“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.

But saying that – or saying only that – would be a disservice to all of the committed and courageous journalists who have given their lives in pursuit of reporting from the most dangerous corners of the earth.

That is especially the case with Foley, a Medill grad who was kidnapped in 2012 while reporting from Syria. My former Medill colleague Steve Duke said it best on a Facebook post when he described James, his former student. “He was a brave, committed journalist who went into dangerous places so the rest of us could know what was going on,” Duke wrote.

A year before being captured in Syria, Foley was kidnapped in Libya. After his release, he wasted little time in getting back out on the front lines in search of the story – and the truth – even after acknowledging to an editor that some would think he was “crazy” for doing so.

I don’t think he was crazy at all. I think he was incredibly courageous, and the very embodiment of what it means to be a war correspondent. He was someone who risked his life to bear witness to the truth.

As such, I hope that Medill, and possibly other journalism and educational organizations will honor his life, and his death, with some form of commemoration. My humble vote: changing the name of the Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism Award to the Medill James Foley Medal for Courage in Journalism Award. The award is given to the individual or team of journalists, working for a U.S.-based media outlet, who best displayed moral, ethical or physical courage in the pursuit of a story or series of stories.

That is small consolation to his family, of course. But it would be an important symbolic statement that the Medill community values the kind of reporting that Foley and others like him have done.

Just this year, more than 30 reporters have been killed for being journalists, with many others killed or injured in the line of duty, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Many thousands of other journalists face similar risks in conflict zones around the world every day.

The best person to speak for Foley and his commitment to journalism is Foley himself. Fortunately for us, he took the time to address the circumstances of his first kidnapping, and the lessons he learned from it, in a very frank talk at Medill in 2011. Read about it here.

Foley, a 2008 Medill grad, was emotional that day as he recounted his 44-day ordeal in prison cells in Libya to a packed audience in Evanston as part of the Gertrude and G.D. Crain Jr. lecture series.

Especially remarkable was that Foley agreed to publicly discuss his experience just two weeks after his release. He was contemplative and brutally honest about his time reporting from Libya for Boston-based GlobalPost about clashes between rebel groups and Libyan armed forces battling for control of key cities.

Previously a teacher, Foley switched to journalism in part because his brother was in the Air Force. He said he was also a frustrated writer who wanted to see the world. He said he wanted to tell the American public the real stories about war and where American taxpayer dollars were being spent in the name of protecting them.

At Medill, he took classes on national security reporting and even attended the same weekend “Hostile Environment” training seminar that I take my Washington-based students to, so they can begin the process of learning how to minimize the dangers of reporting from the field.

Foley liked embedding with U.S. troops, but that wasn’t enough. He decided that to get the real story, he had to cover the Libyan revolution by mingling with rebel groups as they advanced on government forces 500 miles southeast of Tripoli.

While doing so, Foley and three other journalists were shot at by Libyan troops in the frontline town of Brega. While three of them were taken captive, the fourth — South African photographer Anton Hammerl — is believed to have been killed in the gunfire.

“Our story is a very cautionary tale,” Foley, then 37, conceded. “We made a lot of mistakes.”

Foley told the audience that day that his Medill training, as well as his field experience, taught him that the critical aspect of covering conflicts is to be mentally strong. That came in handy, not only during his time in prisons and  after media organizations and humanitarian groups successfully pressured Libyan authorities to release him and the other two journalists.

Despite his time spent in Libyan prisons, Foley said he wouldn’t stop reporting on conflicts.

“I told my editor I know this is crazy but I want to go back to Libya,” he said. “But emotionally I am nowhere near ready.”

“Feeling like you’ve survived something—it’s a strange sort of force that you are drawn back to,” Foley was quoted as saying about his Libya experience in news reports today.

Foley was back on the front lines soon enough, covering the conflict in Syria, where he wanted “to expose untold stories,” the BBC reports. The circumstances of how he was taken into custody, and by whom, are still cloudy – at least publicly. His family has asked for privacy during this impossibly difficult time.

Conclusive evidence that Foley had in fact been murdered by ISIL was still being pursued Wednesday. But his mother, Diane Foley, posted a statement on the “Free James Foley” Facebook page in which she implored the kidnappers to spare the lives of the remaining hostages, including at least one American journalist.

On a more personal note, she added, “We have never been prouder of our son Jim. He gave his life trying to expose the world to the suffering of the Syrian people.”

During his talk at Medill, Foley said his Libya experience taught him another important lesson, one that is especially relevant today with the news of his death. He said the loss of a fellow journalist had made the recovery process a lot more difficult for him.

“Every day I have to deal with the fact that Anton is not going to see his three kids anymore,” he said of the South African photographer. He told the hushed crowd that day that he believed conflict zones can, indeed, be covered safely.

“This can be done,” he said, “but you have to be very careful.” “It’s not worth losing your life,” he added. “Not worth seeing your mother, father, brother or sister bawling.”

Two influential advocacy organizations have issued a must-read report on how large-scale U.S. surveillance is not only harming journalism and the public’s right to know, but also undermining the rule of law by creating a chilling effect on lawyers trying to do their jobs in the national security realm.

That’s quite a strong and sweeping statement, but the 120-page report by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union backs it up in great detail, including interviews with more than 90 journalists, lawyers and both current and former government officials.

The joint report, released on July 28, is titled, “With Liberty to Monitor All: How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming Journalism, Law, and American Democracy.”

It says the broad and deep surveillance that is occurring, largely out of public view, and government secrecy overall are undermining press freedom, the public’s right to information, and the right to counsel. These are all human rights essential to a healthy democracy, the groups say, and government actions are “ultimately obstructing the American people’s ability to hold their government to account.”

Many journalists writing about national security issues, as well as lawyers and others involved in the system, have been forced to adopt elaborate countermeasures in order to keep their communications, their sources, and other confidential information secure in light of what the groups say is an “unprecedented” level of U.S. government surveillance of electronic communications and transactions by the National Security Agency and other U.S. agencies.

“The work of journalists and lawyers is central to our democracy,” said report author Alex Sinha, the Aryeh Neier Fellow at Human Rights Watch and the ACLU. “When their work suffers, so do we.”

Here’s a link to the news release announcing the report, and here’s the report itself, which can be downloaded for free. Hard copies also can be purchased.

The report isn’t the first to conclude that journalists are finding that surveillance is “harming their ability to report on matters of great public concern.’’

But in its interviews with key journalists, the report reveals good detail on the topic, in its section on The Impact of Surveillance on Journalists, and in another on US Surveillance, Secrecy, and Crackdown on Leaks.

Among those quoted is Steve Coll, a noted author of national security books who is also a staff writer for The New Yorker and the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. “Every national security reporter I know would say that the atmosphere in which professional reporters seek insight into policy failures [and] bad military decisions is just much tougher and much chillier,” Coll says.

That’s not surprising, given all of the revelations about NSA spying in the wake of the massive leaks of classified information about such programs by Edward Snowden. But it is very disconcerting, especially the linkage between the surveillance and media efforts to practice the kind of accountability reporting that is so essential to a democracy.

Washington Post reporter Dana Priest adds that by making it harder for reporters to do their jobs, the government “makes the country less safe.”

“Institutions work less well, and (secrecy) increases the risk of corruption,” Priest said, adding that, “Secrecy works against all of us.”

The report concludes that the chilling effect also has been significant on government officials, and details numerous deterrents put in place to discourage leaks, such as leak investigations and prosecutions, over-classification of documents and preventing officials from having contact with the media. Another significantly detrimental program: the “Insider Threat Program” that essentially requires employees to turn in colleagues who they believe may be leaking state secrets.

One of the most eye-opening aspects of the report is its section on The Impact of Surveillance on Lawyers and Their Clients. This is a part of the controversy that has received far less media coverage than the Obama administration’s crackdown on journalists, but it is especially disconcerting. The report says that the widespread surveillance has sowed deep levels of uncertainty and confusion among lawyers over how to respond to it, “perhaps even more so than the media.”

“Part of that uncertainty derives from the widespread sense that we have yet to learn the full extent of the government’s surveillance powers, and what steps the intelligence community is taking to avoid scooping up attorney-client communications,” said the report. “Part may also reflect the unsettled legal landscape regarding whether attorneys who are surveilled have legal recourse.”

The report found that large-scale surveillance programs endanger lawyers’ ability to communicate confidentially with clients, especially when the government takes an intelligence interest in a case. That’s a problem because failure to meet those responsibilities can result in lawyers facing discipline through professional organizations, or even lawsuits.

The surveillance programs also make it more challenging for lawyers to defend their clients, because they rely on the free exchange of information to build trust and develop legal strategies. “Both problems corrode the ability of lawyers to represent their clients effectively,” the report said.

“As with the journalists, lawyers increasingly feel pressure to adopt strategies to avoid leaving a digital trail that could be monitored. Some use burner phones, others seek out technologies designed to provide security, and still others reported traveling more for in-person meetings,” said the report. “Like journalists, some feel frustrated, and even offended, that they are in this situation. ‘I’ll be damned if I have to start acting like a drug dealer in order to protect my client’s confidentiality,’ said one.”

Said one lawyer specializing in international dispute resolution who was granted anonymity in exchange for being candid: “I found it shocking to think that the U.S. is doing this [surveillance]—and I was at DOJ before.”

Sinha, the report’s author, said, “The US holds itself out as a model of freedom and democracy, but its own surveillance programs are threatening the values it claims to represent. The US should genuinely confront the fact that its massive surveillance programs are damaging many critically important rights.”

To its credit, the report has a robust section on the Government’s Rationale for Surveillance, and it spoke in-depth with some key current and former officials, all of whom staunchly defended the surveillance as being both lawful and necessary to protect the nation from its many enemies.

“These programs are important, vital and lawful,” argued Bob Deitz, who served as General Counsel for the NSA from 1998 to 2006, in an interview with the report’s authors.

The authors did not conclude one way or another whether the programs fall within the letter of US statutory law, whether intelligence officials have engaged in willful misconduct or whether oversight has been adequate, saying such questions fall outside the scope of their report. “However, our research strongly suggests that the US did not design the programs with protection of human rights foremost in mind,” they wrote.

Perhaps most important, the two groups issued a list of recommendations, many of which are similar to those issued in the past year by the Committee to Protect Journalists and other organizations that have been sharply critical of the government’s surveillance.

It calls on the Obama administration and Congress to end “overly broad or unnecessary” surveillance practices, protect whistleblowers and reduce government secrecy and restrictions on official contact with the media. Like other organizations, it also calls on the government to “stop prosecuting people who disclose matters of great public interest.”

Josh Meyer is director of education and outreach for the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative. He spent 20 years with the Los Angeles Times before joining Medill in 2010, where he is also the McCormick Lecturer in National Security Studies. Josh is the co-author of the 2012 best-seller “The Hunt For KSM; Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,’’ and a member of the board of directors of Investigative Reporters and Editors. | Earlier Insights columns

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.

Posted July 11, 2013

The cat-and-mouse Edward Snowden/National Security Agency (NSA) scandal has fueled the summertime news cycle with a high tech — though drawn-out — version of a police chase.

Reporters flocked to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport to search for the contractor who revealed secret NSA surveillance activities, and booked seats on flights to countries where Snowden might find refuge from the long arm of the United States government — only to discover he was a no-show.

Meanwhile, the diplomatic posturing of Latin American officials who feel the U.S. is bullying them into refusing asylum to Snowden added a side drama to media coverage of the actual crime — assuming that the courts will judge his actions a crime.

But the core issues have been more difficult to pursue.

While revealing that the NSA was able to scoop up all the calls from a willing Verizon network, the crime story for the last two weeks has overshadowed the larger issues:

• What information has the NSA absorbed into its electronic storage facilities?
• How long it will keep such “metadata?”
• Will Americans have the right to know more about what the government is doing in the name of national security?

Only in the last few days has the media, specifically The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, revealed more of the underpinnings of the operations that Snowden described.

On Sunday, The Times reported, “In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects,”  but also others who may harm national security.

Since 2007, according to The Times, the 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, “has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court” that alone decides what amount of surveillance of Americans and others is permissible.

On Monday, The Wall Street Journal followed up with its own front page story that claimed the FISA court has expanded the definition of “relevant” data to include essentially everything the intelligence agencies want to collect. Officials have defended their actions, saying that they are not recording individual conversations or text messages.

They claim that there are safeguards in place.

That may be true at the moment. But in her blog early last month, New Yorker writer Jane Mayer warned about the government’s use of metadata. She quoted Susan Landau, a security expert and author of Surveillance or Security on the impact of metadata.

“The public doesn’t understand, it’s much more intrusive than content,” Landau told Mayer. “(Learning) who you call and who they call.  If you can track that, you know exactly what is happening — you don’t need the content.”

These reports seem to buttress earlier warnings by two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado.

The Journal noted that both men “have argued repeatedly that a “secret interpretation” of the Patriot Act is being used to collect the electronic data of almost all Americans.

The notion of a secret court allowing the government to follow secret rules is mind-boggling.  Interpretations of other court decisions that could extend the intrusiveness of the state into the private life of every citizen seem impossible to justify, whatever the goal and the marginal risk.

I suspect that most Americans are only vaguely aware of the amount of information the NSA and other intelligence agencies are collecting to track potential terrorists.  Even as more becomes known, I also suspect that most Americans would not complain if some of that information includes their own records and movements.

That governments go beyond their own laws to seek ever greater control is neither surprising nor new.

David T.Z. Mindich, a professor of media studies, journalism and digital arts at Saint Michael’s College, in  an op-ed column for the Times, described how Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton in 1862 received permission from President Abraham Lincoln to control the country’s telegraph lines, and then used that power to impose censorship.

The difficulty, of course, is that some secrets need to be kept.

There is a legitimate reason to work the “dark side,” as former Vice President Dick Cheney insisted, just as Stanton argued that the government must have control of the telegraph traffic to ensure a Union victory.

The Snowden affair has made it painfully clear that the Obama administration — and the Bush administration before it — have stretched our thinking about national security law and how the courts should deal with state secrets.

But the job of the media is to throw light on such subjects, especially where the government may be overreaching, violating the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights and threatening civil liberties.

Given the secret nature of the FISA court and the NSA programs, it’s unfair to blame journalists for not having all the details.

But reporters need to pursue the story with members of Congress and the Internet providers who are cooperating in the wholesale collection of information about Americans.

It is not enough to accept the “trust us” language of administration officials, or the nice round number of “50 terrorist plots” they claim were stopped or prevented by these intrusions. How about releasing one or two or three good examples, and let them be tested to see if the metadata collection is really warranted?

There is a proposal to appoint an adversarial attorney who would look at the government’s presentations before the FISA court — something that should have been in place from the beginning.

It is never enough to have just sincere government assurances; the role of a free press is to challenge and test those official explanations

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” — a saying often attributed to Thomas Jefferson but in fact widely used by many thinkers in the 18th and 19th centuries — should be in every reporter’s DNA.

Every administration says it is working in the best interests of the United States. What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is that leaders will often justify anything they wish to accomplish by drafting opinions, often in secret, about how to apply the law.

It is also clear that vigilance is needed, even if we think government intentions are benign.

What seems benign may seem like a violation of privacy when the secret attention of the state is focused on you or me.

Tim McNulty is co-director of the Medill National Security Journalism Imitative and a lecturer at Northwestern University’s Medill School. He was a longtime foreign correspondent and senior editor at the Chicago Tribune. He helped direct the newspaper’s coverage of the September 11 tragedy, the American strike into Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq.

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.

Well into a summer of shelling, street fighting and sniper fire, several of the scores of correspondents covering the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982 would joke, a bit wistfully, about the “courage not to file.”

That summer was long and, despite the Mediterranean breezes, the air was steamy and fear prevailed one day to the next. Fighting between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Israelis surrounding the western half of the city was sporadic and intense, and from early June to the end of August stories of the destruction and urban warfare dominated front pages around the world.

Writing about military conflict has its dangers, of course, but adrenaline-infused reporting also carries a strange excitement. Some reporters and photographers become known as “war junkies” because they often move from covering one conflict to another. For many, a quote attributed to a young Winston Churchill describes the experience nicely:  “Nothing is as exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”

Reporters recorded the events but soon recognized that even accounts of bombings and shooting can sound the same or only marginally different from the day before.  Beyond recording the incremental news, the latest outrage or attempts to create a cease-fire, journalists became hungry for sidebars, those intriguing stories that personalize the conflict or explore a quirky consequence.

One day, for instance, I was delighted to interview a tall and elegant French prostitute who retired to Beirut to open a tiny, checked-tablecloth restaurant.  “You must tell me when to leave,” she said rather plaintively as I sat down with two other reporters for lunch. It was a week or so into the conflict and the Israeli Defense Force had dropped notices over the city telling civilians to leave and detailed a number of safe passage streets they could use in the next day or two. Everyone believed that street-to-street fighting was inevitable and would be vicious.

I suggested to the retired and anxious woman that if she was afraid for her life, she should get out immediately.  No, that wasn’t the concern, dying is easy, she replied, her worry was being disfigured.

A week or so later, I walked past the shuttered café and learned that she finally had left, after gunmen aiming to settle a private score with others had burst into the restaurant. In the exchange of gunfire, they shot her pizza oven, fatally.

Such stories, though ephemeral, gave readers a taste of life and the people in a besieged city.  They also gave reporters a chance to of get away from the daily grind, the “feeding the beast” mindset of so much journalism that we practiced then and even more now in the era of a 24/7 news cycle.

Richard Ben Cramer
(SOURCE: Simon & Schuster)

The death of an old friend and colleague a few months ago reminded me not only of my own mortality and of such primitive tools of journalism, but his passing also brought back memories of that odd longing for the “courage not to file.”

Richard Ben Cramer, the friend who won a Pulitzer for his coverage of Middle East conflict and went on to win accolades for his extraordinary book What It Takes, about the 1988 presidential campaign, exemplified the admonition that arose in the heat of reporting so many scores, hundreds of relatively easy front-page stories.

Cramer understood what it takes to have that courage, and he was supported by the legendary Gene Roberts, then executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, but who worked before and after at The New York Times.

A Telex machine. (SOURCE: Wikipedia)

The PLO had agreed to a cease-fire and accepted international offers to evacuate their fighters onto freighters and with their safe passage guaranteed, to sail into exile in Tunisia.  Other events were yet to come in that tumultuous time, the massacre at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps by Christian militias was not long away; the following year, the American embassy in Beirut would be destroyed by a bomb; and later, a suicide bomber would drive his truck through the gates of a U.S. Marines compound at the Beirut airport, killing 241 servicemen. Yasser Arafat would return to Lebanon once again, but this time further north in the town of Tripoli, to fight and flee from a Syrian-backed force.

But this day was the denouement of the deadly summer-long fight, and almost every journalist in the city was focused on seeing and recording the climatic departure of PLO fighters from the port. The news would be atop every front page in the U.S., Europe and throughout the Middle East and Africa.

I saw Richard in the lobby and invited him to join me on a ride out to the port. “Naw,” he replied.  “I think I’ll give it a pass today.”

He and his editor had decided to use the wire service reports, allowing Richard to concentrate on finishing the long piece he had been working on:  the life of raggedy but disciplined Palestinian fighters and their street fighting ways against a powerful, indeed overwhelming, army.

To devote that day to writing his narrative and to ignore the surefire front-page story of the climax of a three-month war was simply astounding to me.  Scores of other reporters were conscientious, hardworking and all the rest; Richard’s (and his editor’s) belief was that it was more important to give readers a well-reported and fascinating read into the minds and actions of these young fighters.

The attitude was audacious and exemplified ever after for me what the “courage not to file” really meant. So much of that summer and the years before and after were absorbed in daily, dutiful stories.  Perhaps even more than my fair share appeared on the front page, but so many of them are not memorable, not really worth the time and attention I gave to them. As Frank Sinatra sang, “Regrets, I’ve had a few. . .” and this was one that I never fail to mention.

Richard showed the same confidence and courage in more peaceful circumstances as he wrote about outsize sports figures such as Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams. But his major work began in 1988 as we followed presidential candidates around the country.

He knew his book exploring the background and emotional motivations behind each candidate wouldn’t come out for at least a year or even longer. Actually it appeared four years later, in time for the 1992 election. But he believed it was essential as a good journalist to tell a more developed and important story about what it takes for a candidate to believe he should be the president. 
For many, Cramer’s book is a classic of political reporting, outliving dozens of campaign books before and since. Twenty years after Cramer’s book came out, a young reporter at the Medill school at Northwestern asked me about the best political book I ever read. I told him, “What It Takes.”

When Richard died earlier this year, there were many tributes to him and his craft. Among them, this Washington Post blog, his obituary in The New York Times, and a Daily Beast appreciation.

There are many fine examples of the type of literary journalism practiced by Richard and those who preceded him as far back at John Hersey and even Stephen Crane. Their ranks include contemporary writers from the New Yorker’s John McPhee, Susan Orlean and, more recently, Katherine Boo.

But most of contemporary journalism, or what passes for it, is focused on shorter, quick-hit, daily, perhaps hourly updates.  These stories are not memorable nor are they meant to be.  They address a hunger for the latest information; they feed the beast not in large, satisfying meals but in spoons full of fact or, worse, just attitude.

I don’t mean to crank that daily reporting is not worthwhile; it is the lifeblood of good journalism.  How else would we keep track of political shenanigans and corruption; how many organizations would send observers to sit in courtrooms and take note of justice denied; how many would devote the time and expense required to expose the operations of shady businesses?

But what I learned from Richard and others who had the “courage not to file” was that so much of what passes for reporting is not worth your time.  I learned that it is better to follow your instincts when you come across a good story that demands your attention and takes serious effort.  These stories won’t all win Pulitzer Prizes, or become best-selling books or be transformed into successful screenplays.

What they will do, however, is give you stories for years to come, and memories of how you spent a life of reporting.

Tim McNulty is co-director of the Medill National Security Journalism Imitative and a lecturer at Northwestern University’s Medill School. He was a longtime foreign correspondent and senior editor at the Chicago Tribune. He helped direct the newspaper’s coverage of the September 11 tragedy, the American strike into Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq.

The expanding use of drones over U.S. airspace has become a fast-growing national security topic and privacy concern. We asked our colleague Paul Rosenzweig, who co-authored a recent Heritage Foundation paper on drones, to weigh in. 

Flying drones—unmanned aerial vehicles—have been made famous by their use in the war on terrorism, notably through lethal strikes on terrorist targets in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such drones are a small fraction of those used by the United States today. There are thousands of drones, used for a wide variety of purposes, from scientific research to military operations.

Drones, mostly without a weapons capability, are employed by the government and the private sector. Because of the drones’ wide-reaching surveillance capabilities, however, even unarmed drones could threaten personal privacy and civil liberties. As the FAA develops regulations for the operation of drones in domestic skies, it must take into account constitutional concerns and privacy rights.

In a research paper for the Heritage Foundation, (see bottom of story) I and three colleagues gave some thought to what the right set of rules and regulations might look like.  Here, in summary are some thoughts about how drones should be used domestically.

First, we should consider the redlines or limitations:

• The use of drones in a military capacity (while armed) should be severely restricted to situations of actual invasion or insurrection.
• The use of drones for domestic surveillance of First Amendment activity is fundamentally at odds with U.S. constitutional principles.
• Drones equipped with novel sensor arrays ought not to be permitted absent a clearly demonstrated need and a careful consideration of countervailing privacy and civil liberties concerns.
• Drones should not be used as a platform for the collection of massive unstructured data sets that could form the basis for sophisticated tracking and behavioral analytics.
• Drones are unsuitable for use as a routine means of surveillance in non-threatening situations.

One of the unmanned aircraft used by the U.S. Border Patrol.
SOURCE: Inspector general’s report.

On the other hand, there are plenty of situations where domestic drone use is both sensible and practical and where our effort should be to authorize and regulate the use, rather than limit it or restrict it.  For example, consider these uses:

• Border Patrol Security
  • Long-term surveillance of a specified area or route
• Emergency Preparation and Disaster Response
  • Planning routes and anticipating vulnerabilities
  • Catastrophic effects and remediation planning
  • Emergency cell coverage restoration
  • Deterrence of criminal behavior in unpatrolled areas
• Agriculture
  • Crop dusting (pesticides) or infestation eradication
  • Monitoring of crop growth
• Maritime Domain Awareness
  • Long-term surveillance of a specified area or route
• Environmental Monitoring
  • Wildlife tracking
  • Monitoring droughts and flooding
  • Monitoring locks, dams, and levees in remote areas

The list can go on.  And of course in any such listing there will be value judgments and choices that need to be made.  So the fundamental  recommendation that the paper makes is for Congressional engagement.  After all, these are interesting, difficult and indeterminate choices we will be making – isn’t that what our elected representatives are for?

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