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How an independent art and technology festival captured my heart
When I told my friends and co-workers I was attending the XOXO Festival in Portland, Oregon, last weekend, I had a difficult time explaining what it was about. The event website describes it as an "experimental festival celebrating independently produced art and technology." But that doesn't quite explain why the event, now four years in the running, struck a chord with me. One of the initial reasons I was drawn to XOXO was that it's about embracing technology not just as a means to make money, but also as a means for creativity and independence. This year, however, XOXO meant much more. The central theme of the festival, more than any other year, was about one thing: community.
Edward Snowden wants you to call him what he is: a trained government spy
Edward Snowden has been called a variety of things: whistleblower, patriot, traitor. But when it comes to his technical expertise, he's usually just referred to as a hacker, contractor or some flavor of system administrator. That, Snowden says, doesn't do his role and background justice. In an excerpt of an NBC interview, Snowden asserts that he's a technical expert "trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word," worked undercover and overseas for the CIA and NSA, lectured at a counterintelligence training academy and implemented systems for the government "at all levels." According to the infamous whistleblower, he qualifies as a spy in the classic sense since he "lived and worked undercover overseas -- pretending to work in a job that I'm not -- and even being assigned a name that was not mine."
