Bacteria hijack plentiful iron supply source to flourish

In an era of increasing concern about the prevalence of antibiotic-resistant illness, Case Western Reserve researchers have identified a promising new pathway to disabling disease: blocking bacteria's access to iron in the body.

The scientists showed how bacterial siderophore, a small molecule, captures iron from two abundant supply sources to fan bacterial growth -- as well as how the body launches a chemical counterassault against this infection process. Their findings appear in a recent edition of The Journal of Experimental Medicine.

"Bacterial siderophore will be an important target for therapeutics one day because it can be modified to prevent bacteria from acquiring iron, but at the same time, it's possible to preserve host access to iron," said senior author Laxminarayana Devireddy, DVM, PhD, assistant professor of pathology, Case Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Investigators knew from the outset that bacterial siderophore captures iron from the host mammal and transforms it so that bacteria can absorb and metabolize the mineral. In this investigation, Devireddy and his colleagues discovered that human mitochondria, which very closely resemble bacteria, possess their own iron-acquisition machinery -- mitochondrial siderophore. Mammalian mitochondria are membrane-encased subunits within cells that generate most of the cell's energy, and like their bacteria counterparts, mammalian mitochondria have their own siderophore mechanism that seeks out, captures and delivers iron for utilization.

At the test tube level, investigators found that bacteria can feed on iron supplied by bacterial siderophore and mitochondrial siderophore. From this glut of iron, bacteria proliferate and make the host mammal very ill with an infection.

"It's like bacteria can use their own iron-capture machinery or the host's. It just doesn't matter," Devireddy said. "They are very good at utilizing siderophore from both bacterial and mammalian siderophore sources. That means that bacteria get the most iron."

Case Western Reserve researchers also demonstrated that the absence of mitochondrial siderophore in a mammal can enhance its ability to resist infection. When investigators exposed mice deficient for mitochondrial siderophore to systemic infection by E. coli, the animals resisted infection. The reason? E. coli bacteria had less iron to access from mitochondrial siderophore-deficient mice.

Additionally, mammals are not entirely defenseless from a bacteria raid on mitochondrial siderophore iron supplies. In another phase of their investigation, scientists found that normal mice secrete the protein lipocalin 24p3, which isolates bacterial siderophore and suppresses synthesis of mammalian siderophore.

"The action of lipocalin significantly reduced the mortality of the mice from the E. coli infection, and some mice actually recovered," Devireddy said. "That kind of delay in bacterial proliferation gave the immune system time to identify and then neutralize the microbe."

These findings highlight the potential of developing effective therapeutics to reverse bacterial infection.

"Any approach that would suppress either bacterial or mitochondrial siderophore and activate lipocalin-2 would likely slow infection, allowing the host's immune system to respond," Devireddy said. "Such novel approaches would also provide a much-needed alternative to treat those infections that have become antibiotics resistant."

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Case Western Reserve University . The original article was written by Jeannette Spalding. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Tiny DNA pyramids enter bacteria easily -- and deliver a deadly payload

Bacterial infections usually announce themselves with pain and fever but often can be defeated with antibiotics -- and then there are those that are sneaky and hard to beat. Now, scientists have built a new weapon against such pathogens in the form of tiny DNA pyramids. Published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, their study found the nanopyramids can flag bacteria and kill more of them than medicine alone.

David Leong, Jianping Xie and colleagues note that some infectious pathogens can lie in wait, undetectable in the human body or in places that antibiotics have a hard time accessing. Engineered nanomedicine offers a new way to deliver drugs directly into bacterial cells, but the carriers developed so far pose problems such as toxicity. So Leong's team decided to use DNA to build a better, safer drug-delivery tool.

They made little pyramids out of DNA that were so small that thousands could fit in the period at the end of this sentence. Then, they attached gold nanomaterials as fluorescent tags and also packaged the drug actinomycin D (AMD) into the struts of the DNA pyramids. In tests on the common bacteria Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus, the scientists tracked the nanopyramids as they entered the cells and released the drug payload. This killed 65 percent of the S. aureus and 48 percent of the E. coli, compared to 42 percent and 14 percent with AMD alone.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by American Chemical Society . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Immune system component found that resists sepsis in mice

Molecular microbiologists from the Keck School of Medicine of USC have discovered that mice lacking a specific component of the immune system are completely resistant to sepsis, a potentially fatal complication of infection. The discovery suggests that blocking this immune system component may help reduce inflammation in human autoimmune and hyper-inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and Type 2 diabetes.

The study was published online on June 23 in The Journal of Experimental Medicine, a leading peer-reviewed scientific journal in research medicine and immunology.

The immune system is the body's first line of defense against infection. The system, however, can also injure the body if it is not turned off after the infection is destroyed, or if it is turned on when there is no infection at all. Scientists do not yet fully understand how the immune response is turned on and off and continue to study it in hopes of harnessing its power to cure disease.

In this study, scientists have found that a component of the system, HOIL-1L, is necessary for formation of the NLRP3-ASC inflammasome signaling complex.

"This regulatory mechanism is critical in vivo, where we find that mice lacking HOIL-1L are completely resistant to sepsis, which is a lethal inflammation model of human sepsis," said Mary Rodgers, PhD, USC postdoctoral fellow and the study's first author. "Our results suggest that blocking the activity of HOIL-1L could be a new therapeutic strategy for reducing inflammation in disease."

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of Southern California - Health Sciences . The original article was written by Alison Trinidad. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Sugar protects cells from bacterial invasion

No admission for bacteria: Scientists from the University of Freiburg have succeeded in preventing Pseudomonas bacteria from entering host cells with the help of a sugar complex. Dr. Thorsten Eierhoff and junior professor Dr. Winfried Römer from the Institute of Biologie II, both members of the Cluster of Excellence BIOSS Centre for Biological Signalling Studies of the University of Freiburg, have identified a sugar complex that binds the bacterial protein LecA in close cooperation with research groups led by Prof. Dr. Nicolas Winssinger from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and Dr. Anne Imberty from the University of Grenoble, France. This protein enables the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa to invade human lung cells. The researchers published their findings in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

Among other things, the hospital germ Pseudomonas aeruginosa can cause inflammation of the skin and lungs in patients with a weak immune system or a chronic illness. Moreover, these bacteria are often resistant to antibiotics. In tests conducted in cell culture, the researchers demonstrated that the germs penetrate into human lung cells 90 percent less often when treated with the agent.

The bacterial protein LecA binds the sugar galactose, which is exposed by receptors at the host cell surface. Via LecA, the bacterium attaches itself to the host cell and forces its way in. This allows the bacterium to spread through the body. The researchers developed a molecule that prevents LecA from docking onto the host cell receptors by binding to the bacterial protein with great precision. The research group led by Imberty succeeded in illustrating how the interaction between the sugar and the LecA protein looks like at the molecular level. "The agent is tailored precisely to bind to LecA: A framework of organic molecules places two galactose sugars at the right distance from one another for them to fit snugly into two of LecA's binding sites on the bacterial cell," explains Eierhoff. The agent resembles a plug made of galactose sugars that fits perfectly into the socket of LecA. Once bound to LecA, the agent works like a protective cap, preventing the Pseudomonas bacteria from invading the host cell.

The precisely fitting molecular framework was found by the research group led by the chemist Winssinger. The team arranged molecules that were potential candidates for binding partners on a chip. This allowed the scientists to test many samples at once. They determined which plug fit best with the protein LecA. The group led by Römer then tested the best-fitting molecule in cell culture to measure how many bacteria still managed to invade cells under the influence of the plug.

Binding to host cells via LecA is a significant path of invasion for Pseudomonas aeruginosa in human lung cells. The bacterium is responsible for roughly 80 percent of pneumonia-induced deaths in patients with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder of the mucous membranes. The researchers hope their findings will lead to the development of a novel agent capable of substantially weakening the germ.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

IBM Bets $3B That the Silicon Microchip Is Becoming Obsolete

IBM’s Silicon Nanophotonics chip technology. IBM

IBM is worried that the age of silicon may be drawing to a close. So it’s going to spend $3 billion over the next half-decade to try and find new ways to power the future generations of microprocessors.

“We really do see the clock ticking on silicon,” says Tom Rosamilia, Senior Vice President of IBM Systems & Technology Group.

Today’s state-of-the-art IBM chips use silicon components that are already tiny — just 22 nanometers in width. But looking about five years into the future, parts become so small that it becomes extremely difficult to maintain a reliable on or off state. “As we get into the 7 nanometer timeframe, things really begin to taper off,” Rosamilia says.

So the first step of IBM’s $3 billion quest will fund research into ways of making these smaller chip components work — even if they don’t use silicon. IBM has high hopes for a silicon alternative, called carbon nanotubes, but the concept still needs work if it’s going to become as easy to crank out carbon nanotube chips as their silicon alternatives. Another promising area is silicon nanophotonics: a way of using light instead of electrical signals to send data around the chip.

The microprocessor industry has had an amazing ride, but already you can some fraying at the edges of Moore’s Law

Beyond that, IBM is also investing in brand new ways of number-crunching—quantum computing, or Neurosynaptic chips — that use computing models that go beyond the digital computing paradigm that has dominated the tech industry for fifty years.

The microprocessor industry has had an amazing ride, but already you can some fraying at the edges of Moore’s Law—the observation that chip performance doubles ever two years or so.

Microsoft is starting to use custom-designed chips for its Bing search engine — they say that it may be better to get performance boosts this way, rather than relying on general-purpose server chips to speed up. And scientists who maintain a list of the world’s top supercomputers worry that today’s supercomputers aren’t becoming powerful at quite the same clip.

If you ask the world’s largest chipmaker, Intel, the company will tell you that Moore’s Law is alive and well, and that it expects to crank out faster and faster chips for the foreseeable future.

So why the disconnect? Most likely, it comes down to the different business models of Intel and IBM. Although both companies make their own microprocessors, Intel rules the high-volume desktop market. It sells server chips too, but at higher volumes than IBM. Big Blue, on the other hand, is looking to carve out profitable niches for its systems, taking advantages of its expertise in software and system design to build unique systems. It’s looking for competitive differentiation—not necessarily high-volume sales.

And if quantum computers, carbon nanotubes, and computers modeled on the human brain are what it takes to get there, then IBM may be buying itself a $3 billion head start.

White Castle Honors Alice Cooper for His Dedication to Cheeseburgers

Boris Spremo/Getty

When Alice Cooper looks back on the legendary timeline of his life, there will surely be many years with special significance: 1969, when his Alice Cooper band was signed to Frank Zappa’s label; 1976, when he married his partner Sheryl Goddard; 1991, when his presence brought Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar to their knees in Wayne’s World; and 2011, when Cooper was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

But now, if music’s original shock rocker ever decides to pen a follow-up to his memoir Golf Monster : A Rock ‘n’ Roller’s 12 Steps to Becoming a Golf Addict, he’ll have to include a chapter about one more very special occasion: July 7, 2014—the day Cooper entered the White Castle Cravers Hall of Fame.

The WCCHoF is located at White Castle headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, just 200 miles from Cooper’s birthplace of Detroit. Since its creation in 2001, 7,645 people have tried to get their names in the hallowed Hall, but only two percent have made the cut, putting the successful multi-hyphenate in a truly elite class.

As the pristine, post-war hero glow of the 1950s faded, America spent the late 60s entering its self-aware stage, mirroring the journey of a young Cooper, who was emerging from the unchecked optimism of teenage dreaming into the critical phase of early-20-something self-exploration. But fortunately for Cooper, he didn’t have just rock ‘n’ roll music to aid him on this journey. He also had White Castle’s iconic sliders, too.

No one can say for sure when he first fed his Frankenstein with White Castle’s unique culinary offerings, but we can deduce with reasonable certainty that it, like many events in the improbable star’s trailblazing career, was destiny—a beginning point that would run a traceable line through the life and career of Cooper, leading him back home to the Midwest, and finally into the Cravers Hall of Fame as if he was meant to be there all along.

Cooper was inducted into the Hall by Bill, Marci, and Lisa Ingram, who are the fourth generation of Ingrams to run the family-owned American institution. The company’s vice president, Jamie Richardson, moderated a brief conversation with Cooper to an audience of White Castle employees. A band was in attendance to pay tribute to Cooper and perform several of his songs, with the legend even welcoming attendees to his nightmare by joining in on “No More Mr. Nice Guy”—much to everyone’s surprise and delight.

As he was being inducted, Cooper told his audience, “a lot of my fellow rockers are going to be envious of this honor.” He was then asked how the moment stacked up against entering the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Ever the classy gentleman, Cooper was careful not to offend the Rock Hall by belittling it to the media and simply responded, “there’s no comparison.” As an honoree, he received a tour of the White Castle Headquarters in addition to a plaque commemorating his entrance into the selective WCCHoF.

The “School’s Out” rocker shares this honor alongside 170 inductees, including the five creators of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle; Steven Luch of Detroit, in partnership with his potbellied pig, Nips; and Greek Orthodox Priest, Father John Stavropoulos of Canton, Ohio—Craver legends all.

Get Out! Someone Made an Emoji of Our Jerry Seinfeld Cover

Screengrab: WIRED

In the 1990s it was the Puffy Shirt, but these days Jerry Seinfeld rocks Google Glass. Maybe not at his favorite diner, but definitely on the cover of WIRED—and now in emoji.

The new Seinfeld emoji come courtesy of Jason Richards—the guy behind the @Seinfeld2000 Twitter account—and Houston-based graphic designer Kevin McCauley. And the fun doesn’t stop with Glasshole Jerry. There’s also a non-”modarn” version of @Seinfeld2000 stalwarts Jerry, Elaine, “Gerge,” “Kragnor,” Junior Mints, and even—yes—a puffy shirt.

And the best part is, you might actually be able to use these to send texts (about nothing) to your friends. McCauley created the images for a new app that is reportedly awaiting approval from the App Store.

Unfortunately, even if the app is approved the new emoji might not show up in your standard emoji keyboard. What is the deal with that? The Seinfeld Emoji web site explains, in @Seinfeld2000′s familiar brand of mangled English: “We called Apple and tried to make this hapen [sic] but honestly the CEO, Tim Cook or whatever, he was like ‘how did you get my phone number, this is my confidentiel [sic] unlisted number. I am v busy, plese [sic] stop calling,.’ And then when we called back he simply declined becase [sic] it went straght [sic] to voicemail after only one ring or whatever.”

New internet rule: Write to us in Seinfeld emojis or don’t write to us at all.

The App That Lets You Spy on Yourself and Sell Your Own Data

Citizenme

Facebook and other social networking sites aren’t free. They don’t charge you money to connect with friends, upload photos, and “like” your favorite bands and businesses, but you still pay. You pay with your personal data, which these service use to target ads.

For Citizenme, the price you pay is much higher, and it’s trying to shift internet economics back in your direction. The long-term plan is to provide a way for you to sell your own online data directly to advertisers and others of your choosing. But it isn’t there just yet. In the meantime, it’s focused on helping you collect and analyze your social media data through a mobile app that connects to multiple social networks—giving you more insight into how things work today. “The very first step is raising awareness, helping people understand what’s being done with their data,” says Citizenme founder StJohn Deakins.

Deakins, who has experience building mobile technologies for emerging markets, got the idea for Citizenme a few years ago, after selling mobile video company Triple Media to the private equity firm NewNet in 2010. “The biggest issue I could see for the internet is our data and what happens to our data,” he says. He acknowledges that personal data is essential to the health of the net because it drives the advertising that funds things. But today’s invasive data collection policies have made people distrustful. Citizenme hopes to change that by making users more aware of this process and, ultimately, letting them decide how their data is used.

How It Works

You start by connecting your social profiles to the app, which stores your data locally on your phone. Nothing is stored on Citizenme’s servers. So far, the app handles Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, but other services, such as Pinterest, are planned for the future.

Citizenme

From there, you can see what data you share publicly on those networks, and get a better sense of the overall privacy settings and policies of those services. The app includes a guide to each network’s terms of service. Particularly alarming policies—such as Facebook’s broad license to your photos and other content—are highlighted in red to get your attention. And when a company updates its terms of service, Citizenme alerts you and lets you vote on whether you think it’s a good or bad change. “It’s like an anti-virus for terms of service,” Deakins says, even though the outcome of such a vote is purely symbolic.

The company also worked with Cambridge University to create a series of personality tests that can be run against your data, letting you see how different networks might perceive you. For example, the app can predict whether you’re politically liberal or conservative, and tell you whether you are more conservative on LinkedIn than you are on Twitter. It’s fun, if not particularly useful, and it might help explain some of the ads Facebook sends your way.

What the Future Holds

So far, the app is only available for iOS, but an Android version is planned for next month. Eventually, Deakins says, the team wants to offer the app for all operating systems and—with your permission—integrate far more information, including location data, statistics from health trackers, or your even genome, via services like 23andMe. That would let you learn far more about your online self and how advertisers perceive you, while providing still more data you eventually could sell.

In order to build more trust, Deakins says the company will open source the client-side of the app “bit by bit,” and it may release some server-side code as well. To keep itself accountable to users, the company also plans to establish an independent non-profit organization that will approve changes to Citizenme’s terms of service. Users will be able to vote on such changes.

The company plans to make money by taking a cut from any dollars that users earn by selling their data. If you choose not to sell your data, you’ll have the option of paying a subscription fee. “The idea is that you sell your data for a fair price,” Deakins says. “If you’re selling your data so other people can get free access to the service, then you’re not getting fair value. So some users need to pay. That’s the fairest way that we can think of.”

The Big Question

The big question is whether anyone will want to sell their data, but Deakins is confident they will. He says that so far users fall into two main groups. The first is older users who want greater control of their privacy and happily pay a subscription fee to have it. The second is younger users who, long since used to companies like Facebook profiting from their data, want to profit from it as well. He notes that selling the data could have other benefits as well.

“If I’m going to buy a new car in two weeks time, I want to share that, because I want advertising and discounts for my new car,” he says. “For me, there’s a big benefit because I get a discount on my new car. The advertiser wins because they get a verified, validated lead. For the publisher, the advertising is validated through the individual. Pretty much everyone wins in the ecosystem.”

Citizenme isn’t the first to try something like this. The defunct non-profit organization Attention Trust tried giving users tools to collect and sell their data as far back as 2005. But Deakins thinks the time is finally right, given the ubiquity of smartphones and social media. “We have an internet ecosystem where all of our data is incredible valuable,” he says. “That means that market forces say that all our data needs to get sucked up into the cloud. But the natural next progression is giving people power over their own data.”

Glenn Greenwald on Why the Latest Snowden Leak Matters

Flickr user Gage Skidmore

After weeks of broadcasting his intention to “name names” and publish the identities of specific Americans targeted by the NSA and FBI for surveillance, journalist Glenn Greenwald finally made good on his promise.

Greenwald spoke with WIRED prior to publication of his story late Tuesday night. In the story, Greenwald and colleague Murtaza Hussein identified five Muslim-Americans whose email addresses appeared on a lengthy surveillance target list. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden provided the list to Greenwald last year, which included more than 7,000 email addresses, at least 200 of which were tagged by the government as being “U.S. persons.” In naming five of those in the Greenwald story, it’s the first time that American targets of the government’s surveillance, who were never arrested or accused of terrorist activity, have been identified.

In this frank interview with Greenwald, he explains the significance of the revelations. He also divulges why he delayed the story last week instead of publishing as planned, and discusses the possible existence of a mysterious “second leaker,” and why it has taken a decade to finally get confirmation of surveillance activities that were first reported in 2005 and 2006 by the New York Times and USA Today.

WIRED: You’ve written that it’s unclear if the government obtained warrants to conduct surveillance of the five Muslim-Americans identified in your story, but it appears that, at least in the case of Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on Muslim-American Relations, a government official has said no warrant was obtained to surveil him. Also, the surveillance was all conducted in 2008 or earlier, when a warrant wasn’t needed under certain programs. So do you think the government had warrants or not?

GLENN GREENWALD: Even prior to the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, if they were targeting Americans on U.S. soil they would have had to have gone to the FISA Court and gotten a warrant unless they were conducting it under the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which I don’t think is likely… I think it’s very likely that most of them were surveilled subject to a FISA warrant. I think it’s possible that…the reason [Awad] wasn’t was because he spent so much time on foreign soil that they were able under the Protect America Act and other authorities to target him without a FISA Court warrant… . He probably [spent] 50 percent of the time [overseas].

WIRED: You write that another media outlet was told by the government that no warrant was used with Awad and you suggested this was the reason the story was delayed last week. What media outlet are you talking about?

GG: We were partnering with a media outlet that was going to do TV and promote our story. They then started to try and do some of their own reporting on the story so that when they went on TV they would have something to add. So they called a couple of their sources and a couple of their sources said, “We never got a FISA warrant against Awad and to the extent that [Greenwald is] reporting that the NSA did, [he's] wrong.” We actually weren’t even reporting that they got a FISA warrant against Awad, but we did write our story on the premise that they had FISA warrants against all of them, because that was what the NSA kept telling us: “oh you shouldn’t report this because this was all done with FISA Court approval.” So given that we had the NSA saying in general “we got FISA approval” and then these anonymous sources who this media outlet vouched for as being pretty senior and knowledgeable saying “no, they never did [get one for Awad],” we just felt like we had to resolve that or do the best we can or write into the story that we didn’t know. That was the only reason we held the story at the last minute: was just to investigate that one narrow claim.

WIRED: Is it possible the media outlet misunderstood their sources?

GG: It’s a very big respectable media outlet. They didn’t tell us who their sources were, of course, because they were anonymous. But they went back [to the sources] and we then went to the NSA and we said, “What’s going on? You’ve been telling us for months that all of this was done with the approval of the FISA Court. Now you have people in DoJ and FBI saying…Awad and maybe one other one didn’t have a FISA warrant.” They said, “we can’t control what they say.” Then they started saying. “there are theories we could have used where we could have surveilled some of these people without FISA warrants.” They would never explicitly confirm or deny that any of these people were FISA targets. It was all off-the-record hypotheticals: “If we were to surveil people, it would all be done with FISA warrants, which is why you shouldn’t reveal your targets.”

“This is the first time that there’s a human face on who the targets are of [the U.S. government's] most intrusive type of surveillance.”

WIRED: Were you able to identify any of the other Americans on the list? You write that at least 200 were flagged on the spreadsheet as being U.S. persons.

GG: In virtually none of the cases is there an actual name next to the email address. So sometimes you can identify the name from the email address if you look at the organization to which they belong and do some digging. But in the vast majority of cases, it’s impossible to find the identity of the person whose email address is being targeted.

WIRED: You point out that one of the most important aspects, aside from the fact that you’ve got attorneys being targeted for surveillance, is that this gives the people who were targeted standing to sue in a way that hasn’t existed in the past.

GG: I think there’s several really significant aspects. For one, this is the first time that there’s a human face on who the targets are of [the U.S. government's] most intrusive type of surveillance. It’s all been this sort of abstract…oh the NSA is acquiring these capabilities and is engaged in mass surveillance and indiscriminate vacuuming. But here you really get to see who these people are who are the people worthy of their most invasive scrutiny. I think it’s important for people to judge—are these really terrorists or are these people who seem to be targeted for their political dissidence and their political activism?

Secondly, I think there’s a huge discrepancy between how American Muslims are treated and how non-Muslims are treated. Because there are so many similarly situated non-Muslims who have done as much, if not more, to end up on the list [but] who aren’t on the list. But people who are Muslim end up on the list…. And the question becomes, if you’re engaging in political dissidence that some people consider threatening, should you really be targeted?

“There’s a huge discrepancy between how American Muslims are treated and how non-Muslims are treated. Because there are so many similarly situated non-Muslims who have done as much, if not more, to end up on the list [but] who aren’t on the list.”

The big significance as well is it’s impossible now to throw these people out of court on standing grounds. I think you’re probably going to see some of them, if not all of them, challenge the constitutionality of the statutory framework, as well as the specific spying that they were subjected to.

WIRED: The government made a number of objections to you publishing the story. What were they?

GG: They were simply saying: if you reveal our targets you could blow our ongoing surveillance operations or reveal our sources and methods. Their second argument was: you’re crossing a line here because this isn’t a case where we’re asking you to take our word for it that this was proper; we actually have a FISA Court judge…who said that this was proper. So for you to then go and disclose it is completely inappropriate, given that it’s not just us saying this is legitimate but an independent judge saying that.

WIRED: Let’s talk about Richard Clarke [who served on a recent oversight panel that examined the surveillance programs and largely found the programs to be acceptable except for a few recommendations for changes]. If only he had known about this list, he tells you, he would have asked tougher questions of the government and asked to see individual FISA warrants to review them. What do you make of this reaction that suddenly this concerns him now more than it did before?

GG: He is kind of this consummate national security state insider who generally lends himself to endorsing whatever those agencies do, but at the same time likes to maintain this public facade that he’s the reasonable, questioning insider who will object when things go too far… . He endorsed huge amounts of all of these activities while sitting on that panel, and then I think was confronted with some evidence that suggested that some of his endorsements might have been baseless. And now he’s trying to back pedal and say, “oh if only I had known.” …I know that these advisory panels don’t get the lists of the people that they’re targeting and they don’t scrutinize any of this information either. So for them to just offer these general endorsements that there is no abuse and that there’s no evidence of wrongdoing without seeing this information, I think, shows just what a farce those oversight panels are. What’s more significant than him saying had he known he would have looked more into it, is the fact that he never—and therefore his fellow panel members never—bothered to ask for and certainly never got… the list of American whom they were actually spying on. How can you conduct an investigation without that?

WIRED: Well, you don’t even need the list of names. All you have to know is how many Americans are on the list and why they’re on it—those are obvious questions and they didn’t even go that far to ask them.

GG: I would argue you do need the names. But you’re absolutely right that…there’s this kind of intermediary bit of information that they seem not to have shown any interest in, either, which is remarkable given what a clean bill of health they gave the NSA on these issues.

WIRED: There was also his other statement about not asking to see any of the court orders. The reason he gave was that they were just five guys working part time and didn’t have the resources to do that.

GG: Maybe that’s why you don’t sign this huge report clearing the NSA of all wrongdoing. You either say we need more resources, or you say in the report that you didn’t get the things you needed and therefore can’t come to any conclusions.

WIRED: In 2006 USA Today broke the story about the phone records bulk-collection program, but at the time the government and telecoms denied it. It took seven years to get confirmation of this program with the Snowden documents. Do you have an idea why we had these great revelations in 2005 from the New York Times about the warrantless wiretapping program and then in 2006 from USA Today about the phone records collection and then nothing for so long?

GG: What was amazing was that even the New York Times revelation—they won the Pulitzer and it was like a scandal for a little while—but the outcome of that was that Congress got together in 2008 on a bipartisan basis and voted to make that program legal.

“You can actually see for yourself what they’re doing in a way that you were never supposed to.”

I do think there was an assumption that when the country voted against Bush and his party, and in favor of this other party that was vowing to uproot these polices, that it was sort of like, well, whatever problems we had they were sort of over [now]. I think part of the reason why people reacted so strongly to our story was because it was the first time that we saw that Obama was doing it [too], that it had basically continued and even expanded… . I think there’s a huge difference between reporting something because sources told you and saying to people, “look at these documents that you were never supposed to see. You don’t have to rely on my word or anybody else’s word. You can actually see for yourself what they’re doing in a way that you were never supposed to.” I think that’s a big part of why it has resonated [now]; it’s that these documents make it indisputably clear exactly what they’re doing in the way that a New York Times or USA Today story based on anonymous sources just doesn’t do.

WIRED: After the first Snowden revelations were published last year, Senator Ron Wyden (D–Oregon), who is on the intelligence committee, warned that we were just seeing the tip of the iceberg and there was so much more about the surveillance that hadn’t come out yet. You have characterized this story as the finale in your coverage, the pinnacle of your reporting on this topic. Does this and the other stories now constitute the whole iceberg? (With the understanding that of course you don’t possess everything about the government’s surveillance in your cache of documents.) But is this the peak now?

GG: When I talked about my finale I just sort of meant…basically I’ve been doing this for a year now so it’s just kind of time for me to do other things. I’m sure there are stories in there that I passed by because I didn’t recognize the significance of it and neither did the other journalists working on it that people who have a different set of understandings about things would. I already have a few stories written that are going to come after this one, so this isn’t my last one. But I do think there are some really big stories left to tell that would probably be very related to what Ron Wyden was saying… . But we have a snippet of what the NSA did. We don’t have anything close to everything that the NSA did. And it’s possible—in fact I think it’s highly probable—that there are things Ron Wyden knows about and was referring to that, for whatever reason, just aren’t in the documents that we have, or we haven’t found them.

WIRED: One revelation in your book that didn’t get much play was the issue of U.S. telecoms partnering with foreign telecoms to upgrade their networks and in the process help the NSA subvert those networks by redirecting the target country’s communications to NSA repositories. That to me was one of the more shocking allegations because you weren’t just talking about phone companies providing access to their own networks and their own customers but serving as pseudo-contractors and agents of the NSA to help them spy on foreign infrastructure. Why didn’t that get more attention?

GG: You know, it’s funny because it was a huge issue here in Brazil, before I wrote the book, because the first story we did in Brazil was about the collection of 2 million metadata and so the question was how was the NSA getting that? The Senate was interested in that…The reason it never took off is because the one thing the NSA holds really close is the identity of their partners. I have a very good idea of who these companies are based on circumstantial evidence, but no one would ever let me say it. But without that, how do you make it stick? The Brazilian government was desperate to know, because they wanted to kick that company out.

WIRED: There has been a lot of speculation about the possible existence of a second leaker, ever since Jake Appelbaum, a developer for The Tor Project, and Der Spiegel published the so-called ANT catalogue of NSA surveillance tools and didn’t attribute the document to Snowden. Then last week Jake published a second story in Germany about surveillance of people who use privacy tools, based on what appears to be leaked source code from an NSA datamining tool. That story also wasn’t sourced to Snowden. You’ve said you think there’s a second leaker.

GG: It’s hard for me because I actually know what’s in the archive and I don’t want to just come out and say: this is in the archive, this isn’t in the archive. But the thing I thought was most notable about that Der Spiegel article Jake did is that they don’t say a single thing about what the source was for those documents, and every single other time Der Spiegel has reported on Snowden documents they say specifically: this came from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. And they were just completely coy and silent on the sourcing for those catalogues. I think that should have been a red flag for a lot of people, in addition to the fact that it wasn’t any of the normal journalists who did that reporting. Everyone knows who got the documents, like me and Laura [Poitras] and Bart [Gellman at the Washington Post].

There are big legal issues surrounding these documents from the start and one of the things we’ve always been told by lawyers is you can report journalistically on the documents but you can’t just hand them out to other people because the minute you start handing them out to other people, you become the source. So given Jake’s obvious proximity to WikiLeaks, the idea that I or Laura or anyone else would just be handing documents of all people to Jake Appelbaum, which means that they could have easily ended up in the hands of WikiLeaks, seems very remote. That’s not what happened.

WIRED: So you still hold strong to this idea that there probably is a second source.

GG: It’s hard for me because I know for certain but I don’t want to be coy and be like well there may be and there may not be but I can’t say for certain because I don’t want to talk about what’s in the archive or not in the archive for the rest of my life… . It’s hard to me to say for certain because there are so many documents.

WIRED: But you did tweet that it seems clear there is a second source.

GG: Exactly, and I stand by that. I mean the reason I said it seems clear—even that’s like a little amorphous—is because of the way both the Der Spiegel article and this latest article said nothing about the sourcing.

A Candid Conversation with Glenn Greenwald About Why the New Snowden Leak Matters

Flickr user Gage Skidmore

After weeks of broadcasting his intention to “name names” and publish the identities of specific Americans targeted by the NSA and FBI for surveillance, journalist Glenn Greenwald finally made good on his promise.

Greenwald spoke with WIRED prior to publication of his story late Tuesday night. In the story, Greenwald and colleague Murtaza Hussein identified five Muslim-Americans whose email addresses appeared on a surveillance target list. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden provided the list to Greenwald last year. It’s the first time that American targets of the government’s surveillance who were never arrested or accused of terrorist activity have been identified.

In this frank interview with Greenwald, he explains the significance of these revelations. He divulges why he delayed the story last week instead of publishing as planned, the possible existence of a mysterious “second leaker,” and why it has taken a decade to finally get confirmation of surveillance activities that were first reported in 2005 and 2006 by the New York Times and USA Today.

WIRED: You’ve written that it’s unclear if the government obtained warrants to conduct surveillance of the five Muslim-Americans identified in your story, but it appears that, at least in the case of Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on Muslim-American Relations, a government official has said no warrant was obtained to surveil him. Also, the surveillance was all conducted in 2008 or earlier, when a warrant wasn’t needed under certain programs. So do you think the government had warrants or not?

GLENN GREENWALD: Even prior to the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, if they were targeting Americans on U.S. soil they would have had to have gone to the FISA Court and gotten a warrant unless they were conducting it under the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which I don’t think is likely… I think it’s very likely that most of them were surveilled subject to a FISA warrant. I think it’s possible that…the reason [Awad] wasn’t was because he spent so much time on foreign soil that they were able under the Protect America Act and other authorities to target him without a FISA Court warrant… . He probably [spent] 50 percent of the time [overseas].

WIRED: You write that another media outlet was told by the government that no warrant was used with Awad and you suggested this was the reason the story was delayed last week. What media outlet are you talking about?

GG: We were partnering with a media outlet that was going to do TV and promote our story. They then started to try and do some of their own reporting on the story so that when they went on TV they would have something to add. So they called a couple of their sources and a couple of their sources said, “We never got a FISA warrant against Awad and to the extent that [Greenwald is] reporting that the NSA did, [he's] wrong.” We actually weren’t even reporting that they got a FISA warrant against Awad, but we did write our story on the premise that they had FISA warrants against all of them, because that was what the NSA kept telling us: “oh you shouldn’t report this because this was all done with FISA Court approval.” So given that we had the NSA saying in general “we got FISA approval” and then these anonymous sources who this media outlet vouched for as being pretty senior and knowledgeable saying “no, they never did [get one for Awad],” we just felt like we had to resolve that or do the best we can or write into the story that we didn’t know. That was the only reason we held the story at the last minute: was just to investigate that one narrow claim.

WIRED: Is it possible the media outlet misunderstood their sources?

GG: It’s a very big respectable media outlet. They didn’t tell us who their sources were, of course, because they were anonymous. But they went back [to the sources] and we then went to the NSA and we said, “What’s going on? You’ve been telling us for months that all of this was done with the approval of the FISA Court. Now you have people in DoJ and FBI saying…Awad and maybe one other one didn’t have a FISA warrant.” They said, “we can’t control what they say.” Then they started saying. “there are theories we could have used where we could have surveilled some of these people without FISA warrants.” They would never explicitly confirm or deny that any of these people were FISA targets. It was all off-the-record hypotheticals: “If we were to surveil people, it would all be done with FISA warrants, which is why you shouldn’t reveal your targets.”

“This is the first time that there’s a human face on who the targets are of [the U.S. government's] most intrusive type of surveillance.”

WIRED: Were you able to identify any of the other Americans on the list? You write that at least 200 were flagged on the spreadsheet as being U.S. persons.

GG: In virtually none of the cases is there an actual name next to the email address. So sometimes you can identify the name from the email address if you look at the organization to which they belong and do some digging. But in the vast majority of cases, it’s impossible to find the identity of the person whose email address is being targeted.

WIRED: You point out that one of the most important aspects, aside from the fact that you’ve got attorneys being targeted for surveillance, is that this gives the people who were targeted standing to sue in a way that hasn’t existed in the past.

GG: I think there’s several really significant aspects. For one, this is the first time that there’s a human face on who the targets are of [the U.S. government's] most intrusive type of surveillance. It’s all been this sort of abstract…oh the NSA is acquiring these capabilities and is engaged in mass surveillance and indiscriminate vacuuming. But here you really get to see who these people are who are the people worthy of their most invasive scrutiny. I think it’s important for people to judge—are these really terrorists or are these people who seem to be targeted for their political dissidence and their political activism?

Secondly, I think there’s a huge discrepancy between how American Muslims are treated and how non-Muslims are treated. Because there are so many similarly situated non-Muslims who have done as much, if not more, to end up on the list [but] who aren’t on the list. But people who are Muslim end up on the list…. And the question becomes, if you’re engaging in political dissidence that some people consider threatening, should you really be targeted?

“There’s a huge discrepancy between how American Muslims are treated and how non-Muslims are treated. Because there are so many similarly situated non-Muslims who have done as much, if not more, to end up on the list [but] who aren’t on the list.”

The big significance as well is it’s impossible now to throw these people out of court on standing grounds. I think you’re probably going to see some of them, if not all of them, challenge the constitutionality of the statutory framework, as well as the specific spying that they were subjected to.

WIRED: The government made a number of objections to you publishing the story. What were they?

GG: They were simply saying: if you reveal our targets you could blow our ongoing surveillance operations or reveal our sources and methods. Their second argument was: you’re crossing a line here because this isn’t a case where we’re asking you to take our word for it that this was proper; we actually have a FISA Court judge…who said that this was proper. So for you to then go and disclose it is completely inappropriate, given that it’s not just us saying this is legitimate but an independent judge saying that.

WIRED: Let’s talk about Richard Clarke [who served on a recent oversight panel that examined the surveillance programs and largely found the programs to be acceptable except for a few recommendations for changes]. If only he had known about this list, he tells you, he would have asked tougher questions of the government and asked to see individual FISA warrants to review them. What do you make of this reaction that suddenly this concerns him now more than it did before?

GG: He is kind of this consummate national security state insider who generally lends himself to endorsing whatever those agencies do, but at the same time likes to maintain this public facade that he’s the reasonable, questioning insider who will object when things go too far… . He endorsed huge amounts of all of these activities while sitting on that panel, and then I think was confronted with some evidence that suggested that some of his endorsements might have been baseless. And now he’s trying to back pedal and say, “oh if only I had known.” …I know that these advisory panels don’t get the lists of the people that they’re targeting and they don’t scrutinize any of this information either. So for them to just offer these general endorsements that there is no abuse and that there’s no evidence of wrongdoing without seeing this information, I think, shows just what a farce those oversight panels are. What’s more significant than him saying had he known he would have looked more into it, is the fact that he never—and therefore his fellow panel members never—bothered to ask for and certainly never got… the list of American whom they were actually spying on. How can you conduct an investigation without that?

WIRED: Well, you don’t even need the list of names. All you have to know is how many Americans are on the list and why they’re on it—those are obvious questions and they didn’t even go that far to ask them.

GG: I would argue you do need the names. But you’re absolutely right that…there’s this kind of intermediary bit of information that they seem not to have shown any interest in, either, which is remarkable given what a clean bill of health they gave the NSA on these issues.

WIRED: There was also his other statement about not asking to see any of the court orders. The reason he gave was that they were just five guys working part time and didn’t have the resources to do that.

GG: Maybe that’s why you don’t sign this huge report clearing the NSA of all wrongdoing. You either say we need more resources, or you say in the report that you didn’t get the things you needed and therefore can’t come to any conclusions.

WIRED: In 2006 USA Today broke the story about the phone records bulk-collection program, but at the time the government and telecoms denied it. It took seven years to get confirmation of this program with the Snowden documents. Do you have an idea why we had these great revelations in 2005 from the New York Times about the warrantless wiretapping program and then in 2006 from USA Today about the phone records collection and then nothing for so long?

GG: What was amazing was that even the New York Times revelation—they won the Pulitzer and it was like a scandal for a little while—but the outcome of that was that Congress got together in 2008 on a bipartisan basis and voted to make that program legal.

“You can actually see for yourself what they’re doing in a way that you were never supposed to.”

I do think there was an assumption that when the country voted against Bush and his party, and in favor of this other party that was vowing to uproot these polices, that it was sort of like, well, whatever problems we had they were sort of over [now]. I think part of the reason why people reacted so strongly to our story was because it was the first time that we saw that Obama was doing it [too], that it had basically continued and even expanded… . I think there’s a huge difference between reporting something because sources told you and saying to people, “look at these documents that you were never supposed to see. You don’t have to rely on my word or anybody else’s word. You can actually see for yourself what they’re doing in a way that you were never supposed to.” I think that’s a big part of why it has resonated [now]; it’s that these documents make it indisputably clear exactly what they’re doing in the way that a New York Times or USA Today story based on anonymous sources just doesn’t do.

WIRED: After the first Snowden revelations were published last year, Senator Ron Wyden (D–Oregon), who is on the intelligence committee, warned that we were just seeing the tip of the iceberg and there was so much more about the surveillance that hadn’t come out yet. You have characterized this story as the finale in your coverage, the pinnacle of your reporting on this topic. Does this and the other stories now constitute the whole iceberg? (With the understanding that of course you don’t possess everything about the government’s surveillance in your cache of documents.) But is this the peak now?

GG: When I talked about my finale I just sort of meant…basically I’ve been doing this for a year now so it’s just kind of time for me to do other things. I’m sure there are stories in there that I passed by because I didn’t recognize the significance of it and neither did the other journalists working on it that people who have a different set of understandings about things would. I already have a few stories written that are going to come after this one, so this isn’t my last one. But I do think there are some really big stories left to tell that would probably be very related to what Ron Wyden was saying… . But we have a snippet of what the NSA did. We don’t have anything close to everything that the NSA did. And it’s possible—in fact I think it’s highly probable—that there are things Ron Wyden knows about and was referring to that, for whatever reason, just aren’t in the documents that we have, or we haven’t found them.

WIRED: One revelation in your book that didn’t get much play was the issue of U.S. telecoms partnering with foreign telecoms to upgrade their networks and in the process help the NSA subvert those networks by redirecting the target country’s communications to NSA repositories. That to me was one of the more shocking allegations because you weren’t just talking about phone companies providing access to their own networks and their own customers but serving as pseudo-contractors and agents of the NSA to help them spy on foreign infrastructure. Why didn’t that get more attention?

GG: You know, it’s funny because it was a huge issue here in Brazil, before I wrote the book, because the first story we did in Brazil was about the collection of 2 million metadata and so the question was how was the NSA getting that? The Senate was interested in that…The reason it never took off is because the one thing the NSA holds really close is the identity of their partners. I have a very good idea of who these companies are based on circumstantial evidence, but no one would ever let me say it. But without that, how do you make it stick? The Brazilian government was desperate to know, because they wanted to kick that company out.

WIRED: There has been a lot of speculation about the possible existence of a second leaker, ever since Jake Appelbaum, a developer for The Tor Project, and Der Spiegel published the so-called ANT catalogue of NSA surveillance tools and didn’t attribute the document to Snowden. Then last week Jake published a second story in Germany about surveillance of people who use privacy tools, based on what appears to be leaked source code from an NSA datamining tool. That story also wasn’t sourced to Snowden. You’ve said you think there’s a second leaker.

GG: It’s hard for me because I actually know what’s in the archive and I don’t want to just come out and say: this is in the archive, this isn’t in the archive. But the thing I thought was most notable about that Der Spiegel article Jake did is that they don’t say a single thing about what the source was for those documents, and every single other time Der Spiegel has reported on Snowden documents they say specifically: this came from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. And they were just completely coy and silent on the sourcing for those catalogues. I think that should have been a red flag for a lot of people, in addition to the fact that it wasn’t any of the normal journalists who did that reporting. Everyone knows who got the documents, like me and Laura [Poitras] and Bart [Gellman at the Washington Post].

There are big legal issues surrounding these documents from the start and one of the things we’ve always been told by lawyers is you can report journalistically on the documents but you can’t just hand them out to other people because the minute you start handing them out to other people, you become the source. So given Jake’s obvious proximity to WikiLeaks, the idea that I or Laura or anyone else would just be handing documents of all people to Jake Appelbaum, which means that they could have easily ended up in the hands of WikiLeaks, seems very remote. That’s not what happened.

WIRED: So you still hold strong to this idea that there probably is a second source.

GG: It’s hard for me because I know for certain but I don’t want to be coy and be like well there may be and there may not be but I can’t say for certain because I don’t want to talk about what’s in the archive or not in the archive for the rest of my life… . It’s hard to me to say for certain because there are so many documents.

WIRED: But you did tweet that it seems clear there is a second source.

GG: Exactly, and I stand by that. I mean the reason I said it seems clear—even that’s like a little amorphous—is because of the way both the Der Spiegel article and this latest article said nothing about the sourcing.

Animals Who Drink and the People Who Cut Them Open

A dead, cut-open cedar waxwing full of fermented pepper berries Hailu Kinde

The bodies started arriving in 2005—dead birds, dozens of them, ferried in coolers. Cedar waxwings, grey-brown birds about the size of a person’s hand with vivid red dots on the tips of their wings and a yellow, raked-back crest, were dying by the flock in suburbs across Los Angeles. They seemed to be committing suicide, throwing themselves at windows and walls like something out of Hitchcock. Animal Control would show up, and the dead bird would end up in San Bernardino, about half an hour east of downtown LA by freeway, in the lab of a diligent veterinarian named Hailu Kinde.

Kinde, a sort of animal coroner, worked for UC Davis and the state of California. His job was to figure out what killed animals—not just birds, but livestock, horses, whatever. The point was to figure out if there was an ongoing threat, a disease that might jeopardize the local economy or people’s lives. Over the next couple of years, Kinde took delivery of almost 100 waxwings.

A bird necropsy starts at the throat. Kinde uses a scissors to cut downward, to the top of the chest, and then he cuts off the legs—he prefers the word “disarticulate.” The next step is to peel the skin and feathers upward, exposing the muscles of the breast. “Once you have the breast muscle, on each side you go with the scissors,” Kinde says. “And then you have the thoracic and abdominal organs open to you.”

The first thing Kinde noticed in the birds was damage, bits of bleeding and bruising to the muscles. No surprise—they’d run into buildings. In most of the birds, the liver had also burst, another hallmark of collision. But it was the throat that took Kinde by surprise. Cut open, the esophagus of each was packed with tiny red berries. “And then we go down to the stomach, the gizzard, and it’s engorged, too,” Kinde says. That’s not weird by itself; cedar waxwings are frugivores. They live mostly on fruit. But it started Kinde thinking. “The immediate cause of death in these birds was trauma,” he says. “But why?”

Kinde sent samples of the birds’ tissue for the usual tests—heavy metals like mercury and arsenic, organophosphate pesticides, West Nile virus, avian influenza, bacterial infection. And he hit the books. Cedar waxwings sometimes get disoriented because of heat, but only at a certain time of year, so that wasn’t the answer. The fruit, though, was interesting. They were from an invasive ornamental pepper tree that grows clusters of bright red berries, inducing animals like cedar waxwings to eat them and spread the seeds via droppings. When the fruit ripens and animals don’t get to it right away, yeast moves in. Pepper fruit can ferment right on the tree.

So next Kinde sent the intestinal contents of one of his birds out for an ethanol screen. He got a major hit—226 parts per million. “It was much, much higher than the amount of alcohol that would make a person intoxicated” Kinde says. Cedar waxwings get anywhere from 85 to 100 percent of their calories from fruit, and the pepper berries seemed to be the only thing available to them. Kinde concluded that the birds were stuffing themselves on fermented berries and trying to fly while intoxicated. Disoriented, they’d fly right into a building.

In other words, the pretty birds got smashed, and then they got smashed.

You’d think that a fruit-eating bird would be ready for that eventuality, right? Like most toxins, ethanol gets processed in the liver, and in fact cedar waxwing livers are, as a matter of ratio, larger than in other birds. Some ornithologists initially disputed Kinde’s claim—they couldn’t imagine the birds eating enough fermented fruit to overwhelm their ability to handle it. So Kinde sent them his pictures of sliced-open birds stuffed with whole berries from beak to gizzard like something sent down from the kitchens of ancient Rome. The ornithologists shut up.

The literature records other instances of cedar waxwings getting drunk and failing at flying. In fact, pretty much every animal in the wild occasionally partakes. In 2010 Indian elephants got into homemade rice wine intended for a village celebration and went on what newspapers described as a “drunken rampage,” killing three people. Egyptian fruit bats sometimes have trouble flying after eating fermented fruit. Now, it’s more controversial to say that non-human animals seek out fermented fruit for its psychoactive effects. As far as I can tell, most of the recorded instances of animal boozing are accidental, or take place when non-humans would starve if they didn’t eat the fermented stuff—as was the case with the cedar waxwings.

But what about human animals? What about primates? It’s hard to tell without falling into an evolutionary just-so story, but Steven Benner—a researcher who does a lot of work on the origins of biological processes like fermentation—has a hypothesis. At a recent scientific meeting, he talked about some work he was doing on the ancient antecedent of the enzyme we humans use to digest ethanol. He said that by inferring its structure back along evolutionary time (looking at commonalities among primate species today and working backward) he’d found a point about 10 million years ago where that enzyme got 50 times as efficient. That would’ve been about when some common ancestor of humans, chimps, and gorillas got more terrestrial, climbing down from trees. Maybe the fruits that had fallen to the ground were more likely to be fermented than the ones our great-to-the-nth-power grandparents picked fresh.

And maybe at that point they started to enjoy it.

The TSA’s Instagram Feed Is Terrifying and Totally Awesome

An "augmented" smartphone case discovered at Boston International Airport.

An "augmented" smartphone case discovered at Boston International Airport.

Bear mace discovered in a carry-on bag at the Anchorage airport. You can pack bear mace in your checked bags if the volume is less than four ounces and it has less than a 2% active ingredient of either CS or CN.

Bear mace discovered in a carry-on bag at the Anchorage airport. You can pack bear mace in your checked bags if the volume is less than four ounces and it has less than a 2% active ingredient of either CS or CN.

A handgun and loaded magazine caught at the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.

A handgun and loaded magazine caught at the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.

This dark knight shuriken was discovered in a carry-on bag this week at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport.

This dark knight shuriken was discovered in a carry-on bag this week at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport.

A pocket .45 discovered at the Dallas Fort Worth airport.

A pocket .45 discovered at the Dallas Fort Worth airport.

An Improvised Explosive Device (IED) training kit discovered in checked baggage at the Honolulu airport. It's not really an IED, but definitely looks like one.

An Improvised Explosive Device (IED) training kit discovered in checked baggage at the Honolulu airport. It's not really an IED, but definitely looks like one.

An inert 60mm mortar round discovered at the Washington Dulles Airport.

An inert 60mm mortar round discovered at the Washington Dulles Airport.

Some kind of...throwing star with six folding blades? Discovered in a passenger’s carry-on bag at the Las Vegas airport.

Some kind of...throwing star with six folding blades? Discovered in a passenger’s carry-on bag at the Las Vegas airport.

This novelty watch looked enough like an explosive device to get it seized at the Oakland International Airport.

This novelty watch looked enough like an explosive device to get it seized at the Oakland International Airport.

This comb-knife was discovered in a passenger’s carry-on bag at the Detroit Airport.

This comb-knife was discovered in a passenger’s carry-on bag at the Detroit Airport.

Samurai sword discovered in a carry on bag at BOS.

Samurai sword discovered in a carry on bag at BOS.

Throwing stars discovered in a carry-on bag at the Dallas Love Airport.

Throwing stars discovered in a carry-on bag at the Dallas Love Airport.

81 pounds of marijuana discovered in checked baggage at the Oakland International Airport.

81 pounds of marijuana discovered in checked baggage at the Oakland International Airport.

The Transportation Security Administration hasn’t endeared itself to the public by shuffling every airline passenger in America through full-body scanners and getting up close and personal with a pat-down search if they decline. It’s been accused of overreach, overspending, and redundancy. But one thing the bureaucratic behemoth has definitely done right is to create an always entertaining and occasionally unbelievable Instagram feed.

The feed is essentially a gallery of some of the craziest items people try to get past security checkpoints. There’s no shortage of material—the TSA claims an average of 40 firearms (often loaded) are seized at checkpoints every week. Nine-bladed super knife? Grenade? Everything you need to assemble a bomb? Yes, all that and more. Everything that’s seized is photographed for posterity, if not the spectacle, and then shared on social media to show people what’s what.

“We’re just using a new mechanism to reach an audience with Instagram,” says TSA Press Secretary Ross Feinstein. “We’re not trying to make a statement that people are trying to do anything nefarious with these items. We’re just trying to alert people that these are still prohibited items.”

In addition to the guns and other prohibited items, the TSA feed also features adorable drug-sniffing dogs, spotlights various employees and calls out programs and promotions. In the year since it was started, the feed has drawn more than 72,000 followers. Over that time, the agency has made some headway reminding travelers of the rules and making the case that the TSA’s work is meant to keep them safe. “Many often assume our officers are not discovering dangerous, prohibited items,” says Feinstein. The feed undoubtedly is part of a carefully scripted PR strategy to improve the agency’s image, but it’s hard to not get drawn in.

Bob Burns (known as Blogger Bob) is the guy who makes the feed what it is. Each week he reviews reports from some 450 airports nationwide, looking for the most interesting incidents. He works with the agency’s national coordination centers to secure the photos from the airports, which he posts with friendly reminders of what’s prohibited on a plane and why.

“I’ll ask for a photograph and a lot of times I’ll be surprised by what I see,” Bob says. “A lot of times I’m not even sure what the photo’s going to look like—the report might just say ‘a four inch knife,’ but for all I know it could be a steak knife or it could be one of these fantasy Klingon knives.”

Blogger Bob joined TSA one year to the day after 9/11. Before that, he did a stint in the Army and as a traveling singer/songwriter. He quickly ascended the TSA ranks and helped launch the TSA blog and Week in Review section in 2008. Even now, there is no dedicated social media team or budget, just Bob. As the TSA’s social media voice, he toes the party line, but knows from experience just how weird and interesting the stuff gathered at the front lines is.

“I used Instagram personally so I knew the kind of photos people shared, and I just knew that the photos we had from the week in review would be successful,” he says.

Beyond the blog and Instagram, the TSA also maintains an active Twitter account and says its social media channels were established strictly to improve communication. The blog has been the site of contentious conversations about the organization, and Feinstein says customer complaints have been addressed and resolved using Twitter.

When the government starts a social media account, it can draw a lot of attention. Look no further than the sudden popularity of the CIA’s first tweet. In the right hands, a social media presence can give personality to an otherwise inscrutable organization. Bob says the social media channels have helped to shift the conversation a bit.

“You change it from people complaining about TSA to people saying, ‘Wow look what TSA found, I can’t believe someone would try to come through with this,’” He says. “We like to show not only that our workforce is capable of finding these things, but we’d like to educate people.”

Despite its popularity, TSA’s Instagram account is ultimately something it really wishes didn’t exist. It’s fed by the mistaken and often dangerous oversight of passengers who at best slow us all down as we slog through security. At worst, they put people passengers in danger.

“We would love to put a blog post on our website every Friday that says, ‘We did not discover any firearms at checkpoints nationwide, we didn’t discover any prohibited items like knives or any suspicious items whatsoever,’” says Feinstein. “While we like utilizing social media, we’d rather not find these items.”