NSA

Project Censored 2014

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joe@sfbg.com

Our oceans are acidifying — even if the nightly news hasn’t told you yet.

As humanity continues to fill the atmosphere with harmful gases, the planet is becoming less hospitable to life as we know it. The vast oceans absorb much of the carbon dioxide we have produced, from the industrial revolution through the rise of global capitalism. Earth’s self-sacrifice spared the atmosphere nearly 25 percent of humanity’s CO2 emissions, slowing the onslaught of many severe weather consequences.

Although the news media have increasingly covered the climate weirding of global warming — hurricane superstorms, fierce tornado clusters, overwhelming snowstorms, and record-setting global high temperatures — our ocean’s peril has largely stayed submerged below the biggest news stories.

The rising carbon dioxide in our oceans burns up and deforms the smallest, most abundant food at the bottom of the deep blue food chain. One vulnerable population is the tiny shelled swimmers known as the sea butterfly. In only a few short decades, the death and deformation of this fragile and translucent species could endanger predators all along the oceanic food web, scientists warn.

This “butterfly effect,” once unleashed, potentially threatens fisheries that feed over 1 billion people worldwide.

Since ancient times, humans fished the oceans for food. Now, we’re frying ocean life before we even catch it, starving future generations in the process. Largely left out of national news coverage, this dire report was brought to light by a handful of independent-minded journalists: Craig Welch from the Seattle Times, Julia Whitty of Mother Jones, and Eli Kintisch of ScienceNOW.

It is also the top story of Project Censored, an annual book and reporting project that features the year’s most underreported news stories, striving to unmask censorship, self-censorship, and propaganda in corporate-controlled media outlets. The book is set for release in late October.

“Information is the currency of democracy,” Ralph Nader, the prominent consumer advocate and many-time presidential candidate, wrote in his foreword to this year’s Project Censored 2015. But with most mass media owned by narrow corporate interests, “the general public remains uninformed.”

Whereas the mainstream media poke and peck at noteworthy events at single points in time, often devoid of historical context or analysis, Project Censored seeks to clarify understanding of real world issues and focus on what’s important. Context is key, and many of its “top censored” stories highlight deeply entrenched policy issues that require more explanation than a simple sound bite can provide.

Campus and faculty from over two dozen colleges and universities join in this ongoing effort, headquartered at Sonoma State University. Some 260 students and 49 faculty vet thousands of news stories on select criteria: importance, timeliness, quality of sources, and the level of corporate news coverage.

The top 25 finalists are sent to Project Censored’s panel of judges, who then rank the entries, with ocean acidification topping this year’s list.

“There are outlets, regular daily papers, who are independent and they’re out there,” Andy Lee Roth, associate director of Project Censored, told us. Too many news outlets are beholden to corporate interests, but Welch of the Seattle Times bucked the trend, Roth said, by writing some of the deepest coverage yet on ocean acidification.

“There are reporters doing the highest quality of work, as evidenced by being included in our list,” Roth said. “But the challenge is reaching as big an audience as [the story] should.”

Indeed, though Welch’s story was reported in the Seattle Times, a mid-sized daily newspaper, this warning is relevant to the entire world. To understand the impact of ocean acidification, Welch asks readers to “imagine every person on earth tossing a hunk of CO2 as heavy as a bowling ball into the sea. That’s what we do to the oceans every day.”

Computer modeler Isaac Kaplan, at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration office in Seattle, told Welch that his early work predicts significant declines in sharks, skates and rays, some types of flounder and sole, and Pacific whiting, the most frequently caught commercial fish off the coast of Washington, Oregon, and California.

Acidification may also harm fisheries in the farthest corners of the earth: A study by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme outlines acidification’s threat to the arctic food chain.

“Decreases in seawater pH of about 0.02 per decade have been observed since the late 1960s in the Iceland and Barents Seas,” the study’s authors wrote in the executive summary. And destroying fisheries means wiping out the livelihoods of the native peoples of the Antarctic.

Acidification can even rewire the brains of fish, Welch’s story demonstrated. Studies found rising CO2 levels cause clown fish to gain athleticism, but have their sense of smell redirected. This transforms them into “dumb jocks,” scientists said, swimming faster and more vigorously straight into the mouths of their predators.

These Frankenstein fish were found to be five times more likely to die in the natural world. What a fitting metaphor for humanity, as our outsized consumption propels us towards an equally dangerous fate.

“It’s not as dramatic as say, an asteroid is hitting us from outer space,” Roth said of this slowly unfolding disaster, which is likely why such a looming threat to our food chain escapes much mainstream news coverage.

Journalism tends to be more “action focused,” Roth said, looking to define conflict in everything it sees. A recently top-featured story on CNN focused on President Barack Obama’s “awkward coffee cup salute” to a Marine, which ranks only slightly below around-the-clock coverage of the president’s ugly tan suit as a low point in mainstream media’s focus on the trivial.

As Nader noted, “‘important stories’ are often viewed as dull by reporters and therefore unworthy of coverage.” But mainstream media do cover some serious topics with weight, as it did in the wake of the police officer shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. So what’s the deciding factor?

As Roth tells it, corporate news focuses on “drama, and the most dramatic action is of course violence.”

But the changes caused by ocean acidification are gradual. Sea butterflies are among the most abundant creatures in our oceans, and are increasingly born with shells that look like cauliflower or sandpaper, making this and similar species more susceptible to infection and predators.

“Ocean acidification is changing the chemistry of the world’s water faster than ever before, and faster than the world’s leading scientists predicted,” Welch said, but it’s not getting the attention is deserves. “Combined nationwide spending on acidification research for eight federal agencies, including grants to university scientists by the National Science Foundation, totals about $30 million a year — less than the annual budget for the coastal Washington city of Hoquiam, population 10,000.”

Our oceans may slowly cook our food chain into new forms with potentially catastrophic consequences. Certainly 20 years from now, when communities around the world lose their main source of sustenance, the news will catch on. But will the problem make the front page tomorrow, while there’s still time to act?

Probably not, and that’s why we have Project Censored and its annual list:

 

2. TOP 10 US AID RECIPIENTS PRACTICE TORTURE

Sexual abuse, children kept in cages, extra-judicial murder. While these sound like horrors the United States would stand against, the reverse is true: This country is funding these practices.

The US is a signatory of the United Nations’ Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, but the top 10 international recipients of US foreign assistance in 2014 all practice torture, according to human rights groups, as reported by Daniel Wickham of online outlet Left Foot Forward.

Israel received over $3 billion in US aid for fiscal year 2013-14, according to a Congressional Research Service report. Israel was criticized by the country’s own Public Defender’s Office for torturing children suspected of minor crimes.

“During our visit, held during a fierce storm that hit the state, attorneys met detainees who described to them a shocking picture: in the middle of the night dozens of detainees were transferred to the external iron cages built outside the IPS transition facility in Ramla,” the PDO wrote, according to The Independent.

The next top recipients of US foreign aid were Afghanistan, Egypt, Pakistan, Nigeria, Jordan, Iraq, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. All countries were accused of torture by human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Kenyan police in Nairobi tortured, raped, or otherwise abused more than 1,000 refugees from 2012 to 2013, Human Rights Watch found. The Kenyan government received $564 million from the United States in 2013-14.

When the US funds a highway or other project that it’s proud of, it plants a huge sign proclaiming “your tax dollars at work.” When the US funds torturers, the corporate media bury the story, or worse, don’t report it at all.

 

3. TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP, A SECRET DEAL TO HELP CORPORATIONS

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is like the Stop Online Piracy Act on steroids, yet few have heard of it, let alone enough people to start an Internet campaign to topple it. Despite details revealed by Wikileaks, the nascent agreement has been largely ignored by the corporate media.

Even the world’s elite are out of the loop: Only three officials in each of the 12 signatory countries have access to this developing trade agreement that potentially impacts over 800 million people.

The agreement touches on intellectual property rights and the regulation of private enterprise between nations, and is open to negotiation and viewing by 600 “corporate advisors” from big oil, pharmaceutical, to entertainment companies.

Meanwhile, more than 150 House Democrats signed a letter urging President Obama to halt his efforts to fast-track negotiations, and to allow Congress the ability to weigh in now on an agreement only the White House has seen.

Many criticized the secrecy surrounding the TPP, arguing the real world consequences may be grave. Doctors Without Borders wrote, “If harmful provisions in the US proposals for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement are not removed before it is finalized, this trade deal will have a real cost in human lives.”

 

4. CORPORATE INTERNET PROVIDERS THREATEN NET NEUTRALITY

This entry demonstrates the nuance in Project Censored’s media critique. Verizon v. FCC may weaken Internet regulation, which Electronic Frontier Foundation and other digital freedom advocates allege would create a two-tiered Internet system. Under the FCC’s proposed new rules, corporate behemoths such as Comcast or Verizon could charge entities to use faster bandwidth, which advocates say would create financial barriers to free speech and encourage censorship.

Project Censored alleges corporate outlets such as The New York Times and Forbes “tend to highlight the business aspects of the case, skimming over vital particulars affecting the public and the Internet’s future.”

Yet this is a case where corporate media were circumvented by power of the viral web. John Oliver, comedian and host of Last Week Tonight on HBO, recently gave a stirring 13-minute treatise on the importance of stopping the FCC’s new rules, resulting in a flood of comments to the FCC defending a more open Internet. The particulars of net neutrality have since been thoroughly reported in the corporate media.

But, as Project Censored notes, mass media coverage only came after the FCC’s rule change was proposed, giving activists little time to right any wrongs. It’s a subtle but important distinction.

 

5. BANKERS REMAIN ON WALL STREET DESPITE MAJOR CRIMES

Bankers responsible for rigging municipal bonds and bilking billions of dollars from American cities have largely escaped criminal charges. Every day in the US, low-level drug dealers get more prison time than these scheming bankers who, while working for GE Capital, allegedly skimmed money from public schools, hospitals, libraries, and nursing homes, according to Rolling Stone.

Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg, and Peter Grimm were dubbed a part of the “modern American mafia,” by the magazine’s Matt Taibbi, one of the few journalists to consistently cover their trial. Meanwhile, disturbingly uninformed cable media “journalists” defended the bankers, saying they shouldn’t be prosecuted for “failure,” as if cheating vulnerable Americans were a bad business deal.

“Had the US authorities decided to press criminal charges,” Assistant US Attorney General Lanny Breuer told Taibbi. “HSBC (a British bank) would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the US, the future of the institution would have been under threat, and the entire banking system would have been destabilized.”

Over the course of decades, the nation’s bankers transformed into the modern mafioso. Unfortunately, our modern media changed as well, and are no longer equipped to tackle systemic, complex stories.

 

6. THE “DEEP STATE” OF PLUTOCRATIC CONTROL

What’s frightening about the puppeteers who pull the strings of our national government is not how hidden they are, but how hidden they are not.

From defense contractors to multinational corporations, a wealthy elite using an estimated $32 trillion in tax-exempt offshore havens are the masters of our publicly elected officials. In an essay written for Moyer and Company by Mike Lofgren, a congressional staffer of 28 years focused on national security, this cabal of wealthy interests comprise our nation’s “Deep State.”

As Lofgren writes for Moyers, “The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction.”

This is a story that truly challenges the mass media, which do report on the power of wealth, in bits and pieces. But although the cabal’s disparate threads are occasionally pulled, the spider’s web of corruption largely escapes corporate media’s larger narrative.

The myopic view censors the full story as surely as outright silence would. The problem deepens every year.

“There are now 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances — a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government,” Lofgren wrote, of a group that together would “occupy the floor space of almost three Pentagons — about 17 million square feet.”

 

7. FBI DISMISSES PLOT AGAINST OCCUPY AS NSA CRACKS DOWN ON DISSENT

Nationally, law enforcement worked in the background to monitor and suppress the Occupy Wall Street movement, a story the mainstream press has shown little interest in covering.

A document obtained in FOIA request by David Lindorff of Who, What WHY from the FBI office in Houston,, Texas revealed an alleged assassination plot targeting a Occupy group, which the FBI allegedly did not warn the movement about.

From the redacted document: “An identified [DELETED] as of October planned to engage in sniper attacks against protestors (sic) in Houston, Texas if deemed necessary. An identified [DELETED] had received intelligence that indicated the protesters in New York and Seattle planned similar protests in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, Texas. [DELETED] planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest groups and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership via suppressed sniper rifles.”

Lindorff confirmed the document’s veracity with the FBI. When contacted by Lindorff, Houston Police were uninterested, and seemingly (according to Lindorff), uninformed.

In Arizona, law enforcement exchanged information of possible Occupy efforts with JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, according to a report by the Center for Media and Democracy titled Dissent on Terror. The CEO meant to evade possible protests, and local law enforcement was happy to help.

Law enforcement’s all-seeing eyes broadened through the national rise of “fusion centers” over the past decade, hubs through which state agencies exchange tracking data on groups exercising free speech. And as we share, “like,” and “check-in” online with ever-more frequency, that data becomes more robust by the day.

 

8. IGNORING EXTREME WEATHER CONNECTION TO GLOBAL WARMING

In what can only be responded to with a resounding “duh,” news analyses have found mainstream media frequently report on severe weather changes without referring to global warming as the context or cause, even as a question.

As Project Censored notes, a study by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found extreme weather events in 2013 spurred 450 broadcast news segments, only 16 of which even mentioned climate change. National news outlets have fallen on the job as well, as The New York Times recently shuttered its environmental desk and its Green blog, reducing the number of reporters exclusively chasing down climate change stories.

Unlike many journalists, ordinary people often recognize the threat of our warming planet. Just as this story on Project Censored went to press, over 400,000 protested in the People’s Climate March in New York City alone, while simultaneous protests erupted across the globe, calling for government, corporate, and media leaders to address the problem.

“There is a huge mismatch between the magnitude of the challenge and the response we heard here today,” Graca Machel, the widow of former South African President Nelson Mandela, told the United Nations conference on climate change. “The scale is much more than we have achieved.”

 

9. US MEDIA HYPOCRISY IN COVERING UKRAINE CRISIS

The US battle with Russia over Ukraine’s independence is actually an energy pipeline squabble, a narrative lost by mainstream media coverage, Project Censored alleges.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has drawn fire from the media as a tyrant, without complex analyses of his country’s socio-economic interests, according to Project Censored. As the media often do, they have turned the conflict into a cult of personality, talking up Putin’s shirtless horseback riding and his hard-line style with deftness missing from their political analysis.

As The Guardian UK’s Nafeez Ahmed reported, a recent US State Department-sponsored report noted “Ukraine’s strategic location between the main energy producers (Russia and the Caspian Sea area) and consumers in the Eurasian region, its large transit network, and its available underground gas storage capacities,” highlighting its economic importance to the US and its allies.

 

10. WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION SUPPRESSES REPORT ON IRAQ IMPACTS

The United States’ legacy in Iraq possibly goes beyond death to a living nightmare of cancer and birth defects, due to the military’s use of depleted uranium weapons, a World Health Organization study found. Iraq is poisoned. Much of the report’s contents were leaked to the BBC during its creation. But the release of the report, completed in 2012 by WHO, has stalled. Critics allege the US is deliberately blocking its release, masking a damning Middle East legacy rivaling the horrors of Agent Orange in Vietnam. But Iraq will never forget the US intervention, as mothers cradle babies bearing scars obtained in the womb, the continuing gifts of our invasion.

Proud of the whistleblowers

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rebecca@sfbg.com

A lot has happened since June 2013, when famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, then 82, donned a pink feather boa to lead an energized San Francisco Pride Parade contingent on behalf of US Army private Bradley Manning, who couldn’t attend due to being held in federal custody.

Manning, a whistleblower who stood accused of leaking classified US documents, was celebrated as a queer hero by the more than 1,000 parade participants. They hailed the young private’s courageous decision to share US military secrets with WikiLeaks in a bid to expose human rights atrocities committed during the Iraq War.

The Bradley Manning Contingent had been ignited by the drama following Manning’s nomination as a grand marshal for Pride, then crowned grand marshal in an erroneous public statement, an announcement that was then emphatically revoked by the San Francisco Pride Board of Directors.

The messy, embarrassing incident made international headlines and sent a torrent of criticism raining down upon Pride. Progressives sharply condemned the board as spineless for being afraid to stand with a celebrated queer whistleblower whose act of self-sacrifice could alter the course of history.

In late August 2013, Manning announced that she identified as female and would be known as Chelsea Manning from that day forward. The announcement was concurrent with her sentencing to 35 years in prison for leaking classified US government documents.

The whistleblower’s name and gender identity aren’t the only things to change since last year: Chelsea Manning has been named an honorary grand marshal for the 2014 Pride celebration.

“The 2013 SF Pride Board’s controversial decision to revoke her status as Grand Marshal fueled an international controversy and created intense strife within the local LGBT and progressive communities,” a statement on Pride’s website explains. “In January, in the spirit of community healing, and at the behest of SF Pride’s membership, the newly elected SF Pride Board of Directors reinstated Manning’s status as an honorary Grand Marshal for the 2014 Celebration and Parade.”

The other game-changing subplot of this continuing whistleblower saga, of course, began to unfold just weeks before the 2013 Pride celebration, when former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden came forward to explain that he’d leaked secret NSA documents to expose a sweeping dragnet surveillance program intercepting millions of Americans’ digital communications, because he believed it posed a threat to democracy and personal freedom.

Snowden first unmasked himself as an NSA whistleblower in a statement filmed in a hotel room in Hong Kong; he’s now in Russia, where he’s been temporarily granted asylum. Ellsberg recently joined an advisory board to the newly formed, Berlin-based Courage Foundation, which has set up a legal defense fund for Snowden. Manning continues to serve out her prison sentence, while Julian Assange, founder and publisher of WikiLeaks (which exposed Manning’s leaks to a global audience) marked his second anniversary of being confined within the walls of the Ecuadoran Embassy in London on June 19.

Meanwhile Glenn Greenwald, whom Snowden selected as the recipient of his revelatory NSA files, has just embarked on a US book tour.

“The last year has been a bit intense,” Greenwald told a sold-out audience at San Francisco’s Nourse Theater on June 18, shortly after his arrival onstage was greeted with a standing ovation. His newly released book, No Place To Hide, provides an overview of what’s transpired in the movement against government surveillance since Snowden first approached him with leaked NSA documents.

“The surveillance state is aimed not at terrorists,” Greenwald said, “but at entire citizenries, without any shred of evidence of wrongdoing. The debate that has been triggered is about more than just surveillance,” he added, spurring dialogue on several overarching issues, “including the value of privacy.”

Greenwald named two troubling outcomes to emerge from the exposure of government secrets: First, the whistleblowers had been tarnished in the press as freakish or crazy as a way to diminish the gravity of the information they’ve revealed; secondly, the government’s practice of conducting massive electronic surveillance raises questions about how far press freedom can possibly extend in the digital age.

The author and constitutional lawyer then engaged in some myth-busting against the narratives that had been put forward concerning Snowden — claims that the security analyst is “a fame-seeking narcissist” or a spy.

“When I asked him over and over again why [he did it] … He told me it was the pain of having to live the rest of his life knowing he’d done nothing about this,” Greenwald said.

He added that he found the actions of those who sought to condemn Snowden to be very telling. “It is not simply a bunch of hacks or loyalists. The people who have decided that there must be some hidden secret motive … are doing that because they really can’t believe that a person can take an action … out of political conviction,” he said. “There’s a belief by the people who are soulless and have no convictions that everyone else is playing by the same rules.”

Nor was this treatment of being raked over the coals unique to Snowden. Manning was maligned in the press as suffering from a “gender disorder,” Greenwald pointed out, rather than being accepted as a transgender person.

And in the case of Assange, Greenwald shared an illuminating anecdote: “The Iraq War logs showed extreme atrocities,” he pointed out, but The New York Times granted this story just as prominent front-page treatment as “a profile of the quirky personality attributes of Julian Assange.” This article painted the WikiLeaks founder as bizarre and freakish, Greenwald explained, containing the “shocking revelation that Julian Assange’s socks were actually dirty.”

Meanwhile, on the morning of Greenwald’s San Francisco speech, Assange made a virtual public appearance in his own right. In a conference call with the Bay Guardian and other media outlets held from within the walls of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, the WikiLeaks publisher discussed his bizarre situation and took questions from the press.

Assange has been granted asylum in Ecuador and is staying in an apartment inside the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, but if he sets foot outside the building, he will be immediately taken into custody by British security forces. More than $10 million has reportedly been spent on having officers stand guard outside the embassy, where they harass his guests as they come and go — but the British security apparatus is only one of several complicated problems facing Assange. His other adversaries include the governments of Sweden and the United States, both of which want to put him on trial.

In Sweden, prosecutors are waiting to try him on allegations of sexual misconduct — but “If he goes to Sweden, it will more than likely mean a one-way ticket to the United States,” his attorney Michael Ratner made plain in the press call.

In the US, WikiLeaks continues to be the subject of a criminal investigation by the Justice Department, which Assange described as the longest ever directed against a publisher.

“It is against the stated principles of the US, and I believe the values of its people, to have a four-year criminal investigation against a publisher,” Assange said. He added that the government’s targeting of WikiLeaks for publishing classified documents could have ramifications for any members of the press who seek to dig deeper than just reporting “the contents of a press conference,” as he put it. And with the rise of digital media, “All publishers will shortly be Internet-based publishers,” he added.

Journalists peppered Assange with questions, and evidently some couldn’t resist the temptation of infotainment. Had he been tuning into the World Cup? One wanted to know.

“I have been watching the World Cup,” Assange replied, “although the reception in this building is quite difficult.”

And who, pray tell, is he rooting for? “Ecuador undoubtedly deserves to win,” Assange said. “But I think there’s such prestige riding on the issue for Brazil that they are the most likely victors.”

Alerts: June 18 – 24, 2014

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WEDNESDAY 18

 

Glenn Greenwald: Snowden, the NSA and the US Surveillance State

The Nourse Theatre, 275 Hayes, SF. (773) 583-7884 tinyurl.com/glengreenwald. 7-9pm, $6. Greenwald, who received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service along with his UK Guardian colleagues, will recount his Hong Kong meeting with Edward Snowden, discuss new information on the National Security Agency’s abuse of power and examine the bigger picture implications of the NSA’s surveillance. Greenwald will also be signing his new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, The Center for Economic Research and Social Change, Metropolitan Books, The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School and KPFA.

 

Film and Discussion: DamNation

The David Brower Center, 2150 Allston, Berk. (510) 809-0900 tinyurl.com/damfilm. 7pm, $10 advance, $12 at door. Award-winning film DamNation explores America’s pride in large dams and the ways that we rely on rivers. The film looks at the effects of dams on fish and landscapes, as well as the values that come along with dams. Guests include Matt Stoecker, DamNation Producer/Underwater Photographer, Jason Rainey, Executive Director of International Rivers, and Steve Rothert, California Regional Director of American Rivers.

THURSDAY 19

 

Labor in the Food System

120 Kearny No. 3100, SF. (510) 654-4400 tinyurl.com/foodsys. 6-8:45, free. This panel will explore all levels of food production, from farm to government, and will have speakers from the various levels. They will discuss wages, food distribution, food processing and more. The panel is put on by Food First, which aims to end hunger-inducing injustices. Speakers include James Cochran, Gail Wadsworth, Margaret Reeves and Paul Ramirez.

 

Do Good Lab’s International Development Trivia Night

Soda Popinski’s, 1548 California, SF. tinyurl.com/oslg7d5 6-9pm, $15 per individual or $60 per team. Trivia is fun, but doing it for a cause with five other friends is even better. On Thursday, Do Good Lab will hold its International Development Trivia Night in collaboration with FUNDAESPRO, a women’s empowerment organization based in Guatemala City. For $60—$10 per person—teams can compete to raise money for the organization, which provides childcare for working mothers and literacy education to women. Better yet, all tips to the bar (staffed by with special guest bartenders) will go toward FUNDAESPRO’s childcare and education centers.

American revolution: Smith Henderson talks ‘Fourth of July Creek’

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Smith Henderson is all smiles. His debut novel, Fourth of July Creek, has been receiving rave reviews since its release two weeks ago, has a 100,000 copy pressing from HarperCollins, and was recently called “the best book I’ve read so far this year” by Washington Post critic Ron Charles.

“I was not expecting the Ron Charles thing … that was amazing,” Henderson says, sipping his beer on the outdoor patio of Farley’s East in Oakland. (He’ll be reading from the book Tue/17 at San Francisco’s Book Passage.) While the degree of success that the book is receiving tickles Henderson, he doesn’t pretend to be shocked that people are enjoying his work. “When people tell me ‘I love your book,’ I’m happy, but not chagrined. I wrote the book toward my interests, so of course I like my book.” Henderson smokes a cigarette as he chuckles. 

His novel explores the plight of Pete Snow, a Montana social worker who discovers a feral boy, Benjamin, and his survivalist father Jeremiah Pearl. While dealing with the dissolution of his own family, several other cases, and a tumultuous romance, Snow uncovers Pearl’s revolutionary ideas and begins to question his own safety and that of his entire community, the rural town of Tenmile. Henderson’s intertwining plot confronts a plethora of contemporary societal ailments, including alcoholism, suspicion of government, child neglect, cultural polarization, and the gift and curse of religion. 

Much of our conversation concerned the intricate plot points that Henderson somehow manages to sew together seamlessly. Such a combination of topicality and technical flourish has led Charles and several other high-profile critics to throw around words like “Great American Novel,” meaning work consistent enough and broad enough in  political scope to say something profound and lasting about the nation. 

Henderson isn’t one to label his own work, but he doesn’t entirely laugh off the potential hyperbole either. “I think it’s tricky to use words like ‘Great American Novel’ because it’s set in Montana — it’s a very white state. There’s a lack of diversity that I think is necessary in talking about the whole country.” After a moment of rumination, however, he offers a partial refutation of his own point. “That being said, the novels that come to mind are pretty regional as well; Beloved is pretty focused on a single location and group.”

While Montana might not be the optimal mirror for America, it’s a place that Henderson knows quite well. A native son, he grew up in the state and went to college, like Pete Snow, in Missoula. (He now lives in Portland, Ore.) “My whole family are cowboys and loggers. My dad is still a logger,” he says proudly. “Montana is a weird place … there’s a libertarian streak that is pretty unique in how it manifests itself.” 

Henderson cites the 2004 election, in which Montana voted for George W. Bush, legalized medical marijuana, and constitutionally banned gay marriage all on the same ballot. The odd mix between “live free or die” and socially conservative practices in the state provided an ideal climate for the confrontation between Snow, a government employee with the Department of Family Services, and the fiercely anti-authority Pearl. The eventual escalation between the government and the community is easy to believe. 

“Things are always liable to get a bit wacky and out of control up there,” says Henderson. 

Yet Henderson, while by no means conservative or religious, isn’t trying to write a book about extreme zealots. “At first it’s possible to look at Pearl and think he’s completely insane. But a lot of his paranoia is not entirely unfounded.” 

Near the end of the book, Pearl uses an example of government agencies  replenishing the Montana wolf population as an example of how dangerous Federalism can become. “Pearl basically suggests, ‘You may think your wolves are pretty, but they are liable to eat me.’ That lack of practicality is real.” 

While Henderson set Fourth of July Creek in the early 1980s, he was inspired by the rhetoric going on in national politics today. “Arguments like those of Pearl’s are all over the place right now, and initially they may seem just as paranoid. But when you have unmitigated drone strikes and NSA surveillance it isn’t impossible to see where people are coming from.” 

He does, however, see the value of government intervention — Helena pays his ultimately heroic (or at least likeably anti-heroic) protagonist, after all. “On the other hand, you have health care, gay rights, the environment, all receiving meaningful support.”

Though informed and interested in the modern state of affairs, Henderson was very intentional in his chronological setting of the book. He leans forward and takes on a quieter, more intense tone as he talks about the era directly succeeding Carter’s economic and military failures. “1980 was an inflection point. Obviously Carter, while getting a lot right, struggled a ton in the implementation. And the backlash to that, coming in the form of the Reagan Revolution, has really defined modern society … We learned how to make wealth out of thin air — at least for some people.” 

Reagan’s election and the surrounding rhetoric takes center stage in the book. Judge Dyson, an aging and alcoholic Democrat, openly weeps as he watches the election results with Snow. “It was the death of the LBJ, rural-big-government Democrat. And that’s something I’m not sure we’ll ever get back.” 

In addition to highlighting the philosophical shifts that have led to the urbanization of liberal thought, Henderson also uses the relatively unorganized pre-digital bureaucracy as a major plot device. “There was no concept of secondary trauma in 1980 Montana. There was no social worker to help Pete deal with the horrific things that he sees on a daily basis.” 

The dearth of support systems fuel Snow’s drinking bouts, depression, and difficulty in handling his daughter’s disappearance and ex-wife’s instability; he may be a great social worker, but the state’s inability to track his emotional progress and casework eats away at his life.

A fascinating storyteller and political force, Henderson is also often  technically experimental. The portion of the book that details Snow’s daughter’s descent is done in the form of an anonymous question and answer. “When I write, I almost always write questions to myself: ‘Where is Pete Snow from?’ ‘Choteau.’ ‘Why Choteau?’ For the Rachel section, I just left it in that form.” 

But the section is far from unfinished. Henderson left the section as is because of the intensity of its content — in a pure third-person narrative it felt too stilted. “The voices are full of an anxiety and intensity that couldn’t be captured with the more impartial voice in the rest of the book.”

The frenetic 90 minutes that we spent discussing Fourth of July Creek further convinced me that the book cannot be distilled to one message, but is rather a varied rumination on insecurity, suspicion, and government. When I asked Henderson what he thinks the primary takeaway is, however, he was remarkably candid and quick in his response. He pointed me to the Thoreau quotation that opens the book: “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.” 

Henderson then highlighted a passage in which Snow is likened to a priest for how much he gives up to help dysfunctional families. “America in the ‘80s was losing trust for institutions, and continues to. Despite all of his flaws, Pete is worthy of our trust, and hopefully represents a powerful refutation of Thoreau’s instant suspicion for government or those who come to help us.”

Henderson’s creation, while transcending political ideology, powerfully shows the potential for altruism even in a country as broken as the US.

 

Smith Henderson

Tue/17, 12:30pm, free

Book Passage

1 Ferry Building, SF

www.bookpassage.com

Feinstein, Pelosi, and NSA/CIA spying

1

EDITORIAL

Two of the most powerful members of Congress — Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Nancy Pelosi — are from San Francisco. They’ve each spent much of their long tenures in Congress serving on the Intelligence Committees in their respective houses, overseeing the increasingly overreaching surveillance state. And they’re now in positions to do something significant to rein in the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency, if they can move from statements of outrage to actions of courage.

Feinstein is at the center of the latest national security controversy, criticizing the CIA for spying on her Senate Intelligence Committee staffers as they researched legislation to expose and rein in the CIA’s interrogation and torture policies. Apparently, Feinstein doesn’t like being subjected to the same kind of blanket NSA surveillance that she’s been defending, so perhaps this is a welcome lesson for her.

Pelosi was also in a key oversight position when this illegal wiretapping by the federal government began under then-President George W. Bush, something we and others called her out for at the time (see “Pelosi knew about warrantless spying,” 1/25/06).

Pelosi’s defense then was “I objected in writing” when she was briefed on the federal government’s overreaching surveillance operation, something that falls far short of what we would expect from someone who regularly get vilified by conservatives as epitomizing San Francisco’s liberal values.

Now is the time for San Francisco’s most powerful congressional representatives to represent our values, and those of the rest of civilized world that has condemned US surveillance programs that violate international law and cultivate backdoors and other weaknesses in this country’s critical cybersecurity infrastructure.

Feinstein should introduce bipartisan legislation, possibly co-sponsored with Sen. Rand Paul, a libertarian Republican who also has expressed concerns about the security state, to repeal the USA Patriot Act, the post-9/11 bill that gave vague license to many of the current excesses.

Pelosi and Feinstein should also pressure President Barack Obama to accept all or most of the 46 important reforms recommended by his commission on government surveillance, even if starts a fight that costs party unity in the short term.

“In our view, the current storage by the government of bulk metadata creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty,” the commission wrote in its report to Obama, which was released in mid-December.

Obama has already expressed concerns about the Democratic Party losing ground in this year’s mid-term election because of apathy among Democratic voters, but a bold break from the imperial presidency of the Bush era could be exactly what the party needs to fire up the base.

Yet more important than such political considerations, it’s simply the right thing to do, and something that Feinstein, Pelosi, and the Bay Area’s other congressional representatives should be vigorously pushing.

Alerts: March 12 – 18, 2014

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WEDNESDAY 12

San Francisco Neighborhoods on the Brink Bird and Beckett Books and Records, 653 Chenery, SF. www.birdbeckett.com. 7pm, free. A panel discussion on displacement, gentrification, rising rents, and the loss of affordable housing. Join us to discuss the dilemma facing longtime residents and renters of modest means — and the gutting and gentrification of San Francisco — as real-estate speculation and a quickly widening income gap drive rents to dizzying heights while the rental supply dwindles. Ellis Act evictions are buffeting many of our neighbors, and the lack of affordable housing affects us all.

 

THURSDAY 13

 

Screening: Terms and Conditions May Apply Unitarian Universalists Hall, 1924 Cedar, Berk. www.bfuu.org. 7pm, $5-10 donation, no one turned away for lack of funds. Have you ever read the “Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policies” connected to every website you visit, phone call you make, or app you use? Of course you haven’t. But those agreements allow corporations to do things with your personal information you could never even imagine. What are you really agreeing to when you click “I accept”? Find out in this disquieting exposé.

 

FRIDAY 14

 

Visual Activism Symposium Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St., SF. www.sfmoma.com/events. 9am-7pm, free with pre-registration. Join us for a symposium exploring the relationship between visual culture and activist practices. Art can take the form of political and social activism, and activism often takes on specific, and sometimes surprising, visual forms. How is our broader visual culture shaped by activist practices that circulate in public space? Scholars, artists, and activists address these and related questions in a series of presentations, performances, workshops, and interactive projects.

SATURDAY 15  

International Day Against Police Brutality Arroyo Park, 7701 Krause, Oak. www.march15oak.noblogs.org. 12pm, free. March 15th has been designated as International Day Against Police Brutality since 1997, as an initiative by radical groups in Montréal and Sweden. Police brutality is nothing new to Oakland, and for the second year in a row we will observe the International Day Against Police Brutality with a demonstration beginning at Arroyo Park in east Oakland. A rally will start at noon, followed by a march starting at 1pm.

SUNDAY 16

Anonymous Internet Communication Niebyl Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph, Oak. cuyleruyle@mac.com. 10:30am-12:30pm, free. It’s no secret that the NSA was and is secretly spying on people here at home and around the globe. The justification given for this activity is that it can prevent terrorism and crime. While we wait for Congress or the courts to do something, we can right now actively protect our individual privacy, using freely available technical tools and best practices. Keith Davis will discuss the motivations for Internet Anonymity and the different levels of privacy that can be obtained. He also will provide caveats and warnings associated with the use of privacy tools and practices.

Google Glass Explorer opens up on bar fight, privacy

Last week, I interviewed a Google Glass “Explorer” for an article about Glass and privacy. It wasn’t Sarah Slocum.

“Explorer” is a Google term for people enrolled in a program to beta-test Glass, a wearable computer that can surf the Internet, livestream, geo-locate, and record through a computerized prism affixed to a set of eyeglasses.

There are at least 10,000 Explorers currently giving the $1,500 prototypes a test run, and more than 27,000 participating in a Google+ community about it. The Silicon Valley tech giant views its Explorers as inhabiting a “living laboratory,” and is actively seeking feedback on the gadgets’ use and functionality.

The Explorer I spoke with is Matt Hunt, and his recent removal from Oakland bar Telegraph for wearing Glass is chronicled in detail in this Medium story by journalist Susie Cagle. The writer discloses that her partner, Billy Agan, told Hunt to remove the Glass before he was kicked out.

Not yet available for retail, Glass has proven to be a lightning rod – particularly in bars, where people are more apt to feel that it is invasive. Some bar owners are concluding that the best approach is to ban Glass altogether, to avoid headaches. 

Unlike most new technology, this particular device has quickly come to be associated with class tension in the Bay Area, a region that is being radically altered by an economic shift fueled by an influx of tech workers. Glass has also caused people to fear surreptitious surveillance in an era when new revelations about secretive government spying programs are surfacing with every passing week. 

There are conflicting accounts of what unfolded when Hunt was booted from Telegraph after his confrontation with Agan. Hunt says he refused to remove the Glass because he didn’t think Agan had the authority to tell him to stop wearing it; bar owner John Mardikian says Hunt responded by defaming the bar on social media, which Hunt refutes (Hunt had previously been helping Mardikian with social media and IT work). Agan wasn’t available for comment. All told, the conflict appears to have produced two major outcomes: hurt feelings all around, and a ban on Glass at Telegraph.

“I don’t want it here, because it’s anti-community,” said Mardikian, who imposed the ban. “I want people to feel comfortable when they are here.”

Other bars have proactively banned glass too.

Conflict aside, Hunt did share a perspective on wearing Glass that might interest anyone who has wondered about it – whether from a standpoint of curiosity or suspicion. Because while some people are viscerally repelled by the gadget and may assume that it is recording (it might be, but you can tell by checking to see if the user’s eye is lit up), there’s also a low level of understanding about what the thing actually does.

Hunt told us he was excited about Glass before it came out, and saved up the $1,500 required to get it. “I’ve always been a techie,” he said. “I’m always about smart everything.” 

To wear Glass is to be an attention a magnet, he said. “There are some people who approach me about it who are very calm, and they are curious, and they ask me about it.”

But as evidenced by the drama that unfolded at Telegraph, wearing Glass can stir up trouble when people feel that their personal boundaries are being violated. “Something I hear all the time is, there’s a camera on your face, and therefore it’s in my face.” But he said that since he rarely ever uses the camera, that fear is unfounded – at least as it pertains to people who are encountering him wearing Glass.

Constant recording and even live streaming through Glass is technically possible. It’s also problematic with the current model, due to battery drain.

“If you were out and about, it would have to be tethered to your phone’s Internet connection,” he explained. “It uses a lot of data.” When content is captured through Glass, it is automatically backed up to the cloud, meaning it’s copied onto a server somewhere. That means people who are photographed can’t control what happens to their image, but it doesn’t mean it will be viewed publically or by anyone at all.

So, if he’s not constantly recording, what is Hunt doing when he’s looking at that little computerized prism?

As with a smartphone, he’ll read the news, and check email. There are other functions. “You can have things translated,” he said, like a menu or sign in a foreign language. “Based on your location, it will tell you what’s around you,” such as attractions. But a lot of times it just sits on his face, not doing anything in particular. “Just because you’re wearing it, doesn’t mean you’re using it.”

People who wear Glass can also take advantage of some bizarre “Glassware” apps, like this one, which can feed users hints on people they are encountering in real time.

Taking a picture with Glass involves either tapping the side of the device, or speaking “take a picture” out loud, Hunt explained. There is also an optional feature of winking to take a snapshot.

That may sound like a smooth spy maneuver, but Hunt said it’s actually rather awkward. “I don’t like it,” he said, “because you have to wink like ten times to make it work. It’s very dramatic winking.” Wearing a computer on your face and winking dramatically? Talk about socially awkward.

As for the privacy issue, Hunt said he thought bar owners had a right to ban Glass but believed it was short-sighted, because he thinks Glass will catch on. “Wearable technology is the technology of the future,” he told us with confidence. “What will you do when everyone is wearing it?”

And ironically given what happened at Telegraph, Hunt insisted during our phone interview that Glass users should not wear the device in places where it causes others to feel uncomfortable.

“I want privacy as much as you do,” he said. “And I feel terrible sometimes that people think the NSA is watching them through my eyes.”

Yesterday, today, and Tomorrow

5

cheryl@sfbg.com

VISUAL ART Tom Tomorrow’s real name is Dan Perkins. This is important information if you ever happen to call him up, because you will have to squelch the urge to blurt out “Hi, Tom!” when he answers the phone.

“It happens! That’s what I get for coming up with a pen name,” the editorial cartoonist laughs from his home in Connecticut. “When I was starting out, I was in San Francisco running in a little anti-corporate ‘zine called Processed World. A lot of the contributors used pen names, because there was always a sense that you might get blacklisted or boycotted or something if you were associated with it. So I started using this pen name, which was a misremembered version of an old cartoon character. I didn’t quite realize that I was going to have this 25-year career, and would be stuck with this thing!”

He chuckles before adding, “I would also say, even more than the anonymity in the early days, I thought it would be a mnemonic [device]. The cartoon was called This Modern World. It wasn’t about politics so much in those days, it was riffing on technology and consumerism, and ‘Tom Tomorrow’ seemed appropriate to this kind of retro-futurist thing I was doing.”

Longtime Guardian readers need no introduction to Perkins’ work. This Modern World — which satirizes current events with wry humor and laser-sharp intelligence — has appeared weekly in these pages for nearly 20 years; it’s also syndicated in other papers across America. In addition, he’s authored a children’s book and several cartoon anthologies, including 2012’s The World of Tomorrow, which features an introduction by rocker Eddie Vedder (Perkins drew the album art for Pearl Jam’s 2009 Backspacer, which elevated him to a level of fame he never expected: “There are people who have tattooed [my art] on their flesh!”) Last year, he added the prestigious Herblock Prize to his list of cartooning and journalistic accolades. Though he’s East Coast-based these days, he’ll be heading to California next week for events at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco and the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa.

Long before he made his name with This Modern World, Perkins says he was “always drawing little comics and cartoons, as far back as I can remember. I’ve been putting together a new PowerPoint show for this Cartoon Art Museum event, and I’ve actually dug up some of these old cartoons. I have this political cartoon that I drew at the age of 14! It’s terrible [laughs], but it’s kind of funny to show it. It’s about Jimmy Carter! Because when I was 14, Jimmy Carter had just given an interview to Playboy magazine, and was being widely mocked for saying that he had lusted after women in his heart. So here I am at 14, drawing a cartoon about that, which is very funny to me in retrospect.”

As he got older (“like every young cartoonist in the 1980s, I went through a phase of trying to do a Gary Larson rip-off, because The Far Side was at the height of its popularity”), he began combining collage with cartooning “in order to riff on advertising culture and technology and so on,” before circling back to politics.

“I’m just doing this one cartoon — it’s not a comprehensive news source — so each week has to be some mixture of something I’m really interested in; something that maybe, hopefully has a news hook; and something that I have something interesting to say about,” he says. “Something that I can be funny about. It may not always show, but I really don’t want to waste the reader’s time.”

Though he admits George W. Bush was an easier politician to make fun of, the Obama administration has also supplied him with plenty of material. “I have a recurring character named ‘Droney’ — the friendly surveillance drone. I do a lot of stuff on the NSA, and the fact that Guantanamo has not been closed, and so on.”

A veteran of the alt-weekly publishing world, Perkins has a unique perspective on how the industry has changed over the years. “I think the short answer is, alt-weekly cartoonists — and there’s maybe a dozen of us working right now — are truly an endangered species. We came into a certain ecosystem and set our own rhythms around that ecosystem,” he says. “Obviously, between the financial crash in 2008, and the ongoing influence of the Internet, that’s been a more tenuous ground. I’m profoundly grateful to the papers that still run cartoons like mine, but it’s an era of entropy. We’re all kind of just hanging on. I’m not the only content creator ever to point out the fact that it’s tricky to figure out how to make a living online. It’s ironic, because [thanks to the Internet], my reach as a cartoonist has never been greater.” (His semi-joking advice to young cartoonists: “Marry someone with tenure.”)

For his Cartoon Art Museum gig, he’ll be sharing the spotlight with a special guest: one of San Francisco’s famed Doggie Diner heads. “To me, the Doggie Diner heads represent my San Francisco. They represent the San Francisco of artists and pranksters. I have a real affection for them. Sometimes, when I have a dream sequence and I need to convey something strange and surreal, I’ll have a Doggie Diner head say a few words, floating in the background.” *

THE WORLD OF TOMORROW: AN EVENING WITH TOM TOMORROW

Tue/11, 7-9pm, $5

Cartoon Art Museum

655 Mission, SF

www.cartoonart.org

March 15, 2pm, free with admission ($5-$10)

Charles M. Schulz Museum

2301 Hardies, Santa Rosa

www.schulzmuseum.org

www.thismodernworld.com

 

Alerts: February 26 – March 4, 2014

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WEDNESDAY 26

Hoodies Up! A Day of Remembrance for Trayvon Martin Fruitvale BART Plaza, Oakl. www.stopmassincarceration.net. 4pm, free. On the two-year anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s death, join others in sending a message that we will not stand by in silence while youth of color are brutalized, locked up, and murdered. Now is the time for youth, professors and students, artists and writers, athletes, musicians and prominent voices of conscience to rise up in spirited resistance with the clear objective of stopping mass incarceration, criminalization, and the murder of our youth. Wear your hoodie and join the rally to commemorate Trayvon and the many others like him.

 

Protest the NSA Four Seasons Hotel, 757 Market, SF. codepink.nancy@gmail.com. 6:30-7:30pm, free. National Security Agency Deputy Director Chris Inglis stepped down from his post last month, but he continues to defend the work of the NSA and criticizes the important documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Documents leaked by Snowden show that the NSA created a formula for generating random numbers to create a “back door” in encryption products. RSA became a distributor of that formula by putting it into a software tool called Bsafe that is used on personal computers and other products. Inglis will be in San Francisco to attend the RSA Conference.

 

THURSDAY 27

 

Keep the Warriors off the Waterfront Unitarian Universalist Center, 1187 Franklin, SF. sanfranpda@aol.com. 7pm, free. Former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos will be speaking against the proposed building by the Golden State Warriors which will include a 12-story basketball and entertainment complex, a 175 feet high residential tower, a hotel, a 500 space private parking garage, and a 90,000 feet shopping mall on the waterfront and on the Bay itself. Is this what we want for San Francisco’s future? Come hear Agnos challenge the corporate vision of our city.

 

FRIDAY 28

The Congo in Crisis 2969 Mission, SF. www.answercoalition.org/sf. 7pm, $5-10 suggested donation (no one turned away for lack of funds).More than 5 million people have been killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) over the past 15 years. Why is this history rarely reported in the corporate media here? What is the role of the U.S. government and its allies in this ongoing crisis in the Congo and the region? Come listen to speakers Maurice Carney and Akbar Muhammad discuss this little known tragedy.

 

SATURDAY 1

March Against Corruption: San Francisco Justin Herman Plaza, Market and The Embarcadero, SF. tinyurl.com/marchcorruption. 12pm, free. The March Against Corruption is an international campaign to raise awareness about the corrupting influence of money in politics, to organize the public to speak out against and resist the power of special interests, and to work toward abolishing the corrupt relationship between private wealth and public policy. We welcome all individuals and groups to participate in this nonviolent struggle to create the mass movement we need to end the corruption of our corporate plutocratic state.

Spooked

0

rebecca@sfbg.com

The world’s largest computer security conference, RSA, got underway in the Moscone Convention Center on Feb. 24. It’s a huge deal: Speakers will include former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and closing remarks will be given by comedian Stephen Colbert.

Started in 1991, the RSA Conference has grown exponentially. But this year, 13 digital security experts have canceled their scheduled talks in protest of recent revelations that RSA cooperated with the National Security Agency to use a flawed tool for safeguarding sensitive information.

Speakers who are boycotting include technology experts from Google and various security firms. They’re concerned about allegations that RSA, a pioneer in the security software industry, agreed to incorporate a flawed encryption formula into a widely used security product in accordance with a secret $10 million NSA contract.

“In my opinion, RSA has a serious trust issue,” said Jeffrey Carr, CEO of a security firm called Taia Global Inc. and one of the speakers who has decided to cancel his talk and boycott the conference. “I think they’ll just let it die down. There’s been little uproar, even among the security people,” he added.

Carr authored a blog post explaining his decision. He also organized a “town hall” debate, part of an event series called Suits and Spooks, to be held at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco on Feb. 27, featuring commentary from security industry representatives as well as insiders from the national intelligence community.

RSA used the encryption algorithm as a default for its security products, meaning users would have had to actively switch to a different formula to avoid exposure to the security threat.

According to a Reuters article published in December, the NSA arranged the contract as part of a campaign to embed breakable encryption software into security products that are widely used to safeguard personal devices.

Previous reporting by The New York Times, based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, showed that the NSA had generated the weak encryption formula to create a “backdoor.”

EMC, the parent company that owns RSA, issued a response in December that didn’t specifically address the allegations. The company stated that in 2004, when it agreed to use the algorithm, “the NSA had a trusted role in the community-wide effort to strengthen, not weaken, encryption.”

But Carr said researchers within the security industry had suggested the algorithm might be flawed as early as 2006, and RSA did not abandon its use until after the Snowden leaks were publicized.

Other speakers who are boycotting have issued statements publicly condemning RSA. “Your company has issued a statement on the topic, but you have not denied this particular claim. Eventually, NSA’s random number generator was found to be flawed on purpose, in effect creating a back door. You had kept on using the generator for years despite widespread speculation that NSA had backdoored it,” wrote chief researcher Mikko Hypponen of the Finnish company F-Secure.

“As my reaction to this, I’m canceling my talk at the RSA Conference USA 2014 in San Francisco in February 2014,” Hypponen went on. “Aptly enough, the talk I won’t be delivering at RSA 2014 was titled ‘Governments as Malware Authors.'”

Meanwhile, Colbert is also taking some heat for agreeing to speak at the RSA conference.

“We know you, Stephen, and we know you love a good ‘backdoor’ joke as much as we do — but this kind of backdoor is no laughing matter,” activists from Fight for the Future wrote in a petition urging him to join the other speakers who are boycotting the RSA conference. “Companies need to know that they can’t betray our trust without repercussions. We want to hear your speech, but give it somewhere else!”

Speakers boycotting security conference to protest collaboration with NSA

On Feb. 24, the world’s largest computer security conference, RSA, will commence at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. It’s a huge deal: Speakers will include Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and closing remarks will be given by comedian Stephen Colbert.

Started in 1991, the RSA Conference has grown exponentially. But this year, 13 digital security experts have canceled their scheduled talks in protest of recent revelations that RSA cooperated with the National Security Agency to use a flawed tool for safeguarding sensitive information.

Speakers who are boycotting include technology experts from Google and various security firms. They’re concerned about allegations that RSA, a pioneer in the security software industry, agreed to incorporate a flawed encryption formula into a widely used security product in accordance with a secret $10 million NSA contract. 

“In my opinion, RSA has a serious trust issue,” said Jeffrey Carr, CEO of a security firm called Taia Global Inc. and one of the speakers who has decided to cancel his talk and boycott the conference. “I think they’ll just let it die down. There’s been little uproar, even among the security people,” he added.

Carr authored a blog post explaining his decision. He also organized a “town hall” debate, part of an event series called Suits and Spooks, to be held at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco on Feb. 27 featuring commentary from security industry representatives as well as insiders from the national intelligence community.

RSA used the encryption algorithm as a default for its security products, meaning users would have had to actively switch to a different formula to avoid exposure to the security threat.

According to a Reuters article published in December, the NSA arranged the contract as part of a campaign to embed breakable encryption software into security products that are widely used to safeguard personal devices.

Previous reporting by the New York Times, based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, showed that the NSA had generated the weak encryption formula to create a “backdoor.”

EMC, the parent company that owns RSA, issued a response in December that didn’t specifically address the allegations. The company stated that in 2004, when it agreed to use the algorithm, “the NSA had a trusted role in the community-wide effort to strengthen, not weaken, encryption.”

But Carr said researchers within the security industry had suggested the algorithm might be flawed as early as 2006, and RSA did not abandon its use until after the Snowden leaks were publicized. 

Other speakers who are boycotting have issued statements publicly condemning RSA.

“Your company has issued a statement on the topic, but you have not denied this particular claim. Eventually, NSA’s random number generator was found to be flawed on purpose, in effect creating a back door. You had kept on using the generator for years despite widespread speculation that NSA had backdoored it,” wrote chief researcher Mikko Hypponen of the Finnish company F-Secure.

“As my reaction to this, I’m cancelling my talk at the RSA Conference USA 2014 in San Francisco in February 2014,” Hypponen went on. “Aptly enough, the talk I won’t be delivering at RSA 2014 was titled ‘Governments as Malware Authors.'”

Meanwhile, Colbert is also taking some heat for agreeing to speak at the RSA conference.

“We know you, Stephen, and we know you love a good ‘backdoor’ joke as much as we do—but this kind of backdoor is no laughing matter,” activists from Fight for the Future wrote in a petition urging him to join the other speakers who are boycotting the RSA conference. “Companies need to know that they can’t betray our trust without repercussions. We want to hear your speech, but give it somewhere else!”

Did Feinstein see a drone?

6

For years now, Bay Area organizers with the antiwar group Code Pink have been staging protests outside the Pacific Heights residence of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Code Pink director Medea Benjamin has led delegations to Pakistan and Yemen in the past to protest US drone strikes, and San Francisco activists have frequently appeared outside the senator’s home to sound off against the US military’s use of drones.

But more recently, Code Pink activists have paid visits to Feinstein to let her know what they think of her comments condemning the actions of whistleblower Edward Snowden.

“We at Code Pink think Edward Snowden did a great service to this country,” by leaking secret National Security Agency documents detailing the intelligence agency’s dragnet surveillance program, said organizer Nancy Mancias.

So on June 15, 2013, “We flew a couple toy helicopters outside her home” as part of an anti-surveillance protest. It was an “Austin Powers” themed protest, she added, “playing spy-type music.”

But a couple months ago, Feinstein mentioned during a hearing about drones that she’d actually seen a drone peeking outside her window at her San Francisco home. She said it crashed shortly after she detected it.

But that left activists and others wondering about Feinstein’s account, since Mancias says the remote controlled device they sent up to fly around Feinstein’s mansion was not a drone, but rather a pink helicopter, “like a toy you pick up at Toys-R-Us.”

The Code Pink activists captured video of the event, she added, and sent it to the television program 60 Minutes. “Hopefully, they’ll air it when they interview Dianne Feinstein.”

Another wrinkle in Feinstein’s story is that “she said she was home when this demonstration was happening,” Mancias said. “But we were knocking on the door, ringing the doorbell.”

Believe it or not, Feinstein has actually responded to this sort of activity in the past by coming to the door and engaging with the concerned, pink-clad citizens.

“She’s a very old school politician,” Mancias said by way of explanation. “She’s very approachable. On that day she didn’t come outside, and if she was home, we would have loved to have a discussion with her about Edward Snowden.”

So was Feinstein’s account of spotting a surveillance drone rooted in nothing more than noticing a pink kid’s toy zip past her window during a routine Code Pink protest?

Nobody knows for sure but nevertheless, Code Pink activists feel vindicated. “I can say that we actually achieved our goal,” Mancias said. That’s because more recently, Feinstein has softened her stance somewhat and admitted that “we need to look into” the domestic surveillance program.

But that perception of a small victory doesn’t mean they aren’t going back. On Tuesday, Feb. 11, Code Pink plans to return to Feinstein’s Pac Heights mansion for yet another protest, this time to coincide with a national day of action being planned in opposition to NSA spying.

Called “The Day We Fight Back,” the Feb. 11 action day will consist of website owners installing banners to encourage their visitors to challenge online spying, and employees of tech companies calling on their organizations to do the same.

“We’re asking people to bring surveillance equipment, drones, and magnifying glasses,” to Feinstein’s house, Mancias said, presumably talking about props and not real surveillance equipment (does Google Glass count?). “We’ll just play some music,” she added, “and have a fabulous time.”

‘The Bachelor’ (episode 4, what better time to start?) recap: APOLOGY PLZ

1

Forgive the late (mid-season) arrival, some copy got lost in translation. And if you buy that, Juan Pablo’s public image has a shot.

So last week, amid all the real news (Chris Christie things, GOP things, Obama-NSA things, Sochi things) and amid all the Bieber news (eggs, DUI’s, Jeremy Bieber’s existence, shiny shorts, smiling mugshots) there was a bad piece of Bachelor news. 

Juan Pablo, the current Bachelor, decided to share his feelings on a matter he was totally unqualified to address, he did so in a socially tone-deaf manner and is now dealing with that fallout. 

But because The Bachelor was filmed awhile ago, we got to travel back to the vacuum that was Episode 4, and Episode 4 was filmed before this question undoubtedly (and justly) ruined Juan Pablo in front of cameras for forever. If you’re still reading, you know the deets, but before we go for some fish pedicures, let’s dive into the events in a totally chronological fashion:

It opens with Juan Pablo wishing his daughter goodbye, which a week ago would’ve been super-sweet or whatever. Not this week, JP! Meanwhile, Chris Harrison shows up to the girls’ house and lets the girls know that they’re going to South Korea. 

Clare, who’s a hairstylist from Sacramento, cries because no one else is crying. She then let’s the viewers know that she’s never been anywhere before. Anywhere. It turns out that Clare doesn’t count Sacramento as a place. Shots fired, Clare, shots fired.

Juan Pablo starts the South Korean expedition with a group date. The date’s clue: Pop! Onomatopoetic, JP, onomatopoetic. Also, very vague. But details emerge. Those details? Again, murky. 

The girls ride to the date in a van. They talk about how awesome South Korea is. Chelsie, the Science Educator, displays a poor knowledge of how to wear seat belts by wearing it below her chest, and no one else seems to make this mistake. The girls meet Juan Pablo outside a giant building, which, he so kindly informs us, is a K-Pop recording studio. Juan Pablo tells the girls that, “All the K-Pop is made here.” Hear that girls? ALL OF IT.

The girls go inside to meet… 2NE1! 

2NE1? 

2NE1!

2NE1, we are told, is the biggest K-Pop group in all of South Korea. They’re like the “Spice Girls of South Korea,” Juan Pablo says. Maybe Juan Pablo, but the Spice Girls without Scary, Baby, Ginger, or Posh, soooo…

The girls get their date task from what appears to be the front woman of the uber-famous band, 2NE1. How do we know that she is the front woman? We don’t, but she certainly is assertive. The task she assigns them is dancing. 

Nikki, the pediatric nurse from Missouri, hates dancing. But Kat, the medical sales rep from Scottsdale, loves it. Kat loves everything, it would seem, but she especially loves dancing. And she is incredible at it, she doesn’t mind telling us. “I was made for this,” she says. 

(For whatever reason, Cassandra, the NBA Dancer, is neither offended by this comment nor is she interviewed. She is either the most boring person ever or the producers are as confused about the girls’ identities as Juan Pablo is.)

Back to the dancing. Nikki is really bad. Kat announces once again that she’s really good. Because this is a newspaper blog, that claim was investigated. The findings? Inconclusive. When the camera shows Kat dancing, only Kat is shown dancing. So, in regards to its validity, the statement is difficult to assess.

2NE1, a group that, in case you forgot, is really famous in South Korea, teaches them dance steps, then leaves the room. The girls learn these dance steps. 2NE1, a really famous K-Pop group (they really drove this point home, so I feel I should too), comes back into the dance studio with big news: The girls will be backup dancers at their show that may or may not take place in a few hours. 

Nikki is pissed. She hates dancing, after all. Kat, on the other hand, besides possessing a generally unpleasant demeanor, is thrilled. 

Kat decides that the crowd is here to see her. Again, no mention of Cassandra’s profession. 

*Pause.* BACKUP DANCING IS HER PROFESSION, ABC, HER PROFESSION. IT WOULD BE LIKE JUAN PABLO GOING TO A SOCCER FIELD ON THE BACHELORETTE (WHICH HE DID) AND FAILING TO MENTION THAT HE USED TO DO THAT FOR MONEY (WHICH THEY DIDN’T. PS: SORRY FOR THE DOUBLE NEGATIVES AND FOR THE CAPSLOCK). *Play.*

Back to the show. The girls perform inside a mall, which means only one thing: South Korea has very few limitations when it comes to choosing concert venues. 

After the date, the girls do the awkward group dinner date thing, and Nikki ends up with a rose, much to the chagrin of the rest of the girls. They think she’s a downer — which she totally is — and they don’t understand why she got the rose. This, for those wondering, is standard practice on The Bachelor.

Meanwhile, at Bachelor Mansion: South Korea, Sharleen gets the one-on-one date card, and proceeds to look unenthused. The date is thankfully not one that involves a private concert featuring a marginally known country-pop star singing to an audience of two. Those are the worst.

Instead, JP asks Sharleen to sing on their date. Sharleen does not, however, ask JP to perform his profession afterwards, which is a good thing. We know plenty about Juan Pablo, but we have no idea what he does to make money in real life. He is listed as a “Sports Consultant” on the Bachelor website, which is only slightly more specific than the title of “Government Person.” 

Anyways, back to the date. JP and Sharleen kiss. It’s way less awkward than their Episode 3 kiss and far more private. They stop kissing and start talking, which means an awkward transition from one of Juan Pablo’s strengths to one of his weaknesses. He wants kids, she doesn’t. Doesn’t seem to faze either one. Cross that bridge when we get there, I suppose.

A bridge Sharleen doesn’t need to worry about crossing? The Rose Ceremony Bridge, which doesn’t really exist, but whatever. Why? She got a rose, because she always gets a rose. Juan Pablo thinks she has “mundo,” like Atlas, or something. 

Moving on. The rest of the girls get the clue for their group date. They are going to be eating street-food and exploring Seoul, Seoul style. On their date, we learn that Clare is petrified of eating octopus. Andi, the lawyer, reminds us that octopus is widely available outside South Korea, and its presence shouldn’t alarm anyone. Kelly, the Dog Lover from Atlanta (real title), makes a fellatio joke, which is funny, but in a you-had-to-be-there kind of way. And, to be clear, it was a you-had-to-be-there-while-we-were-filming-in-South-Korea kind of way. 

After the tasting fiasco, the group goes to an establishment offering fish pedicures. For the uninitiated out there, a fish pedicure is when you stick your feet in a plastic tub filled with fish that snack on your dead foot-flesh. It looked about as comfortable as it sounds. Post-fish feeding, JP takes the girls to sing karaoke, because all Juan Pablo likes to do is sing and dance, we’re learning.

After the Octopus-Fishicure-Karaoke date, the girls get their alone time with Juan Pablo. 

But there’s a M. Night twist coming at the girls: Juan Pablo won’t kiss any of them on this Seoul-ful evening. His reasoning? He has a daughter, who he doesn’t want to set a bad example for. At this time, it’s important to note that this fact has neither stopped him from making out with “six” other girls since this thing has started, nor does it explain his motives for coming onto the show in the first place. 

(And after host Chris Harrison‘s “27 Girls” shenanigans and JP’s secret pact with himself, the only fitting ending to this season of The Bachelor would be an “After the Rose” revelation that Harrison has, in fact, been dead this whole time and we, America, are now all blessed with the gift/curse of Young (aka Best) Haley Joel Osment. I can see no other alternative, regardless of what Reality Steve says.)

But I digress… Andi gets time with Juan Pablo. She wants a kiss, but JP’s made that personal pact. Impasse, folks, impasse. What does Andi do? Busts ol’ JP’s balls for being both a bad dancer and a dude who is more clearly a dancer than he is a professional. In any field. That second part was made up, but she was thinking it. She was totally thinking it. JP likes the ball-busting, though, and seems smitten. Still no kiss for Andi, though. 

Then Lauren, the accomplished pianist, gets her one-on-one time, and she is worried about the connection between her and the Venezuelan dancing machine. Juan Pablo reassures her that everything is fine, but he refuses to kiss her when she directly propositions him for such, because of his whole sabbatical from kissing thing. Weird rationale, Juan Pablo, weird rationale. 

Anyway, she’s visibly crushed, and he then goes on to explain to the poor girl that even sans kiss he is still super into her and that he really wants to get to know her more, which is sort of like the Bachelor equivalent of George telling Lenny how awesome their farm is going to be. Message to Lauren: You’re an accomplished pianist, you’ll be fine. You don’t want to live in Miami. You’re not named Pitbull. Back to the action! 

After the JP-Lauren awk-fest, Clare, the hairstylist from Sacramento who has already cried this episode, gets more screen time, which we can file in the Non-Octopus Related folder. Clare is a piece of work, behavior-wise, but Juan Pablo is absolutely unabashed about how “hot” he thinks she is. Juan Pablo calls himself helpless. They kiss. Juan Pablo apparently forgets he has a daughter whom he may or may not be disappointing. 

After the kiss, he awards Andi with the date rose. Yes, Andi. To recap (within the recap): He’s admittedly helpless around Clare, won’t kiss Andi, Lauren or anyone else on the second group date, but he then awarded the date rose to someone other than Clare. Makes total sense.

Following a necessary commercial break, the Episode 4 Rose Ceremony gets underway. The three girls who already got roses — Sharleen, Nikki and Andi — agree to let the other girls have the precious one-on-one time with JP, because they already got their roses. Who says the Bachelor is all about girl-on-girl crime? 

Whoever it was is totally right. Nikki, who is potentially the human manifestation of a rain cloud, decided that she didn’t agree to this rule and that she wanted her one-on-one time with JP regardless of rose acquiescence. She interrupts Clare, who was in the process of talking smack on Nikki. (The timing on this show makes NASA look like amateurs, BTW.) Nikki, oblivious to the smack talk, asks for time. Clare is displeased. Juan Pablo asks Nikki awkward questions about her relationship with the rest of the girls in the house. Nikki throws Clare under the bus. It all happens very fast.

After Girl, Interrupted: Bachelor concludes, Nikki seeks out Kelly for moral support-venting camaraderie. Some righteous talk is dropped regarding Clare, neither of them like her attitude, but… But!!! BUTTTT… Clare emerges from around a corner and walks up to the clandestine-ish meeting. Kelly changes the subject remarkably well. She should consider changing her profession from Dog Lover to Subject Switcher. 

BUT! Kelly can’t handle the awkwardness and spills the beans that she and Nikki were talking about Clare. Sort of. Again, this season is vague. Clare and Nikki talk about barely anything, and then the Rose Ceremony begins (Note: The events might not have proceeded that quickly, but this is a two-hour show, folks. Latitude is requested.)

The roses, in order, go to Renee, Chelsie, Kelly, Danielle, Cassandra, Alli, Clare and Kat, the Dancing Queen. Lauren was predictably sent packing, and so was Elise, a girl whose existance I was unaware of until she didn’t get a rose. It’s down to 11. Here’s to hoping Juan Pablo gets interviewed some more this week. 

Episode Grade: B.* 

*Justification for Episode Grade: None. But, to be more specific, only an episode featuring either, a) real violence, b) real, deserved tears, c) an ambulance or d) a hot tub/paddle boat combo can earn an A from this particular grader.

Solomon: The CIA, Amazon, Bezo, and the Washington Post: An exchange with Executive Editor Martin Baron

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By Norman Solomon 

(B3 note: This exchange between Norman Solomon and the Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron followed a Solomon column that dramatized the ethical issues involving the Post and its new owner Jeff Bezos, founder and CE0 of  Amazon. Solomon noted that Amazon has landed a $600 million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency.  He wrote that “news media should illuminate conflicts of interest, not embody them” and that Bezo is now doing “big business” with the CIA “while readers of the newspaper’s  CIA coverage are left in the dark.”) 

 
To: Martin Baron, Executive Editor, and Kevin Merida, Managing Editor, The Washington Post
 
Dear Mr. Baron and Mr. Merida:

On behalf of more than 25,000 signers of a petition to The Washington Post, I’m writing this letter to request a brief meeting to present the petition at a time that would be convenient for you on Jan. 14 or 15.


Here is the text of the petition, launched by RootsAction.org:

“A basic principle of journalism is to acknowledge when the owner of a media outlet has a major financial relationship with the subject of coverage. We strongly urge the Washington Post to be fully candid with its readers about the fact that the newspaper’s new owner, Jeff Bezos, is the founder and CEO of Amazon which recently landed a $600 million contract with the CIA. The Washington Post’s coverage of the CIA should include full disclosure that the sole owner of the Post is also the main owner of Amazon — and Amazon is now gaining huge profits directly from the CIA.”

The petition includes cogent comments by many of the people who signed it.

I hope that you can set aside perhaps 10 minutes on Jan. 14or 15 for the purpose of receiving the petition and hearing a summary of its signers’ concerns.

For confirmation of an appointment, I can be reached on my cell phone…

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Norman Solomon
Director and Cofounder, RootsAction.org
 
[January 2, 2014]

********************

Dear Mr. Solomon:
 
Thank you for your note. I was able to read the petition on the RootsAction.org site and to see the list of those who signed it. I certainly would be happy to review any additional information you might send.
 
The Post has among the strictest ethics policies in the field of journalism, and we vigorously enforce it. We have routinely disclosed corporate conflicts when they were directly relevant to our coverage. We reported on Amazon’s pursuit of CIA contracts in our coverage of plans by Jeff Bezos to purchase The Washington Post.
 
We also have been very aggressive in our coverage of the intelligence community, including the CIA, NSA, and other agencies, as you should know. The Post was at the leading edge of disclosures about the NSA in 2013. Most recently, it reported on the CIA’s hidden involvement in Colombia’s fight against FARC rebels, including a fatal missile attack across the border in Ecuador. You can be sure neither the NSA nor the CIA has been pleased with publication of their secrets.
 
Neither Amazon nor Jeff Bezos was involved, nor ever will be involved, in our coverage of the intelligence community.
 
The petition’s request for disclosure of Amazon’s CIA contract in every story we write about the CIA is well outside the norm of conflict-of-interest disclosures at media companies. The Post is a personal investment by Jeff Bezos, whose stake in Amazon is large but well less than a majority. The CIA’s multi-year contract with Amazon is a small fraction of company revenues that have been estimated at roughly $75 billion in 2013. Amazon maintains no corporate connection to The Post.
 
Even so, we have been careful to disclose Jeff Bezos’ connection to The Post and Amazon when directly relevant to our coverage, and we will continue to do so. For example, such disclosures would be called for in coverage circumstances such as the following:  CIA contracting practices, the CIA’s use of cloud services,  big-data initiatives at the CIA, Amazon’s pursuit of cloud services as a line of business, and Amazon corporate matters in general.
 
We take ethics very seriously here at The Post. One of our policies is that we seek comment from the subjects of our stories prior to publishing them and that we make a genuine effort to hear and absorb their point of view. By contrast, I am unaware of any effort to hear us out prior to the launch of this petition drive. A personal meeting now does not seem necessary or useful.
 
I hope this note explains our perspective. And again, if you wish to send additional information that you feel might be helpful to us, we will review it closely.
 
Sincerely,
Martin Baron
Executive Editor
The Washington Post
 
[January 2, 2014]

********************

Dear Mr. Baron:

Thank you for your letter.

Whatever the Post’s guidelines and record on ethical standards, few journalists could have anticipated ownership of the paper by a multibillionaire whose outside company would be so closely tied to the CIA. Updating of the standards is now appropriate.

You write that The Washington Post has “routinely disclosed corporate conflicts when they were directly relevant to our coverage.” But the RootsAction.org petition is urging the Post to provide readers of its CIA coverage with full disclosure that would adequately address — and meaningfully inform readers about — relevant circumstances of the current ownership.

Those circumstances are not adequately met by a narrow definition of “corporate conflicts.” A reality is that the Post is now solely owned by someone who is by far the largest stakeholder in a world-spanning corporate giant that has close business ties — and is seeking more extensive deals than its current $600 million contract — with the CIA, an agency which the newspaper reports on regularly.

The petition requests that The Washington Post adopt a full disclosure policy that is commensurate with this situation. The gist of the request is recognition that, as the saying goes, sunshine is the best disinfectant for any potential conflict of interest.

When you write that the Post has a policy of routinely disclosing corporate conflicts when “directly relevant to our coverage,” a key question comes to the fore:  What is “directly relevant”? Given that few agencies are more secretive than the CIA — and even the most enterprising reporters are challenged to pry loose even a small fraction of its secrets — how do we know which CIA stories are “directly relevant” to the fact that Amazon is providing cloud computing services to the CIA?

Amazon’s contract with the CIA is based on an assessment that Amazon Web Services can provide the agency with digital-data computing security that is second to none. We can assume that a vast amount of information about CIA activities is to be safeguarded by Amazon. With what assurance can we say which stories on CIA activities are not “directly relevant” to Jeff Bezos’s dual role as sole owner of the Post and largest stakeholder in Amazon?

We actually don’t know what sort of data is involved in what your letter calls “the CIA’s use of cloud services.” The disclosure/non-disclosure policy that you’ve outlined seems to presume that, for instance, there would be no direct relevance of the cloud services contract to coverage of such matters as CIA involvement in rendition of prisoners to regimes for torture; or in targeting for drone strikes; or in data aggregation for counterinsurgency. Are you assuming that the Post’s coverage of such topics is not “directly relevant” to the Bezos/Amazon ties with the CIA and therefore should not include disclosure of the financial ties that bind the Post’s owner to the CIA?

Readers of a Post story on the CIA — whether about drones or a still-secret torture report, to name just two topics — should be informed of the Post/Bezos/Amazon/CIA financial ties. In the absence of such in-story disclosure, there is every reason to believe that many readers will be unaware that the Post’s owner is someone with a major financial stake in an Amazon-CIA deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

If Amazon’s $600 million multiyear cloud contract with the CIA is a small fraction of the company’s revenue, there is clear intent for it to grow larger. And $600 million is, by itself, hardly insignificant; let’s remember that Mr. Bezos bought the Post for less than half that amount.

“We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA,” a statement from Amazon said two months ago. In public statements, Mr. Bezos and Amazon have made clear that they view this as a growing part of Amazon’s business: a feather in the corporate cap of the company in its drive to increase market share of such business operations. This is intended as a major and expansive income source for Amazon and for its CEO, Mr. Bezos, whose personal wealth of $25 billion is a consequence of Amazon’s financial gains.

Why not provide a sentence in the Post’s substantive coverage of CIA activities, to the effect that “The Post’s owner Jeff Bezos is the largest stakeholder in Amazon, which has a $600 million contract with the CIA”?

By declining to provide such disclosure, the Post is failing the transparency test when coverage of the CIA falls outside of the circumscribed areas where your letter says Post policy now provides for disclosure (“CIA contracting practices, the CIA’s use of cloud services, big-data initiatives at the CIA, Amazon’s pursuit of cloud services as a line of business, and Amazon corporate matters in general”).

Such concerns are among the reasons why tens of thousands of people, including many Post readers, have signed the petition to The Washington Post that I will be delivering onJanuary 15. While it’s unfortunate that you don’t want to have a meeting for a few minutes on that day, I hope that you will mull over the concerns that are propelling this petition forward.

Sincerely,
Norman Solomon
RootsAction.org

[January 4, 2014]

********************

Dear Mr. Solomon:
 
Thank you for expanding upon your views.
 
Just to reiterate, The Post has among the strictest ethics policies in the field of journalism. Those policies are sufficiently expansive, comprehensive, and current to take into account The Post’s acquisition by Jeff Bezos. The policies are strictly enforced. However, as I explained in detail in my previous note, your proposal is far outside the norm of disclosures about potential conflicts of interest at media organizations.
 
Meantime, as plain evidence of our independence, we will continue our aggressive coverage of the intelligence community, including the CIA. I hope you’ve noticed it. The CIA has, and it’s not happy.
 
Sincerely,
Martin Baron
Executive Editor
The Washington Post
 
[January 4, 2014]

______________________________________________

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

Stealing secret records about government spying used to be way more complicated

In 1971, a group of radicals broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania and stole a bunch of documents about J. Edgar Hoover’s surveillance program targeting dissidents and antiwar activists.

Thanks to their criminal act, which they followed up by anonymously sending copies of the files to major media outlets, awareness of FBI spying under Cointelpro penetrated mainstream consciousness.

More than 40 years later, the people behind that theft have unmasked themselves in a new book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI, authored by Betty Medsger. The former Washington Post reporter convinced some of the burglars to come forward and tell their tale. Medsger previously served as chair of the journalism department at San Francisco State University.

A New York Times piece spotlighting the book describes the historic event and draws a comparison with modern day whistleblower Edward Snowden, who used access granted to him as a National Security Agency contractor to shed light on secret documents detailing NSA surveillance programs.

“Unlike Mr. Snowden, who downloaded hundreds of thousands of digital N.S.A. files onto computer hard drives, the Media burglars did their work the 20th-century way: they cased the F.B.I. office for months, wore gloves as they packed the papers into suitcases, and loaded the suitcases into getaway cars. When the operation was over, they dispersed.”

The burglary also entailed lock picking, opening a window with a crowbar, and memorization of FBI staff’s comings and goings; also, they never again met as a group after making off with the files.

Even as technology has given intelligence agencies the ability to build a once unfathomable surveillance system that regularly sweeps in the communications of millions of law-abiding Americans, it’s also made it easier for information about such activities to be brought into the light of day – with just a few simple keystrokes.

Solomon: We met Edward Snowden in Moscow: Please defend his right to travel

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(B3 note: Norman Solomon sent out the following message from Roots.org. The message was signed by four Americans who recently  visited Snowden in Moscow: Thomas Drake, Ray McGovern, Jesselyn Raddack, and Coleen Rowley.)

Most Americans probably take the right to travel for granted until this right is lost or curtailed. Passports are, of course, required for most international travel. When our group (Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake, Ray McGovern and Coleen Rowley) recently traveled to Moscow to meet with Edward Snowden and present him with the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence, we depended upon our fundamental right to travel.

The intelligence whistleblower whose integrity we honored, however, has been deprived of that right. Vindictive U.S. officials revoked the passport of Snowden, whose disclosures have informed and educated the people of the United States and the world about secret surveillance and massive data-gathering that the NSA and other government agencies are engaged in within the U.S. and around the world.

If you’ve already signed the RootsAction petition urging that Snowden’s passport be restored, please forward this email to people you know and urge them to do the same. If you haven’t yet signed the petition, you can add your name by clicking here.

Proposals for serious reforms that will enhance security as well as preserve constitutional rights are now being studied and debated in Congress as a result of the disclosures. Snowden made it clear in our conversation with him that achieving debate and reform of the unethical, illegal and counter-productive massive data collection was his sole motivation and remains his focus. He hopes to play a continuing role in that debate, even if it’s at long-distance from Russia where he was granted temporary asylum.

The least we can do in recognition of Snowden’s personal sacrifices on behalf of all of our civil liberties and human rights is to sign and share this petition urging Secretary of State John Kerry to restore the NSA whistleblower’s passport.

To send an email now to Secretary of State Kerry, click here.

Please forward this link to like-minded friends:
http://SupportEdwardSnowden.org

Thank you!

Best wishes,
Thomas Drake
Ray McGovern
Jesselyn Radack
Coleen Rowley

Background:
Ray McGovern: Snowden Accepts Whistleblower Award

www.RootsAction.org

NSA spies on Google and Yahoo users

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More revelations on spying by the National Security Agency were published in the Washington Post on Oct. 31. Thanks again to whistleblower Edward Snowden, we now know that the NSA is capturing massive amounts of communications data flowing between data centers maintained by Bay Area-based Google and Yahoo.

According to the Post, digital information produced by Google and Yahoo account holders — texts, emails, documents, videos and yes, that does include content — is being copied by the NSA and sent to its Fort Meade headquarters, where some but not all is retained by the agency.

The NSA is intercepting Google and Yahoo user account information as it moves between data centers, but the exact collection points remain a mystery. A smiley face inserted into a hand-drawn sketch from a top-secret file was enough to cause a couple Google engineers to “explode in profanity,” the Post reporters noted.

That drawing demonstrated how encryption, a security measure meant to shield data from third parties, is “added and removed here,” at an intersection between the public Internet and Google’s internal cloud servers.

Seeing as how Google is a ubiquitous presence in our lives and a key player in Silicon Valley’s tech industry, it’ll be interesting to see how native San Franciscan US Sen. Dianne Feinstein responds to the news that the NSA has apparently been intercepting the tech giant’s data without its knowledge. Feinstein is uniquely positioned to weigh in on this activity in her capacity as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Since Snowden’s first leak, Feinstein has kept up the drumbeat that NSA’s spying program is good for national security. On Oct. 2, at a Judiciary Committee hearing on oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, she delivered the following statement:

“Our great strength today, ladies and gentlemen, in protecting this homeland, is to be able to have the kind of technology that’s able to piece together data while protecting rights. I listened to this program being described as a surveillance program. It is not. There is no content collected by the NSA. There are bits of data—location, telephone numbers—that can be queried when there is reasonable, articulable suspicion. … I will do everything I can to prevent this program from being cancelled out. To destroy it is to make this nation more vulnerable.”

But more recently, following revelations of spying on foreign leaders, Feinstein changed her tune. In an Oct. 28 statement, she said the Senate Intelligence Community was “not satisfactorily informed.”

Suddenly, rather than being notified and informed, the committee members were seemingly kept in the dark while the NSA ran wild. She said, “It is abundantly clear that a total review of all intelligence programs is necessary so that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are fully informed as to what is actually being carried out by the intelligence community.”

Latest NSA spying news features emoticons and Google engineers exploding with profanity

More revelations on spying by the National Security Agency were published in the Washington Post today. Thanks again to whistleblower Edward Snowden (whose actions gave this cartoonist pause with a “Post-Snowden moment”) we now know that the NSA is capturing massive amounts of communications data flowing between data centers maintained by Google and Yahoo.

According to the Post, digital information produced by Google and Yahoo account holders – texts, emails, documents, videos and yes, that does include content – is being copied by the NSA and sent to its Fort Meade headquarters, where some but not all is retained by the agency.

It’s known that the NSA is intercepting Google and Yahoo user account information as moves between data centers, but the exact collection points remain a mystery. While some of that information evidently belongs to Americans, there doesn’t seem to be detailed information about how much of it originates in the U.S. versus foreign nations. The main tool for capturing this data is a project called MUSCULAR, operated in collaboration with British intelligence agency GCHQ. 

A smiley face inserted into a hand-drawn sketch from a top-secret file was enough to cause a couple Google engineers to “explode in profanity,” the Post reporters noted. That drawing demonstrated how encryption, a security measure meant to shield data from third parties, is “added and removed here,” at an intersection between the public Internet and Google’s internal cloud servers.

Seeing as how Google is a ubiquitous presence in our lives and a key player in Silicon Valley’s tech industry, it’ll be interesting to see how native San Franciscan Sen. Dianne Feinstein responds to the news that the NSA has apparently been intercepting the tech giant’s data without its knowledge. Feinstein is uniquely positioned to weigh in on this activity in her capacity as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Since Snowden’s first leak, Feinstein has kept up the drumbeat that NSA’s spying program is good for national security.

On Oct. 2, at a Judiciary Committee hearing on oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, she delivered the following statement:

“Our great strength today, ladies and gentlemen, in protecting this homeland, is to be able to have the kind of technology that’s able to piece together data while protecting rights. I listened to this program being described as a surveillance program. It is not. There is no content collected by the NSA. There are bits of data—location, telephone numbers—that can be queried when there is reasonable, articulable suspicion. … I will do everything I can to prevent this program from being cancelled out. To destroy it is to make this nation more vulnerable. I just wanted to say that. I had to say it.” 

Speaking earlier this year, at a Sept. 26 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on FISA, Feinstein delivered a reminder of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001 and sought to offer reassurance on the data collection program, saying:

“This committee as well as the Judiciary Committee have reviewed the legality of these programs, been briefed on their operation, and been notified of problems with their implementation. Further, this committee has previously informed all senators of additional classified information regarding these programs available for their review prior to Senate consideration of these measures. 

It is my opinion that the surveillance activities conducted under FISA, and other programs operated by the National Security Agency, are lawful, they are effective, and they are conducted under careful oversight.”

But more recently, following revelations of spying on foreign leaders, Feinstein changed her tune. In an Oct. 28 statement, she said the Senate Intelligence Community was “not satisfactorily informed.”

Suddenly, rather than being notified and informed, the committee members were seemingly kept in the dark while the NSA ran wild. “It is abundantly clear that a total review of all intelligence programs is necessary so that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are fully informed as to what is actually being carried out by the intelligence community,” she said.

Seems the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee could start by reading Washington Post articles detailing the contents of Snowden’s leaks. There’s plenty of information in there.

Shit happened (Oct. 23-29)

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Tenant proposals and Guardian forum address eviction crisis

Tenant advocates have proposed a sweeping set of legislative proposals to address what they’re calling the “eviction epidemic” that has hit San Francisco, seeking to slow the rapid displacement of tenants by real estate speculators with changes to land use, building, rent control, and other city codes.

“In essence, it’s a comprehensive agenda to restrict the speculation on rental units,” Chinatown Community Development Center Policy Director Gen Fujioka told the Guardian. “We can’t directly regulate the Ellis Act [the state law allowing property owners to evict tenants and take their apartments off the rental market], but we’re asking the city to do everything but that.”

The package was announced Oct. 24 on the steps of City Hall by representatives of CCDC, San Francisco Tenants Union, Housing Rights Committee of SF, Causa Justa-Just Cause, Tenderloin Housing Clinic, UNITE HERE Local 2, Community Tenants Association, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice.

“San Francisco is falling into one of the deepest and most severe eviction crises in 40 years,” SFTU Director Ted Gullicksen said. “It is bad now and is going to get worse unless the city acts.”

The announcement came a day after the Lee family — an elderly couple on Social Security who care for their disabled daughter — was finally Ellis Act evicted from its longtime Chinatown home after headline-grabbing activism by CCDC and other groups had twice turned away deputies and persuaded the Mayor’s Office to intervene with the landlord.

But Mayor Ed Lee has been mum — his office ignored our repeated requests for comment — on the worsening eviction crisis, the tenant groups’ proposals, and the still-unresolved fate of the Lees, who are temporarily holed up in a hotel and still hoping to find permanent housing they can afford.

The package proposed by tenant advocates includes: require those converting rental units into tenancies-in-common to get a conditional use permit and bring the building into compliance with current codes (to discourage speculation and flipping buildings); regulate TIC agreements to discourage Ellis Act abuse; increase required payments to evicted tenants and improve city assistance to those displaced by eviction; require more reporting on the status of units cleared with the Ellis Act by their owners; investigate and prosecute Ellis Act fraud (units are often secretly re-rented at market rates after supposedly being removed from the market); increase inspections of construction on buildings with tenants (to prevent landlords from pressuring them to move); prohibit the demolition, mergers, or conversions of rental units that have been cleared of tenants using no-fault evictions in the last 10 years (Sup. John Avalos has already introduced this legislation).

“The evidence is clear. We are facing not only an eviction crisis but also a crisis associated with the loss of affordable rental housing across the city. Speculative investments in housing has resulted in the loss of thousands affordable apartments through conversions and demolitions. And the trend points to the situation becoming much worse,” the coalition wrote in a public statement proposing the reforms.

Evictions have reached their highest level since the height of the last dot-com boom in 1999-2000, with 1,934 evictions filed in San Francisco in fiscal year 2012-13, and the rate has picked up since then. The Sheriff’s Department sometimes does three evictions per day, last year carrying out 998 court-ordered evictions, Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi told us, arguing for an expansion of city services to the displaced.

At “Housing for Whom?” a community forum the Guardian hosted Oct. 23 in the LGBT Center, panelists and audience members talked about the urgent need to protect and expand affordable housing in the city. They say the current eviction epidemic is being compounded by buyouts, demolitions, and the failure of developers to build below-market-rate units.

“We’re bleeding affordable housing units now,” Fred Sherburn-Zimmer of Housing Right Committee said last night, noting the steadily declining percentage of housing in the city that is affordable to current city residents since rent control was approved by voters in 1979. “We took out more housing than we’ve built since then.”

Peter Cohen of the Council of Community Housing Organizations actually quantified the problem, citing studies showing that only 15 percent of San Franciscans can afford the rents and home prices of new housing units coming online. He said the housing isn’t being built for current city residents: “It’s a demand derived from a market calculation.”

Cohen said the city’s inclusionary housing laws that he helped write more than a decade ago were intended to encourage developers to actually build below-market-rate units in their projects, but almost all of them choose to pay the in-lieu fee instead, letting the city find ways to build the affordable housing and thereby delaying construction by years.

“It was not about writing checks,” Cohen said. “It was about building affordable units.”

Discussion at the forum began with a debate about the waterfront luxury condo project proposed for 8 Washington St., which either Props. B or C would allow the developer to build. Project opponent Jon Golinger squared off against proponent Tim Colen, who argued that the $11 million that the developer is contributing to the city’s affordable housing fund is an acceptable tradeoff.

But Sherburn-Zimmer said the developer should be held to a far higher standard given the obscene profits that he’ll be making from waterfront property that includes a city-owned seawall lot. “Public land needs to be used for the public good.”

Longtime progressive activist Ernestine Weiss sat in the front row during the forum, blasting Colen and his Prop. B as a deceptive land grab and arguing that San Francisco’s much ballyhooed rent control law was a loophole-ridden compromise that should be strengthened to prevent rents from jumping to market rate when a master tenant moves out, and to limit rent increases that exceed wage increases (rent can now rise 1.9 percent annually on rent controlled apartment).

“That’s baloney that it’s rent control!” she told the crowd. (Steven T. Jones)

Students fight suspensions targeting young people of color

Sagging pants, hats worn indoors, or having a really bad day — the list of infractions that can get a student suspended from a San Francisco Unified School District school sounds like the daily life of a teenager. The technical term for it is “willful defiance,” and there are so many suspensions made in its name that a student movement has risen up against it.

The punishment is the first step to derailing a child’s education, opponents said.

Student activists recognize the familiar path from suspensions to the streets to prisons, and they took to the streets Oct. 22 to push the SFUSD to change its ways. Around 20 or so students and their mentors marched up to City Hall and into the Board of Education to demand a stop of suspensions over willful defiance.

A quarter of all suspensions in SFUSD for the 2011-12 school year were made for “disruption or defiance,” according to the California Department of Education. Half of all suspensions in the state were for defiance.

When a student is willfully defiant and suspended, it’s seen as a downward spiral as students are pushed out of school and onto the streets, edging that much closer to a life of crime.

“What do we want? COLLEGE! What are we gonna do? WORK HARD!” the students shouted as they marched to the Board of Education’s meeting room, on Franklin Street.

They were dressed in graduation gowns of many colors, signs raised high. They smiled and danced and the mood was infectious. One driver drove by, honked and said “Yes, alright!” Assorted passersby of all ethnicities cheered on the group. The students were from 100% College Prep Institute, a Bayview tutoring and mentoring group founded in 1999 aiming to educate students of color in San Francisco. Their battle is a tough one. Though African American students make up only 10 percent of SFUSD students, they accounted for 46 percent of suspensions in 2012, according to SFUSD data. Latinos made up the next largest group, at 30 percent. (Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez)

Techies to NSA: Stop spying on us!

Thousands of privacy and civil liberties activists, including many from the Bay Area, headed to Washington DC for an Oct. 26 rally calling for surveillance legislation reform, in response to National Security Agency spying programs. It was organized by more than 100 groups that have joined together as part of the Stop Watching Us coalition. The group has launched an online petition opposing NSA spying, and planned to deliver about 500,000 signatures to Congress. Many of the key drivers behind Stop Watching Us, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to Mozilla, are based in San Francisco. (Rebecca Bowe)

Celebrities tell NSA to stop spying as digital privacy advocates head to D.C.

Thousands of privacy and civil liberties activists are bound for Washington, D.C. for an Oct. 26 rally calling for surveillance legislation reform, in response to National Security Agency spying programs.

It’s being organized by more than 100 groups that have joined together as part of the Stop Watching Us coalition. The group has launched an online petition opposing NSA spying, and plans to deliver about 500,000 signatures to Congress on Sat/26. Many of the key drivers behind Stop Watching Us, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to Mozilla, are based in San Francisco.

In advance of the rally, Stop Watching Us also released a video featuring celebrities who, like millions of Americans, happen to like corresponding via email and text messages. It features appearances from Phil Donahue, John Cusack, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Congressional Rep. John Conyers, NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, and others.

Since Edward Snowden leaked the NSA spying documents earlier this year, the Bay Area has been host to a number of protests organized in response. This past July, some college kids who met on reddit organized a march against NSA spying, called Restore the Fourth (referring to Fourth Amendment privacy rights), and paraded through downtown San Francisco. Meanwhile, the first-ever clues that the NSA was running a domestic spying program were picked up at AT&T’s Folsom Street facility in San Francisco by whistleblower Mark Klein, who exposed the operations in technical documents that subsequently spurred a lawsuit and mainstream news coverage in 2006.

As The Atlantic Wire pointed out not too long ago, the Stop Watching Us coalition is unique in that it straddles ordinary political boundaries:

“It comprises perhaps the most diverse collection of groups in the modern history of American politics. Among the groups and businesses that are signatories to it are: 4Chan, Freedomworks, BoingBoing, CREDO Mobile, Greenpeace USA, Mozilla, reddit, Sunlight Foundation, Taxpayers Protection Alliance, and California’s The Utility Reform Network. You can see the thread that ties these organizations together, but it’s a thin one.” 

Is the growing digital privacy movement at all worrisome to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who is chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a former San Francisco mayor? So far, she doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of backing down. Feinstein defended the spying program in a recent USA Today editorial, writing that she believes the program should continue and even stating that “the call-records program is not surveillance.”

Project Censored

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joe@sfbg.com

This year’s annual Project Censored list of the most underreported news stories includes the widening wealth gap, the trial of Pfc. Bradley Manning for leaking classified documents, and President Obama’s war on whistleblowers — all stories that actually received considerable news coverage.

So how exactly were they “censored” and what does that say of this venerable media watchdog project?

Project Censored isn’t only about stories that were deliberately buried or ignored. It’s about stories the media has covered poorly through a sort of false objectivity that skews the truth. Journalists do cry out against injustice, on occasion, but they don’t always do it well.

That’s why Project Censored was started back in 1976: to highlight stories the mainstream media missed or gave scant attention to. Although the project initially started in our backyard at Sonoma State University, now academics and students from 18 universities and community colleges across the country pore through hundreds of submissions of overlooked and underreported stories annually. A panel of academics and journalists then picks the top 25 stories and curates them into themed clusters. This year’s book, Censored 2014: Fearless Speech in Fearful Times, hits bookstores this week.

What causes the media to stumble? There are as many reasons as there are failures.

Brooke Gladstone, host of the radio program On the Media and writer of the graphic novel cum news media critique, The Influencing Machine, said the story of Manning (who now goes by the first name Chelsea) was the perfect example of the media trying to cover a story right, but getting it mostly wrong.

“The Bradley Manning case is for far too long centered on his personality rather than the nature of his revelations,” Gladstone told us. Manning’s career was sacrificed for sending 700,000 classified documents about the Iraq war to WikiLeaks. But the media coverage focused largely on Manning’s trial and subsequent change in gender identity.

Gladstone said that this is part of the media’s inability to deal with vast quantities of information which, she said, “is not what most of our standard media does all that well.”

The media mangling of Manning is number one on the Project Censored list, but the shallow coverage this story received is not unique. The news media is in a crisis, particularly in the US, and it’s getting worse.

 

WATCHING THE WATCHDOGS

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, which conducts an annual analysis of trends in news, found that as revenue in journalism declined, newsrooms have shed 30 percent of their staff in the last decade. In 2012, the number of reporters in the US dipped to its lowest level since 1978, with fewer than 40,000 reporters nationally. This creates a sense of desperation in the newsroom, and in the end, it’s the public that loses.

“What won out is something much more palpable to the advertisers,” says Robert McChesney, an author, longtime media reform advocate, professor at University of Illinois, and host of Media Matters from 2000-2012. Blandness beat out fearless truth-telling.

Even worse than kowtowing to advertisers is the false objectivity the media tries to achieve, McChesney told us, neutering its news to stay “neutral” on a topic. This handcuffs journalists into not drawing conclusions, even when they are well-supported by the facts.

In order to report a story, they rely on the words of others to make claims, limiting what they can report.

“You allow people in power to set the range of legitimate debate, and you report on it,” McChesney said.

Project Censored stories reflect that dynamic — many of them require journalists to take a stand or present an illuminating perspective on a set of dry facts. For example, reporting on the increasing gulf between the rich and the poor is easy, but talking about why the rich are getting richer is where journalists begin to worry about their objectivity, Gladstone said.

“I think that there is a desire to stay away from stories that will inspire rhetoric of class warfare,” she said.

Unable to tell the story of a trend and unable to talk about rising inequality for fear of appearing partisan, reporters often fail to connect the dots for their readers.

One of Project Censored stories this year, “Bank Interests Inflate Global Prices by 35 to 40 Percent,” is a good example of the need for a media watchdog. Researchers point to interest payments as the primary way wealth is transferred from Main Street to Wall Street.

It’s how the banks are picking the pockets of the 99 percent. But if no politician is calling out the banks on this practice, if no advocacy group is gaining enough traction, shouldn’t it be the media’s role to protect the public and sound the battle cry?

“So much of media criticism is really political commentary squeezed through a media squeezer,” Gladstone said, “and it comes out media shaped.”

 

SHAPING THE MEDIA

McChesney says journalism should be a proactive watchdog by independently stating that something needs to be done. He said there’s more watchdog journalism calling out inequity in democracies where there is a more robust and funded media.

And they often have one thing we in US don’t — government subsidies for journalism.

“All the other democracies in the world, there are huge subsidies for public media and journalism,” McChesney said. “They not only rank ahead of us in terms of being democratic, they also rank ahead of us in terms of having a free press. Our press is shrinking.”

No matter what the ultimate economic solution is, the crisis of reporting is largely a crisis of money. McChesney calls it a “whole knife in the heart of journalism.”

For American journalism to revive itself, it has to move beyond its corporate ties. It has to become a truly free press. It’s time to end the myth that corporate journalism is the only way for media to be objective, monolithic, and correct.

The failures of that prescription are clear in Project Censored’s top 10 stories of the year:

1. Manning and the Failure of Corporate Media

Untold stories of Iraqi civilian deaths by American soldiers, US diplomats pushing aircraft sales on foreign royalty, uninvestigated abuse by Iraqi allies, the perils of the rise in private war contractors — this is what Manning exposed. They were stories that challenge the US political elite, and they were only made possible by a sacrifice.

Manning got a 35-year prison sentence for the revelation of state secrets to WikiLeaks, a story told countless times in corporate media. But as Project Censored posits, the failure of our media was not in the lack of coverage of Manning, but in its focus.

Though The New York Times partnered with WikiLeaks to release stories based on the documents, many published in 2010 through 2011, news from the leaks have since slowed to a trickle — a waste of over 700,000 pieces of classified intelligence giving unparalleled ground level views of America’s costly wars.

The media quickly took a scathing indictment of US military policy and spun it into a story about Manning’s politics and patriotism. As Rolling Stone pointed out (“Did the Media Fail Bradley Manning?”), Manning initially took the trove of leaks to The Washington Post and The New York Times, only to be turned away.

Alexa O’Brien, a former Occupy activist, scooped most of the media by actually attending Manning’s trial. She produced tens of thousands of words in transcriptions of the court hearings, one of the only reporters on the beat.

2. Richest Global 1 Percent Hide Billions in Tax Havens

Global corporate fatcats hold $21-32 trillion in offshore havens, money hidden from government taxation that would benefit people around the world, according to findings by James S. Henry, the former chief economist of the global management firm McKinsey & Company.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists obtained a leak in April 2013, revealing how widespread the buy-in was to these tax havens. The findings were damning: government officials in Canada, Russia, and other countries have embraced offshore accounts, the world’s top banks (including Deutsche Bank) have worked to maintain them, and the tax havens are used in Ponzi schemes.

Moving money offshore has implications that ripped through the world economy. Part of Greece’s economic collapse was due to these tax havens, ICIJ reporter Gerard Ryle told Gladstone on her radio show. “It’s because people don’t want to pay taxes,” he said. “You avoid taxes by going offshore and playing by different rules.”

US Senator Carl Levin, D-Michigan, introduced legislation to combat the practice, SB1533, The Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, but so far the bill has had little play in the media.

Researcher James Henry said the hidden wealth was a “huge black hole” in the world economy that has never been measured, which could generate income tax revenues between $190-280 billion a year.

3. Trans-Pacific Partnership

Take 600 corporate advisors, mix in officials from 11 international governments, let it bake for about two years, and out pops international partnerships that threaten to cripple progressive movements worldwide.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a trade agreement, but leaked texts show it may allow foreign investors to use “investor-state” tribunals to extract extravagant extra damages for “expected future profits,” according to the Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.

The trade watch group investigated the TPP and is the main advocate in opposition of its policies. The AFL-CIO, Sierra Club, and other organizations have also had growing concerns about the level of access granted to corporations in these agreements.

With extra powers granted to foreign firms, the possibility that companies would continue moving offshore could grow. But even with the risks of outsized corporate influence, the US has a strong interest in the TPP in order to maintain trade agreements with Asia.

The balancing act between corporate and public interests is at stake, but until the US releases more documents from negotiations, the American people will remain in the dark.

4. Obama’s War on Whistleblowers

President Obama has invoked the Espionage Act of 1917 more than every other president combined. Seven times, Obama has pursued leakers with the act, against Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Bradley Manning, Stephen Kim, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and most recently, Edward Snowden. All had ties to the State Department, FBI, CIA, or NSA, and all of them leaked to journalists.

“Neither party is raising hell over this. This is the sort of story that sort of slips through the cracks,” McChesney said. And when the politicians don’t raise a fuss, neither does the media.

Pro Publica covered the issue, constructing timelines and mapping out the various arrests and indictments. But where Project Censored points out the lack of coverage is in Obama’s hypocrisy — only a year before, he signed The Whistleblower Protection Act.

Later on, he said he wouldn’t follow every letter of the law in the bill he had only just signed.

“Certain provisions in the Act threaten to interfere with my constitutional duty to supervise the executive branch,” Obama said. “As my Administration previously informed the Congress, I will interpret those sections consistent with my authority.”

5. Hate Groups and Antigovernment Groups on Rise across US

Hate groups in the US are on the rise, according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center. There are 1,007 known hate groups operating across the country, it wrote, including neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, black separatists, border vigilantes, and others.

Since 2000, those groups have grown by over half, and there was a “powerful resurgence” of Patriot groups, the likes of which were involved in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Worst of all, the huge growth in armed militias seems to have conspicuous timing with Obama’s election.

“The number of Patriot groups, including armed militias, has grown 813 percent since Obama was elected — from 149 in 2008 to 1,360 in 2012,” the SPLC reported.

Though traditionally those groups were race motivated, the report noted that now they are gunning for government. There was a smattering of news coverage when the SPLC released its report, but not much since.

6. Billionaires’ Rising Wealth Intensifies Poverty and Inequality

The world’s billionaires added $241 billion to their collective net worth in 2012. That’s an economic recovery, right?

That gain, coupled with the world’s richest peoples’ new total worth of $1.9 trillion (more than the GDP of Canada), wasn’t reported by some kooky socialist group, but by Bloomberg News. But few journalists are asking the important question: Why?

Project Censored points to journalist George Monbiot, who highlights a reduction of taxes and tax enforcement, the privatization of public assets, and the weakening of labor unions.

His conclusions are backed up by the United Nations’ Trade and Development Report from 2012, which noted how the trend hurts everyone: “Recent empirical and analytical work reviewed here mostly shows a negative correlation between inequality and growth.”

7. Merchant of Death and Nuclear Weapons

The report highlighted by Project Censored on the threat of nuclear war is an example not of censorship, strictly, but a desire for media reform.

Project Censored highlighted a study from the The Physicians for Social Responsibility that said 1 billion people could starve in the decade after a nuclear detonation. Corn production in the US would decline by an average of 10 percent for an entire decade and food prices would make food inaccessible to hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest.

This is not journalism in the classic sense, Gladstone said. In traditional journalism, as it’s played out since the early 20th century, news requires an element of something new in order to garner reporting — not a looming threat or danger.

So in this case, what Project Censored identified was the need for a new kind of journalism, what it calls “solutions journalism.”

“Solutions journalism,” Sarah van Gelder wrote in the foreword to Censored 2014, “must investigate not only the individual innovations, but also the larger pattern of change — the emerging ethics, institutions, and ways of life that are coming into existence.”

8. Bank Interests Inflate Global Prices by 35 to 40 Percent

Does 35 percent of everything bought in the United States go to interest? Professor Margrit Kennedy of the University of Hanover thinks so, and she says it’s a major funnel of money from the 99 percent to the rich.

In her 2012 book, Occupy Money, Kennedy wrote that tradespeople, suppliers, wholesalers, and retailers along the chain of production rely on credit. Her figures were initially drawn from the German economy, but Ellen Brown of the Web of Debt and Global Research said she found similar patterns in the US.

This “hidden interest” has sapped the growth of other industries, she said, lining the pockets of the financial sector.

So if interest is stagnating so many industries, why would journalists avoid the topic?

Few economists have echoed her views, and few experts emerged to back up her assertions. Notably, she’s a professor in an architectural school, with no formal credentials in economics.

From her own website, she said she became an “expert” in economics “through her continuous research and scrutiny.”

Without people in power pushing the topic, McChesney said that a mainstream journalist would be seen as going out on a limb.

“The reporters raise an issue the elites are not raising themselves, then you’re ideological, have an axe to grind, sort of a hack,” he said. “It makes journalism worthless on pretty important issues.”

9. Icelanders Vote to Include Commons in Their Constitution

In 2012, Icelandic citizens voted in referendum to change the country’s 1944 constitution. When asked, “In the new constitution, do you want natural resources that are not privately owned to be declared national property?” its citizens voted 81 percent in favor.

Project Censored says this is important for us to know, but in the end, US journalism is notably American-centric. Even the Nieman Watchdog, a foundation for journalism at Harvard University, issued a report in 2011 citing the lack of reporting on a war the US funneled over $4 trillion into over the past decade, not to mention the cost in human lives.

If we don’t pay attention to our own wars, why exactly does Project Censored think we’d pay attention to Iceland?

“The constitutional reforms are a direct response to the nation’s 2008 financial crash,” Project Censored wrote, “when Iceland’s unregulated banks borrowed more than the country’s gross domestic product from international wholesale money markets.”

Solutions-based journalism rears its head again, and the idea is that the US has much to learn from Iceland, but even Gladstone was dubious.

“Iceland is being undercovered, goddamnit! Where is our Iceland news?” she joked with us. Certainly I agree with some of this list, Bradley Manning was covered badly, I was sad the tax haven story didn’t get more coverage. But when has anyone cared about Iceland?”

10. A “Culture of Cruelty” along Mexico–US Border

The plight of Mexican border crossings usually involves three types of stories in US press: deaths in the stretch of desert beyond the border, the horrors of drug cartels, and heroic journeys of border crossings by sympathetic workers. But a report released a year ago by the organization No More Deaths snags the 10th spot for overlooked stories in Project Censored.

The report asserts that people arrested by Border Patrol while crossing were denied water and told to let their sick die. No More Deaths conducted more than 12,000 interviews to form the basis of its study in three Mexican cities: Nacos, Nogales and Agua Prieta. The report cites grossly ineffective oversight from the Department of Homeland Security. This has received some coverage, from Salon showcasing video of Border Patrol agents destroying jugs of water meant for crossers to a recent New York Times piece citing a lack of oversight for Border Patrol’s excessive force.

The ACLU lobbied the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to call international attention to the plight of these border crossers at the hands of US law enforcement.

If ever an issue flew under the radar, this is it.