By
Ellen Shearer
WASHINGTON – The House Foreign Affairs Committee wants to make sure the United States isn’t beaten by the Russian propaganda machine, and wants to more fully enlist the Voice of America in that effort. But Congress might consider that a better way to combat Vladimir Putin’s efforts to push Russian values is to show the world that American values include a free an impartial press.
“The fact is that (the VOA) has been a great success in the Cold War era and beyond because it’s telling the truth,” said American Press Institute Executive Director Tom Rosenstiel. “We stand for a free press and that promotes democracy.”
The House bill, sponsored by Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., and New York Rep. Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the committee, aims to make sure VOA knows its mission is “to support U.S. public diplomacy efforts.” Continue reading →
By
Ellen Shearer
University of Chicago First Amendment scholar Geoffrey Stone was not expecting unanimity among the group of five experts called together by President Barack Obama to review the National Security Agency’s collection of vast amounts of phone records and other digital information of millions of Americans.
The five-member group was comprised of Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism chief for the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations who criticized Bush’s attitude toward counterterrorism pre-9/11; Michael Morell, who was acting CIA director in 2011 and again in 2012-13 for Obama; Cass Sunstein, who was head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in Obama’s first term; Peter Swire, a professor at the George Institute of Technology who specializes in privacy law and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress; and Stone. Continue reading →
By
Tim McNulty
These are the images that compel us to look: the photos that come charged with high emotion and human drama. The images of war and conflict are especially arresting because of their life and death context.
Capturing the moment of death has a profound impact on the viewer. Robert Capa’s 1937 image of a “Falling Soldier” during the Spanish Civil War still speaks volumes today. The blurry black-and-white photo of Senator Robert F. Kennedy dying on the floor of a hotel kitchen in 1968 also tells a whole story of hope and despair. More recently, the crowd-sourced video of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young Iranian protester shot dead in the streets of Tehran in 2009, provides the story of conflict and election corruption.
Now with video-equipped iPhones and other smartphones, the numbers of images grow into the millions each day whether made by professional photographers or amateurs. But only a few will achieve iconic status.
Some iconic images disgust: Iraqi prisoners humiliated and tortured in Abu Ghraib, or a South Vietnamese police official executing a prisoner with a single shot to his head during the Vietnam War. Continue reading →
By
Josh Meyer
Two of the most credible advocacy organizations have just raised the stakes considerably in the drone wars controversy, contending that American airstrikes in Pakistan and Yemen have killed and injured many more innocent civilians than the U.S. government has acknowledged.
And Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch go even further in their respective reports (read them here and here), alleging that many of the attacks may have been illegal, and perhaps even war crimes.
In some cases, they contend, the US drone strikes and other airstrikes killed many suspected militants when capturing them was a feasible option, or when it wasn’t clear if civilians could be killed along with them. The result: women, children and even a 68-year-old grandmother gathering vegetables in the family fields were killed by powerful missiles fired from pilotless aircraft. Continue reading →
By
Josh Meyer
After decades of turning its critical eye to the lack of press freedoms in other countries, the renowned Committee to Protect Journalists today releases its first comprehensive report on working conditions in the United States — and it’s quite damning.
Essentially, just when you thought the Obama administration’s “war on national security reporters” couldn’t get any worse, CPJ comes along and describes in detail how the situation is actually far more dire than one might imagine.
The “CPJ Special Report” was authored by Leonard Downie, Jr., the former top editor of the Washington Post, and it is as important as it is scathing. Downie’s report is being released today and, while long, it’s worth reading in its entirety — not just by reporters but by the public and certainly by lawmakers and other observers of the growing security state here in Washington.
Continue reading →
By
Paul Rosenzweig
The world of Big Data is a world of pervasive data collection and aggressive analytics. Some see the future and cheer it on; others rebel. Behind it all lurks a question most of us are asking—does it really matter? I had a chance to find out recently, as I got to see what Acxiom, a large-scale commercial data aggregator, had collected about me.
At least in theory large scale data collection matters quite a bit. Large data sets can be used to create social network maps and can form the seeds for link analysis of connections between individuals . Some see this as a good thing; others as a bad one—but whatever your viewpoint, we live in a world which sees increasing power and utility in Big Data’s large scale data sets.
Of course much of the concern is about government collection. But it’s difficult to assess just how useful this sort of data collection by the government is because, of course, most governmental data collection projects are classified. The good news, however, is that we can begin to test the utility of the program in the private sector arena—a useful analog in the private sector just became publicly available and it’s both moderately amusing and instructive to use it as a lens for thinking about Big Data. Continue reading →
By
Ellen Shearer
If current progress toward Syria turning over its chemical weapons ultimately unravels and the U.S. ultimately launches a military strike, it can do so with impunity in terms of Syria’s ability to retaliate kinetically. It doesn’t have the ability to reach any American assets except, possibly, the naval ships nearby.
But in the cyber world, Syria’s ability to attack is more difficult to assess. However, the Syrian Electronic Army, a pro-Assad regime group of hackers that may in fact be directed by President Bashar al-Assad’s administration, has already said it will retaliate if the U.S. launches an air strike.
“It’s like when Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States. We’re sort of ignoring the fact that people have affirmatively said, ‘We’re going to hit you,’” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security and cybersecurity expert. “How good they (the Syrian Electronic Army) are is an open question.”
“It’s like when Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States. We’re sort of ignoring the fact that people have affirmatively said, ‘We’re going to hit you,’” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security and cybersecurity expert. “How good they (the Syrian Electronic Army) are is an open question.” Continue reading →
By
Ellen Shearer
Barack Obama’s speech Tuesday evening outlining the case for a military strike against Syria even while embracing Russia’s proposal that the country agree to give up its stockpile of chemical weapons accomplished many things, although convincing Americans of the need for military force doesn’t appear to have been one of them.
At a town hall meeting at Al Jazeera America’s nightly news show, “America Tonight,” most of the mainly 20-something crowd said the president didn’t give them any new information and didn’t sway their opinions, which were generally against use of force against Syria to destroy its chemical weapons caches.
But among the things the speech did accomplish, according to experts who spoke on the show:
- Making it clear that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government has for the first time acknowledge it does have a supply of chemical weapons, although it has not admitted using them.
- Sending a message to Iran that the United States will use military force to back up threats.
- Pointing out that if Syria can freely use chemical weapons without retaliations, other nations and terrorist groups won’t be far behind.
- The U.S. is willing to act unilaterally if necessary.
Continue reading →
By
Tim McNulty
How much can you discover about your own life by tracking just the destination of your phone calls, texts and e-mails?
National Security Agency officials, as revelations of their surveillance programs continue, insist they are not interested in the actual content of the millions of communications they track. In the past several weeks, however, they have admitted collecting email messages of Americans by the tens of thousands.
The continuing revelations piqued my curiosity about what some company or government agency might learn in even the most casual collection of daily personal communications.
I asked seven graduate students to record the destination and number of their calls and online contacts during a two-day period in early July. I chose the dates at random and in the past so they could look up their own records of online banking, credit card purchases, social media posts, websites and cell phones. Their telephone calls, of course, were almost entirely by cell phone and the called numbers were easy to discover. The GPS tracker embedded in most modern cellphones and nearest cellphone towers that record every signal help pinpoint the caller’s location. Continue reading →
By
Tim McNulty
I Googled “Saudi Arabia” the other day and got a suspiciously even numbered 461,000,000 results. It will take awhile to sift through all of those links.
At the same time, news reports based on leaks about National Security Agency programs describe the raw collection of “metadata” on American citizens and others, electronically scooping up hundreds of millions of telephone numbers and other communications every day.
This ocean of data both amazes and confounds. (Yes, we want security. No, we don’t want our government spying on us.) In this age of the terabyte and more, we’ve come to think that very little is unknowable if we are searching or if someone else is searching for us. We all just need more data.
Many of us sit at desks in classrooms and offices staring at screens for information. We relate to news and often to each other in electronic bytes, share photos and interact with the rest of the world in ways our parents, much less our ancestors, never imagined. We sit in a rarely changing environment, we have “Google” perceptions of life outside our range and much of what we write and talk about is second-hand at best. Continue reading →
