Our  visit began Nov. 5 at the gates of Ft. McNair at 0715 (military time), an historic post that now houses the War College and other graduate programs that are part of National Defense University. War college Dean David Tretler explained the rigorous one-year graduate program, saying those nominated by their service or government agency were tapped based on future leadership potential. Among the college’s graduates are Colin Powell and Dwight Eisenhower.

The speaker for that day’s lecture was Adm. Michael Rogers, director of the National Security Agency and commander of U.S. Cyber Command; he also is an alum. Afterward, we participated in small group seminars with the college’s students to discuss issues of cybersecurity and military strategy.

A campus tour and lunch buffet afforded us even more quality time with the senior military and government officials, where we engaged in deep discussions regarding global politics, economics and security. I had the opportunity to meet a female Army officer who has had four deployments to Afghanistan; we discussed topics ranging from her experience serving overseas, to health crises facing India’s population, to my aspirations as a journalist interested in social justice, security and health issues.

Our first day at the college ended with a panel discussion covering issues between media and military to better inform our stories. Defense reporter Kristina Wong of The Hill noted the difficulty of reaching sources and accessing necessary information, while Col. Edward W. Thomas, Jr. noted the potential security problems facing the nation should the wrong information be reported.

The second day of our visit included a lecture on defense diplomacy by Col.l Robert Timm and additional time in our seminar groups. The visit concluded after a working lunch where expert professors and military personnel touched upon issues of energy and oil, Europe’s impending economic decline and China’s growing naval strength as part of a strategy to assert power and territorial dominance in the region.

The Medill National Security Specialization students, most in their first quarter of the graduate program, had the rare chance to not only learn about our nation’s security challenges and threats from top experts, but to witness first-hand how senior military and government leaders learn to think strategically about the U.S. role in dealing with those issues. That understanding will certainly inform our reporting as we move forward through Medill and into the professional journalism world.

The Summer 2015 National Security Journalism Data/Watchdog Workshop

 This Saturday, July 11, 2015

We’ll be providing a full day’s worth of intensive, hands-on training that focuses on how to use data, documents and the Internet for security reporting at the local, state and national level. The workshop, featuring trainers from IRE and NICAR, its National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting, will be hosted by Medill in its Washington, D.C. newsroom at 1325 G St. NW, Suite 730, Washington, DC.

The program will run from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., with coffee and bagels for breakfast and sandwiches, chips and drinks for lunch. All for a registration fee of $15. We will cap this event at 35 reporters, so RSVP now by sending an email to tiffany.roberts@northwestern.edu with the subject line Medill/IRE National Security Journalism Data/Watchdog Workshop. Those registered to attend will be sent more details ahead of time, including data sets to upload so you’re ready to go.

Agenda and topics:

9:00 am – 10:30 am  – How to Use Data in National Security Reporting, Analysis and Storytelling

10:30 am – 11:45 am  – How to turbo-charge your data reporting, analysis and publication with IRE’s innovative DocumentCloud

11:45 am to 12:15 pm –Lunch and Introduction to Excel: How to use it, importing data for analysis

12:15 pm to 2 pm –  Introduction to data, including identifying good data for analysis, how to sort and filter data and an introduction to functions

2 pm to 2:45 pm  – Introduction to pivot tables

2:45 pm to 3 pm – Data journalism beyond excel: What is possible with database programs?

Our instructors are (alphabetically): 

Anthony DeBarros, IRE’s director of Product Development for DocumentCloud, travels nationally to provide training and education re: the open-source tool. As director of Interactive Applications for Gannett Digital, he led a team that built data-driven interactives for investigations, elections and the Gannett platform as well as publishing tools for the company’s journalists. Tony also spent 15 years with USA TODAY as a database editor and investigative journalist.

Aaron Kessler, a reporter for the New York Times based in Washington, writes about business, autos and related policy issues. He’s spent the last decade as a reporter using data to investigate a wide variety of financial issues, including terrorist financing and other security issues. He was a[masked] Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Business & Economics – a program for journalists to enroll in a year of MBA courses at Columbia Business School. His work has been honored with numerous national awards, and he has twice been a finalist for the Loeb Award, business journalism’s highest honor.

Ron Nixon, a reporter and data journalism specialist at the New York Times, has covered stories ranging from the U.S. role in the Arab Spring to companies violating the Iran Sanctions Act to lobbying by several former high ranking government officials in the Reagan Administration on behalf of the coup government in Honduras. He was also training director for IRE, and his deep experience reporting internationally led Ron to establish The Ujima Project, an online portal of documents and data that allows journalists around the world to access information that may be restricted in their countries.

Steven Rich, the database editor for the investigations unit at The Washington Post. While at The Post, he’s worked on numerous security-related projects, and was a member of the reporting team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for NSA revelations. Steven is also a recently elected member of IRE’s Board of Directors and a former staffer there based at IRE headquarters in Missouri.

Margot Williams, the research editor for Investigations at FirstLook Media’s The Intercept. During her career at The Washington Post, New York Times, NPR and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, she has pursued jihadists online and detainees who died in U.S. immigration detention, investigated Iraq war contractors and followed the money (and private jets) of mayors, governors, senators, presidential candidates, and ex-presidents. During 14 years at The Post, she was a member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams, including in 2001 for national coverage of terrorism.

The Medill National Journalism Security Initiative, begun in January 2009 with the support of the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, offers a sequence of courses that equip graduate and undergraduate journalism students with the knowledge and skills to report on national security issues in ways that have relevance and meaning to a variety of audiences. It also undertakes an annual investigative project with 10 students and a professional media partner, and sponsors a conference for journalists to get a series of briefings on the most pressing national security issues and to share ideas on covering them. And it provides training and background materials on nationalsecurityzone.org as well as webinars to enhance its outreach to working reporters around the country.

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. is a grassroots nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of investigative reporting. IRE was formed in 1975 to create a forum in which journalists throughout the world could help each other by sharing story ideas, newsgathering techniques and news sources.
IRE provides members access to thousands of reporting tip sheets and other materials through its resource center and hosts conferences and specialized training throughout the country. Programs of IRE include the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting and DocumentCloud.

Mark your calendars now: The Medill National Security Journalism Initiative and Investigative Reporters & Editors, Inc. announce the Summer 2015 National Security Journalism Data/Watchdog Workshop in Washington, D.C.

We’ll be providing a full day’s worth of intensive, hands-on training that focuses on how to use data, documents and the Internet for security reporting at the local, state and national level. The workshop, featuring trainers from IRE and NICAR, its National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting, will be hosted by Medill in its Washington, D.C. newsroom at 1325 G St. NW, Suite 730, Washington, DC.

The program is set for Saturday, July 11, and will run from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., with coffee and bagels for breakfast and sandwiches, chips and drinks for lunch — all for a registration fee of $20. We will cap this event at 35 reporters, so RSVP early by sending an email to tiffany.roberts@northwestern.edu with the subject line Medill/IRE National Security Journalism Data/Watchdog Workshop. Those registered to attend will be sent an update with the exact schedule and more details.

Instructors and speakers will include:

• Steven Rich, the database editor for the investigations unit at The Washington Post. While at The Post, he’s worked on numerous security-related projects, and was a member of the reporting team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for NSA revelations. Steven is also a recently elected member of IRE’s Board of Directors and a former staffer there based at IRE headquarters in Missouri.

• Aaron Kessler, a reporter for the New York Times based in Washington who has also been an IRE data journalism trainer. He has managed interactive data-driven websites and worked extensively with visualization/development tools such as Javascipt, JQuery, and Bootstrap.

• Ron Nixon, a reporter and data journalism specialist at the New York Times, will focus on how to cover all the law enforcement agencies most people have never heard of – including domestic surveillance TSA VIPR squads, the secret Postal Service Mail Covers Program and railroad police. He will also talk about how to use federal and state open records laws to draft records requests the right way, how to challenge denials and how to keep a steady flow of information coming into the newsroom with FOI.

• Margot Williams, database editor/correspondent for FirstLook Media publications, including its national security-focused flagship publication, The Intercept. Margot will discuss all of the new tips, tools and technologies you can use to report on national security issues. She has also held that position on NPR’s Investigative Team, The Washington Post and the New York Times.

• Tony DeBarros, the director of Product Development for IRE’s DocumentCloud, will provide hands-on training on how you can use this invaluable tool for reporting, writing and publishing on security-related topics. Tony is a senior member of IRE’s staff, and the former Director of Interactive Applications for Gannett Digital, where he led a team that built data-driven interactives for investigations, elections and the Gannett platform as well as publishing tools for the company’s journalists. Before that, Tony spent 15 years with USA TODAY as a database editor and investigative journalist, working alongside the newsroom’s database team on demographics analysis and investigations.

• Tisha Thompson (invited), an investigative reporter at WRC-TV NBC4 in Washington, DC., is a fifth-generation journalist, and winner of the Loeb, Headliner, EWA, American Legion and Murrow Awards for her data journalism work. She is a frequent speaker at NICAR on how journalists can use database reporting in their daily work, at the local, state and national level. Tisha also specializes in the art of the interview, how to get people to talk to you, even on camera, when they don’t want to.

Sessions will 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.

• Introduction to using data in journalism, including how to use it for analyzing, adding context and finding people to write about.

• Hands-on training in Excel. Learn to build your own spreadsheet from paper records, and basic but powerful functions including putting information in order, filtering out just what you need from a national or statewide data set, and doing calculations with large data sets. We’ll have several tiers, including an intro workshop; importing, sorting and filtering; an introduction to basic formulas and building pivot tables. National security data will be used in the training, focusing on the National Vulnerability Database and other security topics in the news.

• 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.

WASHINGTON — When whistleblower Edward Snowden used an email encryption program called PGP to contact documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, only a tiny fraction of journalists used it. The precaution, designed to scramble messages so only the sender and receiver can read them, was essential for Snowden to leak the information.

The series of stories that followed shocked the world and radically altered the way people think about government surveillance and the Internet. Now, encryption is becoming a standard item of the journalism toolkit, a must-have for anyone hoping to report on sensitive issues that might upset institutions of power. It was also the subject of a workshop recently held at Northwestern’s Medill newsroom in Washington, DC, which walked about 15 journalists through the basic software installations involved in setting up PGP, which is short for “Pretty Good Privacy” and ironically named after a grocery store in Garrison Keillor’s fictional town of Lake Wobegon.

Aaron Rinehart displays the GPG encryption download suite for those at the workshop to follow along. (J. Zach Hollo/THE GROUNDTRUTH PROJECT)

For Aaron Rinehart, one of the workshop’s leaders, the goal is to protect the relationship between journalists and their sources, “to get journalists confident using these tools so sources feel they can give them information safely,” said Rinehart. Without that possibility, he said, the Fourth Estate could be fundamentally crippled.

And it’s not just the NSA journalists and sources need to protect themselves from, warned Rinehart. He used an example of a story exposing pharmaceutical malpractice. “It’s not that sexy of an issue, right? But just think of the potential adversaries.” There’s the government whose regulators screwed up, the drug companies who are poisoning people, and their stakeholders who don’t want to lose profits. With any story, there are likely a host of people who want to hack the journalist and sources to prevent the information from being aired.

The workshop was taught by Rinehart and digital security advisers David Reese and Ferdous Al-Faruque. Rinehart and Reese recently founded TestBed Inc., a technology consulting company. And Al-Faruque is a master’s journalism student at the University of Missouri who said he wants to establish a class there on encryption and cyber security.

Rinehart, who spent time in Djibouti while serving in the Marine Corps, said his motivation for putting on the workshop came from a time when journalism salvaged his college career. “The media saved me,” he said. About a decade ago, Rinehart faced a bureaucratic nightmare at the University of Missouri, when he returned from serving abroad and was not permitted to complete his studies. A local paper led an investigation into the problems veterans were having there, and the university changed policies. Since then, Rinehart said he tries to do all he can to help journalists.

Of the reporters who attended, many are intent on investigative work like the kind that exposed the NSA’s mass, indiscriminate surveillance. “Since I cover national security and defense, I would definitely use this to coax sources to communicate with me or send me documents that they don’t want their government or our government to see or know about,” said Kristina Wong, a reporter for The Hill.

But others also attended, including a cryptologist who said he comes to events like this out of professional interest, and a human rights worker.

“In a lot of countries, activists and human rights defenders especially are really targeted,” said Sarah Kinosian, who monitors American security assistance in Latin America for the Center for International Policy. “So we want to make sure [victims] can pass documentation to us in a safe way.”

The workshop began with Rinehart and Reese playing a segment of Citizen Four, Poitras’s documentary on Snowden and government surveillance that recently won an academy award.

“I would like to confirm out of email that the keys we exchanged were not intercepted and replaced by your surveillance,” a narrator said, reading Snowden’s correspondence with Poitras as a line of ominous tunnel light split darkness on the screen. “Please confirm that no one has ever had a copy of your private key and that it uses a strong passphrase.” Rinehart interjected: “That is what we will be teaching you today.”

He then spoke for a while on the importance of responsible password management, recommending a program called KeePass, before moving on to downloading email client software and installing extensions designed to encrypt communications.

The way it works can seem daunting and complex, especially for anyone not tech-savvy. The email extension, called GPG or PGP, generates both a public and private key for each user. When PGP is used to send an email, the sender uses the receiver’s public key to encrypt the contents of the email so only the receiver’s private key can decrypt it.

Also on the other end, the receiver can see that the sender’s identity is confirmed. A public key is just what it sounds like: something meant to be made public along with an email address so the owner can be contacted by anyone. The private key must be kept secret by the owner, and is used to decrypt messages sent using his or her public key.

In essence, it’s is the same concept of an email. Anyone can send a message to someone but only that someone can read it. But encryption makes it nearly impossible for that message to be intercepted. And while subpoenas can force Google or Yahoo to turn over peoples’ emails, PGP makes it impossible for Google and Yahoo to read the messages, so they’d be turning over incoherent nonsense (although it is still possible to see who the sender and receiver are, and the subject line of the email is not encrypted. Ergo, aliases are commonly used once initial contact is made).

Click here to see my public key.

Encryption’s complexity has deterred it from becoming widespread, even in newsrooms. “At The Hill, not many people use it at all,” said Wong, something many would deem troublesome given the publication’s focus on politics and aim to bring transparency to Washington.

But most people agree the complexity is in the technical details behind the process, not in its application. “The world of cryptology and algorithms and coding that goes into encryption tools is difficult for just about anyone to comprehend,” Rinehart said. “But using the tools is quite simple for people who take the time to learn.”

While the majority journalists still do not use encryption, it is becoming common practice for many organizations who do investigative work. The New Yorker, The Intercept, Washington Post, and ProPublica are a few of the early sign-ons for Secure Drop, a new encryption system for journalists designed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and originally coded by Kevin Poulsen and the late Aaron Swartz. Gawker is another publication that uses it, showing encryption may become more widespread for groups focused on less hard-hitting subjects as well.

[Editor’s note: This piece originally appeared in The Huffington Post.]

WASHINGTON – Two prominent National War College professors of Strategy and Policy gave reporters a detailed look at how Islamic State terrorist group recruits and operates during an April 6 National Press Club panel.

The event, cosponsored by the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative (NSJI) and the National War College, and moderated by NSJI Director of Education and Outreach Josh Meyer, sought to increase the media’s knowledge of the Islamic State.

The analysis by Dr. Omer Taspinar and Dr. Richard B. Andres broke down into two sections: the relationship between radicalization and the Islamic State’s rise to power, and the role of social media in radicalization.

Radicalization and the Islamic State

Taspinar said that the creation of the Islamic State is, at its core, a result of Sunni Muslims’ oppression by a Shiite majority within Iraq.

According to Taspinar, de-Baathification in Iraq – or the breakup of the Saddam Hussein-led Baath Party – led to the rise of a Shiite majority within the country, a backlash against Sunni Muslims and the birthing “a sense of Sunni resentment.”

“It’s very hard for the Sunni minority of Iraq to come to terms with the fact that Shiites now are running the country,” he said, noting that Sunnis had historically possessed control of the country from its initial founding until the Baathist fall.

Taspinar also teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and serves as a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution focusing on foreign policy and working with the organization’s Center on the United States and Europe.

He went onto explain that former Baathist leaders became delegated to a lower class and “felt persecuted.” The resulting anger, he said, fueled radicalization. According to Taspinar, in the wake of the Shiite rise to power, Sunnis suffered from collapses in security, capacity and legitimacy (or the descrecration of their former socioeconomic and political status).

“All this contributed to the rise of ISIS, which captured basically the most radical elements within the Sunni groups … starting in Syria,” he said.

Iraqis who sympathized with the radical parties in Syria started crossing the border to join ISIS, he continued.

“ISIS did something that no other radical Salafist jihadist organization managed to do: It established a state — it declared a state,” Taspinar said.

The idea of a caliphate with sovereign government and territory that came with the promise of a return to prophet-era morals and living (and in which Sunnis could return to a once-held state of glory) appealed to disenfranchised Sunnis and drove recruitment, he said.

“You have to understand that, for people in the Islamic world, especially the disenfranchised radicalized youth, there’s this strong sense of nostalgia for the golden age of Islam – the days when Islam was able to actually create a great civilization which surpassed the West in terms of its scientific, architectural, artistic, military achievements,” he said.

The idea of citizenship in such a state – as opposed to membership in a terrorist group like al-Qaeda had long promised – appealed to Muslims in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

Joining ISIS’ “Islamic utopia” was made even easier by geography, Taspinar explained, since all one had to do was cross the Syrian border to arrive.

Taspinar attributes the recent spark in the Islamic State’s recruitment of middle-class, educated individuals from Europe to “relative deprivation.”

He explained this concept as the process by youth become disheartened with the lack of employment avenues despite their education and a “sense of perceived racism” that makes them believe their upward socioeconomic mobility is limited by their Muslim identity. According to Taspinar, the dismal outlook breeds “frustrated achievers.”

In this sense, he explained, there’s more to the Islamic State recruitment than just religious ideology.

According to Taspinar, its early days, the Islamic State was largely unconcerned with the West, more focused on preserving the integrity of its self-declared state in terms of governmental and territorial control.

However, according to Taspinar, its dedication to maintaining caliphatic sovereignty meant that it felt compelled to respond to threats made upon it by outside forces – such as the United States government. This, in turn, sparked the group’s evolution into a more violent form that we, as Westerners, are more familiar with seeing stream across our TVs and occupy our headlines.

How Social Media Radicalizes

Richard B. Andres, who has 16 years of teaching experience and serves as the Energy and Environment Security Policy Chair at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, took a different approach to radicalization.

Rather than examining it in the context of geopolitics, he tackled it in the key of cyber, contextualizing the roots of social media’s capacity to radicalize its users and how that capacity has been used by the Islamic State.

“There’s two particular psychological things politically that social media takes advantage of,” Andres explained.

The first is that, since “human beings are attracted by sensation,” we are literally wired to fall for clickbait. The second is that people are psychologically more likely to click on things that backup our preexisting opinions.

“That’s why Republicans watch Fox News and Democrats watch MSNBC,” Andres explained.

According to Andres, social algorithms serve up social content that plays to preexisting biases, beginning with more mainstream, subtle pieces and eventually building up to obviously radical ones. That helps push people, especially young and impressionable males – toward radicalization, he said.

“Social media will inadvertently… push you more and more like a cult to the point where you’re isolating [sic] from friends, you’re isolating from ideas, all the way to the extreme,” he said.

However, he says traditional media is necessary to fuel the fire, since it supplies content to feed the effect. Content distributed through social channels needs to come from somewhere (since Facebook and Twitter aren’t news organizations), so, like it or not, the inherent biases present in news coverage contribute to the cult effect.

Levels of susceptibility differ, he said, but people who come from “autocratic” countries whose governments keep citizens distanced “from non-biased information” are more likely to fall for the effect, which Andres called “clickwashing.” He says that is because their experience with strongly biased media makes more moderate mainstream coverage seem less trustworthy.

But social media’s radicalizing tendencies don’t stop at creating lone wolves. In fact, Andres noted, its other radicalizing strength does quite the opposite.

“Social media allows people to coordinate their behavior,” he said. “The main defense that autocracies have against dissidents and rebels is they prevent people from coordinating.”

Andres said that the uniting nature of social media helps to counteract suspicions of surveillance that radicals might have, helps you find people who will – much like the aforementioned content – reinforce your extreme biases, and plan tangible gatherings.

ISIS has capitalized on these characteristics of social media to “groom” potential terrorists via clickbait, he said.

It accomplishes this in a five-step manner, Andres explained.

First, he said, ISIS makes “sensationalist images” of graphic violence and other click-inducing things. He noted that Islamic State social followers generally don’t stay engaged by this kind of content, but that it is effective in making first cyber contact via clicks.

Next, he said, they designed those images to link to actual news stories about ISIS’ impact around the world in order to make themselves appear more legitimate.

Third, he said, they “flood Twitter” with identical, radicalizing stories to the point where potential recruits have no choice but to be pulled in due to the psychological pull discussed earlier.

Fourth, he said, they reach out to potential recruits in covert ways, such as through the use of onion routing (such as Tor) to mentor them and to arrange fund transfers associated with joining up.

Finally, he explained, they use social as a way to arrange travel to an ISIS location.

From there, Andres said, the Islamic State uses “the wisdom of the Marine Corps” to pull people with privilege in.

“What the Marine Corps does, it says: ‘This is a cause that’s worth dying for; come fight with us. You’re gonna live in the mud, we’re gonna kick your butt and call you names. It’s gonna be really, really hard, but you’re gonna do something important. You’re gonna suffer and you’re gonna fight.’”

“That message resonates with young people very strongly,” he explained.

According to Andres, this is evidence that the Islamic State has figured out a key factor in the human psyche: People are also wired to want to make a difference in the world – “not just to live well.”

WASHINGTON — The minds behind TestBed, Inc., a Virginia-based IT consulting firm specializing in IT planning, analytics, testing, prototyping and business advice for the public and private sectors, gave journalists a crash course in digital safety and encryption techniques at an April 3 seminar in Washington.

The daylong event, “Cyber Security Skill Workshop for Journalists: Sending Secure Email,” was co-sponsored by the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative and the Military Reporters & Editors Association, and held in the Medill Washington newsroom.

The seminar began with an introductory lecture on cybersecurity basics and common misconceptions about online privacy and security. Security-related superstitions, such as the idea that browsing in so-called “incognito” or “invisible” modes will keep your digital whereabouts truly hidden, were promptly dispelled.

TestBed’s Aaron Rinehart and David Reese then transformed the event into a hands-on lesson in PGP – an acronym for “Pretty Good Privacy” – as well as understanding other aspects of digital fingerprints (including how to create a public key, how to register it in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s PGP directory so that you are more widely contactable by those in the encryption know and how to revoke (or deactivate) a key for security reasons.

The program also included a brief introduction to the Tor network, a group of volunteer-operated servers that allows people to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. Tor, originally developed by the U.S. Navy, hides the route taken from a computer’s IP address to its eventual browsing destination.

Learn how Tor works via Medill reporter William Hicks’ helpful primer and infographic here.

When asked for the top three lessons he hoped attendees would take away from the event, Rinehart emphasized the importance of “good key management,” or not sharing your private PGP key with anyone, operating “under good security practices”(such as updating software and antivirus programs) and making email encryption a regular habit.

“Don’t compromise convenience for security,” Rinehart said in a post-workshop interview. “Try to make this something you can use everyday.”

The event drew a mix of reporters, security experts and students, which included military veterans and defense journalists.

Northwestern University in Qatar journalism student James Zachary Hollo attended the event to research encryption resources available for foreign correspondents and to report on the workshop for the Ground Truth Project in Boston, where he is currently completing his Junior Residency.

Hollo said the seminar gave him a better understanding of how to use PGP.

“I had sort of experimented with it before I came here, but this gave me a much better and deeper understanding of it, and I got to sort of refine my ability to use it more,” he said.

Hollo said he was surprised that many attendees came from military service or military reporting backgrounds, since, in his view, “one of the blowbacks against the NSA story [involving whistleblower Edward Snowden] was that it’s like reporting is like betraying your country.”

The event is aimed at increasing the media’s knowledge of the Islamic State terrorist group. Taspinar is a leading expert on Islamic radicalization and the author of two books: “Political Islam and Kurdish Nationalism in Turkey” and “Fighting Radicalism with Human Development: Education, Employment, and Freedom in the Islamic World.” Andres is a former Defense Department official who specialized in defense planning, especially related to Iraq and Afghanistan. Dr. Andres is also a leading thinker on the role of cyber across the national security realm.

The February story of four teenage girls leaving Britain to join the Islamic State in Syria caught the world unaware but they were not unique. Young men and women have been joining ISIS, apparently after significant exposure to its message on social media. Andres and Taspinar are experts who will help the audience understand how this is developing. They will focus on how the Islamic radical movement in 2015 is using technology to appeal to youth to uproot themselves from relatively secure environments to join a radical movement in a distant land full of conflict.

Lunch will be served, but reservations are required.

The Medill National Security Journalism Initiative, begun in January 2009 with the support of the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, offers a sequence of courses that equip graduate and
undergraduate journalism students with the knowledge and skills to report on national security issues, undertakes an annual student investigative project with a media partner and sponsors an annual conference for journalists featuring briefings on the most pressing national security issues. It also provides training and background materials on nationalsecurityzone.org as well as webinars for working reporters around the country.

The National War College, founded in 1946, educates future leaders of the armed forces, State Department and other civilian agencies for high-level policy, command and staff responsibilities. The national security policy curriculum emphasizes the joint, interagency, and the multinational perspectives. NWC is located on Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington.

TO RSVP OR FOR QUESTIONS, PLEASE CONTACT TIFFANY K. ROBERTS BY PHONE AT (202) 661-0107 OR VIA EMAIL AT TIFFANY.ROBERTS@NORTHWESTERN.EDU.

Government inspector general (IG) offices might be a journalist’s most promising but underutilized resource.

On Thursday, March 12, the National Press Club’s Young Members Committee and the Medill School’s National Security Journalism Initiative will host a panel discussion with IG public affairs officers on how journalists can improve their reporting based on IG resources.

The panel, to be held 6:30 to 7:30 pm in the Murrow Room at the Press Club, will feature public affairs officers from the Environmental Protection Agency, and the departments of Defense, State and Treasury.

Please note: This event will be held on background and panelists’ remarks will not be for attribution.

You MUST register for this event in order to attend. Click HERE to register.

The National Press Club is located at:
National Press Club
529 14th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20045

For more information on this event, please contact:

Sean Lyngaas sean.lyngaas@gmail.com