“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.

ASPEN, Colo. – The National Security Agency is implementing a series of procedural changes to guard against insider threats like that posed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, whose leaks of classified information have caused “significant damage” to U.S. security, the head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command told the Aspen Security Forum on Thursday.

Gen. Keith Alexander, who heads the two agencies, said he has “concrete proof that terrorists have taken action and made changes” based on the information Snowden has made public.

Alexander said he knows what information Snowden downloaded and took from NSA computers and responded “yes” when asked if it was a lot.

“It was a huge break in trust and confidentiality,” he said.

As a result, the NSA is implementing several changes to the way it handles and secures its data, he said.

At the forefront is a “two-person” rule that will require two people to execute certain activities, certainly including the systems administration that Snowden performed. There also will be a requirement that two persons are needed to gain access to secure rooms, like server rooms. The use of removable media, like thumb drives, to move or download data will be severely restricted. And programs underway to encrypt files to make them readable will be expedited.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, speaking earlier Thursday, reiterated that Snowden’s leaks caused “substantial” damage.

“This is a failure to defend our own networks,” Carter said. “… The insider threat is an enormous one. This failure originates from two practices that we need to reverse: “first, the concentration of huge amounts of data in one place and the lack of compartmentalization of data, and second, giving too much authority to get and move classified information to one individual.

“Both are mistakes and have to be corrected,” he said.

Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said Snowden “did this country a service by starting a debate” on what information the government should be allowed to collect.

Alexander and others, including NSA General Counsel Ray De, said the NSA’s program to collect from phone companies and store millions of records of Americans only allowed the NSA to look at the “metadata” and not the content of the messages. To do that, the government must get permission from special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act courts, or FISA courts based on proof of reasonable suspicion of a connection to terrorism.

Alexander said the NSA stores the information so it can have quick access but he would be willing to support having the information remain with phone companies if laws could be passed to ensure quick access by the government.

(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.

Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, TSA Administrator John Pistole announced that the program, an expansion of the PreCheck program, for “known, trusted” travelers will launch in September.

Participants will pay $85 to get a known traveler number identifying them as a low-risk passenger, which will allow them to go through a special security lane. The program will start at 40 airports, with expansion to other airports in the future, Pistole said.

To get the number, people need to register online, providing personal information and two weeks later will either get the number or be denied. The registration will last five years.

Those who qualify will go through security lanes faster and will no longer have to take off shoes or remove computers from carryon luggage, Pistole said.

PreCheck had been limited to frequent fliers who were nominated by airlines.

Pistole noted 1.8 million are screened daily at U.S. airports.
He said he hopes 25 percent of U.S. air travelers will have some type of expedited security screeening by the end of this year and 50 percent by the end of 2014.

Medill NSJI’s Ellen Shearer was among the panelists of journalists, educators and national security experts at this roundtable at the Newseum in Washington on June 25. Click the video above to watch a replay.

Transcript of the session:

Posted June 20, 2013

Federal efforts to block cyberterrorism need more teeth and should focus more on going after threats instead of concentrating on protecting vulnerabilities, according to several top cyber experts speaking at a recent panel sponsored by the American Bar Association.

The cybersecurity panel on June 21 was part of the ABA Homeland Security Law Instutute conference. The speakers were high-level current and former government cyber experts. Here are some of their comments.

Steven Chabinsky, senior vice president of legal affairs at CrowdStrike, which helps companies prevent cyberattacks, and a former deputy assistant FBI director working in the Cyber Division:

“It’s not a victim problem.” The U.S. should “ultimately go after a threat-centric strategy to find and sanction” terrorists and others intent on attacking America’s public or private cyber infrastructure, Chabinsky said. “It’s a threat problem, not a vulnerability problem.”

He said terrorists are waging an “electronic jihad” focused on America’s economy and power, with the electric power grid a particularly appealing target.

Chabinsky also said the current debate on how much government information related to the grid should be made public ignores what terrorist groups already know, based on their own websites and recruiting materials.

“This is viral,” he said, showing a jihadist website that urges cyberattacks on the U.S. power infrastructure. “This is what terrorists who are growing up are looking at.”

Cyberthreats include attacks on the confidentiality of data, the availability of the network and the integrity of the network.

Chabinsky warned that assumptions that malware’s dangers are mainly around intellectual property theft ignore the fact that malware disturbs systems that can then be taken over.

Stewart Baker, a partner at the Washington law firm Steptoe and Johnson and a former assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security, shared Cabinsky’s concerns.

He agreed that the government has not done enough to pursue those who have committed cyberattacks.

The has been a “failure of responsibility for the government to find and stop the people who are attacking us,” he said.

He said federal regulations prevent companies from disabling servers of those attacking them and suggested federal authorities “work with the people under attack instead of prosecuting them.”

Leonard E. Bailey, special counsel for national security, computer crime and intellectual property at the Justice Department:

Bailey said a new presidential executive order, signed in February, offers some solutions.

It provides framework for the government to work with the private sector to protect critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. It offers voluntary protections for companies, he said.

Evan Wolff, a partner at the law firm Hunton and Williams and a former special assistant to the assistant secretary for infrastructure protection at the Department of Homeland Security, called the order a “call to action for information-sharing:”

It offers an incentive for companies to adopt cybersecurity standards.

Wolff also emphasized the role of the Department of Homeland Security, saying it is central to cybersafety.

(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.

“One quarter (25%) of the mainstream media coverage monitored from May 1 through May 4 involved reconstructing the commando mission at bin Laden’s secret hiding place” the report said.

“. . .The second-biggest storyline in the mainstream press was also one that involved reporting more than analysis. It detailed reactions to bin Laden’s death from around the world and around the country, and accounted for 24% of the bin Laden coverage monitored. “

With news organizations buffeted by layoffs, bankruptcies and other economic disasters, it is encouraging to see such a strong performance by journalists who kept their eye on the news and stayed away from the political analysis and punditry that could have marred their performance.

As PEJ put it, “For a mainstream media culture that reflexively seeks out conflict, the coverage so far has projected a greater sense of national unity and that has persisted through the week.”

That performance was a stark contrast to the information on Facebook and Twitter, where the largest single topic was people sharing jokes about bin Laden’s death — 19 percent — followed by discussions of whether bin Laden was really dead, 17 percent.

“The question of political fallout and who deserved credit for the mission—Obama or his predecessor, George W. Bush—combined to account for 15 percent of the coverage,” the report said, “with more Twitter and Facebook users giving the nod to the current president.”

But what may seem just sleazy when it’s a private citizen turns a little scary when it’s the government using fake identities to spread misleading information on the Internet.

The Guardian newspaper reports that the military’s Central Command, headed by Gen. James Mattis, has contracted with a California firm to create an “online persona management service.” The contract is intended to help the military “secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence Internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.”

The program is aimed at disrupting terrorists and extremists and the personas will communicate only in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto – not English, a Centcom spokesman said.

“Because the Internet recognizes no national boundaries, U.S. propaganda efforts in programs like this, even if properly targeted at foreign audiences, could cross our border and improperly influence domestic policy discussions in violation of the law and core democratic principles, said Michael German of the American Civil Liberties Union. “ And because these programs are conducted behind a wall of secrecy, they are too easily misused and abused. Congress and the American public need to know a lot more about these programs before they are implemented to ensure that government propaganda isn’t improperly targeting Americans and influencing our domestic policy debates.”

But Jim Harper of the Cato Institute saw the plan as an appropriate Defense Department operation as long as it does not aim at U.S. citizens.

“Infiltrating jihadi groups and others is a normal part of intelligence gathering and disruption of terrorism planning,” Harper said. “… It’s hard to create a false persona, and it’s easy to flub operations like this, but the mere existence of this program might be sowing distrust among people who might otherwise feel free to organize attacks on U.S. interests.”

Jeff Jarvis, associate professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, used his BuzzMachine blog to criticize the idea.

“It’s appalling that in this era of greater transparency and accountability brought on by the Internet, the US of all countries would try to systematize sock puppetry. It’s appallingly stupid, for there’s little doubt that the fakes will be unmasked. The net result of that will be the diminution, not the enhancement, of American credibility.

“But the effort is amusing as well,” he continued, “for there is absolutely no need to spend millions of dollars to create fake identities online. Any child or troll can do it for free. Millions do. If the government insists on paying, it can use salesforce.com to monitor and join in chats.”

Centcom is reportedly paying a new company called Ntrepid  $2.76 million to create the fake-persona program.

[field name=”report”]The new report (right) by the Police Executive Research Forum was the result of case studies in six locations: Phoenix and Mesa, Ariz.; Prince William County, Va.; New Haven, Conn.; Minneapolis; and Montgomery County, Md.

Previous research by PERF found many local police chiefs feel frustrated with the way immigration policies and laws are affecting local law enforcement.

In fact, the police officials gathered to review the recent report and issued recommendations to the Obama administration and Congress, chief among them that immigration reform needs to happen now  and a strong consensus that because immigration laws are federal laws.

“New legislation should include provisions regarding guest workers, provision of permanent legal status, and employer and family-based visa systems,” the recommendations said.

Because past efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform have failed, local police in some jurisdictions “have stepped into the breach,” PERF said.

“For many police chiefs, the immigration issue has been a defining moment,” said PERF Executive Director Chuck Wexler. “They have had to navigate wisely between two very vocal factions. For the chiefs profiled in our report, the guiding principle has been that the police must maintain the confidence of all community members, that nobody should be afraid to contact the police. These chiefs have taken a difficult issue and turned it into an opportunity to reassure the community of their strong commitment to effective and impartial policing. In the process, the police have become the public face of good government, common sense, and rationality.”

While the chiefs’ recommendation is a worthy one, it is unlikely to be listened it.

The House passed an immigration reform bill in 2005. The Senate passed its version in 2006. But the two chambers couldn’t reconcile the differences and the effort died, despite the support of President George W. Bush.

After he became president, Barack Obama signaled that he was ready to renew the push for immigration reform, but political pressure and his greater interest in pushing through health care reform put immigration on the backburner. And that’s where it’s likely to stay until after the 2012 election.

In 2006, the U.S House of Representatives passed the Border Protection, Anti-terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, and in 2006 the U.S. Senate passed the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006. Neither bill became law because their differences could not be reconciled in conference committee.^[4] The legislative negotiations and national activism behind immigration reform from 2001-2007 is the subject of 12-part documentary film series How Democracy Works Now.

In 2009 the immigration reform became a hot topic, since the Barack Obama administration recently signaled interest in beginning a discussion on comprehensive immigration reform before year’s end

The Washington Post reported that CBS said Logan is in a U.S. hospital, but a source said she has returned to her home.

Logan “suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating,” CBS said.

Victims of sexual assault trying to recover need to address their mental health as well as physical health, experts say.

Elana Newman, a psychology professor at the University of Tulsa and research director for the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, said it’s common for reporters who have sustained sexual assaults to have mental health aftereffects, although some “do just fine.”

She said that too often journalists who have been sexually assaulted while working just “go get some counseling and come back to work. It’s helpful for news organizations to give people a rest, not just therapy.”

But therapy for sexual assault can be “very effective” and  some of the most effective treatments – exposure treatments or cognitive behavorial therapy — take only six to 12 weeks, Newman said.

Those therapies, however, are quite difficult “because it involves going over the event in detail, remembering the worst” so the reporter’s body stops going into “alarm state,” she said.

Co-workers also should be briefed on how to interact with the assault victim. Keep it neutral – supportive but not intrusive, she advised.

A comment like, “I heard about what happened. I’m sorry. I’m here for you if you need anything” would be appropriate. “Journalists tend to go for the story, but they need to take the middle ground” when talking to a colleague who has been attacked, said Newman.

The Washington Post reported that “Tuesday’s arguments went to the heart of a larger debate about WikiLeaks – whether the posting of the documents was free speech or a violation of national security. They also provided a high-profile test of outdated rules about what data the government can seize in the new world of social networking.”

An American Civil Liberties Union lawyer representing one of the Twitter clients argued that releasing the information would violate the First Amendment right to free speech and the Fourth Amendment protection against unwarranted searches.

The judge, who originally ordered Twitter to provide the information,  has taken the case under consideration.

The case once again points to the problem of outdated laws, in this case being used by the prosecution, being applied to today’s information technology.

As the Post article noted, “The number of court orders and subpoenas from authorities demanding that technology companies and telecommunications firms turn over information about their clients is rapidly growing. But the rules protecting personal information are spotty and not up to date with Internet technology. Experts say they were meant to deal with telephone records, not such evolving technology as e-mails and tweets.”