"Edward Snowden: The game plan for the NSA leak"New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer talks to the NSA leaker, somewhere in Moscow.by KenAs New Yorker features director Daniel Zalewski explains in his introduction to the interview with Kim Dotcom below, when he learned that this year's New Yorker Festival would attempt remotely connected virtual interviews with subjects unable to be onsite, he immediately thought of two people: former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, from somewhere in Russia; and Internet ultra-entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, from his compound in Auckland, New Zealand, where he has remained since the spectacular January 2012 raid U.S. authorities in cahoots with New Zealand law-enforcement troops launched the sort of raid normally associated with most-wanted terrorists to shut down Kim's file-sharing company, Megaupload.I'm not going to say that you learn everything there is to know about a person by seeing the person tell his/her own story, but there's a good chance you're going to learn things, and see sides of the person, you won't get just from reading about him/her. Goodness knows, I've read and heard a great deal about Edward Snowden, for example, but looking at the clips of his festival interview with ace New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, well, this isn't really the person I had imagined. You'll hear him answer Jane's question as to why, when the leaking of all the classified material was so meticulously planned, the plan didn't include an exit strategy for him personally, and hearing him explain it, I'm prepared to believe that he really didn't think that what would happen to him, which was unknowable to him in any case, figured much in his thinking, especially since he thought of himself as such a small part of the total operation.I was also fascinated to learn, given all the punditocratic assertions, often imprecations, of what each pundit unhesitatingly believes was in Snowden's head in undertaking the release of his massive document cache, they all have their heads up their butts. With all that bloviating about Snowden's qualifications to determine what documents should be made public, I was fascinated to hear that he never intended to be the judge of that -- this was the whole point of doing the document releases through established journalists. I don't know how many other clips there are besides this one from the Snowden interview, but just from this one I have a very different sense of the guy.Live from New Zealand, meet Kim Dotcom, Hollywood's Public Enemy No. 1New Yorker features director Daniel Zalewski gets an amazing story out of irresistibly charming Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom.By contrast with Edward Snowden, Kim Dotcom was almost totally unknown to me. After watching the interview, where the German-born New Zealander chats so freely and easily and, seemingly, so unreservedly, I have the feeling that I know everything there could possibly be to know about him and his path to the founding of Megaupload, which plugged the need, then as now, for sharing really large files. Not surprisingly, not all the files that were transferred via Megaupload were legal, and to the Hollywood moguls in particular Kim became something like Public Enemy No. 1. (It turns out, by the way, that contrary to Daniel Zalewski's original understanding, Kim isn't under house arrest in New Zealand, though he was for a while. He just can't leave the country.)However, Kim is quick to point out that quite a lot of the material on Megaupload is copyright-protected (and the avenging authorities, he notes, are often quite muddled about what is and what isn't protected); that in YouTube fashion the company was always quick to remove material upon complaint from a copyright holder; that the draconian raid was organized without any attempt to engage the company in any kind of dialogue about legal problems; and that the way the raid was conducted, large quantities of perfectly legal content was effectively destroyed. Kim's understanding of what brought the raid on was the prospect of President Obama's 2012 reelection campaign, for which large quantities of Hollywood cash would be sought. It's also his understanding that the operation was spearheaded by Vice President Biden, standing in for a squeamish president. Kim also has interesting things to say about the way in which Hollywood has made itself so vulnerable to unauthorized international distribution of its content, suggesting that there are other ways of organizing the financing of its products which would go along way toward eliminating this vulnerability.Nevertheless, with minimal regard to legalities, the avenging U.S. feds have taken pretty much everything from Kim, and done everything they can to close off sources of funds -- including funds totally unrelated to Megaupload -- to prevent him from mounting any kind of defense against their efforts to silence him. He also believes that the breakup of his marriage is a direct result of the traumatic way his business was terminated.Am I the only one who is utterly charmed by Kim? I feel like he's my new best friend, or at least I wish he were. His English, despite the unmistakable German accent, is effortlessly idiomatic, and he sure sounds like he has nothing to hide.This is a long clip, but you should be able to pause it by clicking on it, then reclicking to restart."Larry David on writing Curb Your Enthusiasm and why he doesn't understand 'squirmish' people"Meanwhile Larry David, in conversation with New Yorker editor David Remnick, is, well, Larry David.And then there's Larry David. I love Larry David, and New Yorker editor David Remnick is a splendid audience. Could anybody but Larry be so upset to discover that a surprising number of Curb Your Enthusiasm viewers were made squeamish by portions of episodes? Larry says it never occurred to him that anything he writes could make people uncomfortable. Offended, sure. In Larry's mind that's pretty much a given. (In the clip we can see how pleased with himself he is even now by making the connection between "survivor" as in CBS's fake-survivalist series and "survivors" as in concentration-camp survivors, and I"m guessing there are still a lot of people who are just as offended as they were when the episode in question aired. So viwers who are offended, of course. But viewers who are made uncomfortable? This seems to make Larry feel really bad.#
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