“Jim: The James Foley Story” premiered at Sundance on Jan. 23. It will premiere on HBO starting Feb.6 at 9 p.m. EST.

“Jim’s story is important for so many reasons, most notably it speaks to the silent crisis faced by families if a loved one is taken hostage,” his parents, Diane and John Foley, said in a statement. “It also shows the world the risks that are undertaken by freelance journalists to tell the frontline stories our nation depends on. We could not be prouder of our son and we are grateful to Brian Oakes for creating a film that captured these issues so poignantly.”

Sting wrote a song, “The Empty Chair,” for the film.

“It’s a very devastating film and at the end I had to be picked up off the floor… this movie is the antidote to the nonsense that we see going on in the world now,” said Sting while performing for a live audience at Sundance.

In August 2014, Foley was beheaded by the Islamic State after being held hostage in Syria for more than 600 days. His parents founded the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation to carry out his legacy, including supporting American hostages and their families, advocating for greater safety measures for freelance journalists and creating educational opportunities for disadvantaged youth.

Medill Professor Ellen Shearer, who is a member of the ACOS executive committee and is also co-director of the Medill National Security Journalism Initative, said the standards represent a crucial move to ensure that journalists, especially freelancers, do not go into dangerous reporting situations without protections under the impression that editors and news directors expect the exclusive stories that lead to unnecessary risks.

The murders of American journalists last year by the Islamic State, notably the beheading of Medill alum and GlobalPost reporter James Foley, were the catalyst for the creation of the principles.

Blue Force tracking is a term used in the military for a computer system that tracks where military forces – friendly (blue forces) and hostile – are located. A new website has taken that name and used it to explain its mission – to help Americans understand where its military forces are in a unique, nuanced way.

The point of Blue Force Tracker (www.blueforcetracker.com) is not to show where troops are physically deployed, but to give Americans a more informed understanding of where their members of the military are in terms of mindsets—how they think, how they live, why they do what the do, what it means to them—and what it means to all of us.

The site and a complementary mobile app were launched in July by Nolan Peterson, a 2012 alumnus of the Medill School of Journalism’s graduate program who had served as an Air Force officer—a special operations pilot with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

www.blueforcetracker.com

Peterson wants to show Americans what’s going on in the military here and abroad by using as writers those who have recently served in the military, experts and current members of the military as his reporting staff in addition to professional journalists.

Peterson also said people who have served in the military or abroad have a deeper knowledge because they’ve experienced the culture and the issues of conflicts. He said he noticed it in his own reporting—when he went to Afghanistan as an embed before joining the Air Force his perspective was different than when he returned as a veteran because “people were telling me more things that they wouldn’t tell a civilian journalist.”

“Using people with real-world experience has two advantages – your breadth of knowledge of the stories that are out there and your ability to get sources ” he said in an interview. “We wanted to leverage that to give journalism skills to people with real credibility about the topics they are writing about.”

Peterson said he’s guiding the veterans, active-duty military and experts to change their perspectives from opinion into news and analysis.

A few months of reading posts on Blue Force Tracker shows he’s making some real headway in his mission. I found the stories from veterans and active-duty military to offer knowledge and perspectives that helped me think about some issues such as in new ways.

Blue Force Tracker Assistant Editor James LaPorta, for instance, shared a play-by-play on a day in the life of his platoon in the southern Helmand Province of Afghanistan – a straightforward account of boredom interrupted by fierce fighting and danger, something most Americans cannot conceptualize.

Eric Chandler , flew F-16s for 20 years. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan and wrote about his fears of helping out at the Combat Support Hospital.

A sample of the headlines on the front page of Blue Force Tracker. (Sept. 29, 2014)

“I told myself I was busy flying high performance jet aircraft in combat. I couldn’t afford to be distracted. … In a word, I was afraid. I was afraid to go to the hospital. I didn’t want to see the broken bodies of my service buddies. And I was ashamed that I was afraid, which made it worse. Luckily, pilots are good at compartmentalizing. Especially me.”

This brief passage gives enormous insight into what pilots, and other service members, have to battle inside themselves while fighting the enemy.

One point, made again and again by active-duty contributors as well as recent veterans, is the disdain felt for the “thank you for your service” mantra that is heard everywhere — from airline personnel letting service members, if they’re in uniform, get on planes first, to lawmakers and politicians offering thanks as part of a political statement.

Joe Osborne, a Blue Force contributor who spent 15 years in the Air Force, including multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, made the point in writing about the death of Maj. Gen. Harold Greene, who was killed when, according to reports, “a Taliban member dressed as an Afghan National Army soldier shot the general and more than a dozen others at an Afghan compound on the outskirts of Kabul.”

“What we need to do, as a nation, is offer more than just thanks to service members. Instead, we need to remember them. We need to remember those still deployed, and we need to remember those who made the sacrifice, who volunteered to go where others would not dare.”

Another contributor wrote that “I have been talking a lot with my military peers lately, and I sense a rising tide of disappointment among veterans with those who have never served. Most people with whom we interact cannot even place Afghanistan or Iraq on a map, but they still have incredibly strong opinions about what we have tried to do there. We don’t understand why our fellow countrymen don’t care enough to learn about these place and the issues that affect them, so they at least have the faintest clue about what they are sending these young men and women off to endure.”

The anger is palpable, but the call to action for citizens – and for journalists trying to help inform and engage Americans on the important issues of U.S. security and military operations – is clear.

Posted Sept. 4, 2014

The second beheading of an American journalist by ISIS in two weeks may indicate that the Sunni militant group is targeting journalists in a particularly brutal form to show the world – and particularly President Barack Obama – its strength and influence, according to several experts.

“We’ve seen this before by drug cartels in Mexico, and now by ISIS in Syria and northern Iraq,” said Frank Smyth, executive director of Global Journalist Security, a firm that trains journalists to operate in hostile environments. “Journalists in such environments should no longer expect that their role as independent observers will be respected.”

In a video released Tuesday, Steven Sotloff, 31, was shown being beheaded by a member of ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The White House said intelligence officials believe the video to be authentic.

On Aug. 19, ISIS released a video showing the beheading of James Foley, another American journalist freelancing for GlobalPost.com. Sotloff also was a freelancer who had written for Time magazine and Foreign Policy. In both videos, the journalists were kneeling, dressed in orange jumpsuits and being guarded by a black-clad and masked ISIS fighter wielding a knife.

“Journalists — every professional operating in violent environments — need to know that neither their roles nor their nationalities will protect them,” Smyth said. “On the contrary, the two back-to-back beheadings by ISIS of James Foley and Steven Sotloff suggest that journalists are being targeted because of their nationality, while their executions are being used to amplify ISIS’ message of terror around the globe.”

However, Phil Balboni, president of GlobalPost, said the murders of journalists may be more the result of the kind of conflicts occurring today in Syria and elsewhere – where journalists have to operate without protection of the U.S. military or local authorities.

“It’s the nature of the conflict that can lead to journalists being one of the few good targets of opportunity,” he said.

Delphine Hagland, the U.S. director of Reporters Without Borders, said the killing of journalists is now part of ISIS’ information war.

“The fact that they are targeting information providers is not new,” she said. “Many Syrian journalists have been threatened or killed if they didn’t follow” ISIS’ propaganda talking points when they wrote articles.

“There now is clearly a new level of violence toward foreign journalists and American journalists,” Hagland said.

Reporters Without Borders estimates that 40 professional journalists – 13 foreign and 27 Syrian – have been killed since March 2011.

Smyth said security training for journalists and others, including humanitarians operating in the same areas, must emphasize avoidance skills and situational awareness at least as much as how to navigate contingencies like hostile mobs or armed combat.

“Staying safe is very hard to do,” he said. “Journalists must be plugged in to various possible sources of information, and update it constantly. Journalists must also give themselves a wider margin of error than they might do in other circumstances.”

Hagland agreed that the situation in Syria has become more dangerous for journalists and as a consequence, “Syria is disappearing for news maps.”

“Who can still report on what is happening?” she asked, noting, “News coverage itself is a victim of the war.”

(More INSIGHTS columns).

Ellen Shearer is co-director of the National Security Journalism Initiative, as well as the William F. Thomas Professor of the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. She teaches in the school’s Washington Program. Before joining the Medill faculty, she was a senior editor at New York Newsday, a consulting editor at Newhouse News Service, marketing executive at Reuters, and held positions as senior executive, bureau chief and reporter at United Press International.

Posted May 28, 2014

WASHINGTON – The House Foreign Affairs Committee wants to make sure the United States isn’t beaten by the Russian propaganda machine, and wants to more fully enlist the Voice of America in that effort. But  Congress might consider that a better way to combat Vladimir Putin’s efforts to push Russian values is to show the world that American values include a free an impartial press.

“The fact is that (the VOA) has been a great success in the Cold War era and beyond because it’s telling the truth,” said American Press Institute Executive Director Tom Rosenstiel. “We stand for a free press and that promotes democracy.”

The House bill, sponsored by Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., and New York Rep. Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the committee, aims to make sure VOA knows its mission is “to support U.S. public diplomacy efforts.”

“There have always been places in the world where the VOA is the most reliable, most professional news source,” said my Medill School of Journalism colleague Associate Dean Craig LaMay, who is an expert on international media. “But there is now as there has always been a tension in its public service mission, and questions about its editorial independence.”

The Royce-Engle measure also is intended to fix a continuing management problem that, according to the State Department inspector general and others, clearly needs fixing. The VOA is governed by the Broadcasting Board of Governments, a part-time group whose members meet once a month. The bill would create a full-time agency head and turn the board into an advisory group.

A New York Times editorial said that “it is critical that the sponsors guarantee the American public as much as the world that standards of professional journalism will not be sacrificed in favor of a simplistic propaganda megaphone.”

“The proposed overhaul has understandably alarmed members of the V.O.A. news staff who fear that it will undermine a congressional mission enacted in 1976 that, far from a propaganda agency, set its role as an ‘accurate, objective, and comprehensive’ source of news,” the Times wrote.

One of those is Al Pessin,  senior VOA foreign correspondent based in London and, in full disclosure, a member of the advisory board of the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative. In an op-ed published by The Hill newspaper, Pessin acknowledged that the Royce-Engel measure would keep intact the VOA charter language, requiring “accurate, objective, and comprehensive” news, But, he warned, it would be “only within the rubric of promoting U.S. foreign policy.”

“There are two main problems with this.  First, it is not consistent with American values.  VOA has always prided itself on showing the world what an objective American news organization is.  These bills would require it to be more like Russia Today, a state organ that Secretary of State John Kerry recently called a ‘propaganda bullhorn,’” Pessin wrote. “. . . The second problem is that no one wants to listen to such a radio station, or watch such television broadcasts or visit such a website.”

There are other problems.

American foreign policy changes with administrations so the organization would become incoherent over time, Rosenstiel noted.

And, just as Pessin warned that no one would want to listen to an American propaganda radio service, Rosenstiel warned that no one would want to work for it.

“We as journalists don’t want to work there so they’d drive away the best talent,” he said.

But Lamay noted the VOA was created as a public diplomacy organ, originally under the U.S. Information Agency. “So how you see VOA’s mission depends on what kind of news and information you think constitute an effective public diplomacy program,” he said.

(More INSIGHTS columns).

Ellen Shearer is co-director of the National Security Journalism Initiative, as well as the William F. Thomas Professor of the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. She teaches in the school’s Washington Program. Before joining the Medill faculty, she was a senior editor at New York Newsday, a consulting editor at Newhouse News Service, marketing executive at Reuters, and held positions as senior executive, bureau chief and reporter at United Press International.

WASHINGTON – University of Chicago First Amendment scholar Geoffrey Stone was not expecting unanimity among the group of five experts called together by President  Barack Obama to review the National Security Agency’s collection of vast amounts of phone records and other digital information of millions of Americans.

The five-member group was comprised of Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism chief for the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations who criticized Bush’s attitude toward counterterrorism pre-9/11; Michael Morell, who was acting CIA director in 2011 and again in 2012-13 for Obama; Cass Sunstein, who was head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in Obama’s first term; Peter Swire, a professor at the George Institute of Technology who specializes in privacy law and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress; and Stone.

Stone said the fact that the group could present recommendations fully supported by all members gave extra weight to their report. They review group recommended that that phone companies or a private third party maintain the data needed by the NSA rather than the NSA itself and that access be allowed only by a court order.

The president rejected the recommendation that the FBI be required by law to obtain judicial approval before using a national security letter to obtain Americans’ records.

In a video interview with Medill National Security Zone, Stone detailed key points from the recommendations.

Posted Sept. 15, 2013

If current progress toward Syria turning over its chemical weapons ultimately unravels and the U.S. ultimately launches a military strike, it can do so with impunity in terms of Syria’s ability to retaliate kinetically. It doesn’t have the ability to reach any American assets except, possibly, the naval ships nearby.

But in the cyber world, Syria’s ability to attack is more difficult to assess. However, the Syrian Electronic Army, a pro-Assad regime group of hackers that may in fact be directed by President Bashar al-Assad’s administration, has already said it will retaliate if the U.S. launches an air strike.

“It’s like when Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States. We’re sort of ignoring the fact that people have affirmatively said, ‘We’re going to hit you,’” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security and cybersecurity expert. “How good they (the Syrian Electronic Army) are is an open question.”

In August, the SEA caused The New York Times’ website to go down. It also has hit other Western media organizations, either by hitting their websites or seizing their Twitter feeds. Among those targeted have been The Washington Post, CBS News, the Associated Press and National Public Radio.

Washington Post reporter Max Fisher wrote on Aug. 27 that SEA members are more likely pranksters than Syrian government-aligned hackers. Rosenzweig, who also is a lecturer at the Medill School of Journalism and a contributor to Medill National Security Zone, said that it is not clear how much influence Assad’s government has on the group, but it could be more significant.

He also said the attack on the Times’ website was more sophisticated than a simple “denial of service” attack in which hackers flood a website so legitimate traffic can’t get in, but the underlying data is not destroyed.

SEA instead hacked into the domain name register and changed the Internet Protocol addresses so that when a user typed “nytimes.com” he would go to an IP address controlled by “bad guys in Syria.”

The U.S. is fairly vulnerable to cyberattack, whether from Syria or other state or non-state actors.

“It’s more than a theoretical worry,” said Rosenzweig. A cyberattack could be anything from “mischief to vandalism to significant damage.”

National Security Agency Chief Keith Alexander has said the agency is preparing for both offensive and defensive action if the U.S. is subjected to a cyberattack.
“You can assume that offensively they’re trying to figure out whom to take out . . . they could be planning an offensive attack,” Rosenzweig said.

Rosenzweig said that if he were in Alexander’s shoes, he would have developed intelligence about how attacks might occur and be looking for the
warning signs that such attacks were imminent.

“If I knew where some of their command and control servers were, I’d be preparing to disrupt, degrade and disable them,” he said. “And I’d be working with critical infrastructure to push as much information about the SEA or other enemy as possible out to (places like) the New York Stock Exchange and any other targets.

“I’d also be worrying a little.”

(More INSIGHTS columns).

Ellen Shearer is co-director of the National Security Journalism Initiative, as well as the William F. Thomas Professor of the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. She teaches in the school’s Washington Program. Before joining the Medill faculty, she was a senior editor at New York Newsday, a consulting editor at Newhouse News Service, marketing executive at Reuters, and held positions as senior executive, bureau chief and reporter at United Press International.