The graduate students selected to receive the McCormick scholarships are Cat Boardman, Alexandra Hines, Michelle Kim, Eliza Larson, Rachel Menitoff, Melanie Saltzman, Matthew Schehl, Tammy Thueringer, Chris Walljasper and Kjerstin Wood. Two students have been designated as alternates: Carolyn Freundlich and Matthew McKinney.

The winners of these $7,500 graduate student scholarships will work under the supervision of Josh Meyer, director of education and outreach of the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative, to report on the national security implications of landmines and other “explosive remnants of war.”

“I’m very excited to have the opportunity to work with such a talented and enthusiastic group of student reporters in tackling an issue of such huge national – and international – importance,” said Meyer, a 20-year veteran of the Los Angeles Times who joined Medill in 2010 and who is also the McCormick Lecturer in National Security Studies.

“As armed conflicts rage across the globe and the wars wind down in Afghanistan and Iraq, this topic couldn’t be more timely. We expect to deliver a series of innovative stories of real importance to the American public.”

Ellen Shearer, William F. Thomas Professor of Journalism and co-director of the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative, said she is “thrilled by the possibilities for great reporting and storytelling that this terrific group of students affords us.”

This year’s effort will be the fifth in which Medill collaborates with national media partners to publish a project across all media platforms while emphasizing the use of innovative multimedia and interactive journalistic techniques.

The project, formally known as the National Security Reporting Project, will focus on the deadly legacy of landmines, cluster munitions and other military materiel that have been deployed – and are still being deployed – in more than 65 countries, killing and maiming untold thousands of innocent men, women and children. It will also focus on why the U.S. government has refused to sign landmark treaties governing the use and cleanup of these weapons.

The fifth quarter specialization program in national security reporting is part of Medill’s larger National Security Journalism Initiative, which is funded by the Robert R. McCormick Foundation. The National Security Reporting Project launched in 2010 and its first effort, Global Warning, on the national security implications of climate change, won a prestigious national award from the Online News Association.

The 2011 project on the challenges facing the military reserves, including the National Guard — Hidden Surge — also garnered national attention. Both were published by The Washington Post; the 2010 project also was distributed by McClatchy News Service. The 2012 project on energy security, Oil Change, was published by GlobalPost and featured on The Post’s website, and the 2013 project on global food security was done in conjunction with USA Today.

The creative minds behind Marine Corps recruiting are trying to make TV ads that portray a more realistic picture of being a Marine than some of their ads in the past have. And to do that, they’re recruiting real Marines. Thomas Brennan of the Jacksonville (NC) Daily News reports on the casting call at Camp Lejeune, and explains what directors are looking for to represent the Corps. Full story.

Cutting down on military contracting

Contractors provide a big proportion of services to the U.S. military, and are usually paid significantly more for their services than in-house employees would be. A Montana senator and retired colonel is introducing a bill that aims to reduce and restrict that practice in the future, and Jenn Rowell of the Great Falls Tribune brings clarity to the complex and often-overlooked topic. Full story.

Virginia’s uninsured veterans

Veterans who aren’t qualified for benefits from the VA and also can’t get Medicaid find themselves in a tough spot when it comes to getting the health care they need. Amy Jeter of the Virginian-Pilot reports on this segment of the population in Virginia.

More sexual assault reporting at Fort Hood

Reports of sexual assaults are up at Fort Hood, but experts believe it’s actually an indication of improved reporting procedures rather than an increase in assaults. Rose L. Thayer of the Killeen Daily Herald reports.

Since 1985, Reports Without Borders, an international non-profit, non-governmental organization that promotes and defends freedom of information and freedom of the press, has worked to keep journalists both physically and electronically secure.

Delphine Halgand, the Washington director for Reporters Without Borders, said staying safe in the cyber realm is more important than ever.

“Your computer and information exchanged on the Internet can be very easily monitored and for journalists that can mean your sources, your data and your investigation can be monitored.”

The organization held a workshop for two dozen Medill graduate students and faculty in Chicago to talk about the risks of relying on technology for protection and what journalists can do to help make sure their data and sources stay safe.

Stephane Koch teaches Medill MSJ students about some of the potential risks of using technology when reporting in both the U.S. and abroad.

Halgand says it’s important to exercise caution when using technology because it not only houses our information, but it can also lead back to the contacts who provide it.

“Confidentially in sources is key for investigative journalists and that’s why journalists need to be aware,” she said.

Halgand said protecting sources in the U.S. helps ensure the press is able to work and investigate sensitive issues, but in some parts of the world, it’s important for an even more compelling reason.

“Abroad it’s key because it can be a question of death if a journalist is meeting a sensitive contact to interview them and then their computer is compromised,” Halgand said.

The Reporters organization aims to help journalists do their job safely on several levels.

“We provide physical safety tools like helmets and bulletproof vests, GPS beacons and other ready-for-war-zone items, but we also can provide a virtual private network and encryption software,” Halgand said.

Halgand suggested that if journalists are going to places like Iran, Vietnam or any other security-sensitive countries, they contact RWB and check out their Online Survival Kit before hopping on a plane.

“Most of the time journalists call us and say ‘I’m in Bahrain and I know the police are following me. I’m leaving in two days and I know they are going to ask me for my computer at the border but I don’t want to destroy all my interviews. What can I do?’” Halgand said.

Halgand said if journalists take time to prepare themselves, it could help prevent both those last minute issues and other ones.

Below is an unabridged version of a backround brief for which I did extensive resarch on behalf of participants of the March 21, 2014 symposium, Sources & Secrets, which will be a gathering of top journalists, national security scholars and government officials to talk about the conflicts that arise when the state tries to protect its secrets and the media tries to report on them for the public good.

This briefing (Download PDF) covers the major legal issues that reporters confront when covering national security, and explains some of the key laws and regulations. Key topics:

• The use of the Espionage Act and other statutes to go after reporters’ sources
• The erosion of the reporter’s privilege in defending against subpoenas and other demands for  information
• Leak investigations aimed at national security journalists and their sources
• The Justice Department guidelines on subpoenas, including recent revisions
• The provisions and prospects of a federal media shield law
• The relevant provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act

→ Download PDF

Peter Nickeas, 28, overnight breaking news reporter for the Chicago Tribune, makes a phone call from his office – his car.  John Kuhn/MEDILL

More than 400 times last year, family members had to stand next to the lifeless body of a loved one. More than 400 funerals. More than 400 trips to select a casket. More than 400 mourned by family and loved ones.

More than 400 times, murder – mostly from violence concentrated in several already-fragile neighborhoods – visited the streets of Chicago.

Yet the headlines bragged about the historic lows: Only 431 in 2013, they noted. But that’s news outlets focusing on the stats. One reporter in Chicago has made a point of trying to understand the humanity – the humans – behind the stats, behind the headlines, by going where the murders happen, when they happen, just like the cops.

Peter Nickeas was one of the first to respond to more than 225 of those crime scenes. One of two overnight breaking news reporters for the Chicago Tribune, he stood next to people whose sons, daughters, mothers, fathers and best friends had just been killed, people for whom the historic lows of Chicago violence mean absolutely nothing.

Nickeas talks to police officers, gang members, victims of violence and their families and friends. But he doesn’t stop there, where most reporters do.

For example, a man shot George Anderson in the head while he was standing in the street near Marquette Park on June 7. Police tape surrounded his dead body. A drunken man stumbled toward the tape, his black T-shirt pulled up over his head. He tried to walk through the crime scene. Cops tried to pull him back.

Marchello Kellum watched all this unfold. While a police officer’s Taser threatened the drunken man’s bare chest, Kellum spoke:

“You’re being real disrespectful. That’s my brother-in-law there.”

None of this information made it into the paper. But Nickeas wrote down what he saw and heard, and he included it under the timeline section of the Tribune’s website, along with pictures.

Always on the phone, Nickeas stops at the Tribune a few times each night. John Kuhn/MEDILL

These short narratives reveal tension in crime scenes that typical stories with headlines like, “Man killed, four others wounded in Chicago overnight” lack. Nickeas writes both kinds of stories. But only one gets at what the 431 murders of 2013 mean for the city.

Nickeas is a part of an old tradition of crime reporting. The City News Bureau of Chicago used to serve as a wire service, alerting media outlets of breaking news. Reporters worked out of police stations and would sometimes go out with detectives.

But that started to dwindle in the ‘90s, and eventually the wire’s breaking news desk folded into the Tribune. And until Nickeas came along, overnight reporters worked from behind a desk, calling police districts for information. They went out only if there was a major story.

Nickeas is out every night. Two scanners, a laptop, phone, camera and sometimes even a staff photographer in tow, Nickeas’ car is his desk, the streets his newsroom. He encompasses both the beat-down fatigue of a worn war reporter and the compassion of a social worker. He talks straight, and in the language of the streets.

“My job is to take what I see and spit it out as something people can relate to. It’s about the neighborhood. It’s about the reaction. You can’t fucking do that unless you spend time on the job,” he said. “Nobody else, dude, is out there on the fucking streets.”

Dan Haar, Nickeas’ editor at the Tribune, said his timelines are resonating with people. The more traditional, bare facts stories, he said, have desensitized readers to the emotion hidden within them. And people want more.

“He gets email all the time from people saying, ‘You made me realize what this murder rate is really like,’” he said. “It’s something we should have been aching for. And now it’s indispensable,” Haar said.

Nickeas believes the city is tearing itself apart, and that covering the violence by dry numbers alone doesn’t help anyone understand the effects of the killings, which is why the streets are his office.

“I didn’t get into this so I could have a 9-5 punch the clock,” he said. “It’s important. I know it’s important.”

His timelines include what he sees and hears on the job. In one, “My soul is damn near destroyed,” he is at the funeral of 30-year-old Alphonso Love, killed just months after his 27-year-old sister. Nickeas is standing next to their mother:

“‘I don’t wanna go in there, I don’t wanna go in there,’ she cried again.

A man with white gloves held the glass doors open under a sign that read, ‘United Baptist Church’ and ‘Serving God through Humanity.’

The preacher’s steady voice guided Love and a small group of relatives down the aisle. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.’

The man with the white gloves shut the doors.”

In this way, “Pete shows you the numbers,” Haar said. “You see his eye. You see what he’s hearing. He’s watching and listening so he can show you the stories that he sees.”

You stand next to Nickeas and observe parents explaining to their kids the proper way to duck their heads when they hear that firecracker noise.

You see intoxicated and entitled nightclub patrons indignant that they are forced to walk around a dead person lying in the street.

You witness a man – stuck outside the tape surrounding the city’s latest murder victim – try to seduce a woman who’s unable to enter her home until the freshly killed body is removed.

Nickeas’ reporting demands that you think about having to explain to your 6-year-old why someone would want to hurt somebody else. In front of your house.

“How do you answer that question? Why should you ever have to answer that question?” Nickeas asked.

Haar said questions like this bring the numbers to life. “This shows you what a fatal shooting does to a neighborhood. What it did to 400 neighbors, 400 families.”

It’s why Nickeas believes the type of coverage he provides is crucial. He’s putting a face on national security issues that are often viewed in a macro sense. He’s portraying security as something intensely personal, which it is.

He said sweeping societal statements about bad people doing bad things don’t do the victims or the offenders of the violence justice. And the same goes with police department press releases.

Shuffling scanners, a laptop, camera and notebook, Nickeas reports and files stories from his car. John Kuhn/MEDILL

“You need to write about people making bad decisions,” and show that there’s a difference between excusing bad behavior and citing circumstances that contribute to it.

He said people should be aware of things like the Dan Ryan Expressway, which isolated poor, black Chicagoans from the rest of the community. To this day, the freeway—built while Richard J. Daley was mayor— contributes to the violence. But, “You can’t go around shooting people up because Old Man Daley was an asshole.”

These kinds of contributing factors aren’t present in all of Nickeas’ timelines. But the best ones get at them.

And it’s easy to forget just how hard—and sometimes dangerous—it is to do what Nickeas does during his shift.

He’s been chased by a man who he thought had a gun. Cursed at countless times by grieving and angry residents.

He has rules for his coined defense-by-offensive driving:

Don’t stop at red lights. Creep up to them, time them right. Don’t allow for ambiguity at stop signs. Make it clear whose turn it is to go. Avoid one-way streets that have speed bumps. Always avoid alleys.

His job takes him into dangerous places at dangerous times. Places where revenge is commonplace and the sounds of fired weapons echo only blocks away.

Personal risk is required of him in order to know the streets and neighborhoods where the killings happen. In order to describe them in timelines.

To cover the stories he does, to notice the detail and hear the conversations, “You have to keep your eyes open when you don’t want to. I’m good at keeping my eyes open,” Nickeas said.

Like when he and a photographer stuck around after firefighters left the scene of George Anderson’s murder and noticed Jennifer Wallace pour liquid from a yellow cup over the ground where he died, in silent tribute.

But what Nickeas sees comes at a price.

“When you’re standing back watching, you just have to absorb. It’s some sad-ass shit. If you’re around this drama it starts to affect you. It jades you. It affects your view on society,” he said.

But, “If it hurts me to write it,” he added, “I can basically assume that somebody’s going to read it.” Describing firefighters, for example, as they hose blood from a basketball court where 13 people were shot is probably tough to do. But it’s something most people don’t get to see otherwise.

It dredges up emotion. Exposes the broader hurt.

And that’s “like turning a light on and seeing things for what they are. Now you saw the people on the street. You saw people crying. You see how they remove the body. You see how they hose down the sidewalk. You’re seeing all this overnight. A lot of times it’s on a dark block—nobody cares that somebody’s dying,” Haar said.

It’s enough light to give a glimpse of those 431 families.

Nickeas responded to more than 225 crime scenes in 2013. John Kuhn/MEDILL

WASHINGTON – 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.

Stone said the fact that the group could present recommendations fully supported by all members gave extra weight to their report. They review group recommended that that phone companies or a private third party maintain the data needed by the NSA rather than the NSA itself and that access be allowed only by a court order.

The president rejected the recommendation that the FBI be required by law to obtain judicial approval before using a national security letter to obtain Americans’ records.

In a video interview with Medill National Security Zone, Stone detailed key points from the recommendations.

So here we sit, resolutely mid-continental, a thousand miles or so from any ocean, cocooned by neighboring nations that are friendly if not always obedient, well beyond the impact of North Korean missiles and California earthquakes, unscarred by 9/11, as safe as safe could be. For a reporter on the national security beat, Chicago and its hinterland would seem to be barren soil indeed.

But dig a little deeper and there are national security stories aplenty here, not just vague threats but on-going activity. Granted, some stories, such as non-proliferation theory or Pentagon management, have to be datelined Washington. But there are many other security stories that can be done without leaving town.

For instance:

Chicago is a major city because of its location, which makes it the premier transport hub of the nation. It started life as a trading post along the trails from the East. It is still the western terminus for shipping down the St. Lawrence Seaway and through the Great lakes. It became and remains the nation’s train depot. Most goods transiting the U.S. pass through Chicago. Because phone lines follow railway lines, Chicago is now the leading internet switching center in the Western Hemisphere.

The recent report on the Chicago Tri-State Metropolitan Region by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development summed up this centrality:

“The region is North America’s premier transportation and logistics hub. It is a major continent-wide player in passenger air travel, air cargo, railways and trucking, with a concentration of warehousing and intermodal facilities across the metropolitan region. This hub contributes not only to regional growth but to national performance.”

Any that disrupts this immense flow of goods and people would literally pull the plug on the American economy. What could cause this disruption?

The person who had given this the most thought is probably Stephen Flynn, former Coast Guard officer, former fellow at the Council on Foreign Affairs in New York, now a professor at Northeastern University. In appearances here, Flynn speculated that a nuclear device put inside a container in, say, Karachi could be shipped to Long  Beach, offloaded onto a train there and carried across the American West to the vast Chicago transshipment yards where it could be detonated.

In the 12 years since 9/11, Flynn and others have campaigned for stricter controls on contents of containers bound for the United States and for closer inspection of containers both in foreign ports and in American ports like Long Beach. As they say, once a container leaves the port, it’s too late to find out what’s in it. The question is: how much progress have we made on this? How good are inspections and other controls? Ask Flynn. Or go to Long Beach and have a look.

Complications — and questions

All this gets a little complicated. There are questions of sovereignty: can we station American inspectors in foreign ports to check containers as they are loaded on ships? There are questions of budgets: the federal government has refused to pay for this, on the grounds that the ports, by and large, are owned by their cities and it’s up to the cities to pay. There are questions of business practices, with government inspectors insisting on knowing what companies are shipping, or giving some companies that agree to certain standards a sort of an I-Pass through inspections. Mostly there are questions of the sheer ability to thoroughly check the millions of containers that pass through ports each year: the last I heard, each container got a check that average about 30 seconds.

As the nation’s leading internet switching center and a city that depends on broadband to do business, Chicago is vulnerable to cyber attacks that could cripple not only the city but much of the American economy. Once upon a time, only the ocean ports — the New Yorks and San Franciscos — were open to the outside world, taking in its goods and graft and using them before passing them on to inland places such as Chicago. Today, when the main items in global trade are information and ideas, every city is a port, and Chicago is one of the biggest of them all.

What is Chicago and the nation doing to protect this vital center from cyber attack? It’s worth a story, if you’re a national security reporter.

So is the Office of Emergency Management and Communication, known generally as the “911 center” (911 in this case referring to the emergency telephone number, not to the 9/11 attacks.) The office is on West Madison Street, on the way to the United Center, and should be on every security reporter’s beat. It’s the HQ of first responders, a place filled with people thinking about what would happen in an attack or disaster.

Conspirators close to home?

Most Americans still expect that terrorist attacks, if they come, will be planned in the Afghanistan wilderness by groups such as Al Qaeda. The bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City or the more recent Boston Marathon bombing taught us that terrorism can strike anywhere and can be carried out by American citizens whose ties to organizations such as Al Qaeda are tenuous or non-existent. The Midwest is pocked with militias and other home-grown groups, often survivalist or white supremacist and sharing a hatred of the government: one such group in Michigan spawned one of the Oklahoma City conspirators. The FBI is working with local law enforcement to watch these groups and stop them before they convert their ideology into mass murder. This is a steady, quiet campaign, hard to report but definitely worth a story.

Anti-immigration activists argue that increased immigration, especially from Mexico, opens the door to foreign terrorists. In fact, there is no recorded case of a terrorist entering the United States across the Mexican border: of the thousands of undocumented immigrants arrested at the heavily guarded frontier, not one has been involved in terrorism.

If there’s a national security threat from immigration, it probably lies in the drug trafficking and gang activities that have become as global these days as banking. Many would argue that this criminal activity poses a greater threat to the U.S. than any foreign jihadists.

Finally, America’s economic problems are beginning to impact its ability to remain secure. It’s expensive to be a superpower with global responsibilities: the Soviet Union lost the Cold War and broke up partly because its incompetent economy could no longer support its strategic ambitions. Already, some commentators say that America’s economic decline is undermining its ability to pay for a strong military, to project force across the world – and to provide its homeland security.

Nowhere is this economic decline more evident than in the Midwest, in decaying cities such as Detroit and Flint, in hollowed-out factory towns across the region and in the huge disparities in wealth between Chicago’s Gold Coast and the savage streets of its inner city. If the nation’s economic future determines its national security, a reporter can write this story without leaving town.

Posted Jan. 29, 2014

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.

Life Magazine’s iconic image of bodies on Buna Beach.
Photo by George Strock.

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.

They also may inspire, such as the lone Chinese dissident standing and blocking a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square.  The older iconic photos keep their vitality: four generations still recognize the jubilant image of a sailor kissing a nurse in New York’s Times Square when V-J Day was announced and World War II ended.

These images easily substitute for a thousand or more words whether they are used to send a message, to symbolize compassion, to sum up a triumphant moment (raising the flag at Iwo Jima), to establish a poignant truth about the human condition  (Kevin Carter’s photo of the vulture and the emaciated African child) or bring the reality of violence as close as possible.

Photos also may be used as propaganda, to score political points or even to mislead.  So knowing the story behind the photo, even iconic photos that seem to sum up the entire story, is often to know more than what your eyes are telling you.

The story of the photograph of Buna Beach is one of the best illustrations of a single stark image that reflects the immediate consequences of battle and the sad, larger truth of war.

But it is the story behind the photo that provides insight into the tension and the cooperation that often exists between the media and the military.

The photograph was made well after Pearl Harbor and beginning of the American effort to beat back Imperial Japanese forces in the Pacific.  From early 1942 until Japan’s surrender in 1945, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps were engaged in “island hopping,” fighting entrenched Japanese forces in places with familiar names —Guadalcanal, Okinawa, and the Marshall Islands.

As it became clear through the years of war, these were deadly battles and often the most dangerous moments were the first landing on the heavily defended beaches.

Buna Beach was one of the early engagements.

Through the first year of war, gruesome images of dead Japanese and German soldiers were shown in newsprint and on newsreels, but well into the war’s second year no one yet had seen a dead American despite the daily death and casualty reports from the War Department.

Access to images of the war and American troop deaths was kept from the American public by a decision of the White House and compliance by the military and the media.

Concern about the public’s morale was real and long. Before the U.S. entered the war there had been lively debate between those who wanted to intervene in the fighting in Europe and isolationists who opposed American involvement in what they saw as a “European war.”   Pearl Harbor silenced most of that and invigorated the American public to sign up for duty and ramp up production of war materiel.

President Franklin Roosevelt and his advisors, however, worried that images of dead American soldiers would be dispiriting to civilians just as the war effort moved into full swing. Widespread mobilization was under way and the administration insisted that any photos of dead Americans would hurt the war effort and harm national security.

The media agreed to go along with the military censorship.

In the offices of Life magazine, the nation’s premier photojournalism magazine, a young photo editor named A.B.C. (Cal) Whipple focused his attention on a photo taken of three dead American troops on a Pacific beach.  Their bodies are half-buried in the sand; a destroyed landing craft is visible in the background. Their faces are not visible, but the image has a desolate, even haunting aspect.

The picture had been taken many months earlier by one of the magazine’s staff photographers, George Strock.  Despite Whipple’s lobbying his editors and their entreaties to the Pentagon, military censors wouldn’t budge and the news media of the time would not think of going against their decision.

Whipple died just last year at 94 and his New York Times obituary quoted from a memoir he had written for his family about that photo.  “I went from Army captain to major to colonel to general until I wound up in the office of an assistant secretary of the Air Corps, who decided, ‘This has to go to the White House.’”

Perhaps unbeknownst to Whipple and his editors, Roosevelt and his advisers already were worried that Americans were getting frustrated by the length of the war and the required rationing and shortages of everything from foods to nylon to rubber tires.  The grumblers, Roosevelt and others felt, should be reminded that other Americans were making far greater sacrifices.

So in September 1943, nearly eight months after the Buna Beach fighting, Roosevelt and Elmer Davis, the director of the Office of War Information, gave Life editors permission to run Strock’s photo—and they gave it a full page in the large format magazine.

Opposite it, an editorial said that the administration believed “that the American people ought to be able to see their own boys as they fall in battle; to come directly and without words into the presence of their own dead.”

And, finally, one of the war’s most iconic photographs made it to the public’s eye, late and because of an ulterior motive, but also because of a journalist who recognized a stunning image and persisted in wanting to show the truth of battle.

Tim McNulty is co-director of the Medill National Security Journalism Initative 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 group of journalism, legal and technology experts discussed the report from the president’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, which included 46 recommendations to reform government surveillance practices; Obama’s speech outlining his plans for reform; and a report released the day before by the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that called the NSA telephone data collection program illegal.

University of Chicago Professor Geoffrey Stone, a panelist, First Amendment scholar and member of the president’s Review Group, said the five-member group’s recommendations were unanimous.

“We feel very strongly that the recommendations we put forth are sound,” Stone said at the panel discussion, held Jan. 24 at the National Press Club in Washington and sponsored by Medill National Security Journalism Initiative and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Stone said a terrorist attack has not been successfully executed since 9/11 in part because of the work of the intelligence community. However, he said we must “strike the right balance” between protecting the country and civil liberties.

Obama ordered Attorney General Eric Holder to find a way for telephone companies or third parties to store the telephone metadata rather than the NSA, a key recommendation of the Review Group.

But Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Institute, said that the amount of government surveillance is setting the world on “a very bleak trajectory.”

He predicted that in the future many Americans whose information is gathered as part of the national security efforts in the could be charged with other offenses, part of “mission creep” that can occur if the government has access to huge amounts of personal data.

“As long as we’re collecting all this information, why not also enforce these other laws?” Meinrath said. “I don’t want it [the world] to be one of endless security, where the hardware can’t be trusted.”

Obama said the NSA uses signals intelligence only for  “legitimate national security purposes,” but that is a very broad term, according to Karen Kaiser, associate general counsel at the Associated Press for newsroom legal matters. Kaiser said that in a Department of Justice investigation of an AP article, private phone numbers and those of AP bureaus not related to the article were swept up.

Kaiser said such investigations make it hard for journalists to report on national security issues.

“I think we’re seeing a very real threat to journalism,” Kaiser said. “And a need for greater protection.”

Siobhan Gorman, an intelligence correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, said journalists need to take steps to protect sources, such as interviewing them in person rather than on the phone to ensure they are not being surveilled.

Gorman reported on the Snowden revelations in 2013 and said that having such documents leaked made the government more accountable.

“It really forces the government hand, when the evidence is black and white,” Gorman said.

Barton Gellman, who broke the NSA story in The Washington Post using information from Edward Snowden along with the Guardian newspaper, said the president left a lot of unanswered questions.

“The president addressed only a small fraction of the discussion of the review group,” Gellman said.

For example, Gellman said the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 does not account for recent technological developments and should be revisited.

Highlights from the discussion, below.