We are pleased to present National Security Zone: War 2.0, a special report by NSZ Carnegie Fellow Sharon Weinberger, who spent the six months investigating social media and its opportunity to predict and perhaps even influence, future international events.

The Pentagon is now funding efforts to develop models that can predict rising insurgencies, or even identify ways to undermine covert terrorist networks. Military-funded researchers and private companies are looking at how to apply these models to cell phone records, online social networks, and data collected from numerous other online and public sources. This burgeoning field, which we call “War 2.0,” is a fast growing, but little examined phenomenon.

War 2.0 includes extensive original research on the growth of this field and catalogues the research projects run by various parts of the national security community; reports on how they’re being used operationally; and shows the connections between the entities funding and performing work in this burgeoning area.

Whether such efforts are successful or not, they are likely to influence national security strategy in the years ahead. See the complete package.

The project, called Hidden Surge, found that many have been hastily channeled through a post-deployment process that has been plagued with difficulties, including reliance on self-reporting to identify health problems. These service members face unique challenges and report higher rates of some mental health problems and related ills than active-duty troops.

Work by a team of 10 students in Medill’s graduate journalism program was published Feb. 15 in The Washington Post and is available on the Medill’s Hidden Surge site.  Students interviewed more than 80 current and former military and health officials and experts, and National Guard and Reserve troops and their families, and reviewed scores of official documents and reports. They traveled to military bases, National Guard installations and medical centers in nine states to do on-the-ground reporting.

“Reporting from military bases and other locations from Montana to Missouri and from New Mexico to North Carolina, the Medill students have done a real public service,  delivering a well-reported and well-told examination of an issue that is only now being fully acknowledged by the military,’’  said Medill faculty member Josh Meyer, who directed the project and reported on national security for the Los Angeles Times for 20 years.

The students’ research and interviews with current and former officials suggest that attempts by Congress, the military and private contractors to address the problems have been uncoordinated and often ineffective. That includes efforts to provide the kind of comprehensive medical care and support networks that help diagnose what military leaders call the signature wounds of the post-9/11 conflicts — post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury.

Reservists lack access to the system or networks that experts say are needed to assess and treat their injuries. After brief demobilization assessments, reserve troops return home and must navigate disparate health-care and support providers, often without the psychological safety net that comes from living near members of their unit.

“The National Guard faces unique challenges compared to our active-duty counterparts,” acknowledged Gen. Craig McKinley, chief of the National Guard Bureau, which is responsible for administering the guard’s 54 state and territorial units. He said the Obama administration is redoubling efforts to address resulting problems, including substance abuse, depression, PTSD and suicide.

The Findings

• The guard and reserve have been hit particularly hard by mental health issues. From September 2010 to August 2011, post-deployment health reassessment screenings found nearly 17 out of every 100 returning reservists had mental health problems serious enough for follow up. They are 55 percent more likely than active-component service members to have such problems.
• Because of screening lapses, reserve soldiers were sent overseas who should not have been, including some with behavioral problems that could become aggravated by the stress of combat and lead to depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and even suicide.
• Private contractors are responsible for much of the pre- and post-deployment screening; the latest multi-year “readiness’’ contract proposal is estimated to be worth about $1 billion. Despite the public funding, they are not required to provide any kind of comprehensive public reporting on their efforts and whether they are successful.
• Congress has not been aggressive in addressing the reserve health issues. In December, Sen.  Ron Wyden, D-Ore., couldn’t get enough support to even require the Pentagon to study his proposal to ease the transition of reserve troops by giving them more time and resources on their way home.

“The students’ imaginative use of video storytelling and interactive graphics, as well as traditional narrative,  to present their work showcases their understanding of the need to find new ways to engage people and keep them informed on important issues like national security,” said faculty member Ellen Shearer, co-director of the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative and director of the Medill Washington Program.

The students learned sophisticated interactive storytelling approaches with the help of Kat Downs, interactive projects editor at The Washington Post and Greg Linch, the Post’s world and national security producer.

An annual initiative

The Hidden Surge project is the second in a series of annual investigations that are part of Medill’s broader National Security Journalism Initiative which is funded by the McCormick Foundation. The first project, Global Warning,  examined the threat posed to national security by climate change. It garnered international attention and won a national award from the Online News Association.

The National Security Journalism Initiative is unique in journalism education. It comprises undergraduate and graduate classes at Medill in Chicago and Washington; research and reporting projects; and resources and training that provide students and working journalists with the knowledge and skills necessary to report accurately and with context on issues related to defense, security and civil liberties.

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Heading the project was our Carnegie Fellow, Paul Rosenzweig, former first Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security. He is the coauthor (with James Jay Carafano) of Winning the Long War: Lessons from the Cold War for Defeating Terrorism and Preserving Freedom (Heritage Books) and the author of the forthcoming book Cyberwarfare: How Conflicts in Cyberspace are Challenging America and Changing the World (Praeger).

Increasingly, in a networked world, technological changes have made it easy to collect vast storehouses of personally identifiable information. The processing power of computers has increased exponentially, while the costs of storing data have followed an inverse exponential curve. More and more powerful computer algorithms are being set loose to analyze larger and larger sets of personal data. This is the phenomenon sometimes known as “data mining” or “link analysis” and it is the subject of this project.

As the available treasure trove of personal data has grown, so have governmental and commercial efforts to use this personal data. Commercial enterprises target ads and solicit new customers. Governments use the data to identify and target previously unknown terrorism suspects — to find so-called “clean skins.” This capability for enhanced data analysis has already proven reasonably effective. The prospect ahead is only for more, larger data mining programs, not fewer.

Yet this analytical capacity also comes at a price – the peril of creating an ineradicable trove of information about innocent individuals. That peril is one common to all human endeavor – a tool that can be used for good can also be misused. In the government sphere one imagines data mining to identify political opponents, for example, and in private sector we fear targeted spam.

The Data Minefield project presents original research on the U.S. government’s use of data mining and link analysis tools for national and homeland security. In the research presented, reporters will find useful layman’s explanations of the technology; a guide to experts in the field and government reports; an explanation of how one might cover the topic; and more.

The fundamental premise of the project is simple: Increasing computing and storage capacity is allowing the discovery of knowledge previously unknown. In doing so the technological change is challenging our settled conceptions of privacy and civil liberties. At the intersection of technology and privacy lies a lot of good reporting opportunities.

In what it dubbed The Privacy Project, the 17-student team focused on digital privacy and how it affects, in often little-noticed or overlooked ways, the rights of online consumers.

Like a Boss

The team also launched a working prototype web site with viral hooks based on the “Like a Boss” meme that helps educate two different audiences about ways to protect their online privacy; and an umbrella web site that captures the rigorous product development process the students followed, and showcases their work.

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Tara McKelvey in Swat Valley, Pakistan, just northwest of the area in which Osama bin Laden had been hiding.

For her investigation of U.S. special military operations, Medill National Security Journalism Initiative Fellow Tara McKelvey visited Pakistan to explore the role — and risks — of special operators working there. She reported from Swat Valley, northwest of Abbottabad, where Osama bin Laden was killed by special forces troops this week.

“I found that things on the ground, and in the air, were different from what U.S. and Pakistani officials had told me. Officially, Pakistanis were running the campaign against terrorists; in fact, Americans were often leading the charge, tracking fighters in the Haqqani network in Waziristan as well as other terrorists, and collecting intelligence through surveillance devices. They were not supposed to be taking the lead, since they were serving only in advisory roles in Pakistan, but they were,” McKelvey recalled yesterday on the Daily Beast.

“A Pakistani journalist who frequently travels with the military in Waziristan, for example, described how Americans had gone on raids—in many cases, even when the Pakistani soldiers have balked—and said his country’s soldiers just hated their American counterparts,” she wrote, concluding “cooperating with the Pakistani military and intelligence agency has been notoriously difficult, and the Pakistanis did not seem to play much of a role during the raid on Sunday.”

“Just got this,” Birgitta Jónsdóttir wrote on Jan. 7, adding in a second tweet: “usa government wants to know about all my tweets and more since november 1st 2009. do they realize i am a member of parliament in iceland?”

The Department of Justice had obtained a secret order for all of Jónsdóttir’s Twitter account information. Twitter was supposed to provide the information and not tell the users involved that their information was being shared with the Justice Department. Twitter fought for and won the ability to inform Jónsdóttir of the order. The announcement set off a firestorm of Page One media coverage and renewed calls for the reform of a little-known communications law.

Timeline: The Electronic Communications Privacy Act
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Jonsdottir and the two other people named in the order – Jacob Appelbaum and Rop Gonggrijp – had been listed as producers on the WikiLeaks video “Collateral Murder,” which shows U.S. troops in Iraq shooting unarmed civilians, including two Reuters journalists. The Justice Department had announced it was looking for ways to prosecute the organization for recent leaks of classified material.

“I’d been expecting something,” Jónsdóttir said when reached by phone recently. When Jónsdóttir traveled to the U.S. 10 days after the video posted, she made sure to notify Iceland’s foreign affairs minister so she could get a diplomatic passport.

But Jónsdóttir’s brush with the U.S. government actually came  thanks to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a law passed in 1986 that privacy advocates say doesn’t properly protect people now that even private correspondence happens online.

“Once upon a time, we mostly kept our files in our houses,” said Ryan Calo, director of the consumer privacy project at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society. Today, he said, we put our personal information “in the hands of third parties.”

ECPA, as it is known, lets government investigators compel those third parties – in this case, Twitter – to secretly give up their clients’ personal information. The Dec. 14 order asking for Jónsdóttir’s information demanded that Twitter not “disclose the existence of the application or this Order of the Court, or the existence of the investigation, to the listed subscriber or to any other person, unless and until authorized to do so by the Court.”

Twitter challenged the order, and three weeks later, the judge who approved it also allowed it to be unsealed. That’s when Jónsdóttir – and the global media – found out.

When she found out, Jónsdóttir got in touch with some friends from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF and the American Civil Liberties Union are now fighting the order in court.

The ACLU maintains that the order – and the part of ECPA that allows it – violate both the First and Fourth Amendment. Prosecutors ought to have to get a warrant based on probable cause for this kind of information, ACLU Spokesman Benjamin Siracusa Hillman said.

This kind of a case wasn’t particularly surprising, Siracusa Hillman said, but it was of great concern that the order targeted information “that we viewed as deeply private and expressive.” Jónsdóttir is a political activist and she tweets “on a whole bunch of issues, most of which have nothing to do with WikiLeaks,” he added.

The ACLU argues that because this part of the statute is unconstitutional, it shouldn’t be enforced. But, Siracusa Hillman said, “Congress can always choose to enact greater privacy protection than the constitution requires.”

Reform on the table?

Murmurs of reform have come from both chambers. The House and Senate Judiciary Committees each held  hearings just last year to assess how well ECPA protects privacy, national security and American business interests in the 21st century.

Congressmen on both sides of the aisle described the act’s inadequacies as indisputable. “No one would quibble with the notion that ECPA is outdated,” Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said in his opening speech.

House Judiciary member Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., now the committee’s chairman, noted that the issue is “not one that I think reeks of partisan divisions.”

“I think we all know that a 24-year-old original law and a 16-year-old second law is way out of date compared to where the technology is at,” he said, citing the conflicting interpretations the law has generated in the realm of cell phone privacy as proof that it must be updated.

Justice Department officials have been less enthusiastic.  At last year’s Senate hearing, Associate Deputy Attorney General James A. Baker listed cases the department could not have solved without the act, including one in which an EPCA subpoena helped identify the creator of a child pornography site. He described the law as “forward-looking” and suggested problems with applying it to the Internet lie with the courts, not the law itself.

But Leahy cited changing it as part of his agenda for the new Congress in a speech on Jan. 11. “The Judiciary Committee will continue the work we started last year to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, so that security agencies have the tools needed to keep us safe from cyber threats, and our federal privacy laws keep pace with advancing technology,” he said.

Reform is “one of the issues that we need to take a look at this year,” though no timeline has yet been set, said Leahy spokeswoman Erica Chabot.

The Twitter fight carries on

The more immediate fight over ECPA is in the ongoing Twitter case. The ACLU and the Justice Department argued in a Feb. 15 hearing at a federal court in Virginia.

Justice Department prosecutors responded directly to the ACLU’s criticism of the law’s constitutionality. They called their order to Twitter “routine” and said it had to remain sealed to protect national security, according to the Washington Post.

Justice Department representative Tracy Schmaler said she had no further comment when contacted in early March.

The Department has supporters, too. The First Amendment does not give WikiLeaks the right to endanger Americans by revealing state secrets, said James Carafano, a national security scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

“There’s no absolute protection for free speech,” Carafano said.

The ACLU wants the judge to undo the order. “We’ve also sought to unseal any other orders that may exist, in order to be able to challenge those orders,” Siracusa Hillman said. “Since we don’t know whether or not they exist, it’s obviously difficult to challenge them.”

As for Jónsdóttir? She’s not planning to come to the United States any time soon. She’s not afraid, but any kind of interrogation “would be really unpleasant,” she said.

She has plenty to do in Iceland anyways, including finishing work on a media law that she’s hoping will be the most advanced in the world.

The proposal, which copies select parts of media law from all over the world – including American whistleblower protection law – has passed in the Icelandic parliament, but the process requires updating 13 separate parts of Icelandic law, which Jónsdóttir hopes will be done by the middle of this year.

“I want this to be sort of the benchmark, the standard for how we modernize” freedom of speech, Jónsdóttir said. “You have to upgrade these laws all the time,” she added.

Today, the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative unveils results of its “The Age of Special Warfare” project, which involved six months of research and reporting in the U.S. and abroad and provides detailed information and a worldwide map of special operations the U.S. has conducted since 2001, with particular attention to the missions in progress as of the end of 2010.

The goal of the project by NSJI’s Cargegie Fellow Tara McKelvey: provide an overview for journalists and journalism students of this essential but poorly understood section of the American military. See the special report.