EVANSTON, Ill. — The Robert R. McCormick Foundation has renewed a $1 million grant to fund the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative at Northwestern University over the next two years. The NSJ program provides journalists-in-training and working journalists with the … Continue reading
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
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
With U.S. involvement in Iraq ended and the withdrawal from Afghanistan drawing near, many of the winners of this year’s Military Reporters & Editors contest turned their attention to the problems confronting troops returning home as well as veterans, from … Continue reading
The DC Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists will kick off its 2013-14 program calendar on Wednesday, Oct. 16, from 6 to 8:30 p.m., featuring Hebah Abdalla, senior interview producer with Al Jazeera English (AJE), and Lisa Fletcher, host … Continue reading
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:
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
The unemployment rate for veterans who have served since 9/11 hit 10% in August, the highest point since January, monthly data from the Bureau of Labor statistics released today showed. The rate for all veterans dropped slightly to 6.2%, as … Continue reading
Finally catching up with competitors such as Google who have issued transparency reports for several years, Facebook on Tuesday released its first-ever “Global Government Requests Report” detailing the number of times officials in various countries sought data about users and … Continue reading
The press release below gives details of combat journalist Jackie Spinner’s appearance at Cantigny, in Wheaton, IL in early September. The event is sponsored by the McCormick Tribune Foundation, the primary benefactor of the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative. Combat … Continue reading
Medill/GlobalPost investigation sheds new light on $3.2 billion U.S. mine clearance and victim assistance effort.
Medill/USA TODAY investigation of U.S. international food aid programs finds significant, entrenched problems
Read about the project.
→ Continue to the story.EVANSTON, Ill. — The Robert R. McCormick Foundation has renewed a $1 million grant to fund the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative at Northwestern University over the next two years.
The NSJ program provides journalists-in-training and working journalists with the knowledge and skills necessary to report accurately, completely and with context on events and issues related to defense, security and civil liberties. The initiative began in January, 2009 with an initial three-year, $1.3 million McCormick Foundation grant. The grant was also renewed for $1 million over two years in 2011.
