Data below compiled from weekly TSA Blog updates on the number and type of weapons confiscated during carry-on searches at airports. Data is updated weekly (current data through Dec. 31, 2013). (Download CSV file).

The number of guns confiscated from passengers trying to board planes in the U.S. jumped 20% in 2013 to 1,828, with Atlanta leading the way with the most with 110. Confiscations averaged five per day across the U.S.

Full story on 2013 data.

Data for 2014 will be posted soon.

[field name=”barchart”]

Daily Data

Visit this page for a table that includes data for each incident, by airport.

Download the Data

→ Download year-to-date data. (Click on File | Download As and choose your format).

Thanks to NSJI’s Natalie Jones for help with data entry.

Last week all but certainly will be looked back at as a watershed week in shifting support for the Surveillance State by not only U.S. citizens, but members of Congress.

For those who’ve been in eyes-half-open mode because it’s Summer and want to catch up, The New York Times today has a must-read on the politics and cross-party partnerships behind last week’s surprising oh-so-close vote in the House that would have killed funding for the National Security Administration’s telephone data collection, exposed by Edward Snowden.

Two quotes that stand out:

“There is a growing sense that things have really gone a-kilter here.”

“The time has come to stop it, and the way we stop it is to approve this amendment.”

The first, from U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., who is helping craft a bill “to significantly rein in N.S.A. telephone surveillance,” the NYT story says.

The second is from someone who was a force behind the Patriot Act and who is helping Lofgren on that bill. — U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc. His very brief (and unexpected) remarks — seven sentences — before the House vote last week were seen as pivotal.

Meantime, new research data shows the opinion shift among Americans. Almost half of those polled from July 17-21 said their “greater concern about government anti-terrorism policies is that they have gone too far in restricting the average person’s civil liberties,” Pew Research Center for the People & the Press reported on Friday.

That was a 15-point jump since 2010, when the question was last asked. “This is the first time a plurality has expressed greater concern about civil liberties than security since the question was first asked in 2004.”

Nearly 3 in 5 of those adults surveyed — 56% — said courts aren’t providing the safety net needed for government data collection. “An even larger percentage (70%) believes that the government uses this data for purposes other than investigating terrorism,” Pew said.

Politically, a clear lean toward more support for civil liberties vs. national security since 2010 is pretty much across the board, as the chart below shows. Particularly noteworthy is the shift in the civil liberties v. national security view by Tea Party Republicans.

For the media, the public remains divided over how aggressive journalists should be in reporting on secret methods used to fight terrorism — 47% yes, 47% no. That’s the same as 2006. However, there has been a partisan shift, as Republicans now are much more supportive of an aggressive media role (+17 points), while Democrats have retreated (-14 points). See charts below.

In a column today, the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, whose release of Snowden’s inside information along with the Washington Post detonated the current NSA and civil liberties controversy, took note of the shift in the Venn diagram of civil liberties and national security that Pew’s survey revealed.

As I’ve repeatedly said, the only ones defending the NSA at this point are the party loyalists and institutional authoritarians in both parties. That’s enough for the moment to control Washington outcomes – as epitomized by the unholy trinity that saved the NSA in the House last week: Pelosi, John Bohener and the Obama White House – but it is clearly not enough to stem the rapidly changing tide of public opinion.

(Note: If you’re interested, Pew has details on how it conducted its survey).

(More INSIGHTS columns).

Scott B. Anderson is an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School and directs interactive operations for the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative. Among his projects is On The Beat, a column that offers fresh tips, news and resources to help national security reporters excel on their beats.

 Global Warning, a Medill National Security Journalism Initiative graduate student project, has won a prestigious 2011 Online Journalism Award. Winners were announced on Sept. 24 at the Online News Association annual conference in Boston. Global Warning was a finalist in the “Multimedia Feature Presentation, Student” category.

Graduate students in NSJI’s inaugural Specialization Program in National Security Reporting last Fall traveled the globe, investigating the effects of climate change on national security. They produced a powerful and informative interactive package that broke news about the government’s failures to address climate change, the military’s preparations for climate disasters and the security threat of a changing global environment.

The project immediately caught the attention of security experts and prominent media organizations after it was featured in major media outlets in the U.S. and around the world. Three stories in the Global Warning series were published in The Washington Post. Others were picked up by McClatchy Newspapers’ Washington website and sent to hundreds of publications across the nation.

In what it dubbed The Privacy Project, the 17-student team focused on digital privacy and how it affects, in often little-noticed or overlooked ways, the rights of online consumers.

Like a Boss

The team also launched a working prototype web site with viral hooks based on the “Like a Boss” meme that helps educate two different audiences about ways to protect their online privacy; and an umbrella web site that captures the rigorous product development process the students followed, and showcases their work.

[field name=”dynamic”]

The directive says DOD will “respond promptly to all requests in a spirit of cooperation” and will “take affirmative steps” to maximize what’s made available.

You can get a sense of the exact key change in this screen grab of the edited document:

Fierce Government earlier this week parsed out a few more of the changes in the directive.

President Obama in an executive order on Jan. 21, 2009 ordered “presumption in favor of disclosure” and asked agencies to “harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.”

The Defense Department fared fairly well in March in a Knight Open Government Survey on the status of agency progress in meeting the Obama administration’s request for FOIA enhancements. DOD had taken two action steps — one of only 13 in 49 agencies studied that achieved two.

In another FOIA development, the “FasterFOIA” bill that’s been up and down in Congress was passed by the Senate on a voice voice earlier this month, and sent to the House, where it had been entangled in the debt ceiling debate, MainJustice.com reported. It notes “even among transparency advocates, the bill has critics who say it amounts to nothing more that Washington’s favorite refrain: Let’s create a commission.”

Below are two documents. The first, the edits DOD made in its FOIA directive. The second, a good background and status report on FOIA released in late July by the Congressional Research Service.

[field name=”foiadoc”]

[field name=”crsstatus”]

Journalists who cover the military beat around the country participated in briefings at the Pentagon and panel discussions and presentations with a variety of experts on topics ranging from medical care for veterans to national security law during a June conference organized by the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative.

About 30 journalists chosen from a pool of applicants gathered June 23-24 for the “Covering the Military at Home and Abroad,” sessions in Washington, D.C. Many also participated in an optional one-day immersion in using computer-assisted reporting to cover defense issues. Investigative Reporters and Editors and Medill were co-organizers of those sessions.

“The two-day fellowship and Saturday’s NICAR session were fun and instructive,” conference participant Mike Cronin of The Daily said. “I had a blast, learned a lot.”

Gretel C. Kovach of the San Diego Union-Tribune also found the conference to be a success. “I returned to San Diego full of ideas and skills.”

Below are links to stories from the conference, as well as the main conference page.

• Military contractors a rich source of stories
• Great stories about the military start with understanding of FOIA4
• Experts offer advice on how to best cover medical issues of returning troops
• When it comes to cyber law, serious issues remain unresolved
• General sees speed-up in Afghan transition
• U.S. Cyber Command tasked with protecting Dept. of Defense from Internet explosion
• Conference Photo Gallery
• Main conference coverage page.

The first news I saw on this was early in the day in my Twitter feed — but it wasn’t a tweet of  a news story or someone quoting a news story or government official.

My news came from a tweet based on raw Google data.

In my feed, @BrianBoyer of the Chicago Tribune retweeted fellow Chicagoan (and Googler) @therealfitz with news that Syria had apparently gone dark, based on Google data  — and that was two hours before Google itself officially tweeted about it.

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/brianboyer/status/76675449387880448″]

Google’s tweet:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/google/status/76719765481197568″]

The source: Google’s Transparency Report, which shows near- real-time data for use of Google services by country/region  and “visualizes disruptions in the free flow of information, whether it’s a government blocking information or a cable being cut.”

As the screen shot below shows, you can clearly see Syria falling off the Google system map — then coming back about 24 hours later.

SOURCE: Google

Among the notations that Google added to its own chart was a status report from Renesys, a technology company that  monitors  global web traffic.  In a blog post, it had noted at  about 5:35 a.m. Syria time, “approximately two-thirds of all Syrian networks became unreachable from the global Internet. Over the course of roughly half an hour, the routes to 40 of 59 networks were withdrawn from the global routing table.” (Renesys blog RSS feed).

Here is the Renesys chart showing the take-down, and return:

SOURCE: Renesys

Google’s traffic report page also keeps a running log of major downtime, by country, for its services, which is a good historic archive and secondary source for network watchers.  In March, for example, you can find entries for Armenia, Georgia, Libya and Turkey.

You can check not only the overall status for countries, but also by individual Google services (e.g, You Tube, Blogger, GMail).

Google Transparency also includes country-by-country data about government  “inquiries for information about users and requests for Google to take down or censor content.” The data is a little bit stale, only updated at this point thorough June, 2010. UPDATE ON 6/27: Data is now available through the end of 2010. Here is a country-by-country listing.

Know of other tools and resources? Drop me a line.

Not surprisingly, East and Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa were found to house states with the most filtering. The most extensive filtering of the 47 surveyed nations was found in China, Cuba, Myanmar (Burma), Oman, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Yemen. (See full interactive map below).

Government interference with the Internet has been a very high-profile issue in recent months, particularly with the Arab Spring uprisings and the role of the Internet in the unrest (and government attempts to stop or inhibit the Internet as an enabling tool). The report from UNESCO (United Nations EducationCultural and Scientific Organization) does not cover political filtering alone, however. The studies it cites also measured filtering for social (e.g., pornography), security and other reasons.

“This report does not seek to make such value judgements and instead seeks to expose the extent of the legal and regulatory trends affecting freedom of expression online,” it says. “As such, it should be noted that the meta-analysis . . . measures only the extent of  filtering rather than the significance of the blocked material.”

Mathew Ingram of GigaOm.com has a more thorough take on the full report that’s well worth a read. He concludes:

“More than anything, the picture that UNESCO paints is of global arms race — but instead of guns and tanks, the weapons are computers and hackers and Internet-tracking tools, and increasingly social networking sites as well.”

UNESCO found that a greater “obstacle to expression” than filtering on one continent (Africa) is lack of Internet access at all — and then moves to block sites and access once it has been established in places such as Gambia and Ethiopia.

The map below, created from data extracted from the UNESCO report, shows filtering ratings for countries from 0 to 3, and  depicted by shades of green.

[field name=map]

Larger map.

Below is the chapter from which the map data was extracted. The complete report is available to browse here.

[field name=chapter5]

The session, featuring trainers from IRE’s National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting, will be hosted by Medill’s National Security Journalism Initiative.

The program is set for Saturday, June 25, and will run from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at  Medill News Service, 1325 G St. NW, Washington, DC. There is a $50 registration fee.�
Instructors and speakers will include . . .

• Sarah Cohen, Duke University Knight Chair in Computational Journalism and former Pulitzer-Prize-winning database editor for the Washington Post and IRE/NICAR training director.
• David Donald, data editor for the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity, former IRE/NICAR training director.
• Margot Williams, database editor/correspondent for NPR’s Investigative Team, former database/online investigative guru for both The Washington Post and The New York Times.
• Josh Meyer, director of education and outreach, Medill National Security Journalism Initiative and former 20-year Los Angeles Times reporter, the last decade of that covering terrorism and  national security in Washington.
• Ellen Shearer, director of Medill’s Washington Program, Medill News Service and co-director of the National Security Journalism Initiative.

Planned sessions include:

• Overview of the workshop, introduction to covering national security. Putting it all together in the real world, with a look at quick-turn watchdog stories that you can produce in your newsroom.
• Hands-on training in Excel. Learn to build your own spreadsheet from paper records. Learn basic but powerful functions including putting information in order, filtering out just what you need from a national or statewide data set, and doing math calculations such as change and percent change with large data sets. National security data will be used in the training, focusing on U.S. government weapons sales to foreign countries.
• Effective use of the Internet: What reporters and editors need to know. From better search techniques to the invisible Web, how to find documents and databases on deadline on the national security front and where to find reliable Web sites for enterprise stories. The craft of better searching and not wasting time. Handling issues of credibility and ethics online.
• National security data and documents. Move beyond anecdotes and he-said, she-said journalism with data and documents. Advice on developing a documents state of mind, navigating public records, using new technologies, exploring key records on a variety of related topics, and becoming familiar with key data sets to produce high-impact stories.
• What the National Security Journalism Initiative and IRE can do for you.