cool slide into the Clinton years and we’d be set.

So we didn’t question shit like South Park. We didn’t question shitheads like ‘ironic’ (at the time) racists like Weev in our IRC channel. We had zero fucking awareness of how racism shifted, because the only examples of racism we were ever taught either wore a white robe & burned crosses, or sig-heil’d and lived in misery. We shamefully thought racism = southern*, and since we were alt-goth kids living on the west coast, we were fucking sorted out and safe.

It wasn’t on our radar. We weren’t ready. We hadn’t listened to anyone, because we thought we’d learned enough to not be a problem, and wasn’t that enough?

We didn’t clock or understand the way racist language shifted into a new economic handwringing. We fell into stupid rhetorical traps that snuck racism into concerns about unhoused people and substance abuse. We refused to recognize and realize our own inherent racist attitudes because of the sunk cost fallacy of wanting to believe we really didn’t have to do anything other than be cool and wait it out.

I watched some people absolutely lose their shit when called out on this and flounce directly into the arms of right wing philosophy (always some variation on “left wing politics has gone too far!” when it’s pointed out how they’re upholding inequality with a cherished attitude or anecdote they’ve leaned on for years to prop up the mythology of their self-worth).

No one was ready to realize they weren’t good just by being alternative. And some of them cracked apart.

Racism has a full time advertising budget ready to repackage and rebadge it minute to minute, and you always have to do the work. It never ever fucking stops. And making sure you’re always doing the work has the very valuable side-benefit of keeping you in touch with yourself and what you’re about.

You gotta do the work. It never stops.

*-this fucking haunts me so much.

oh, this gets a reblog

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SimonHova
7 days ago
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As the Gen-X'er being referenced here, I can fully endorse this post. The only good thing Facebook gave our generation was the ability to see how many of our former peers had gone batshit crazy in real time.
Greenlawn, NY
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Movies: I spent a year trying to figure out the weirdest mistake in recent Hollywood history. I succeeded.

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There is nothing quite like becoming birdpilled. I am not a halfway kind of person: When I got into movies, I turned thinking about movies into my job. When I got into running, it wasn’t long until I was running a half-marathon every weekend. So I know what it’s like to become obsessed—and to start seeing your new obsession everywhere.

But during lockdown, I, like a lot of people, gradually became obsessed with birds—and it turns out that, with birds, they really are everywhere. They’re fluttering outside your window when you’re supposed to be working. They’re singing nearby when you’re supposed to be sleeping. They’re soaring overhead when you’re supposed to be paying attention to oncoming traffic.

Bird-watching does sometimes involve just that—watching birds—but for the truly birdpilled, it’s about tuning in to a new layer of reality around you and decoding it. The word bird becomes not just a noun but a verb, and you are always birding. That bird singing when you’re trying to sleep in, that sounds like a dial-up modem? That’s a song sparrow. That bird fluttering outside your window when you’re supposed to be working? Damn, you think, is that a yellow-rumped warbler? That raptor soaring over your head when you’re supposed to be paying attention to oncoming traffic? Usually it’s a red-tailed hawk, but sometimes it’s a turkey vulture, or a black vulture, or something more interesting, something that maybe merits glancing up just a little while longer …

This is your new reality, and after a few months or years of adjusting to the shock of it, you start to feel as if you’re in the Matrix. In every glimpse of an outer tail feather, every snippet of song, you can see those cascading green lines of code, and after a while, you can read them.

Most of the time, this is a peaceful, meditative activity, the kind that puts you in a flow state and has been scientifically proven to reduce stress. No matter how out of control everything else feels, when you’re out in nature, everything is in its right place.

Still, every once in a while, there’s a glitch in the Matrix. In real life, these oddities are thrilling: If something is out of place, it could be a “vagrant,” a migrating bird that has wandered off course from another side of the country or even another hemisphere.

There are, unfortunately, other types of glitches. They come fast and furious, scrambling your brain. You’re watching Indiana Jones trudge through the jungles of South America in the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and one of the first sounds you hear is the famous “awebo” call of the tundra-loving willow ptarmigan, on the wrong end of the American continent. You’re watching Season 3 of The White Lotus, set in Thailand, and you find yourself distracted by the persistent “kon-ka-reeee” of red-winged blackbirds, on the wrong side of the Pacific Ocean. You’re lost in Dune’s sweeping vistas, watching Paul Atreides sulk about his home planet of Caladan, until there it is, on the wrong side of the galaxy: a killdeer.

Like any generous viewer—I consider myself one—you learn to suspend your disbelief. The same way you learn to accept that every phone number in every movie starts with 555, if you’re a birder, you learn to accept that every bald eagle in every movie screeches like a red-tailed hawk.

I maintained this policy throughout my early birdpilling. But then I watched the original movie adaptation of Charlie’s Angels, and I found myself staring down one of the greatest mysteries of recent cinema.

You see, there’s a scene in that movie that tormented me, that kept me up at night, and that lately has had me interrogating a wide variety of seemingly devoted, and certainly well-compensated, filmmaking professionals. That’s because the bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema—and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong. It has haunted not just me but, as I’d later learn, the birding community at large for almost a quarter of a century.

So, naturally, being an all-in sort of person, I embarked upon a wild-goose chase to investigate how and why this monstrosity took flight. I talked to script doctors and scoured legal statutes. I interviewed leading ornithological experts and electronically analyzed birdcalls, all to figure out who laid this giant egg. It took nearly a year. But eventually, I discovered why hundreds of people with a budget of nearly $100 million failed to accurately portray a single bird. The answer was most fowl.

This story was adapted from an episode of Slate’s podcast Decoder Ring. That episode was written by Forrest Wickman and edited by Willa Paskin and Evan Chung. It was produced by Max Freedman. Listen to the original version:

Charlie’s Angels started as a hit 1970s TV show about a trio of crime-fighting women. In 2000 it was adapted into a movie, helmed by the music-video director known as McG. It stars Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu, who play three private investigators trying to save the world from (what else?) an evil tech billionaire.

The scene that really drives me cuckoo, the one that aggressively flouts all avian logic, happens right before the big action finale. At this point, the Angels seem done for. Their headquarters has just been blown up—and their beloved helper Bosley (Bill Murray) has been kidnapped and trapped in a prison cell God knows where.

But Bosley has a radio transmitter implanted in a tooth, and so as the Angels wade through the flaming wreckage of their old offices, they hear a familiar voice. At first, they have no idea how to find him, but then a clue appears: A bird flies to the window of Bosley’s cell. And at our heroes’ darkest moment, it sings its song.

“It’s a Sitta pygmaea!” observes Cameron Diaz’s Natalie, who is allegedly a bird expert. “A pygmy nuthatch! They only live in one place: Carmel!”

And so, with that one bit of birdsong, and Natalie’s expertise, the Angels are able to locate Bosley in Carmel, California, free him from his prison cell, and save the day.

Like most of the movie, this scene is knowingly dumb and very fun, and yet, as any bird-lover can’t help but notice, it is absolutely riddled with errors.

The problems with the scene are as follows:

First, the pygmy nuthatch does not “only live in one place.” I’ve personally seen pygmy nuthatches in at least three states, and they can be found in at least three countries.

Second, the bird shown on-screen is not a pygmy nuthatch. The pygmy nuthatch is a tiny, drab, almost gray-scale bird, so small it can fit inside a roll of toilet paper. Instead, what’s on-screen is a Venezuelan troupial, which is black and neon orange, almost six times the size of a pygmy nuthatch, and also—as the name suggests—not found in Carmel.

Finally, and this might be the most baffling thing, the bird heard on the soundtrack is neither a pygmy nuthatch nor a Venezuelan troupial. It’s an unknown third bird whose identity has, until now, befuddled birders for years.

To summarize: The bird in this scene does not live where it’s supposed to, look like it’s supposed to, or sound like it’s supposed to. To put this in terms of mammals, it’s as if a two-toed sloth climbed up to Bill Murray’s window, howled like some unknown species of canine, and Cameron Diaz identified the howl as a sea otter, saying that sea otters live in only one place on Earth: Carmel, California.

For anyone who knows anything about birds, this scene is a train wreck of the sort that’s simply impossible to ignore. The bird involved is not some background figure: It is not a red-tailed hawk screeching in the distance. It is front and center, strutting around so shamelessly that the first time I saw it, I honestly thought that the filmmakers might be trolling—that they might be flipping me, and others like me, the bird.

I am a journalist, and as such, it was my first responsibility to get the facts. So I decided I needed to methodically make my way through each and every absurd error in this scene to understand how this crime against ornithology had happened.

I was going to start with the very first one: Who introduced a pygmy nuthatch into the script, then had the temerity to say it lived only in Carmel?

From the beginning, it was clear that cracking this mystery was going to be no easy task. “So, when you emailed me,” Charlie’s Angels screenwriter John August told me, when I called him up, back in December 2023, “I had no recollection of a bird being in the movie at all.”

August was hired to write Charlie’s Angels back in 1998, and from the beginning, it was a challenging assignment. “It’s one of the most difficult things I ever had to write,” he said, “because every scene has to do 19 things.” Those things included servicing the storylines of all three Angels, plus Bosley, keeping the complicated plot moving forward, being funny, and keeping every moment action-packed. This was a lot for August to juggle, so it didn’t take long before he copped to not caring about the bird. “I would say, given the many complexities of the Charlie’s Angels script, 100 percent scientific accuracy, bird accuracy, was not a priority.”

Still, he didn’t remember writing the words pygmy nuthatch into the script himself—though he admitted it was possible he had. So I asked August, who keeps meticulous records, if he was willing to show me his very first draft of the script so I could see where it all went wrong.

As he pulled up First Draft A, it began to seem as if his quasi-confession had been premature.

August read aloud from the script: “Bosley whistles to a bright red songbird who has landed on the windowsill. The bird whistles back.” Natalie says, “That’s an ʻiʻiwi. They only live in one place,” and Lucy Liu’s character says, “Hawaii.”

So the pygmy nuthatch was not the bird August had started with. And the bird he had started with? It actually really was 100 percent scientifically accurate. The ‘i‘iwi really is a “bright red songbird” with a whistled song. It really does live in only one place. And that place really is Hawaii.

But for logistical reasons, the location of the scene kept changing. Instead of filming in Hawaii, the team decided to shoot somewhere closer to Hollywood. So the ‘i‘iwi flew out the window, and August had to pick a new bird.

On the draft dated Oct. 26, 1999, the bird was now a “blue-and-white songbird,” August told me. He read aloud again: “Natalie says, ‘That’s a loggerhead shrike: Lanius ludovicianus anthonyi. They only live in one place … Catalina.’ ”

So, already, this wasn’t as on point as the draft with the ‘i‘iwi: A loggerhead shrike isn’t blue. But the Latin name that the script gives belongs to a subspecies, the island loggerhead shrike, which really was known to be only in Catalina—and, OK, a couple of other islands nearby.

Here’s a little bit of my defense,” August said. “It’s early internet. So I probably had to actually, like, look it up in a book or something about, like, What are birds? and What do birds look like?

August may not have known a ton about birds, but he had tried to get it right. And yet, at some point, the bird had really jumped the shark. What had gone wrong? Turns out, August left the movie.

“We had a reading, about a month before production started, and that really went disastrously bad,” he said. “People started freaking out about stuff. And at that point, I left the project, and maybe, like, 11 different writers came on and did a week or two of work during production.”

It was actually a whopping 17 writers who ended up working on the script. In the words of a Los Angeles Times article from the time, “Never has so much top-flight talent been put to work on such a trifle.” “There’s what’s called revision pages,” August said. “If you are adding something new to a script, you put those pages out in a different-colored sheet of paper. So first it’s blue revisions, then pink revisions and yellow revisions. They went through that color rainbow so many times it was like double-cherry revisions by the time the movie stopped shooting.”

So whenever our pygmy nuthatch entered the script, it must have been on one of those colored revision pages, written by one of the other 16 screenwriters who worked on this movie. That meant that there were 16 other suspects to question, and any one of them could have written in the pygmy nuthatch.

I started with Zak Penn. Penn has worked on some of the biggest action franchises of the past three decades, including the X-Men and Avengers movies. But I had tracked him down because I had reason to believe that his rewrites had touched on the bird.

His name was on a later draft of the script I found online, in which the bird had been changed to something even worse: a “blue-spotted egret,” which isn’t a real bird at all. I figured that anyone who had the nerve to straight-up invent a species could have also been the wrongdoer behind our pygmy nuthatch.

“You know, when I was a kid, I actually had, like, a bird-watching book. I remember, like, black-capped chickadees, things like that,” Penn told me when I reached him. Had I underestimated him? But then: “Until you told me a blue-spotted egret wasn’t a real bird, I had no idea that it wasn’t,” he confessed. “I couldn’t give less of a shit about birds.”

Despite his rather cavalier attitude toward some of our world’s most beautiful creatures, Penn denied responsibility for the bogus blue-spotted egret. He also didn’t think he had come up with the pygmy nuthatch, and he didn’t know who had.

But just as I began to mentally prepare to cross-examine the other 15 screenwriters, Penn pulled me back from the brink. He told me that even though he didn’t know the identity of the guilty party, he was pretty sure he knew their motive. “Charlie’s Angels was pretty betwixt and between, and therefore that leads to a lot of people throwing a lot of shit at the screen, trying to find something that sticks,” he explained. “It’s so hard writing a comedy in the studio system, because everybody gets bored and thinks the script isn’t funny anymore because this is the 18th draft they’ve read.” While Penn and I could hatch conspiracy theories, he told me, “my guess is, it’s the chaos is what led to this.” All those writers were desperate for a bird that could make their bosses laugh—and could keep them laughing on the 18th read.

And Penn thinks the pygmy nuthatch’s name makes it uniquely qualified in that regard. “If somebody had said, ‘You know what bird? You’re talking a pygmy nuthatch,’ I would be like, ‘That’s fucking good. Let’s use pygmy nuthatch.’ ”

August agreed. “I suspect that one of the writers who was on board for a week, and just doing kind of surface-level changes, picked a funnier word.” After all, he pointed out, “it has the word nut in it.”

Perhaps chaos and comedy were the true culprits: So out had gone the accurate ‘i‘iwi, the semi-accurate shrike, even the godforsaken “blue-spotted egret”—and in came the pygmy nuthatch.

But for the life of me, I still could not understand: Why didn’t they then use that bird in the movie? If you put it in the script that Bill Murray’s scene partner is a pygmy nuthatch, why not cast a pygmy nuthatch? It was time for me to find out who was responsible, by finding a witness to the film shoot and getting them to sing like a canary.

So the screenwriters had in all likelihood introduced the name pygmy nuthatch to be funny, but then someone had to go get an actual bird.

“There’s a lot of species of birds you just wouldn’t ever want to use,” Guin Dill, who’s been wrangling animals for 30 years, told me. “They just can’t handle it. If a bird gets stressed, they go poof. And they just, like … lose all their feathers. And then what do you do?”

Dill was the animal trainer on Charlie’s Angels. As such, she was responsible for finding the pygmy nuthatch specified in the screenplay and putting it in front of a camera. But as you know, the bird on-screen is decidedly not a pygmy nuthatch. Was she to blame?

“That wasn’t our decision,” Dill said. The humble gray pygmy nuthatch did not have the look the producers and director were going for. “They wanted something very tropical because it was supposed to give it away that he’s on this island. So, keeping that in mind, they were kind of looking for vibrant, a little bit spectacular.” But not too spectacular: “It had to be a small enough bird to fly in through the window, do the song, and then fly out.”

So Dill had to find birds that would fit the bill and share them with the production team. “We sent pictures, initially. It’s kind of like sending headshots of actors. We do the same thing, so we send them an array of pictures, and then they kind of pick and choose, whether it be because of their ability or look.”

Now, if I were an animal casting director, I would have included at least a headshot of the pygmy nuthatch. It might not be the flashiest performer, but why not give authenticity a chance?

Or that’s what I thought, until I learned something unexpected. “We cannot use a lot of birds that are indigenous to the United States,” Dill said. “So it’s really difficult. It’s not that easy.”

It turns out no animal handler would ever have included a pygmy nuthatch, not just because they are small, colorless, and unlikely to grab a viewer’s eye. They are also illegal to cast in a movie.

The reason for this goes back more than 100 years.

“People in the late 19th century and early 20th century were just killing birds wholesale,” Nick Lund told me. Lund works for Maine Audubon, and for more than a decade, he has written countless articles—for the Washington Post, Slate, and Audubon magazine—about the ways that Hollywood gets birds wrong. “There were not the same rules that there are now about hunting regulations, hunting season, bag limits, that kind of thing. And birds were just getting decimated.”

Some of this was for food, but people were eating much more than turkeys and pheasants and ducks. They were eating sparrows, grebes, loons, thrushes, grackles, ibis, pelicans, bobolinks, woodpeckers, and more. If you can think of a bird, it was probably on the menu. In one of John James Audubon’s books, he reported that the snowy owl (aka Hedwig from Harry Potter) tastes like chicken.

And birds were being killed not only for sport and sustenance. They were being killed for women’s hats. “There was this giant millinery trade. And so people were killing birds for their feathers to make these dumb-looking hats that were super popular at the time.” Often, Americans were slaughtering whole rookeries full of egrets for their snow-white plumes. Other times, they were taking “Put a Bird on It” to new extremes, taking an entire dead bird and just plopping it onto a hat. It was like if you took Björk’s infamous swan dress and put it on her head—and made it out of an actual swan.

In February 1886, at the height of the fashion craze, ornithologist Frank Chapman went birding through Manhattan, simply counting the birds on women’s hats. Over two afternoons, he tallied more than 500 hats adorned with more than 40 species of birds, including blue jays, bluebirds, red-headed woodpeckers, Baltimore orioles, common terns, a prairie hen, and a saw-whet owl.

At first, Americans weren’t too concerned about what all this carnage meant for bird populations. In the 1800s, scientists were still debating whether it was even possible for a species to go extinct. Audubon himself insisted that North American birds were so numerous that, at least with our birds, it could never happen.

And then came the tragic case of the passenger pigeon. The passenger pigeon had once been so plentiful across North America that Audubon described them blotting out the sun for days. But they were massacred by the thousands, and in 1914, a passenger pigeon named Martha, the last known member of her species, died alone at the Cincinnati Zoo.

There was powerful outrage about all of this bloodshed—but especially about the hats. The hats were worn mostly by women, and the fight against the hats was also led largely by women. Two of those women were Harriet Hemenway and Minna B. Hall, who, 10 years after Chapman’s expedition through the fashion district, founded the first Audubon Society.

“It actually makes me laugh because, you know, it’s such a dumb fashion trend, and it resulted in all these great laws,” Lund told me.

One of these laws is the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. It was passed in 1918. “It’s this interesting, wide-ranging, broad law that protects migratory birds,” Lund said. “It basically prevents people from harming, taking, killing, capturing native birds in the United States.”

The law has had humongous positive impacts. It’s been credited with saving everything from the snowy egret to the wood duck and the sandhill crane.

But the law also says that you can’t keep our native birds as pets. And though we may not be used to thinking of animals in movies as pets, that’s what they are: working pets. “And so when a company wants to put a bird on TV in the United States,” Lund explained, “they can’t use a native species.”

And a pygmy nuthatch is a native species, a bird covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

So even if anyone involved in Charlie’s Angels had wanted to use a lowly pygmy nuthatch in the movie, they couldn’t have. They were always going to have to use another bird. And once that’s true, I mean, why not get a bird that has real star quality?

And so that’s exactly what Guin Dill, the animal handler, did. In fact, she got two of them.

“Jack and Jill,” she told me. “They were brother and sister.” In a bit of a Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen scenario, both of them appear in the movie.

Jack and Jill might not have been great at taking direction—they would peck at Dill’s cuticles; she thinks she still has scars from them today—but as Venezuelan troupials, they were resplendent birds the color of a tangerine, with shiny black hoods, a sky-blue teardrop around each eye, and a blazing lightning bolt across each wing. The camera loved them.

So now I knew why screenwriters would write in a pygmy nuthatch and why, to cast one, an animal handler had to bring in a foreign import. Still, even once the filmmakers were stuck with the name they picked for fun, and the South American stand-ins that they were legally allowed to put in the movie, they still could have … made their bird sound like an actual pygmy nuthatch, right? Or even like a Venezuelan troupial? But in fact, they did neither: They cast a third bird to lend its voice, one that nobody has been able to identify.

And that means there were actually two mysteries left: Why on Earth did they do that—and what bird was it?

I had been wondering what the hell voices the pygmy nuthatch since the moment I first saw Charlie’s Angels. And it wasn’t just me. For decades, birders have been flocking to the internet to point out the problems with this scene: blogging about it, tweeting about it, posting it to forums and message boards and IMDb Goofs and moviemistakes.com, publishing it everywhere from local newspapers to books to W magazine.

But while these enraged ornithophiles have long identified the “Hollywood impostor” on-screen as the national bird of Venezuela, none of them has ever been able to identify the bird we hear. And with just my ear, I couldn’t either.

Still, I was going to figure this out one way or another. I started by reaching out to the crew member who ought to know best: Michael Benavente, who was the supervising sound editor of Charlie’s Angels, as well as its sequel Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.

Benavente told me up front not only that he didn’t remember much about the bird, but that it really wasn’t a priority at the time. “To be honest, that sound was a very minor part of the film,” he said. “I know it was a plot point and pays off and that kind of stuff, but there was so much other stuff going on with sword fights and, you know, big action sequences.”

But I’d come this far, and I wasn’t going to take indifference for an answer. So I asked him to rewatch the scene with me over Zoom, and some things started to click. The first was that, in the context of the scene, an accurate sound effect wouldn’t have felt right: “Quite frankly, realistic doesn’t always play dramatically or as interesting. You want to punch things up and make them sound fun,” he said.

The bird is helping the Angels set Bosley free. It doesn’t need to sound accurate—it needs to sound like deliverance. And for what it’s worth, that is not the song of a Venezuelan troupial, which sounds more like a car alarm.

The song of a real pygmy nuthatch has problems too—namely, it sounds as if it’s being chewed up like a squeaky toy.

“Yeah, a lot of times the real thing just isn’t cutting it,” Benavente said.

So Benavente’s team needed to deliver a birdsong that was more uplifting and joyful. But there was another thing. Not only did they have to match the song to the bird on-screen; they had to match it to one of the humans: Cameron Diaz.

See, if you listen very closely to the sound effect, as I have, there’s a rising, whistled trill at the end that repeats three times. But the third time you hear it, it’s actually Diaz’s character whistling a pitch-perfect imitation of the bird, blowing through her hands as if they’re a flute.

And that’s the thing that Benavente was focused on. “Basically, I would be more concerned about making sure it looked like it was coming out of her mouth,” he said. In other words, he and his team had to find a birdsong whose rhythm could line up with the visuals that had already been filmed.

So now I knew why they hadn’t used the song of a pygmy nuthatch or a Venezuelan troupial. But that’s where I hit a dead end. Benavente had no idea what bird they had used instead.

Still, I was undeterred. Even if I couldn’t identify the bird, I knew who probably could.

Nathan Pieplow is the author of the definitive Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Eastern and Western North America, which is sort of like Webster’s Dictionary for birdsongs and birdcalls. (He is also an “obsessive birder,” he told me, who is “not allowed by my friends and family to comment on the bird sounds when we are watching movies or TV, because they have had enough of my commentary.”)

One of the reasons Pieplow’s guides are so authoritative is that he helped pioneer a method that relies not on our ears but on our eyes. “The beautiful thing now that you can do is you can create what we call spectrograms, which are computer-generated pictures of the sound,” he said. A spectrogram is a visual representation of an audio recording, and in Pieplow’s field guides, they look like notes on a staff. It’s sheet music for birders.

“With practice,” he explained, “you can learn how to read the spectrograms so that you can look at the picture and you’ll know what it sounds like, or the other way around. If you hear a bird sound, you can picture what it’s going to look like.”

All this practice has made Pieplow an excellent ear birder. While warming him up, I played him birdsongs as far-flung as the pygmy nuthatch and the ‘i‘iwi, and he nailed them all.

But when I played him our mystery bird, even he, the guy who literally wrote the book on North American bird sounds, couldn’t identify it. This bird was really, really, ridiculously hard to pinpoint.

And as I listened to it over and over, I kept circling back to that part that repeats at the end—that Cameron Diaz whistles back perfectly. It’s weird, because it repeats exactly—and I mean exactly—in a way that almost sounds too uncanny, too mechanical, to be the work of any real bird. Was it possible it wasn’t the call of a real bird? Could it be … synthesized by a machine?

There was only one thing to do: ask another machine.

Merlin is an app, downloaded more than 10 million times, that’s basically Shazam for birds. Making “Shazam for birds” had been the holy grail of many birders before, but Merlin, which was developed by the renowned Cornell Lab of Ornithology, really cracked it.

I’d already tried using Merlin on Charlie’s Angels, and the app had been just as bewildered as the rest of us. But I called up Drew Weber, the project manager for Merlin, who explained that the app on my phone would never identify this sound for me—and that’s by design. “By default, Merlin’s only going to show you results for your location and your time of year,” he said.

But then he told me there’s another, more powerful version of the software: “Internally we have what we call the dev app. And it allows us to toggle off the various filtering for location and time of year.”

So Weber set loose his behind-the-scenes version of Merlin on Charlie’s Angels—and he got a hit.

“The song that we were hearing is a fox sparrow,” he said.

I was dumbfounded. We have fox sparrows in New York City! I’ve had them in my literal backyard. If the bird in Charlie’s Angels was a fox sparrow, why hadn’t I been able to identify the song on my own? For that matter, why hadn’t my version of Merlin?

But Weber told me that the fox sparrow in Charlie’s Angels was no New Yorker: “It sounds like the thick-billed subspecies, from California.”

I had to admit: The thick-billed fox sparrow sounded pretty close. But I still wasn’t sure it was quite right—even Weber would admit that Merlin’s A.I. was often wrong—and I wanted a second, human opinion. So I emailed this ID to Pieplow, the birdcall expert.

Pieplow wrote back, asking me to give him a call. “I made a spectrogram of the bird that’s singing in Charlie’s Angels,” he told me. “And so I started thinking, Maybe, maybe I could actually find the source recording that this was made from.”

As Pieplow proceeded to explain, when he was researching his field guide to bird sounds, he had fed a vast library of field recordings of birds into a computer program to turn them into spectrograms, spectrograms he still had.

“So I went to the folder called Thick-Billed Fox Sparrow, and within about two minutes I had found the exact individual bird that was recorded and used in Charlie’s Angels,” he said.

I could hardly contain myself. He had found not only the species, not only the subspecies, but the precise individual that was recorded singing nearly 35 years ago: “It is a thick-billed fox sparrow that was recorded by Thomas G. Sander on June 2, 1990, at the Black Pine Spring Campground in the Deschutes National Forest in Oregon.”

It was the smoking gun. I had goose bumps. We had gotten our bird.

And then it got even better. Pieplow explained to me what was going on with that weirdly mechanical series of trills at the end: The recording had been tampered with. The song we hear in the movie is actually stitched together from two different parts of that same 14-minute recording: The movie uses mostly the first couple of seconds of when the bird sings at 2:47, but then it also tacks on the trill that the bird sings only once, at 3:07—looping it three times so that we can hear it twice before Diaz performs it back, in perfect sync.

It was the butterfly effect: An actress flaps her hands on a set in California and, months later, a thick-billed fox sparrow, in an editing room, sings.

By this point I was feeling pretty satisfied with all I’d been able to uncover, and it was starting to make me see things a little differently.

I had begun this investigation thinking that everyone involved in this movie just didn’t care about birds, but now I knew that wasn’t the case. I mean, they didn’t really care about birds, but rather than being lazy, or incompetent, or malevolent, they had each been trying to solve a problem—and had stretched themselves to do so creatively. And I could understand and even admire that.

But I couldn’t let it obscure the big picture. The bird in Charlie’s Angels was still a mess. As resourceful as everyone had been, their individual choices did not add up!

And there is one person on a movie who is supposed to keep that from happening—one person who is supposed to be taking in the bird’s-eye view. And so I needed to go to that person and demand an explanation. I needed to talk to the director.

Before Charlie’s Angels, McG was best known for music videos, like the one for “All Star” by Smash Mouth. He’s since gone on to direct the fourth movie in the Terminator franchise and, around the time I interviewed him, the No. 1 movie on Netflix, Uglies. But Charlie’s Angels is what made McG McG—and I was curious if any of this bird drama had even registered with him.

After I got in touch with him, he came out strong. “With the greatest respect, I’m the only person to speak on this issue,” McG told me.

It turns out McG remembered everything. He had total recall of the scene, right down to the bird’s Latin name—and he was well aware there was a problem with using that song: “The call is very different of a Sitta pygmaea than the call reflected in the film.”

This was my guy! He got it! And not only had he given a hoot, but he’d tried to make it right.

Before deciding on the two Venezuelan troupials he got from Guin Dill, the animal wrangler, he’d actually wanted to use a bird that looked a lot more like a real pygmy nuthatch. But that bird wouldn’t fly.

It “had a very bright white underbelly,” he explained. “And on top of having difficulty hitting its mark, the white underbelly was casting a bounce onto Bill Murray’s face that was unsavory to the director of photography.”

At this point—it saddens me a little to say—McG, like everyone else, had given up. The movie was over budget, and he was under a lot of pressure. “I was nearly fired off that movie, you know, no less than six or eight times,” he said. “Because it was just so colorful and weird and buoyant and effervescent, and, you know, the studio brass at the time was like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ ”

So he was going to do whatever it took to get the shot. “You can’t spend 90 minutes trying to get the bird to sit on the windowsill to interact with Bill Murray. If one bird can do it, that bird, you know, that bird’s going in.”

And the pygmy nuthatch did have something going for it: its name! It was wrong in all sorts of ways, but the tone, the spirit, the word nut—it had that special something. McG knew it the first time he heard it. “What a great name,” he remembers thinking. “We got to do it. It felt so Charlie’s Angels.”

And McG, he definitely knew what felt like Charlie’s Angels.

Charlie’s Angels, with its goofball mix of action, comedy, and knowing stupidity, became a franchise-launching hit, earning good reviews and one of the highest-grossing opening weekends ever for a first-time director. And—though I hate to admit it—it did it all with a Frankenstein’s monster of a bird.

A bird I had learned was the fault not of any one person—but of many. If this were a whodunit, it would be Murder on the Orient Express, with not just one culprit but dozens, each with their own motive, their own problem to solve. They might be bound by laws. They might be bound by vibes. They might be bound by the small size of the prison window on the set that they already built. And as I’ve learned, you can’t make a movie without breaking some eggs.

“We desperately wanted to get it right,” McG told me. “But then, with great regularity, reality shows up and kicks you in the ass.”

I knew, with this scene, what “right” meant to me—but I am not too stubborn to admit that the people actually working on the film got it right in so many other ways: They picked a bird name that would make you laugh, bird actors who would hit their marks and catch your eye, and a birdsong that would sound like hope.

For years, I thought I had caught the movie out, in this egregious mistake. But maybe I was the birdbrain. Maybe it was time for me to eat crow.

Maybe the wrongest bird in the history of the movies is just right.

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SimonHova
15 days ago
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This is one of the most fun mystery solving posts I'd ever read.
Greenlawn, NY
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my brother got covid because he’s a college professor and there’s not much he can do to mitigate…

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fifthnormani:

inkskinned:

my brother got covid because he’s a college professor and there’s not much he can do to mitigate exposure when he has 200+ students per lecture. he’s got a baby at home, so he does his best, but.

the governmental website for covid information is now propaganda. not a joke, not hyperbole, not an exaggeration: it’s genuinely the definition of propaganda. this is biased misinformation determined to push a political stance. it is being hosted on a government server. it looks like something you’d find in a “top 10 weird internet conspiracy stories (and their origins)” youtube video.

my brother called me when he saw it. he had me type it into google. for a second i legitimately thought that i had typed something wrong. we have both taught college: we have both said “a .gov site is usually a reliable resource.” i just stared at my phone for a long, long time.

i thought about how when i was a kid, conspiracy theories were mostly fun and a little spooky. unserious. i remember reading some long, complicated website about how avril lavigne is dead. how bigfoot is real. it used to be funny-and-a-joke.

over seven million people (globally) have died from covid. america has the highest death rate with over 1.2 million people.

the thing is - every time a person dies from something like a mass shooting or poverty or treatable illness - we are told don’t make it political. we are told it’s just something that can happen. we are told it’s sad but what can you do!

the president of the united states is using a government website to try to erase the very-real deaths that he personally caused due to a complete mismanagement of the pandemic. the president of the united states is using a government server to host propaganda, undermine science and medicine, and encourage distrust amongst his followers.

nothing is going to happen. nobody’s gonna, like, do anything about it. it’s a thursday today, and we are just going to move on from this like we have been moving on from everything else.

yesterday my brother was outside walking his dog, mask included. a guy in a truck pulls up and shouts something about covid and whatever the fuck else. my brother has a good sense of humor, described it to me as enthusiastic! i hadn’t ever been catcalled before, this was new and therefore thrilling! i do see why you hate it, though. like. i have actual covid, does he want me to cough on him?

my brother doesn’t get extra time off work anymore, because the cdc practically doesn’t exist. my brother said i’m not exposing 200 students to covid. his boss shrugged and said: who cares? they’re going to get it eventually anyway. like it isn’t a pandemic.

like it’s just a fucking thursday, and who cares about it.

I do want you to know that there are people who are trying to do something about it. Even if they are a drop in the bucket, they exist.

They are The People’s CDC (they are a nonprofit who have 0 affiliation with the real CDC). I’m subscribed to their emails and they keep me updated, as best they can with their limited resources, on the spread of Covid as well as Calls To Action. This morning, at 11:30 AM, they had a virtual Press Conference to discuss the current attacks on science and what they can do about it. I unfortunately missed that one, but yeah.

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SimonHova
36 days ago
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I thought that he was joking about the government website, but it's so much worse than the Clickhole version that you have in your mind right now.
Greenlawn, NY
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U.K. cartoonist Rebecca Burke on her ICE detainment: 'No one should be here' - The Comics Journal

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SimonHova
43 days ago
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DOGE At NLRB

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Credit: Pixabay

I continue to wonder why Musk’s goons don’t get bodily removed from more offices. By now, Trumpies are in charge of enough agencies that they can order that computer access be turned over to the invaders, and, as in the takeover of the US Institute of Peace, armed guards play a part. We need to hear more about how the takeovers happen.

A whistleblower, Daniel Berulis, has provided information on what happened after the goons took over the computers at the National Labor Relations Board. When Berulis tried to raise concerns internally, someone physically taped a threatening note to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone.

His disclosure to Congress and other federal overseers includes forensic data and records of conversations with colleagues that provide evidence of DOGE’s access and activities. NPR wrote a long article summarizing the disclosure.

Matt Johanson nicely summarized the disclosure on Bluesky.

🧵 THREAD: A federal whistleblower just dropped one of the most disturbing cybersecurity disclosures I’ve ever read.He's saying DOGE came in, data went out, and Russians started attempting logins with new valid DOGE passwordsMedia's coverage wasn't detailed enough so I dug into his testimony:

Matt Johansen (@mattjay.com) 2025-04-18T00:10:37.000Z

Who’s the whistleblower?Daniel Berulis — a senior DevSecOps architect at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), formerly with TS/SCI clearance.He just told Congress the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) pulled off a covert cyber op inside a federal agency.

Matt Johansen (@mattjay.com) 2025-04-18T00:10:47.000Z

DOGE demanded root access.Not auditor access. Not admin.They were given “tenant owner” privileges in Azure — full control over the NLRB’s cloud, above the CIO himself.This is never supposed to happen.

Matt Johansen (@mattjay.com) 2025-04-18T00:11:11.000Z

They disabled the logs.Berulis says DOGE demanded account creation with no recordkeeping.They even ordered security controls bypassed and disabled tools like network watcher so their actions wouldn’t be logged.

Matt Johansen (@mattjay.com) 2025-04-18T00:11:27.000Z

And then the data started flowing out.10+ GB spike in outbound trafficExfiltration from NxGen, the NLRB's legal case databaseNo corresponding inbound trafficUnusual ephemeral containers and expired storage tokens

Matt Johansen (@mattjay.com) 2025-04-18T00:11:45.000Z

They used an external library that used AWS IP pools to rotate IPs for scraping and brute force attacks.They downloaded external GitHub tools like requests-ip-rotator and browserless — neither of which the agency uses.

Matt Johansen (@mattjay.com) 2025-04-18T00:12:00.000Z

The most daming claim in this statement IMO:Within 15 minutes of DOGE accounts being created…Attackers in Russia tried logging in using those new creds.Correct usernames and passwords.2 options here. The DOGE device was hacked. And I don't think I need to explain the 2nd.

Matt Johansen (@mattjay.com) 2025-04-18T00:12:18.000Z

Multi-factor authentication? Disabled.Someone downgraded Azure conditional access rules — MFA was off for mobile.This was not approved and not logged.

Matt Johansen (@mattjay.com) 2025-04-18T00:12:24.000Z

Cost spikes without new resources.Azure billing jumped 8% — likely from short-lived high-cost compute used for data extraction, then deleted.

Matt Johansen (@mattjay.com) 2025-04-18T00:12:32.000Z

US-CERT was about to be called in.CISA’s cyber response team.But senior officials told them to stand down — no report, no investigation.

Matt Johansen (@mattjay.com) 2025-04-18T00:12:49.000Z

Highlights (or lowlights):

  • DOGE were given “tenant owner” privileges, which allowed them full control over NLRB’s cloud.
  • They disabled logging tools so that their actions wouldn’t be logged.
  • 10+ GB spike in outbound data.
  • Within 15 minutes of DOGE accounts being created, attackers in Russia tried logging in using those new creds. Correct usernames and passwords.

The DOGE teams seem to use their “official” status to gain access to computers, but disabling logging tools suggests that they are not working for the federal government. If they were, logging would be part of the job. It’s been clear for some time that DOGE is taking a lot of sensitive data (our formerly private and personal data) for themselves. The Russian attack is a bit of a surprise; they also disabled some of the safeguards like two-factor login, so it could have been part of the continuing Russian attacks to hack government data. I will leave you to imagine other possibilities.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

The post DOGE At NLRB appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

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SimonHova
45 days ago
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Just when I thought that I couldn't be shocked any more by the news.
Greenlawn, NY
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The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans

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The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

This is going to require some explaining.

The story technically begins shortly after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel, in October 2023. The Houthis—an Iran-backed terrorist organization whose motto is “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam”—soon launched attacks on Israel and on international shipping, creating havoc for global trade. Throughout 2024, the Biden administration was ineffective in countering these Houthi attacks; the incoming Trump administration promised a tougher response.

This is where Pete Hegseth and I come in.

On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz. I have met him in the past, and though I didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me, I did think it somewhat unusual, given the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with journalists—and Trump’s periodic fixation on me specifically. It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me. It is not at all uncommon these days for nefarious actors to try to induce journalists to share information that could be used against them.

I accepted the connection request, hoping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter.

Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”

A message to the group, from “Michael Waltz,” read as follows: “Team – establishing a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours. My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items and will be sending that out later this evening.”

The message continued, “Pls provide the best staff POC from your team for us to coordinate with over the next couple days and over the weekend. Thx.”

The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.

One minute later, a person identified only as “MAR”—the secretary of state is Marco Antonio Rubio—wrote, “Mike Needham for State,” apparently designating the current counselor of the State Department as his representative. At that same moment, a Signal user identified as “JD Vance” wrote, “Andy baker for VP.” One minute after that, “TG” (presumably Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, or someone masquerading as her) wrote, “Joe Kent for DNI.” Nine minutes later, “Scott B”—apparently Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, or someone spoofing his identity, wrote, “Dan Katz for Treasury.” At 4:53 p.m., a user called “Pete Hegseth” wrote, “Dan Caldwell for DoD.” And at 6:34 p.m., “Brian” wrote “Brian McCormack for NSC.” One more person responded: “John Ratcliffe” wrote at 5:24 p.m. with the name of a CIA official to be included in the group. I am not publishing that name, because that person is an active intelligence officer.

The principals had apparently assembled. In all, 18 individuals were listed as members of this group, including various National Security Council officials; Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator; Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; and someone identified only as “S M,” which I took to stand for Stephen Miller. I appeared on my own screen only as “JG.”

That was the end of the Thursday text chain.

After receiving the Waltz text related to the “Houthi PC small group,” I consulted a number of colleagues. We discussed the possibility that these texts were part of a disinformation campaign, initiated by either a foreign intelligence service or, more likely, a media-gadfly organization, the sort of group that attempts, and sometimes succeeds, to place journalists in embarrassing positions. I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.


The next day, things got even stranger.

At 8:05 a.m. on Friday, March 14, “Michael Waltz” texted the group: “Team, you should have a statement of conclusions with taskings per the Presidents guidance this morning in your high side inboxes.” (High side, in government parlance, refers to classified computer and communications systems.) “State and DOD, we developed suggested notification lists for regional Allies and partners. Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days and we will work w DOD to ensure COS, OVP and POTUS are briefed.”

At this point, a fascinating policy discussion commenced. The account labeled “JD Vance” responded at 8:16: “Team, I am out for the day doing an economic event in Michigan. But I think we are making a mistake.” (Vance was indeed in Michigan that day.) The Vance account goes on to state, “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”

The Vance account then goes on to make a noteworthy statement, considering that the vice president has not deviated publicly from Trump’s position on virtually any issue. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”
A person identified in Signal as “Joe Kent” (Trump’s nominee to run the National Counterterrorism Center is named Joe Kent), wrote at 8:22, “There is nothing time sensitive driving the time line. We’ll have the exact same options in a month.”

Then, at 8:26 a.m., a message landed in my Signal app from the user “John Ratcliffe.” The message contained information that might be interpreted as related to actual and current intelligence operations.

At 8:27, a message arrived from the “Pete Hegseth” account. “VP: I understand your concerns – and fully support you raising w/ POTUS. Important considerations, most of which are tough to know how they play out (economy, Ukraine peace, Gaza, etc). I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what – nobody knows who the Houthis are – which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.”

The Hegseth message goes on to state, “Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus. 2 immediate risks on waiting: 1) this leaks, and we look indecisive; 2) Israel takes an action first – or Gaza cease fire falls apart – and we don’t get to start this on our own terms. We can manage both. We are prepared to execute, and if I had final go or no go vote, I believe we should. This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered. But, we can easily pause. And if we do, I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC”—operations security. “I welcome other thoughts.”

A few minutes later, the “Michael Waltz” account posted a lengthy note about trade figures, and the limited capabilities of European navies. “Whether it’s now or several weeks from now, it will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes. Per the president’s request we are working with DOD and State to determine how to compile the cost associated and levy them on the Europeans.”

The account identified as “JD Vance” addressed a message at 8:45 to @Pete Hegseth: “if you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.” (The administration has argued that America’s European allies benefit economically from the U.S. Navy’s protection of international shipping lanes.)

The user identified as Hegseth responded three minutes later: “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC. But Mike is correct, we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this. Nobody else even close. Question is timing. I feel like now is as good a time as any, given POTUS directive to reopen shipping lanes. I think we should go; but POTUS still retains 24 hours of decision space.”

At this point, the previously silent “S M” joined the conversation. “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”

That message from “S M”—presumably President Trump’s confidant Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, or someone playing Stephen Miller—effectively shut down the conversation. The last text of the day came from “Pete Hegseth,” who wrote at 9:46 a.m., “Agree.”

After reading this chain, I recognized that this conversation possessed a high degree of verisimilitude. The texts, in their word choice and arguments, sounded as if they were written by the people who purportedly sent them, or by a particularly adept AI text generator. I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.


It was the next morning, Saturday, March 15, when this story became truly bizarre.

At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.

The only person to reply to the update from Hegseth was the person identified as the vice president. “I will say a prayer for victory,” Vance wrote. (Two other users subsequently added prayer emoji.)

According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city.

I went back to the Signal channel. At 1:48, “Michael Waltz” had provided the group an update. Again, I won’t quote from this text, except to note that he described the operation as an “amazing job.” A few minutes later, “John Ratcliffe” wrote, “A good start.” Not long after, Waltz responded with three emoji: a fist, an American flag, and fire. Others soon joined in, including “MAR,” who wrote, “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” and “Susie Wiles,” who texted, “Kudos to all – most particularly those in theater and CENTCOM! Really great. God bless.” “Steve Witkoff” responded with five emoji: two hands-praying, a flexed bicep, and two American flags. “TG” responded, “Great work and effects!” The after-action discussion included assessments of damage done, including the likely death of a specific individual. The Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry reported that at least 53 people were killed in the strikes, a number that has not been independently verified.

On Sunday, Waltz appeared on ABC’s This Week and contrasted the strikes with the Biden administration’s more hesitant approach. “These were not kind of pinprick, back-and-forth—what ultimately proved to be feckless attacks,” he said. “This was an overwhelming response that actually targeted multiple Houthi leaders and took them out.”

The Signal chat group, I concluded, was almost certainly real. Having come to this realization, one that seemed nearly impossible only hours before, I removed myself from the Signal group, understanding that this would trigger an automatic notification to the group’s creator, “Michael Waltz,” that I had left. No one in the chat had seemed to notice that I was there. And I received no subsequent questions about why I left—or, more to the point, who I was.

Earlier today, I emailed Waltz and sent him a message on his Signal account. I also wrote to Pete Hegseth, John Ratcliffe, Tulsi Gabbard, and other officials. In an email, I outlined some of my questions: Is the “Houthi PC small group” a genuine Signal thread? Did they know that I was included in this group? Was I (on the off chance) included on purpose? If not, who did they think I was? Did anyone realize who I was when I was added, or when I removed myself from the group? Do senior Trump-administration officials use Signal regularly for sensitive discussions? Do the officials believe that the use of such a channel could endanger American personnel?

Brian Hughes, the spokesman for the National Security Council, responded two hours later, confirming the veracity of the Signal group. “This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” Hughes wrote. “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.”  


I have never seen a breach quite like this. It is not uncommon for national-security officials to communicate on Signal. But the app is used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters—not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action. And, of course, I’ve never heard of an instance in which a journalist has been invited to such a discussion.

Conceivably, Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of “national defense” information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by my colleague Shane Harris for this story. Harris asked them to consider a hypothetical scenario in which a senior U.S. official creates a Signal thread for the express purpose of sharing information with Cabinet officials about an active military operation. He did not show them the actual Signal messages or tell them specifically what had occurred.

All of these lawyers said that a U.S. official should not establish a Signal thread in the first place. Information about an active operation would presumably fit the law’s definition of “national defense” information. The Signal app is not approved by the government for sharing classified information. The government has its own systems for that purpose. If officials want to discuss military activity, they should go into a specially designed space known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF—most Cabinet-level national-security officials have one installed in their home—or communicate only on approved government equipment, the lawyers said. Normally, cellphones are not permitted inside a SCIF, which suggests that as these officials were sharing information about an active military operation, they could have been moving around in public. Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe.

Hegseth, Ratcliffe, and other Cabinet-level officials presumably would have the authority to declassify information, and several of the national-security lawyers noted that the hypothetical officials on the Signal chain might claim that they had declassified the information they shared. But this argument rings hollow, they cautioned, because Signal is not an authorized venue for sharing information of such a sensitive nature, regardless of whether it has been stamped “top secret” or not.

There was another potential problem: Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.

“Under the records laws applicable to the White House and federal agencies, all government employees are prohibited from using electronic-messaging applications such as Signal for official business, unless those messages are promptly forwarded or copied to an official government account,” Jason R. Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland and the former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told Harris.

“Intentional violations of these requirements are a basis for disciplinary action. Additionally, agencies such as the Department of Defense restrict electronic messaging containing classified information to classified government networks and/or networks with government-approved encrypted features,” Baron said.

Several former U.S. officials told Harris and me that they had used Signal to share unclassified information and to discuss routine matters, particularly when traveling overseas without access to U.S. government systems. But they knew never to share classified or sensitive information on the app, because their phones could have been hacked by a foreign intelligence service, which would have been able to read the messages on the devices. It is worth noting that Donald Trump, as a candidate for president (and as president), repeatedly and vociferously demanded that Hillary Clinton be imprisoned for using a private email server for official business when she was secretary of state. (It is also worth noting that Trump was indicted in 2023 for mishandling classified documents, but the charges were dropped after his election.)

Waltz and the other Cabinet-level officials were already potentially violating government policy and the law simply by texting one another about the operation. But when Waltz added a journalist—presumably by mistake—to his principals committee, he created new security and legal issues. Now the group was transmitting information to someone not authorized to receive it. That is the classic definition of a leak, even if it was unintentional, and even if the recipient of the leak did not actually believe it was a leak until Yemen came under American attack.  

All along, members of the Signal group were aware of the need for secrecy and operations security. In his text detailing aspects of the forthcoming attack on Houthi targets, Hegseth wrote to the group—which, at the time, included me—“We are currently clean on OPSEC.”

Shane Harris contributed reporting.

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