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How to Defend Against Surveillance

richard

Will the Government Think You’re Guilty by Association?

Magazines’ “New Golden Age” Looks Like the Pale Old Age

Soledad O’Brien to Join “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel”

Rosa Flores, Baton Rouge Anchor, Named CNN Correspondent

Trahant Appointed Journalism Chair at U. of Alaska

Britain Admits Atrocities Against Kenyans in Historic Settlement

Despite Humiliations, Canada’s Native J-Students Work It

Local Public-Station Journalists Disproportionately White

Short Takes

Will the Government Think You’re Guilty by Association?

“Let me put it this way,” began Salim Muwakkil, the veteran Chicago writer, in a Facebook posting Wednesday. “I’ve known Assata Shakur from the days when she was known as Joanne Chesimard.

“What’s more, while working as a journalist for the Associated Press, I covered the deadly encounter on the NJ Turpike that resulted in her imprisonment. Thus, I have a rather specialized knowledge of her case. I consider her a victim rather than criminal and have written sympathetically about her plight.

“Assata recently was placed on the FBI’s 10 most wanted terrorist list. Am I now considered a terrorist associate vulnerable to NSA targeting?” he continued, referring to the National Security Agency.

“With that security agency reportedly in possession of all my tele-communications’ contacts, can they now be data mined for any ‘incriminating’ evidence[?] What about those hundreds of people on my contact lists? Are they similarly implicated in associating with someone who once associated with someone now deemed a terrorist? These are not just idle questions and point to the real threat of a national security state.”

As more information about the extent of government surveillance surfaces, others are sharing similar concerns. Last week, the Poynter Institute published “6 ways journalists can keep their reporting materials private & off-the-record” by Beth Winegarner.

Among Winegarner’s suggestions: “Get old school.” “Run your own mail server.” “Encrypt or go anonymous.” “Don’t keep anything online.” “Stay off the phone.” “Consult a lawyer.” She referred readers to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense site, created “to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it.”

Meanwhile, the conversation about Edward Snowden, the former employee of government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton whose leak of NSA documents has dominated the headlines all week, turned to whether he should be considered a hero or a traitor.

In an interview with the South China Morning Post, Snowden told reporter Lana Lam: “I’m neither traitor nor hero. I’m an American.“

David Simon, creator of television’s “The Wire” and a former Baltimore Sun reporter, did not think Snowden disclosed much new. Simon wrote on his blog, “Having labored as a police reporter in the days before the Patriot Act, I can assure all there has always been a stage before the wiretap, a preliminary process involving the capture, retention and analysis of raw data. It has been so for decades now in this country. The only thing new here, from a legal standpoint, is the scale on which the FBI and NSA are apparently attempting to cull anti-terrorism leads from that data. But the legal and moral principles? Same old stuff. . . .”

Clarence Page, syndicated Chicago Tribune columnist, agreed. “The NSA phone sweeps are a large-scale version of police tracking the calls — but not content — on pay phones (remember those?) that were frequented by drug dealers. As a character on ‘The Wire’ used to say, ‘Things change but the game stays the same.’

“Those who fear constitutional breaches should first read the Constitution. It is not biblical scripture. It is often conditional, as in the Fourth Amendment’s protections against ‘unreasonable searches.’ The 10 Commandments, by contrast, do not permit ‘reasonable adultery.’ . . .”

Leonard Pitts Jr., the syndicated Miami Herald columnist, took the opposing view. “If ever tyranny overtakes this land of the sometimes free and home of the intermittently brave, it probably won’t, contrary to the fever dreams of gun rights extremists, involve jack-booted government thugs rappelling down from black helicopters,” he wrote. “Rather, it will involve changes to words on paper many have forgotten or never knew, changes that chip away until they strip away, precious American freedoms.

“It will involve a trade of sorts, an inducement to give up the reality of freedom for the illusion of security. Indeed, the bargain has already been struck. . . .”

Magazines’ “New Golden Age” Looks Like the Pale Old Age

“An upscale men’s magazine decided to praise [its] favorite magazine editors’ work, declaring boldly a ‘New Golden Age’ on its cover,” Connor Simpson wrote Tuesday for the Atlantic Wire. “Except there’s one small diversity problem: all the editors basking in this new golden age are white dudes. . . .”

Simpson noted that for its efforts, “Port is getting taken to task on Twitter and other realms of the Internet. ‘Don’t you buncha jerks dare forget about the relevance of white men at legacy brands!’ said Gawker’s Cord Jefferson. “The ‘new golden age of publishing’ only features white men, obvi,” added [BuzzFeed’s] Rosie Gray. ‘Hey [Port magazine], you don’t admire a single lady magazine editor?’ wondered Spry’s Katie Neal. ‘If I’d known all it took to make a Golden Age was a bunch of white dudes in suits I’d’ve started one a long time ago,’ chimed another. It was posted to the 100 Percent Men tumblr real quick. ‘So, based on the makeup of Crowe’s expert panel, are we meant to conclude that white men are the future of magazines?’ Salon’s Katie McDonough asks,” Simpson continued, referring to Port magazine editor-in-chief Dan Crowe.

” ‘In which case, shouldn’t Port re-title its feature to something like “a new pale, male age” of magazines or something more descriptive of its content?’ That doesn’t seem like a half bad idea. And so on and so on the outrage train went. . . .”

Soledad O’Brien to Join “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel”

“Soledad O’Brien has inked an overall content development deal with HBO and also will join the network’s award-winning sports journalism program Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel,” Marisa Guthrie reported Wednesday for the Hollywood Reporter. “The deal lets HBO have first look at scripted projects and long-form programming concepts developed by O’Brien’s Starfish Media Group.

“O’Brien’s first piece is about an innovative regimen at a San Diego fight club that helps veterans combat mental illness and PTSD. It will air on the June 25 edition of Real Sports.

“Real Sports” airs monthly. Guthrie added, “O’Brien left CNN earlier this year after incoming CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker set about revamping the network’s ill-fated morning show, which O’Brien had been hosting. At CNN, she was responsible for the Black in America and Latino in America franchises. A graduate of Harvard University, she will serve as a visiting fellow for the 2013-14 school year at the university’s Graduate School of Education.”

Rosa Flores, Baton Rouge Anchor, Joins CNN

“CNN has named Rosa Flores as correspondent, it was announced today by Terence Burke, Vice President of Newsgathering for CNN/U.S. She will start in July and will be based in New York City,” CNN said on Wednesday.

The announcement added, “In addition to her role as correspondent Flores will serve as substitute anchor.

“Throughout her career Flores covered a variety of national, state and local stories. Before joining CNN, she anchored the late afternoon newscast at WBRZ, the ABC affiliate in Baton Rouge. . . .”

CNN President Jeff Zucker was criticized by leaders of the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists after his failure to include journalists of color among his first few appointments.

Trahant Appointed Journalism Chair at U. of Alaska

“Journalist Mark Trahant will serve as the 20th Atwood Chair of Journalism at the University of Alaska Anchorage. The position brings nationally known journalists to teach courses and speak to students, journalists and the public in Alaska,” the university announced on Tuesday.

“Trahant is the former editor of the editorial page for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where he chaired the daily editorial board, directed a staff of writers, editors and a cartoonist. He [is] chairman and chief executive officer at the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and a former columnist at The Seattle Times. He has been publisher of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News in Moscow, Idaho; executive news editor of The Salt Lake Tribune; a reporter at the Arizona Republic in Phoenix; and has worked at several tribal newspapers. . . . “

Britain Admits Atrocities Against Kenyans in Historic Settlement

“A 60-year-old wound in Kenya has finally found its recompense,” Gregory Warner reported Sunday for NPR.

“Last week, the British government finalized an out-of-court settlement with thousands of Kenyans who were tortured in detention camps during the end of the British colonial reign. The historic apology — and the unprecedented settlement — has been years in the making.

“It started with a Harvard graduate student named Caroline Elkins. She became fascinated with the Mau Mau — Kenyan rebels from the tribe called Kikuyu — who fought in the ’50s and ’60s for independence from the British,” who had seized their land for settlements. “Back then, in the British press, the Mau Mau were seen as murderous criminals. But Elkins discovered that much more violence was committed by colonial authorities.

” ‘In fact, in total [only] 32 Europeans died,’ Elkins says. ‘As opposed to that, nearly 1½ million Kikuyu were put into some form of detention, where they were tortured and forced to labor.’

“Elkins took the testimony of survivors from those camps, [pored] through logbooks and police records chronicling the abuses, and published her dissertation in 2005 as a book, Imperial Reckoning, the Untold Story of the British Gulag in Kenya,” which won a Pulitzer Prize.

“Four years later, when a team of British and Kenyan lawyers filed a case on behalf of the Mau Mau veterans in the British High Court, they hit a wall. Elkins’ research, from testimonies to written logs, was not enough to meet the court’s standards for evidence.

“The case idled for years in legal purgatory until a breakthrough last fall, when a judge ordered the British Foreign Office to release its own classified records from those colonial detention camps. Elkins says those official documents confirmed, in explicit detail, the systematic torture of male and female detainees.

“There was ‘forced sodomy with broken bottles and vermin and snakes and just horrific, horrific things,’ she says. ‘And the documents confirmed, almost verbatim at times, the kind of oral testimonies I had taken 15 years ago.

” ‘So not only was it absolutely wrenching to read these, but it was also validating on so many levels and particularly that the British government had been calling them liars,’ she says. ‘All the while sitting on the evidence proving that they were actually telling the truth.’

“In a luxury hotel ballroom in Nairobi, hundreds of Kenyan survivors, now in their 70s and 80s, came to celebrate the case’s conclusion. Under an out-of-court settlement, the British government agreed to pay more than $20 million in damages to the living survivors, about $4,000 per person. . . .”

The demonization of the Mau Mau was worldwide, and the news media played an integral part.

In her book, Elkins wrote, “Mau Mau sized the world’s attention in the early 1950s, not just in Britain and the commonwealth countries but also in the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet bloc. Life and other magazines presented photographic spreads with chilling pictorial evidence of Mau Mau’s savagery that contrasted dramatically with images of the local British settlers.

“While the Mau Mau insurgents claimed they were fighting for ithaka na wiyathi, or land and freedom, few people in the Western world took seriously the demands of these so-called savages. The Mau Mau were said to be criminals or gangsters bent on terrorizing the local European population, and certainly not freedom fighters. . . .”

The press was also used by opponents of the atrocities. One newspaper sponsored a tour of Kenya by a Labour member of Parliament, reporting it under such headlines as “The Truth About the Secret Police” and “Gestapo Way in Kenya.”

Elkins wrote Thursday in the Guardian, “In the wake of its announcement, Britain now faces potential claims from across its former empire. From a historical perspective, the government has every reason to be concerned about its legacy. There is unequivocal evidence of colonial brutalities in end-of-empire Malaya, Cyprus and elsewhere. Whether there is enough for successful legal claims is another matter altogether, however. . . .”

Reuters reported, “In 2008, The Times newspaper reported that US President Barack Obama’s Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, had been imprisoned and tortured by the British during the Mau Mau uprising. It quoted his wife, Sarah Onyango, as saying he was whipped every day. . . .”

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