Sunday, February 26, 2017

26 February - Netvibes - oldephartteintraining

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande ...A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Atlantic Wire


The Magnificent Harmony of Sunday In the Park With George - Sunday In the Park With George, currently playing in a limited run at New York’s Hudson Theatre starring Jake Gyllenhaal, is blissfully free of politics—a two-and-a-half hour respite from contemporary anxieties, a holiday on the banks of the Seine, bathed in sunlight and glorious harmony. And yet, without ever straining to, it makes one of the most persuasive cases imaginable for the power of artists, and how deeply integral their work is to a well-ordered society. Art shows us, as Gyllenhaal’s George demonstrates to his mother in one of the first act’s most moving songs, how life can be beautiful. But rather than simply celebrating the fruits of creative labor, Sunday In the Park is a testament to the process of making art; a substantial peek inside the mind of someone wrestling with their own genius. When the show—with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Lapine—debuted in 1984, it was interpreted as one of Sondheim’s most personal expressions, coming on the heels of his critical and financial bomb, Merrily We Roll Along. George, the show’s hero, is obsessed with his paintings, to the detriment of everything else in his life. But as the show unfolds, moving from 19th-century France to 1980s Chicago, it explores the reasoning behind his single-minded fixation, and how George’s role as an observer lets everyone else see the world differently, too. That’s largely because this revival, directed by Sarna Lapine (James Lapine’s niece), is so magnificent and so emotionally rich, anchored by performances by Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford as George’s mistress and artist’s model, Dot. The show is based around Georges Seurat’s 1884 pointillist masterwork, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, and George is a loose version of Seurat, with his life broadly fictionalized. As he sketches studies of Dot, who grumbles about the discomfort, the heat, and George’s fierce focus on his work, projections of his sketches appear on a backdrop onstage, rendered for the audience to witness in real time. All the while George narrates his thought process: the challenge of bringing order and harmony to a blank canvas. Gyllenhaal’s gifts as an actor are well-documented by now, so it’s his vocal talents that may come as a surprise (observe, if you haven’t already, Cary Fukunaga’s short video of Gyllenhaal singing George’s “Finishing the Hat” at the Hudson). His voice is rich, measured, and emphatic. But it’s the acting behind it that really cuts deep, in a remarkable fusion of technical accomplishment and intense absorption in a role. When he sings about mapping out a sky, sensing voices outside but being totally lost in focus, “dizzy from the height” of falling back to earth, you’re tempted, like Dot, to forgive him everything. Ashford, who won a Tony for the 2014 revival of the daffy comedy You Can’t Take It With You, is George’s perfect foil as Dot: sassy, practical, and infinitely charming. But she also conveys the exquisite pain of loving someone so inaccessible, and her chemistry with Gyllenhaal is pure. Toward the end of the first act, when George directs the many elements and characters to come together in a synergy of music and visuals, he places Dot at the front of the “painting,” as if to keep her close. But the supporting cast, too, are adept at bringing comic relief, and balancing the harmony of the show: Robert Sean Leonard as Jules, an accomplished artist; Penny Fuller as George’s mother, lost in nostalgia; Phillip Boykin as a foulmouthed and obstreperous boatman. The peripheral characters by their nature are fleeting archetypes, included to provide contrast with the more textured portrayals of George and Dot. The second act of Sunday In the Park, which leaps ahead to 1984—with Gyllenhaal playing another artist named George and Ashford his grandmother, Marie, Dot’s daughter—has often seemed jarring after the perfection of the first act, but Lapine manages to make the two halves more symbiotic by emphasizing how George’s art is tied to his great-grandfather’s. Just as Seurat used pointillism and the science of light to create new colors and impressions, 1984 George debuts a light installation called a “chromolume” at the Art Institute of Chicago. The work, created by the scenic designer Beowulf Boritt, looms above the audience in a dazzling display of illuminations, weaving and undulating overhead. Ashford, seamlessly segueing into playing a 90-year-old southern grandmother, spells out George’s isolation and creative frustration in “Children and Art,” a song addressed to her mother in the painting. The cracks in her vocals, and the deliberate weakness of Marie’s voice, make it one of the most moving numbers in the show. Modern George’s frustrations are different but rooted in the same fears—unlike his great-grandfather, he has to fundraise for his expensive, technologically advanced works, and respond to the criticism it inevitably receives. But in the song “Move On,” it becomes clear that the two are one and the same, straining to make art that counts, and to do something new. The resolution in the show comes from realizing that just doing the work is enough—everything else is out of an artist’s hands. This production, so deftly directed, emphasizes both the value in the struggle, and the timelessness of great art. It’s powerful indeed to have the experience, even briefly, of seeing the world through the eyes of a visionary. 05:00
Andy Warhol and Get Out: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing - 30 Years After His Death, Andy Warhol’s Spirit Is Still Very Much Alive R.C. Baker | The Village Voice “How much responsibility does a mirror bear for whatever beauty or ugliness it beholds? Warhol loved both the heights and depths of American culture, and reflected it back at us through his work, which remains resonant to this day. Here is the spin he put on the concept of American exceptionalism in the 1985 America book: ‘Maybe you think it's so special that certain people shouldn't be allowed to live [here], or if they do live [here] that they shouldn't say certain things or have certain ideas.’” The Rise of Roxane Gay Molly McArdle | Brooklyn Magazine “Gay has been persistent and precise when so many others have not: She believes in a substantial variety of writers and writing that includes not only race and gender and sexuality but also class, ability, geography. She also takes as long and hard a look at herself as she does anyone else. When considering, in her 2010 HTMLGiant essay ‘A Profound Sense of Absence,’ whether or not she read diversely, Gay concludes: ‘I don’t, nor do I know how to.’” The Age of Rudeness Rachel Cusk | The New York Times Magazine “Are people rude because they are unhappy? Is rudeness like nakedness, a state deserving the tact and mercy of the clothed? If we are polite to rude people, perhaps we give them back their dignity; yet the obsessiveness of the rude presents certain challenges to the proponents of civilized behavior. It is an act of disinhibition: Like a narcotic, it offers a sensation of glorious release from jailers no one else can see.” In Get Out, Racism Is the Horror Story Black People Try to Survive Frederick McKindra | BuzzFeed “Horror films constantly reinforced the concept of the white body’s vulnerability, and subtly advised their audiences to treat only those bodies with concern. Meanwhile, for black characters, and by extension, black people, if no one ever saw you scream, tremble, or bleed, they never learned to see you as human. In the aughts, black characters in horror films were either disposable, not worth depicting at all, or rendered racial amnesiacs when it came to issues that would concern any black person in real life.” Remembering Seijun Suzuki, an Absurdist Auteur in Hired-Gun Clothing Emily Yoshida | Vulture “The Japanese film-production world was a kind of temporary Wild West, no longer locked into the hierarchical promotion system that brought up Ozu and Kurosawa. Suzuki rose up through the reshuffling almost by accident, but once he became a director, he made sure nobody forgot his name.”Harry Belafonte and the Social Power of a Song Amanda Petrusich | The New Yorker “Belafonte was strikingly prescient about the ways in which taste could and would be politicized, and especially about how treacherous it is to confuse consumption with action. This seems, to me, to be an unspoken but profound hindrance to all popular rebellions: If a person reads the right authors, and buys the right records, and vouches for those preferences loudly and repeatedly, it can feel like all the necessary work has been done to align oneself with the proper causes.”Jackie Kennedy’s Strange, Elegant Accent, Explained by Linguists Alex Abad-Santos | Vox “Merely reading that line doesn’t do justice to the voice Portman adopted for the role. If you’re not aware of how Jackie Kennedy spoke, listening to Portman’s Jackie is like the tingle of soda in your throat. It often feels familiar, but in certain spots it pops and jumps. The way she lops off the end of ‘bitter,’ the funny hop in ‘artifact,’ the way she rolls through ‘remembered’—it’s like she’s invented her own unique way of speaking English.” Moonlight’s Forgotten Frequencies Dave Tompkins | MTV News “Moonlight's score is part of this allowed emotional space, internalizing the Miami environment. (In terms of pressing bass to vinyl, wider spaces between the grooves make room for longer wavelengths and lower frequencies.) According to [Nicholas] Britell, the composer, everything in Moonlight’s score has at some point been pitched down and lived an alternate bass life before reaching your ears, whether you hear it or not.” 25 Feb
Girls's Powerful Insight on Trauma - Why do the girls of Girls act that way? That’s the question underlying five years of baffled cultural responses to Lena Dunham’s epic of questionable decisions, cruelty, narcissism, and grace. Girls has never given a straightforward answer to the question. Despite unflinching confessional dialogue and occasional backstory development and sharp cultural satire, Hannah Horvath and her friends still have an air of Athena, sprung into existence fully formed. Asking why these girls spill drinks and impulsively marry and vomit off of bunkbeds is like asking why anyone exists at all. This has made Girls unusual in a cultural landscape where the tragic flashback is the go-to decoder of individual motivation. To take two recent examples from HBO, The Young Pope connected Pope Pious’s childhood abandonment to his adult torment, and Westworld’s so-called “key insight” was that to be human is to remember suffering. In society more broadly, ongoing dialogues about trauma, triggering, and privilege—dialogues that Dunham often wades into as a public figure—insist that personal history needs to be taken as seriously as present conduct does. On Girls, parental issues occasionally surface—Jessa’s flaky dad, Hannah’s closeted one, Marnie’s controlling mom—and brain chemistry came to the fore in Hannah’s OCD plot line. But sometimes it has seemed like the show wants to satirize the notion of explaining character through trauma. Once, Hannah recalled telling her mom that her babysitter touched her vagina at age 3—but added that she had probably been lying at it. At the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, her peers insisted her short story about violent sex must have been non-fiction from an abusive past; the joke was that it actually reflected her adventuresome present: “the time that I took a couple Quaaludes and asked my boyfriend to punch me in the chest.” This week’s sure-to-be-provocative episode “American Bitch”—posted to online platforms now and airing on HBO Sunday night—sharpened the show’s point of view on psychological cause and effect. In it, Hannah visits with a famous author, Chuck Palmer (Matthew Rhys), after writing an essay about accusations that he’d serially preyed on college-aged female fans. Chuck makes his case for innocence, Hannah relates some details from her past, and the two seem to come to an understanding—and then Chuck takes his penis out and presses it against Hannah. It’s a story of personal monstrousness and trauma, but it’s also a story about a system: a gender dynamic that ensures a common experience of degradation for women, whether in their pasts or in the present. Chuck Palmer has a surprising amount in common with Hannah. His fussiness hints at OCD. He proposes that writers need stories more than anything else, echoing Hannah’s experiences-at-all-cost outlook throughout Girls. The two bond over their love of Philip Roth, agreeing that “you can’t let politics dictate what you read or who you fuck” (Chuck’s words). And most tellingly, Chuck professes to want to understand the person he’s talking to but constantly interrupts with his own observations—perhaps a sexist tic, but also a narcissistic one plenty familiar to Girls viewers. In all of these things, Dunham may be sketching some ideas about the intrinsic traits that make a writer. But most of their conversation is a clash of biographies. Chuck emphasizes his loneliness, his daughter’s depression, his ex-wife’s hostility, and the sadness of book-tour life. When Hannah suggests an inappropriate power balance in him hooking up with girls on the road, Chuck shoots back that the real imbalance is that “she looks like a Victoria’s Secret model and I didn’t lose my virginity till I was 25 and on Acutane.” He is the victim in this reading. The women complaining online are exploiting his fame and desperation as well as the power of the internet to amplify harmful claims. It appears that this version of events nearly persuades Hannah, who apologizes for having written something that upset Chuck. But the apology is colored by all the buttering-up that has come before. Chuck repeatedly tells her how smart he thinks she is. He gives her a signed copy of Roth’s When She Was Good. And he claims that he invited her over to try and correct his true error with his accusers: not “pushing” enough to get to know them as people. When he then asks questions about her life, Hannah giggles and blithely answers. But during an earlier, tenser point in the conversation, Hannah relates a less happy bit of her history. In fifth grade, her English teacher Mr. Lasky took a liking to her based on her talent as a writer: He liked me, he was impressed with me, I did like special creative writing, I wrote like a little novel or whatever. Sometimes when he was talking to the class he would stand behind me and he’d rub my neck. Sometimes he’d rub my head, rustle my hair. And I didn’t mind. It made me feel special. It made me feel like someone saw me and they knew that I was going to grow up and be really, really particular. It also made kids hate me and put lasagna in my fucking backpack, but that’s a different story. Anyway last year I’m at a warehouse party in Bushwick and this guy comes up to me and he’s like, “Horvath, we went to middle school together, East Lansing!” And I’m like, “Oh my god, remember how crazy Mr. Lasky’s class was? He was basically trying to molest me.” You know what this kid said? He looks at me in the middle of this fucking party like he’s a judge, and he goes, “That’s a very serious accusation Hannah.” And he walked away. And there I am and I’m just 11 again and I’m just getting my fucking neck rubbed. Because that stuff never goes away. If this is Hannah Horvath’s long-awaited revelation about her past, it’s a relatively mild one: no rape, no violence, just some neck rubbing in class. But the insidiousness of it is in how it fits a pattern of warped gender relations. Chuck is like Mr. Lanksy: an older, powerful man praising a younger woman’s intellectual talents—but also tying that praise to flesh. Hannah’s value as a writer and her value as a body were long ago swirled together by a gatekeeper, and Chuck did something very similar to the young would-be authors he had sex with. If they consented, what were they consenting to? A validation of their mind, or the notion that what really matters is their body? The trauma here is not merely what happened, either. It’s in how honest expressions of discomfort by women are met with hostility and invalidation by men on legalistic pretenses. Consent is hugely important, but the issue isn’t entirely a legal one in this case. It is a moral one, a social one, and an emotional one. Hannah doesn’t seem to want either Chuck or Mr. Lasky in jail. She just wants to tell the truth about a troubling, degrading dynamic, and she is told—both by the guy at the Bushwick party and by Chuck—that she is wrong to do so. The earlier trauma itself didn’t create the new one.The sick twist is that the trauma has now been amplified and reenacted on Hannah for speaking out. Chuck flatters her, convinces her he’s no monster, and then unzips and thrusts against her without warning. For a moment, Hannah seems confused; for another moment, she seems to consider going along with it—she grabs him. Then she freaks out and screams at him. He gives her an evil grin. All the respect he had previously paid her has been rendered a joke. His praise of her mind was foreplay to the reminder that what he really liked was her body. And in Hannah’s moment of her considering whether to give in—for the rush, the faux validation, and the avoidance of conflict that would come with saying “yes”—she was in the same impossible situation as so many women before her. As a public figure, Lena Dunham has written a lot about trauma, especially about how a rape in early adulthood has had a concrete effect on her life over the years. But she also, recently, apologized for saying she “wished” she had had an abortion so as to help destigmatize the practice—a very inartful expression of the idea that a person and their worldview is not merely a result of biography. Girls seems to be trying to reconcile the need to honor the past's influence on the present while recognizing that no individual's history is an island. Did the Mr. Lasky experience change Hannah forever? Maybe. He could be the reason why she wants “to write stories that make people feel less alone than [she] did,” the exact kind of story that brought her to Chuck’s apartment. But that earlier trauma, in itself, didn’t create the new one she experienced in this episode. Nor was it, theoretically, necessary for Hannah to have gone through what she went through in order to care about Chuck's accusers. Why is Chuck such a creep? Girls doesn’t say that it’s because of any specific circumstance in his past. It’s not just because he’s what he calls a “horny motherfucker.” It’s simply because he can be this way. Because he is successful and male, he can put women in spots like the one he put Hannah in. He can expect them to often consent, queasily or not. He can even expect that other men will tell the women not to complain about it later. What he can’t expect anymore, Girls suggests, is for the women to actually remain silent. In the final moments of the episode, Hannah watches Chuck’s daughter play flute. She alternates her gaze between the girl and her father, perhaps weighing the implications of what just happened and what she should do about it. If Hannah writes about his actions, she may hurt him in a way that harms his daughter. But she keeps staring at the girl. She may well be one day put in a situation like the one Hannah was just put in. She may already have been. As Hannah leaves, we see a handful of women walking the opposite direction up the sidewalk, and then turning to enter his building. It reads as symbolism: a nod to all of the women past and future who can relate to what Hannah just went through, as different as their individual backstories may be. 25 Feb
The Atantic's Week in Culture - Don’t Miss The Case for Shyness—Megan Garber traces the history of timidity via Joe Moran’s fascinating new book Shrinking Violets. Chris Pizzello / Invision / APOscars Your 2017 Oscars Crash Course—Arnav Adhikari rounds up all the best stories from Atlantic writers to get you up to speed for the 89th Academy Awards. My 2017 Oscars Predictions—Christopher Orr considers the top contenders for the biggest awards at the ceremony. In Fire at Sea, Tragedy and Normalcy Live Side by Side—Anna Diamond reviews the Oscar-nominated documentary, which offers a compelling portrait of how the migration crisis affects a tiny Italian island. On Denzel Washington’s Enduring Stardom—David Sims explores the reasons behind the Fences actor’s remarkable longevity. A Common Theme For This Year’s Oscar-Nominated Documentaries—Sarah Feldberg explores the films focused on the migrant crisis and Syrian conflict at this year’s Academy Awards. Sundance SelectsFilm Kiki Revisits the Power of New York’s Ball Culture—David Sims praises the new documentary, which looks at a safe haven for LBTQ youths of color, first examined in Paris Is Burning. The South African Building That Came to Symbolize the Apocalypse—Ryan Lenora Brown shares the architectural history of Ponte City, Africa’s tallest apartment block which has become a mainstay of movies about the end of the world. Why Netflix Will Release Martin Scorsese’s Next Film—David Sims unpacks the reasons behind why the streaming service will produce the director’s next gangster epic. Get Out Is a Funny and Brilliantly Subversive Horror Film—David Sims relishes Jordan Peele’s excellent directorial debut. I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore Is a Dark, Goofy Neo-Noir—David Sims watches Macon Blair’s directorial debut, which swerves between indie comedy and ultra-violence. Wikimedia CommonsBooks The Politics of Retelling Norse Mythology—Lisa L. Hannett unpacks Neil Gaiman’s remarkable new book, which has triggered a debate about who owns pagan tales. Simon & Schuster’s Completely Avoidable Milo Yiannopoulos Disaster—Sophie Gilbert criticizes the publisher’s delayed cancelling of the former Breitbart editor’s book deal. Brooklyn Academy of MusicTheater Escaped Alone Finds Comfort at the End of the World—Sophie Gilbert analyzes Caryl Churchill’s new play, which finds solace amid an apocalypse. UniversalMusic The Maddening Media Obsession With Female Feuds, Katy Perry Edition—Spencer Kornhaber discusses the problems with how the singer’s supposed rivalry with Taylor Swift is portrayed. Frank Ocean’s Surprising Slide Back to Pop—Spencer Kornhaber listens to the enigmatic singer’s new collaboration with Calvin Harris and Migos. Eric Miller / ReutersMedia Scenes From the Mall of America—Megan Garber weighs in on the massive shopping center’s announcement of a writing residency in honor of its 25th anniversary. Why Are They ‘Stars’?—Megan Garber connects the history of why celebrities are considered celestial to Shakespeare, Chaucer, and movie cameras. 24 Feb
A Common Theme for This Year's Oscar-Nominated Documentaries - The documentary 4.1 Miles opens to a bright, sunny day on the Aegean Sea. It’s October 28, 2015, and for a moment the setting is beautiful: blue sky, blue water, horizon tilting in and out of view. Then you hear the screams. A gloved hand reaches out of frame and returns pulling a young boy to safety aboard a coast-guard boat. Then the captain spins around with a baby girl in his arms. “Put the camera down,” he says to the person behind the lens. “Take this.” Just over four miles from Turkey, the Greek island of Lesbos has been on the front lines of the global refugee crisis. Since January 2014, more than 1.5 million people have crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, with many fleeing the Syrian civil war, the rise of ISIS, and oppressive regimes and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. Upwards of 12,000 have died or gone missing along the way, but many of those who’ve survived the short but treacherous journey have landed on Lesbos, which received more than 500,000 migrants in 2015 alone. Daphne Matziaraki’s 20-minute Oscar-nominated film 4.1 Miles follows Greek Coast Guard Captain Kyriakos Papadopoulos as he and a small crew on Lesbos head out to sea again and again to pluck desperate men, women, and children from the swells. Before thousands of Syrians, Afghans, and Iraqis started setting out in boats in the hopes of finding refuge in Europe, Papadopoulos spent his days making routine patrols. But the film finds the captain thrust into the role of professional savior without any additional training or equipment—an average citizen trying to deal with a humanitarian disaster. Of the 10 films nominated for the 2017 Academy Awards in the documentary categories, four deal with the Syrian conflict or refugee crisis. Along with 4.1 Miles, the Netflix original The White Helmets and Watani: My Homeland are up for the short-form documentary Oscar, while the Italian film Fire at Sea was nominated for best feature documentary. The strength of these projects lies in the emotional, and often stark, portraits they paint of their characters. If audiences can imagine themselves in the shoes of Syrian rescue workers, a Greek coast-guard captain, an overwhelmed physician, or a migrant mother, these films may do more than enlighten or inform. Their creators all told me they hoped that, like other documentaries that have mobilized viewers and influenced lawmakers, their films can make far-away problems feel more immediately urgent. The films’ nominations were announced just four days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration and three days before he issued an executive order suspending refugee admissions from Syria indefinitely and from all other countries for 120 days. The order also temporarily halted arrivals from seven majority-Muslim nations and cut the total number of refugees that would be admitted to the U.S. in 2017 by more than half to 50,000. While the travel ban has since been suspended by federal courts, Trump’s executive order set off protests at airports across the country and pushed the people and issues portrayed in these documentaries back into the national spotlight. “When I made the film [in 2015], I thought it was very timely because it was when the refugee crisis was in the news,” Matziaraki told me. “I would never ever imagine that unfortunately the film would be so much more timely now in the U.S.” While it’s unusual to have so many Oscar nominees address the same topic, The White Helmets producer Joanna Natasegara told me it makes sense in this case: “Storytelling has always engaged with the most pressing issues of any given time, and documentary perhaps even more than narrative [film].” Those issues today, she said, are the refugee crisis and the war in Syria. As a medium, documentaries offer an intimacy and focus often missing in daily news. Since the Syrian conflict began in 2011, the escalating violence and resulting flood of migrants have been covered by the international press, but in the face of constant coverage, it’s difficult for many readers to sustain the same level of attention day to day. It often takes a particularly horrifying image—a dead toddler washed up on a beach, a blank-faced 5-year-old covered in blood and dust—to re-galvanize interest. Matziaraki, who grew up in Greece but is now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, said even she felt disconnected from the disaster playing out in her homeland. When she arrived on Lesbos, she found the situation was worse than she’d imagined. “I really wanted to make a film that would [bridge] this gap between our comfort zone and the reality of the world,” she said. “I asked them, ‘Why go across the sea if you might die?’ They said, ‘It’s the word “might” that makes us go across the sea. The word “might” is hope.’”The White Helmets director Orlando von Einsiedel also admitted to feeling numb to the tragedy. The film, made with Natasegara, tells the story of the Syrian Civil Defense, a group of volunteer rescue workers in the country who respond to attacks on civilians. When the filmmakers saw a YouTube video of the White Helmets pulling a newborn from a bombed-out building, they recognized a story missing from the mainstream representation of Syria. “There’s a confusing, unbalanced picture of what is left behind for Syrian civilians on the ground, and a vacuum of any narrative about Syrians helping themselves or being active in their own saving,” Natasegara told me. “The idea of the Syrian hero was almost completely absent from the media landscape.” The White Helmets were the “perfect anecdote” to that gap: They were former bakers, builders, tailors, and students who’d banded together to save their fellow Syrians. The other Syria-specific film, Watani: My Homeland follows the family of a rebel commander in Aleppo who has been kidnapped by ISIS. His wife, Hala, and their four children make the heartbreaking decision to flee the country and begin a new life in Germany. The director Marcel Mettelsiefen, a veteran photojournalist who covered the Arab Spring, said documentaries offer an emotional way into a story that can otherwise feel abstract. “The importance of documentary filmmaking is to humanize the conflict,” he told me. In the feature category, Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea focuses on Lampedusa, an Italian island where hundreds of thousands of African refugees have landed since the 1990s. The filmmaker moved to Lampedusa for a year and a half to understand both the rhythms of daily life and the harrowing journey migrants endure to get there. “The film is a cry of help to raise awareness,” Rosi told me, recounting a conversation with one migrant. “When I asked them, ‘Why go across the sea if you might die?’ They said, ‘It’s the word “might” that makes us go across the sea. The word “might” is hope.’” While documentaries may have once been considered stale educational fare, their reputation as an exciting and mainstream art form has undoubtedly grown in recent years. Because of new distribution options and social media, documentaries now have the potential to reach a more global audience. By licensing The White Helmets to video-streaming giant Netflix, von Einsiedel and Natasegara made their film available in 190 countries (fellow documentary Oscar nominee 13th is also on Netflix). Matziaraki’s 4.1 Miles—produced while she was a graduate student in journalism at the University of California-Berkeley—can be viewed on the New York Times’ website, free to anyone with an internet connection. Fire at Sea has been released in 64 countries, including Japan, where it opened earlier this month. According to Reuters, the country accepted only 28 refugees in 2016, yet the 10 p.m. showing sold out in Tokyo on opening night. Documentaries can often have clear, measurable consequences—whether driving politicians to action or investing the general public in an issue that affects them. A 2015 study found that Gasland, the 2010 documentary on the dangers of fracking, led to greater discussion on social media and increased mass-media coverage, after its release and subsequent nomination for an Oscar in 2011. Sometimes films are credited with inspiring legislation—as was the case with the 2012 Oscar-nominated film The Invisible War, which investigated sexual assault in the military, and the 2013 documentary Blackfish, which explored the treatment of orca whales at SeaWorld. Of course, some films have been criticized for misleading audiences by omitting inconvenient details or twisting statistics to make a more convincing argument or interesting story (as was the accusation leveled at the 2010 documentary Waiting for “Superman,” which portrayed charter schools as the prescription for an ailing public education system.) While it’s too soon to tell if this year’s Oscar-nominated documentaries have had a broader effect on people’s understanding of the migrant crisis or Syrian conflict, some of the filmmakers have already seen their work resonate on a smaller scale. Matziaraki said she’s received letters from viewers asking how they can help or donate, including from one who traveled to Lesbos to volunteer after seeing 4.1 Miles. “People that write to me and say, ‘Thank you for changing my mind. Thank you for making me realize what is happening.’ This is really maybe the most important thing,” Matziaraki said. In the Fire at Sea director Rosi’s experience, the emotional connection fostered by these documentaries inevitably leads to a question: “What can I do?” Over the phone from New York, one of Rosi’s film subjects, Pietro Bartolo, offered one answer. As the physician on Lampedusa, Bartolo is often the first person to have real human contact with the refugees who arrive; he’s also the man who performs autopsies on those who don’t make it alive. He told me it’s important to simply show migrants they are welcome. “People say, ‘Can I come to Lampedusa to help?’ We don’t need the help. We never asked for any help,” he said. “On Lampedusa, we are the door. That we leave it open, this is not enough. [When the refugees] arrive in Europe they need to feel that they are home.” 24 Feb
Why Are They 'Stars'? - It makes so much sense to refer to certain kinds of celebrities as “stars.” At their heights, those people inspire the rest of us. They shine, larger than life, above us, and around us. They suggest, in their insistent omnipresence, a certain order to the world. To see the stars—or, more specifically, to believe in them, taxonomically—is to endorse a notion that the people before us on our screens, far from us and yet so close, exist, as the author Jeanine Basinger puts it, “on some plane between ours and that of the gods.” But: Why are they “stars,” specifically? Why is Hollywood’s Walk of Fame populated by pentagrams of pale pink, rather than some other arbitrary shape? Why is it “stars” who are, obviously and incorrectly, Just Like Us? Related Story What We Talk About When We Talk About ‘Demagogues’ The answer has to do with Ovid. And Shakespeare. And Thomas Edison. And Mary Pickford. Stars are stars, certainly, because they sparkle and shine—because, even when they are bathed in the limelight, they seem to have an incandescence of their own. But they are “stars,” much more specifically, because they are part of Western culture’s longstanding tendency to associate the human with the heavenly. They are “stars” because their audiences want them—and in some sense need them—to be. The broad use of the word “star” to indicate a leader among us dates back, Peter Davis, a theater historian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me, to the Middle Ages. Chaucer, who was also the first recorded user of the word “celebrity” and one of the first to use the word “famous,” also hinted at the lexical convergence of the human and the celestial: In The House of Fame, Chaucer’s dreamer worries that he might find himself “stellified.” “O God Who made nature,” the dreamer thinks, “am I to die in no other way? Will Jove transform me into a star?” Chaucer, Dean Swinford points out in his book Through the Daemon’s Gate, was recalling Ovid’s notion of metamorphosis—the idea that humans could be transformed, in this case, into the shiny stuff of constellations. Chaucer’s words also carried architectural implications that would likely have been apparent to his audiences: “Fixing with stars,” Swinford points out, “implies the creation of a mosaic-like decoration of the interior of a cathedral.” The building was an intentional mimicry of the sky, and an unintentional anticipation of Hollywood’s own kind of firmament: It presented stars as a constellation of gleaming lights, always above. It was through the wily dynamics of public relations that “star,” in the United States, was born.The US Weeklyfied version of stellification is in many ways a direct descendant of Chaucer’s: It emphasizes the role of the celebrity as a body both distant and accessible, gleaming and sparkling and yet reassuringly omnipresent. Stars have long suggested a kind of order—and orientation—within chaotic human lives. They have long hinted that there is something bigger, something beyond, something more. Little surprise, then, that—especially as the world of science became more familiar with the workings of celestial bodies—the world of the theater seized on their symbolism. Molière, Peter Davis told me, made Chaucerian use of the personified “star”: In School for Wives, in 1662, Horace describes Agnes as “this young star of love, adorned by so many charms.” Shakespeare, too, neatly anticipated Hollywood’s blending of the personal and the celestial in both his plays and his poems. “We make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars,” Edmund laments in King Lear, “as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion.” Love, too, in Shakespeare’s mind, makes its highest sense as a heavenly force, reassuring in its constancy: In “Sonnet 116,” the bard finds love to be “...an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken; / It is the star to every wand’ring bark, / Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.” It was in this context, Davis explains, that the notion of the human star came to refer, in particular, to the decidedly grounded firmament of the theater—and to the decidedly human person of the actor. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first reference to a “star” of the stage came in 1751, with the Bays in Council announcing, “You may Shine the brightest Theatric Star, that ever enliven’d of charm’d an Audience.” Around the same time, in 1761, the book Historical Theatres of London & Dublin noted of an apparently Meryl Streepian actor named Garrick: “That Luminary soon after became a Star of the first Magnitude.” Garrick would appear again in 1765, in an extremely effusive article written about him in The Gentleman’s and London Magazine: “The rumor of this bright star appearing in the East flew with the rapidity of lightening through the town, and drew all the theatrical Magi thither to pay their devotions to his new-born son of genius….” By the 1820s, it was common to refer to actors as “stars”—for purposes of salesmanship as much as anything else. Theater touring became popular during that time, in both England and America. British actors, in particular, Davis told me, were often promoted as “stars” for their tours in the U.S. as a way to ensure that large audiences would come to witness their performances. Actors like Edmund Kean, George Frederick Cooke, and Charles and Fanny Kemble were celestially sold to American audiences. Sometimes, Davis notes, the actors were considered to have passed their prime in Britain; they used their American tours to reboot their careers back home. It was fitting: Through the wily dynamics of public relations, “star,” in the U.S., was born. The term carried through as theater acting gave way to movie acting—as silent films gave way to talkies. “The observable ‘glow’ of potential stardom was present from the very beginning of film history,” Jeanine Basinger notes in her book The Star Machine. But it also took hold, as with so much else in Hollywood history, fitfully. As Jan-Christopher Horak, the director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, told me, the earliest films didn’t name the actors who starred in them. That was in part because the actors, many of whom had been trained in the theater, were initially embarrassed to be putting their hard-won skills to the service of this strange new medium. The earliest films didn’t bother to name the actors who starred in them.It was also, however, because of the mechanics of the medium itself. On film, Anne Helen Petersen suggests in her book Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and Drama From the Golden Age of American Cinema, the Hollywood star was a function of technology as much as it was one of culture. As early cinema developed in the early 20th century, bulky and unwieldy cameras made it difficult for cinematographers to capture anything beyond full-length shots of actors. “Because viewers couldn’t see the actor’s face up close,” Petersen writes, “it was difficult to develop the feelings of admiration or affection we associate with film stars.” As cameras improved, though, close-ups became more common, emphasizing actors’ faces and humanity. As sound became part of the cinema experience, voices, too, substituted full personas for lurching images. The “picture personality” had arrived. The “star,” yet again, was born. With that came the star system that would give structure to Hollywood for much of its young life. Mary Pickford, Horak notes, one of the first movie actors to be billed under her (stage) name, soon began making films under her own banner. Charlie Chaplin, long before Andy Warhol would ironize the term, became a superstar. The star itself, in the era of spotlights and marquis banners, soon became a metonym—a convenient and fitting way to describe the people who studded Hollywood’s new and expanding firmament. The term that had taken life in the age of Shakespeare and Molière and early romanticism—a time that would, in some places, find art becoming obsessed with the dignity of the individual and the fiery workings of the human soul—came alive yet again in the glow of the screen. It may be quaint, today, to talk of “movie stars.” This is an age defined, after all, by that other Chaucerian term: the “celebrity.” It’s an age of actor-founded lifestyle brands and internet-famous felines and people starring in reality itself. But our current celebrities, too, suggest something similar to what “star” has long evoked: orientation, transcendence, a kind of union between mortals and the gods they have chosen for themselves. “Celebrity” comes from the Old French for “rite” or “ceremony”; it suggests that even the most frivolous of the famous are filling a role that is, in its way, profound. Stars—fusions of person and persona, of the fleshy human and the flinty image on the stage and screen—have long offered a kind of structure within the hectic hum of human lives. They have long promised that most basic and inspiring of things: that we can be something more than what we are. “I am big,” Norma Desmond, that fading star, insisted. “It’s the pictures that got small.” 24 Feb
Frank Ocean's Surprising Slide Back to Pop - “Frank Ocean appears courtesy of Frank Ocean,” reads the liner notes to Calvin Harris’s new single “Slide,” which in this unseasonably warm late February has kicked off the 2017 song-of-the-summer battle. Most artists only ever appear anywhere courtesy of their record label, but Ocean is a free agent and this song is another surprise move in his ongoing rewriting of pop stardom. Last summer, the buzzy R&B singer broke years of unexplained silence with a duo of albums, Endless and Blond(e), that defied conventions both musically and business-wise. The latter of the two releases—the one that was actually for sale and had distinguishable songs, in contrast to the free-form streaming audiovisual project Endless—arrived not via his record company, Def Jam, but independently. Through years of wrangling (and the help of Apple, the new corporate patron of label-agnostic pop artists), he had freed himself of the kind of contract that once was considered both prize and necessity for new singers. It seemed possible he’d then use this newfound liberty to burrow deeper into an anti-commercial, anti-pop mindset. Blond(e) is a masterpiece, but a weird one: mostly free of drums, recognizable song structures, and anything that could be a hit. It took him four years to make, had two competing spellings for its name, and featured a tie-in print magazine. You can understand why its creator might not want to have to run all of his material past Universal Music Group’s A&R. And you might guess that future Ocean projects would become even more esoteric. But today brings the mostly good news that Ocean has not entirely decided to withhold his talents—a voice that imparts both feeling and attitude, an adventuresome ear, a smart and funny lyrical sensibility—from the radio race. He’s paired up with Calvin Harris, the Scottish EDM star famous for unsubtle but irresistible Top 40 fare like “This Is What You Came For” (his 2016 summer smash, featuring Rihanna) and “We Found Love” (his 2011 summer smash, featuring, again, Rihanna). Rounding out the bill are two-thirds of Migos, the Atlanta rap group enjoying breakthrough national success in 2017 with the tricky-fun album Culture and the No. 1 hit “Bad & Boujee.” Harris’s knack for consolidating popular trends and nudging them ever-so-slightly forward is on display here, with the beat for “Slide” sucking in Bruno Mars’s recent revivalist funk and Justin Bieber’s airy tropical house for a blend that will only reveal its full potential when heard on the beach. One of Ocean’s latter-day signatures, a squeaky manipulated voice, opens the track with the couplet “I might empty my bank account / And buy that boy a wooden pipe.” I won’t pretend to know exactly what the wooden pipe is supposed to mean here. But the sentiment comes across, to these ears, as a boy hitting on a boy. Which is not insignificant in 2017 pop, especially in light of recent comments by Migos: Asked about the rapper Makonnen who’d just come out, they said it seemed “fucked up” and “wack” that he’d previously put on a tough, streetwise persona. The group later gave an apology that said they were fine with gays but that didn’t quite address the stereotypes they’d seemed to endorse. In any case, they are now on a track with Frank Ocean, who shook hip-hop with a 2012 admission of an affair with a man—and who has since scrambled all sorts of expectations about culture, machismo, and sex. Migos themselves sound great, the stickiness of their distinctive flows suddenly plainer than ever over such a sturdy and sunny beat. Ocean’s verses seem to cryptically, wearily talk about the moment at the end of a night in the club when the lights come up and you see who you might take home; Migos’s lyrics are explicit boasts of wining and dining and heterosexual screwing around the world. The divides between Ocean, Migos, and Harris’s sensibilities couldn’t be clearer, but the song is a reminder of pop’s power to make very different elements slide together. 24 Feb
My 2017 Oscar Predictions: A Lot of La La Land - It’s that time of year again, when we can all grouse about the inanity of the Oscars: how the Academy ignores blockbusters or ignores indie films or ignores people of color. Only this time, there seems less to grouse about than usual. There are snubs here and there of course (cough, Amy Adams), and actors who through error or pretense find themselves in the wrong categories. But overall the Academy did a pretty credible job this time—credible enough that for this year I’m abandoning my customary categories of “who was nominated but shouldn’t have been” and “who wasn’t nominated but should have been.” But who is going to win? Before attempting to answer that question, I should disclose that I’ve gone 25 for 30 on my picks over the last three years (you can find them here, here, and here), but I missed on Best Picture last year. (I thought The Revenant would beat Spotlight, and I was delighted to be wrong.) It is also perhaps worth noting that I was so spectacularly certain that Avatar would beat The Hurt Locker back in 2010 that I wrote an entire article on the subject. (In that case, I was even happier to be wrong.) Also, as before, I’m only going through ten of the top categories, so if you need help with your picks for sound editing or live-action short, you’ll have to seek assistance elsewhere. So keep all that in mind. As always, I obviously cannot condone any form of gambling, and will in no way consider it my fault if anyone happens to lose money based on my advice. Anyone who makes a little scratch, by contrast, and might be inclined to share it with their Oscar Whisperer, will find me easy enough to track down. Those curious about my own end-of-the-year awards, some of which are notably eccentric, can find them here. Lionsgate / SummitBest Picture Nominees: Arrival, Fences, Hacksaw Ridge, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, La La Land, Lion, Manchester by the Sea, Moonlight This has long been, and remains, La La Land’s race to lose. It’s become fashionable to lament that this is a bad thing and it would be better if Moonlight were to win instead. There are perhaps good arguments to be made on this score, but most of the arguments being made aren’t very good. It is without question a promising sign that Moonlight, a movie about the romance between two black men coming of age in inner-city Miami, directed by a black man, is not only a Best Picture nominee but a genuine contender to win. This is especially true given the Academy’s much-noted shortcomings over the last couple of years. But the widespread critique that La La Land is “only” the frontrunner because it is about Hollywood’s love for itself dramatically shortchanges Damien Chazelle’s film, which is a tremendously ambitious undertaking on its own terms, novel and nostalgic in equal measure. This is not The Artist. Should La La Land come away with the statue, as I strongly suspect it will, it will mean nothing other than that it was a terrific film. If you’re looking for the upset, definitely go with Moonlight. If you’re looking for a really big upset, try Manchester by the Sea or Hidden Figures. If you want an upset even bigger than that, buy a lottery ticket. What will win: La La Land What ought to win: Arrival Dale Robinette / Lionsgate / SummitBest Director Nominees: Damien Chazelle (La La Land), Mel Gibson (Hacksaw Ridge), Barry Jenkins (Moonlight), Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by the Sea), Denis Villeneuve (Arrival) The big surprise here, of course, is that Mel Gibson was nominated, despite the facts that a) Hacksaw Ridge was good but not great; and b) not so long ago, Gibson had a very-well-earned reputation as a depraved maniac. But Hollywood can be forgiving, especially if you have the right friends. In any case, Mel will not be repeating his Braveheart feat by taking home the actual statue. Here, again, the safe money is on Chazelle who, at 32, is already filling up his trophy case. For those who want to split their picture/director votes, Jenkins and Lonergan both have a shot here. Just not a very good one. Which seems like as good a time as any—and no, it won’t be the last—to express my unhappiness that Arrival, the best film of the year, is not really in the running for any of the major awards. My best explanation for this is that the film ultimately found itself betwixt and between: too big to be the kind of arty film that critics love to champion, but not big enough (its domestic box office was almost exactly $100 million) to force its way into the conversation, à la Avatar, in a “the people have spoken” fashion. Regardless, it’s terrific. Go see it if you haven’t already. Who will win: Damien Chazelle Who ought to win: Denis Villeneuve Lionsgate / SummitBest Actress Nominees: Isabelle Huppert (Elle), Ruth Negga (Loving), Natalie Portman (Jackie), Emma Stone (La La Land), Meryl Streep (Florence Foster Jenkins) This is an unusually strong category this year, and would be stronger still if Academy voters hadn’t briefly lost their minds and forgotten to nominate Amy Adams, who gave one of the year’s truly indelible performances in Arrival. Shame on you, Academy voters. Emma Stone is the favorite here, and she’s a perfectly solid pick—even if I’d prefer Negga or Huppert. The strongest challenger is probably Portman, which would be extremely dispiriting. Jackie was not a good movie, nor was hers a particularly good performance. When it comes to portrayals of well-known figures from the 20th century, there are two ways an actor can go: pure mimesis (the accent, the mannerisms, maybe a little prosthetic enhancement) or actually digging beneath the surface to find the real person underneath the fame. The examples I typically think of are Cate Blanchett’s grating, empty portrait of Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator (for the former category) and Christopher Plummer’s deft and nuanced work as Mike Wallace in The Insider (for the latter). Portman’s portrait of Jackie Kennedy falls firmly into the former set. Still, if you want to bet against Stone, this is probably the way to go. There’s a reason Blanchett won for The Aviator and Plumber wasn’t even nominated for The Insider. Who will win: Emma Stone Who ought to win: Amy Adams (had she been nominated); of the nominees, Ruth Negga or Isabelle Huppert Amazon StudiosBest Actor Nominees: Casey Affleck (Manchester by the Sea), Andrew Garfield (Hacksaw Ridge), Ryan Gosling (La La Land), Viggo Mortensen (Captain Fantastic), Denzel Washington (Fences) What was that I was saying about how Hollywood can be forgiving if you have the right friends? Well this is particularly true if those friends are Matt Damon and your big brother Ben Affleck. One can debate the ways in which the cases of Nate Parker and Casey Affleck are similar and are different, but the former’s early Oscar hopes vanished entirely and the latter’s appear to be chugging along unimpeded. It helps Affleck considerably that his performance was genuinely remarkable and his competition is relatively weak, especially given the customary strength of the category. Denzel Washington has the best chance of pulling off an upset here—and it’s a pretty decent one. He’s hampered a bit by the fact that Fences (which Washington directed himself) has very much a “filmed play” quality to it, as does his notably theatrical performance. Gosling may have a (very) outside shot here, too. But if you’re looking for an upset in the major categories—or you just don’t feel good about picking Affleck—Washington is probably the way to go. Who will win: Casey Affleck Who ought to win: Casey Affleck ParamountBest Supporting Actress Nominees: Viola Davis (Fences), Naomie Harris (Moonlight), Nicole Kidman (Lion), Octavia Spencer (Hidden Figures), Michelle Williams (Manchester by the Sea) Every year, there is at least one performer who competes a weight class lower than he or she should in order to get a win. Last year, Rooney Mara and Alicia Vikander both submitted what were really lead performances, but were both nominated for supporting actress—a category that Vikander wound up winning. Viola Davis is no dummy. She’s been nominated for Oscars twice before without winning (for Doubt and The Help), and she wants to take home that statue. Which, as it happens, she is overwhelmingly likely to do. I said it last year and I’ll say it again. The Academy has to take firmer control of its own nominating process if we don’t want to see category fraud like this every season. Davis is a great actress, and was the best thing in Fences. But she should be competing—and perhaps winning—against Stone, Portman, Negga, and Huppert. If you must bet against Davis, Naomie Harris and Michelle Williams have about equal chances of pulling off an upset—which is to say, very little chance at all. Who will win: Viola Davis Who ought to win: Viola Davis A24Best Supporting Actor Nominees: Mahershala Ali (Moonlight), Jeff Bridges (Hell or High Water), Lucas Hedges (Manchester by the Sea), Dev Patel (Lion), Michael Shannon (Nocturnal Animals) Well, at least the Academy realized that if it was going to nominate a performance in Nocturnal Animals it should be Michael Shannon’s slightly creepy lawman and not Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s totally forgettable outlaw. The fact that the latter was nominated—and won!—at the Golden Globes is yet further evidence (as if any were needed in this age) that voters are capable of doing strange and awful things. Let’s assume that the universe has righted itself sufficiently to correct at least this injustice, by giving Mahershala Ali the award he so very clearly deserves. His work in Moonlight was nothing short of stunning. Jeff Bridges is no doubt just happy to be nominated for his outstanding work in Hell or High Water. But if you’re looking for someone to upset Ali, Dev Patel may have a very small shot. Or who knows? Maybe Aaron Taylor-Johnson can win again, this time by write-in vote. My capacity for astonishment has been pretty much exhausted of late. Who will win: Mahershala Ali Who ought to win: Mahershala Ali Amazon StudiosBest Original Screenplay Nominees: Hell or High Water, La La Land, The Lobster, Manchester by the Sea, 20th Century Women It’s awfully nice to see The Lobster, Yorgos Lanthimos’s dystopian tour de force, get some attention here, though if it somehow manages an out-of-nowhere victory, I’ll eat…a lobster? That actually doesn’t sound so bad. It’s also nice to see what could be a genuinely close race here, between La La Land and Manchester by the Sea. There are a number of ways of looking at this one. Will voters go with director Lonergan’s screenplay as an alternative to voting for Affleck as best actor? Or will any Affleck-related drag be able to sink the movie in a close race (like this one) but not in a possible blowout in the acting category? Will La La Land benefit, sweep-like, from its many awards? Or could Chazelle fatigue set in? This is the category in which I am least confident of all, but I’m going with Manchester by the Sea by a nose. What will win: Manchester by the Sea What ought to win: La La Land A24Best Adapted Screenplay Nominees: Arrival, Fences, Hidden Figures, Lion, Moonlight Apart from Supporting Actor, this is the category in which Moonlight—which is adapted from Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue—is most likely to come away a winner. Arrival once looked like it had a solid shot here, like its fellow “thinking person’s sci-fi” movie—and best film of the year—Her three years ago. But my best efforts notwithstanding, it seems to have lost any momentum it ever had. If there’s an upset in the making, it’s likely to be either Hidden Figures or Lion. But neither seems particularly likely. What will win: Moonlight What ought to win: Arrival Lionsgate / SummitBest Cinematography Nominees: Greig Fraser (Lion), James Laxton (Moonlight), Rodrigo Prieto (Silence), Linus Sandgren (La La Land), Bradford Young (Arrival) So what do we know about the cinematography award? We know that, because he is not nominated, Emmanuel Lubezki is probably not going to win for a fourth year in a row (following Gravity, Birdman, and The Revenant). And, nothing against Lubezki, but that’s probably a good thing. We also know that Roger Deakins, who has been nominated an incredible 13 times without ever winning, isn’t going to win—because he’s not nominated either. Nor is (three-time winner, nine-time nominee) Robert Richardson. Keeping track of the award this year is a little like watching the NBA Finals with LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, Kyrie Irving, Draymond Green, and Kevin Love all sitting out hurt. Bradford Young is the first African-American cinematographer ever nominated for the award, which is shocking, and he’d be my pick in a heartbeat for his magnificent work on (you guessed it) Arrival. (He also shot my two favorite films of 2014, Selma and A Most Violent Year.) But here, again, Arrival doesn’t seem likely to get much love.The safest bet, as so often this year, is probably on La La Land and its cinematographer Linus Sandgren. If you want to look elsewhere, Lion probably has the best shot at an upset. Or partisans of Moonlight and Arrival can just cross their fingers and take their chances. Who will win: Linus Sandgren Who ought to win: Bradford Young DisneyBest Animated Feature Nominees: Kubo and the Two Strings, Moana, My Life as a Zucchini, The Red Turtle, Zootopia One of the most remarkable inversions in recent cinema is the way Pixar and Disney Animation—which are both owned by the same company and run by the same executives—have essentially switched places. (I’ll be writing more about this soon.) Disney scored two nominations in the Animated Feature category this year, with Zootopia and Moana. Pixar, meanwhile, couldn’t manage a nod for Finding Dory, despite the fact that it was the second-highest grossing movie of the year behind Rogue One. Go figure. It was actually a banner year for animated movies, especially if you managed to avoid the truly awful Sing. The Red Turtle is a gorgeous, almost-silent fable. Moana is a classic Disney musical showstopper. And Kubo and the Two Strings may be the best stop-motion marvel yet produced by the always excellent Laika (Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls.) But barring a borderline-shocking upset by Kubo, the Oscar will be going to Zootopia. Which is exactly as it should be. What will win: Zootopia What should win: Zootopia 24 Feb
I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore Is a Dark, Goofy Neo-Noir - “What do you want?” an exasperated petty criminal asks Ruth Kimke (Melanie Lynskey), who’s in the middle of the strange vigilante rampage at the heart of the new film I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore. Ruth thinks for a second. “For people to not be assholes!” she replies, which feels as good a battle cry as any in these angry, polarized times. Ruth is a fitting anti-hero for 2017: She’s depressed, she’s being taken for granted in her job, and she has no idea where to direct her resentment. So when it does come spilling out, it has all kinds of unintended consequences, some comical and others decidedly not. The debut film from Macon Blair, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore is a shambling piece of neo-noir that swerves between gentle indie comedy and horrifying violence with ease—a combination that helped it win this year’s Sundance Film Festival Jury Prize. The movie, released Friday on Netflix, is grounded by Blair’s eye for the gruesome, which he surely picked up working as an actor on projects like Jeremy Saulnier’s gory Green Room. At its best, Blair’s film is like Blood Simple crossed with The Three Stooges—a clever, gritty tale of revenge at its most inept, anchored by performances that brim with goofy fury. The protagonist, Ruth, is a nurse living a fairly dull life in an unnamed town. Blair takes special care to focus on the tiny, insignificant details that clearly weigh on her, whether it’s someone cutting in front of her at the supermarket, or a local dog constantly using her front yard as a bathroom. When Ruth’s home is burglarized, the loss of her possessions seems to matter less than the sheer indignity of the matter. The local cops do little more than take a report, leading her to decide to take the matter in her own hands. But I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore is less like Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down than it sounds, at least for most of its running time. Ruth’s confused mission is largely focused on finding her stuff at local pawn shops and taking it back; she’s more interested in reclaiming a little pride than in finding her laptop. She enlists her weirdo neighbor Tony (played by Elijah Wood) as backup, drawn to (if disgusted by) his shamelessness in letting his dog defecate on her property. Tony is the kind of neighbor you’d probably try to avoid interacting with too much if he lived near you; he has a collection of nunchucks and ninja stars but little social aptitude. But he proves a perfect companion for Ruth, and is eager to use her quest for some ineffable sort of justice as an outlet for his own boundless rage. They’re an odd pair of heroes to root for, and there is something darkly alluring about watching them run amok. Ruth finally secures some small moments of petty triumph—that is, until she meets the shady perpetrators of her burglary and things really descend into chaos. Blair started out as an actor working with his childhood friend Saulnier, the American indie-horror director who expertly deploys very realistic, very shocking scenes of violence in films like Green Room and Blue Ruin. So I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore’s eventual nightmarish turn makes sense, and there’s certainly something to be said for the bloody creativity on display. But as the film goes on, it gets hard to figure out just what kind of a larger point Blair is looking to make. Is Ruth a modern-day Travis Bickle, similarly angry at society but far less adept at resorting to violence? If so, her heart doesn’t really seem to be in it by the time the stakes get truly deadly. I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore is most effective as a grumpy, shambolic comedy, a weird buddy picture for Lynskey and Wood that sees the former’s character dabbling in brutish selfishness and the latter’s enjoying a rare chance at a normal human friendship. It’s less interesting as a gory slapstick thriller, but the ending is memorable and Blair’s skill at directing action is undeniable. Still, the film perhaps works best of all as an unexpected treatise on the state of American manners in 2017—and as a story in which the real villain is humans’ collective lack of empathy. 24 Feb
Marine Le Pen: Madame Présidente? - Marine Le Pen is hoping the wave of populism sweeping the Western world carries her to the Élysée Palace. “The wind of history has turned,” Le Pen, who heads the far-right National Front (FN), told a crowd of supporters at the kickoff of her presidential bid earlier this month in Lyon, the industrial city in southeastern France. “It will carry us to the summit.” Opinion polls have shown Le Pen winning the first round of France’s presidential election in April, only to lose to whomever she faces in the second round of voting in May. That candidate will likely be François Fillon, the center-right candidate, or Emmanuel Macron, the independent; polls show the two men seesawing between second and third place in the first round. If no candidate achieves a majority in the first round, the top-two vote getters advance to a second round run-off. Although it’s still early, and polling can be wrong, the likelihood of Le Pen beating either Fillon or Macron in the second round is slim. Still, with the Western establishment reeling from Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, the U.K.’s decision to leave the European Union, and growing anger at political elites throughout Europe, Le Pen and other far-right, populist leaders in Europe fancy their chances. Le Pen envisions a France with closed borders, its own currency, and tough immigration controls; a country that is independent of international bodies like NATO, and one that ultimately puts itself first. This inward thinking, Le Pen reminded supporters, would not be unique to France. “Other people have shown the way,” she said, alluding to the Brexit vote last summer and Trump’s election last November. Although such sentiments might be experiencing a resurgence, many of Le Pen’s policies are not new. Indeed, her 144-point manifesto outlining her vision for France reflects many of the policies the FN has put forward since it was founded more than four decades ago by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. From the onset, the party has opposed the European Union, economic protectionism, and same-sex marriage. It has also been characterized by anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic sentiment (Jean-Marie Le Pen has repeatedly dismissed the Holocaust as a minor “detail” of history and defended collaborators of the Vichy government, which deported tens of thousands of French Jews to death camps during World War II). Those views haven’t earned the FN much electoral success. The party didn’t win a single local election in 2015, and claims only two seats in French parliament. The FN’s previous best performance in the presidential election was in 2002 when Jean-Marie Le Pen advanced to the second round for the first time in the FN’s history; voters handed then-incumbent President Jacques Chirac 82 percent of the vote—an unprecedented victory that was widely regarded more as a rebuke of the FN than approval of Chirac. By the time Marine Le Pen took over as the leader of the FN in 2011, the party began a period of transformative rebranding—one which retained its far-right values with less emphasis on the homophobic, anti-Semitic elements. This ultimately resulted in the expulsion of the elder Le Pen from the party in 2015 in a family battle played out in the media. National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen delivers a speech next to his daughter, Marine Le Pen, in Britany, France on March 17, 2007. (Daniel Joubert / Reuters)“Voluntarily or not, he gave ammunition to our adversaries,” Le Pen said of her father in November, adding: “Today our adversaries no longer have that ammunition.” Still, the younger Le Pen’s rebranding efforts alone may not be enough. Dr. David Lees, a researcher on French politics at Warwick University, told me last November that though Le Pen’s outsider status has certainly helped her anti-establishment image, it could also pose a challenge. “The FN has only got two members of the National Assembly in France … so if she does win, she wouldn’t be able to form a government,” Lees said. “She would find it very hard to govern without having any sense of support in Parliament. She just wouldn’t get anything through because the options of ruling by decree in France are very small for a president.” Indeed, finding common ground with other members of the government would prove difficult for Le Pen—especially in comparison to competitors like Macron, whose centrist, business-orientated agenda could be more appealing to swing votes on the left and right than the FN’s populist agenda. Still, Le Pen’s rebranding has proven effective in communities previously marginalized by the FN. The party has actively pursued more progressive causes such as promoting women’s rights and gay rights, as well as protecting France’s Jewish community from anti-Semitism—often by presenting Muslim immigration as a threat to all three. “We do not want to live under the rule or threat of Islamic fundamentalism,” she told supporters in Lyon, and accused Muslim immigrants of “looking to impose on us gender discrimination in public places, full body veils or not, prayer rooms in the workplace, prayers in the streets, huge mosques.” The FN has found common cause with far-right parties throughout Europe who share its anti-Islam and anti-globalist agenda, as well as other governments. Le Pen has praised both Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, noting that if she were elected, the three leaders “would be good for world peace.” Le Pen has been a vocal proponent of rapprochement with Russia. In addition to rejecting the notion of Russia’s actions in Ukraine’s Crimea as an invasion, she also condemned U.S. and EU sanctions on Moscow as “completely stupid.” The FN received an 11-million euro (about $11.6 million) loan from the Moscow-based First Czech Russian Bank in 2014, and Le Pen has reportedly asked Russia for another loan to finance her current presidential bid, citing French banks’ refusal to lend. Fredrik Wesslau, the director of the Wider Europe Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me in January that Moscow’s ideological affinity with the FN is what attracts it to most of Europe’s far-right populist parties. “They see a country that’s willing to stick up for socially conservative rights, that’s embraced authoritarian populism, that’s also xenophobic, in particular anti-Islam, which is something that many of these parties can relate to,” Wesslau said. “There’s a lot of overlap.” And while the FN leader isn’t the only French presidential candidate to support better relations with Russia (Fillon, the center-right candidate, has also supported reconciliation), reports of Russian media coverage favoring Le Pen against other contenders has sparked concerns Moscow might try to interfere in France’s elections similar to the way it did in the U.S. elections. But for all the challenges Le Pen faces as an untested leader of historically fringe party, one that is often overlooked is her role as France’s sole female candidate. Women have historically been underrepresented in French politics, with female lawmakers making up 25 percent of the National Assembly and 27 percent of the Senate. Édith Cresson became the first and only woman to serve as prime minister in 1991 under President François Mitterrand, but suffered low approval ratings and lost the post after less than a year—a loss some attribute to misogynist attitudes among the Socialist party elites. Socialist party member Ségolène Royal made French history in 2007 when she became the first woman to be nominated as a presidential candidate by a major party. She lost to Nicolas Sarkozy in the second round. If Le Pen advances to the second round as polls suggest she could, she’ll only be the second female candidate to have done so since Royal. It’s a glass ceiling Lees said she may have a difficult time shattering. “We’ve never had a female president, we’ve never had a female leader really in France,” Lees said. “So there really isn’t precedent there.” With the first round of voting less than two months away, Le Pen has the task of maintaining the lead polls have given her since the start of the election. But it will also involve not being derailed by recent allegations she misused 300,000 euros of EU funds to pay her parliamentary assistants. It’s a charge Le Pen denies, and one that has resulted in the arrest of her chief of staff, Catherine Griset, who has been charged with breach of trust. Le Pen’s lawyers say the investigation is an attempt to harm the presidential hopeful “at the very moment when her candidacy is making a major breakthrough.” 24 Feb

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Photo: Water calligraphy, by Théo Paul - Water calligraphy © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Théo PaulDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall24 Feb
Photo: What lies ahead, by farflungistan - What lies ahead © Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: farflungistanDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall24 Feb
Sing Pao Staff Threatened in Hong Kong - Hong Kong-based Sing Pao Daily News has reported that members of its staff have been threatened and that its computer systems were attacked. Hong Kong police are investigating the incidents. Sing Pao is a pro-Beijing newspaper that over the past year has published a series of anonymous columns that are very critical of Chief Executive C.Y. Leung and the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government, Beijing’s main representative office in Hong Kong. Elson Tong at Hong Kong Free Press reports on the recent harassment of the paper’s staff: The newspaper also claimed that “a large number of suspicious individuals who look like mainlanders” have been loitering outside its offices, as well as following and photographing its managers since mid-February. On Wednesday, Sing Pao published testimonies from several of its reporters, who claimed to have spotted men observing them outside restaurants in which they were dining and pretending to use their mobile phones, all whilst avoiding nearby police officers. “When [the managers] attempted to approach the other party… the man quickly left in haste,” the newspaper wrote. [Source] The South China Morning Post reports that the harassment includes posters with photos of newspaper staff taken from their travel permits, which should only be accessible to official agencies like China Travel Service and the Ministry of Public Security: Among those shadowed was chief editor Lau Mei-yee, the Post has learned. A police source said Lau had filed a report on Sunday about threats to her personal safety and she had also called on behalf of the newspaper. A picture of at least one staff member had appeared in a “threatening” bill posted near an employee’s home and the newspaper believed the photo was cropped from their home return permit, the travel document that enables Hong Kong residents to travel to mainland China. […] It is understood that Hong Kong police have stepped up their investigations after receiving reports from the newspaper management two times in the past few days. A police source said Lau had provided new information on Tuesday when she said leaflets containing her photo and smearing her were found near her home. [Source] The Committee to Protect Journalists issued a statement condemning the harassment: The company statement said it believes the harassment is connected to a series of Sing Pao columns criticizing outgoing chief executive Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong’s top leader, and the Chinese government’s Liaison Office, Beijing’s top representative body in Hong Kong, in the run up to the chief executive election on March 26. “Journalists in Hong Kong should be able to do their jobs without fear of reprisal, particularly in these crucial days leading up to the chief executive election,” said Robert Mahoney, CPJ’s deputy executive director. “We call on Hong Kong authorities to thoroughly investigate this incident and prosecute those responsible for the cyberattacks against Sing Pao and the harassment of its staff.” [Source] Sing Pao’s chairman is currently being investigated by police in mainland China for “illegal business transactions,” accusations which he says are politically motivated. Danny Mok of the South China Morning Post reports that official media in China republished months-old news of his investigation in August, just after the newspaper published a hard-hitting column critical of Leung: The report by Xinhua said Gu Zhuoheng, 44, chairman of pro-establishment Sing Pao Media Enterprises since October 2014, was wanted by Shenzhen police for an alleged connection to a case of illegally receiving some 150 million yuan (HK$173 million) from financial platform cnmeidai.com, based in Shenzhen. Gu denied similar reports, published previously, in a statement in August, saying he had no relationship with the platform, which claimed to be China’s first online medium of its kind providing services from peer-to-peer lending to financing for small and medium-sized enterprises. Gu also stressed that he had been free to travel between Hong Kong and the mainland. He earlier claimed he had been under revenge-driven political attack since last year because he would not submit to a “certain power”. He has not identified the power. [Source] © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Hong Kong media, Leung Chun-ying, sing paoDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall23 Feb
Person of the Week: Chai Jing - CDT is expanding its wiki beyond the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon to include short biographies of public intellectuals, cartoonists, human rights activists, and other people pushing for change in China. The wiki is a work in progress. 柴静 Screenshot from Chai’s 2015 film “Under the Dome,” which exposed the source and effects of smog. (Source: Under the Dome) Chai Jing is the impassioned journalist known for her viral self-funded documentary on air pollution, “Under the Dome.” Co-released online in February 2015 by Youku and People’s Daily Online, “Under the Dome” was viewed 200 million times before being censored. Chai launched her career in broadcast journalism when she was still in college, joining Hunan Fine Arts Radio (湖南文艺广播电台) as a host in the mid-1990s. She moved to CCTV in 2001, where she earned her chops covering the SARS outbreak in 2003 and the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. She also started reporting on the environment, earning the 2007 “Green China Person of the Year” award for her special “Shanxi: Desperate to Curb Pollution” (山西：断臂治污). Chai blogged and engaged with netizens online, who admired her liberal views and outspokenness: Why must authoritarian [regimes] necessarily fall? That’s because authoritarian system[s] do not have the capacity to housekeep themselves, and the wicked will not withdraw of their own will. Authoritarian systems can only become more and more sordid, more and more bloated. Democracy, on the other hand, is a political form that does have the capacity to clean its own house and to root out the wicked. And so [democracy] can continue to develop. [Source] Chai left CCTV in 2013 and soon after gave birth to her daughter. Photos of Chai with her baby at an airport emerged in February 2014, along with reports that she had given birth in the U.S. Some netizens called her a “traitor,” though others felt they could not blame her for “voting with her feet.” Chai resurfaced in 2015 with “Under the Dome,” her gripping, TED-like exposé on the smog that suffocates much of China every winter. Chai interwove the story of her pregnancy and her daughter’s first days breathing Beijing’s dirty air with a scientific explanation of pollution’s effects on the human body, interviews with officials, and her signature hard-hitting reporting. Chai identified the wide usage of fossil fuels and the lack of government oversight as the primary reasons behind the heavy smog, calling for government action in regulating polluters and improving air quality. “Under the Dome” went viral and sparked online discussion. The film was viewed 200 million times in the short days that it remained on Chinese video streaming sites. But backing from the state newspaper People’s Daily was not enough to save “Under the Dome” from censorship. A propaganda directive leaked days after the film’s release told the media to stop promoting “Under the Dome.” Soon, the video was ordered to be deleted from Chinese websites. The documentary had been released on the eve of the People’s Political Consultative Conference and the National People’s Congress, dooming Chai’s urgent message lest it surpass the events in Beijing. Despite the censorship of Chai’s film and its coverage, netizens honored the journalist by coining the phrase Chai Jing blue to describe the capital’s cerulean sky amid the political meetings. Entry written by Anne Henochowicz. Can’t get enough of subversive Chinese netspeak? Check out our latest ebook, “Decoding the Chinese Internet: A Glossary of Political Slang.” Includes dozens of new terms and classic catchphrases, presented in a new, image-rich format. Available for pay-what-you-want (including nothing). All proceeds support CDT. © josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: air pollution, Chai Jing, smog, word of the weekDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall23 Feb
Photo: Sujiatun, by Zhu - Sujiatun © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: ZhuDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall22 Feb
Xinjiang Attack Spurs GPS Car Tracking, Military Rallies - A deadly knife attack in Xinjiang’s Pishan county last week, in which eight people including the three assailants were killed, has brought a wave of tightened security measures to the already tightly controlled region. (Three suspects in a previously undisclosed attack in 2015 had previously been shot dead in Pishan in January.) In Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, for example, all motor vehicles will have to be fitted with satellite tracking devices or be turned away from fuel stations in order to “ensure social security and safety and promote social stability and harmony.” From Tom Phillips at The Guardian: “There is a severe threat from international terrorism, and cars have been used as a key means of transport for terrorists as well as constantly serving as weapons. It is therefore necessary to monitor and track all vehicles in the prefecture,” an earlier announcement stated. […] Recent years have seen radicals with links to Xinjiang use vehicles to carry out a series of terror attacks in China including a May 2014 market bombing in the capital Urumqi and an attack in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in October 2013. [A vehicle was also used in another attack in Hotan on December 28.] […] Yang Shu, a terrorism expert at Lanzhou University in north-west China, said the tracking devices would help bolster the government’s fight against terror in a vast but sparsely populated region where about 1.5 million residents are spread over an area almost twice the size of the United Kingdom. […] Yang said the installation of such devices – which he believed was part of a pilot project that would eventually be rolled out across Xinjiang – was far cheaper than putting up tens of thousands of security cameras. [Source] Other steps reported in the wake of the Pishan incident include heightened airport security and street patrols. The U.S. government-backed Radio Free Asia has reported random checks of pedestrians’ phones for “terror-related” material, and seven arrests for spreading rumors about religious violence. Authorities have also staged a series of rallies including thousands of soldiers and armed police as shows of force in cities across the region. The Guardian’s Tom Phillips reports: Zhu Hailun, the region’s deputy Communist party chief, told the assembly authorities would wage a unflinching campaign against the Islamic terrorists and separatists they blame for the bloodshed. “We shall load our guns, draw our swords from their sheaths, throw hard punches and relentlessly beat, and strike hard without flinching at terrorists who must be brought down a peg or two,” Zhu was quoted as saying by the state-run Xinjiang Daily newspaper on Sunday. “With the caring and strong leadership of the Communist Party Central Committee, where President Xi Jinping serves as the core … the strong support of 23m people from all ethnic groups in Xinjiang, and with the powerful fist of the People’s Democratic Dictatorship, all separatist activities and all terrorists shall be smashed to pieces,” Zhu added. The Urumqi parade was the third such event to be staged in Xinjiang in under a week. Thousands of troops paraded through Hotan, a city in southern Xinjiang, last Thursday while Kashgar, a Silk Road trading hub near China’s border with Kyrgyzstan, saw a similar march the following day. [Source] Authorities in Hotan have displayed the carrot as well as the stick, publicizing unusually large rewards on offer for informers. From Michael Martina at Reuters: The rewards range up to 5 million yuan ($730,000) for verifiable “operational inside information” on plans for attacks in crowded areas or at government and Communist Party departments, the state-run Hotan Daily said on Tuesday. “The awards for reporting violent terrorists and religious extremists establishing ties, or inciting or swearing oaths of holy war, or clues on the organization of illegal cross-border entry and exit are 3 million yuan to 2 million yuan,” the newspaper said. The policy includes payment for “absolutely confidential” tips on crimes such as supplying guns and inciting crowds to petition over grievances. At the bottom of the range, tipsters can get 2,000 yuan ($290) for reporting “face coverings and robes, youth with long beards, or other popular religious customs that have been radicalized”, the newspaper said. [Source] The New York Times’ Edward Wong also reported on the rallies: James Leibold, a scholar of Xinjiang and China’s ethnic policies at La Trobe University in Australia, said the recent rallies seemed disproportional to the current threat level. “The new regime of Chen Quanguo not only wants to look tough on terror in the eyes of the Han and Uighur population of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, but also wants to send a message back to Zhongnanhai that his regime is going to take a more hard-line stance on terror when compared to his predecessor Zhang Chunxian,” Professor Leibold said. Zhongnanhai is the name of the Communist Party’s leadership compound in central Beijing. Mr. Leibold said Mr. Chen was “clearly angling for a Politburo seat at the 19th Party Congress,” an important political meeting that is expected to take place in Beijing in the fall. Mr. Leibold, who has recently written on security forces in Xinjiang, said his research showed that the Xinjiang government had recruited more than 30,000 new police officers to be present at streetside mobile stations since Mr. Chen took power last year. [Source] Leibold discussed Chen’s implementation of “convenience policing” and “grid surveillance” in Xinjiang in an article with Adrian Zenz in December’s edition of Foreign Affairs: Funding these new positions (and the necessary equipment) is expensive. The public security budget of the autonomous government in Urumqi has skyrocketed 356 percent since 2009, rising to $7 billion in 2016. Yet Xinjiang’s total internal security budget is at least three times higher, over $25 billion in 2015, when one adds local security spending and fiscal transfers from the central government. […] Most Uyghurs remain deeply suspicious of the party-state and its enforcement agencies. Since 2009 the gap between the Uyghur and Han communities has widened significantly, with few policy levers for ameliorating the deep tensions that exist. The party’s new convenience policing strategy is set to exacerbate this mistrust and drive Uyghur resentment further underground. The failure to address the deep sense of cultural insecurity at the heart of Uyghur life today means that the violence will continue, even if there are fewer incidents and perhaps more unsophisticated lone-wolf attacks. [Source] © Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Armed Police, Hotan, military, police, surveillance, Urumqi, Uyghurs, Xinjiang, Xinjiang violenceDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall22 Feb
Feminist Group’s Weibo Shuttered - Feminist Voice (女权之声), a Chinese feminist group, had their Weibo account temporarily shuttered after it posted a translation of a Guardian article about a Women’s Strike called in the United States for March 8, International Women’s Day. Tom Phillips of The Guardian reports: Xiong Jing, an editor for the “Feminist Voice”, told the Guardian that Weibo had sent the group a private message on Monday night informing it that the account, which was set up in 2010 and has more than 80,000 followers, had been temporarily blocked. Weibo blamed “recent publications [that] violated the state’s relevant laws”. Speaking to Radio Free Asia, a US-funded news outlet, Xiong said Weibo had not been “very specific” about its motivations but “we are guessing that it’s because we sent out some tweets calling for a women’s strike action against Trump”. Li Maizi, one of the leading lights of China’s nascent feminist movement, said the attempt to silence “Feminist Voice” was part of a broader government push to rein in those battling for gender equality. “It is part of a public opinion war and a battle for influence in China.” [Source] Didi Kirsten Tatlow at The New York Times reports that participants in Feminist Voice believe the shutdown is part of a broader crackdown on civil society which they expect to intensify in the run-up to the annual National People’s Congress meetings in March and the 19th Party Congress this fall: “This is about attacking civil society,” Lu Pin, a founder of Feminist Voices who lives in New York, said in a telephone interview. “They want to take away our voice.” “It’s just the beginning,” Ms. Lu predicted, in a politically tense year in China. “What?” said a message posted on the group’s WeChat social media account. “What’s incomprehensible is a post reporting on a women’s event overseas could be breaking Chinese laws and regulations.” The message said the group suspected that the post about the planned strike in the United States was behind the shutdown because that was the only one of its Weibo posts to be censored recently. [Source] Chinese feminist activists living in the U.S. participated in the Women’s March on January 21, both to express opposition to the proposed policies and discourse of the newly minted Trump administration, but also to send a message back home to women’s rights activists in China. In an interview with The New York Times’ Luo Siling, activist Lü Pin explains: Why did Chinese feminists take part in the Women’s March on Washington? In 2015, the case of the Feminist Five attracted the support of feminists around the world, which made me appreciate the importance of international solidarity. Participation in this march was another expression of this. If feminists in the U.S. need support, I’m willing to join them. We also wanted to contribute to the march’s diversity. So my friends made posters, in both Chinese and English. This was meant not just as a response to American feminists, but also to show women in China that we were engaged in international issues. In fact, I think promoting this march in China was more important than supporting American feminists. That’s why we organized the interactive broadcast through WeChat. [Source] Two years ago around March 8, five feminist activists in China were detained for their participation in advocacy campaigns against sexual harassment. Since their release, they have been subject to varying degrees of official interference and harassment. Some have traveled overseas, including Li Maizi (aka Li Tingting), who has used social media to support Feminist Voice and the Women’s Strike. © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: activists, Internet censorship, Li Tingting, sina weibo, women's rightsDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall22 Feb
Decentralization of Internet Control Leaves Cracks - In China, when major events unfold, a combination of government directives, keyword filtering, post deletion, paid pro-government commentary, and other forms of censorship and propaganda guides the narrative in the direction that the state determines. In a recent study, University of Michigan’s Mary Gallagher and Blake Miller analyzed 50 million comments on Chinese social media and news posts about three major events: the G20 Summit in Hangzhou, the ruling of the International Tribunal on the South China Sea Disputes between China and the Philippines, and the explosions in the Port of Tianjin in August 2015. They found considerable diversity in responses from users whom they believe to be members of the “Fifty Cent Party,” or paid government commentators, which they wrote about for the Washington Post: Our findings suggest that information control in China is more varied and decentralized than we thought, as a Washington Post editorial also argued. China’s ability to control information is impressive, but decentralization makes the system hard to tightly control. For example, although the surveillance powers granted by China’s recently issued Cybersecurity Law are formidable, its implementation has been far from disciplined. A recent Washington Post report details how private data obtained using these new powers is being openly sold on the market, perhaps by rogue government officials. In the Tianjin crisis, the quick and unified online response suggests a great deal of government planning, coordination and iterative updating of information strategies. But the response to the South China Sea ruling points to a lack of preparation and coordination — and perhaps even disagreement between different parts of the government. These moves suggest that Beijing is taking new steps to solidify control over the Web — and making sure what’s out there on the Internet are the messages that the CCP wants China’s citizens to read. [Source] While the tactics revealed by Gallagher and Miller’s research may point to a sophisticated, flexible, and reactive effort at information control, GreatFire’s Charlie Smith argued to Index on Censorship that the Chinese government’s attempts at creating “cyber sovereignty”–the idea that each country has the right to control the internet within their territory–are misguided: Index: The Chinese government warned in December that its controls on the internet are necessary to prevent foreign powers from “destabilising the state”. Would Great Fire be considered to be associated with such powers? What would be the consequences of this? Smith: I don’t think the Chinese authorities fully understand how the internet works. They have this great image in their mind of creating “cyber sovereignty” but this is an impossible task. The internet by nature is international. Information is exchanged across borders. So, yes, foreign powers are destabilising China’s internet every minute. In the opinion of the Chinese authorities, I guess this happens every time somebody says “Xi Jinping is a totalitarian despot” or shares a photo of the great leader with his pants too high. But even if the authorities were able to establish what they think is “cyber sovereignty”, they would quickly find that many Chinese also like saying nasty things about Xi Dada. [Source] © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: fifty cent party, Great Firewall, Internet censorship, internet sovereignty, propagandaDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall22 Feb
Photo: El Flautista de Hangzhou, by Javi Prieto - El Flautista de Hangzhou © Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Javi PrietoDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall21 Feb
China’s Party–Media–Think-Tank–Corporate Complex - Three articles last week explored the extent of Party influence over different sections of Chinese society: news media, think tanks, and private sector business. In an op-ed at Hong Kong’s Oriental Daily News, translated at China Media Project, journalism professor Qiao Mu wrote that a combination of political and commercial pressures have banished the country’s news media from any meaningful role in society: [… A]t the start of the Xi Jinping era, there was talk again of media “moving at the grassroots, transforming work attitudes, and changing writing styles,” an elaborate way of saying that traditional Party newspapers should strive to be competitive against commercial media and newly-emerging social media. Very quickly, however, the talk changed again, and we heard about the urgency of “media being surnamed Party,” which essentially laid fresh emphasis on the old “mouthpiece theory” of the media. But now, rather than applying more exclusively to Party news outfits that, as we say, “eat the emperor’s grain,” this theory was broadened to assert strict control over commercial newspapers and websites, and over all types of content, including commentaries and even advertisements. […] Unable to speak up under strict political and economic pressures, Chinese media stuck somewhere in the middle these days, talking without substance about changes in housing prices, or about remote international issues. They don’t speak about power, nor do they dare talk about rights — whether the political rights of the citizen, such as the right to vote, or the economic rights of the taxpayer. The only arenas of relative safety left to them are finance, economics, and of course entertainment. [Source] For more from CMP on media policy under Xi, see David Bandurski’s summary of a recent article from the Party Committee of the All-China Journalist’s Association. Xi’s views on the media, which the article praised as having “enriched the press theory of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” were also summarized in a China Daily infographic on Monday. At South China Morning Post, meanwhile, former editor-in-chief Wang Xiangwei described how “the emperor’s grain” and the stifling of more independent organizations have thwarted efforts to elevate China’s think tanks to the top global ranks: Xi reportedly took a personal interest in pushing the development of think tanks soon after he came to power in late 2012. […] This has led to what some analysts call a great leap forward in think tanks, as central government departments, local authorities and universities scramble to refashion old research institutes into think tanks, or set up completely new ones. But the mushrooming number belies the fact that high-quality think tanks are still rare. Most are directly owned and funded by the central government and local authorities. […] As a result, those think tanks have become the mouthpieces of government policies; they rarely criticise any government decision or offer effective alternative solutions and recommendations – something that anyone attending international symposiums and listening to presentations by Chinese researchers can attest to. [Source] The Economist discussed the issue in 2014, noting that “the Western notion of think-tanks as a government’s ‘external brains’ has not taken root in China. […] The party wants its brains to be internal organs.” Commenting at The New York Times in the wake of China’s recent failure to win formal recognition as a market economy, Yi-Zheng Lian described the extent to which Party control pervades even private sector business: Hyper control, interventionism, currency manipulation — no, China is not a market economy. But it’s worse than that: The Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) has systematically infiltrated China’s expanding private sector and now operates inside more than half of all nonstate firms; it can manipulate or even control these companies, especially bigger ones, and some foreign ones, too. The modern Chinese economy is a party-corporate conglomerate. […] Starting in 2001, every private-sector firm with at least three C.C.P. members among its employees was required to have a party unit. Much like the party cells in the Red Army decades earlier, party units in companies were expected to “firmly implement the Party’s line, principles and policies,” as the Constitution of the C.C.P. stipulates. [… T]he problem isn’t just that the Chinese economy isn’t a market economy in that the government won’t let it operate freely enough. Its very structure, including in the private sector, has been designed — and is redesigned, again and again — to serve the C.C.P.’s will and its interests, economic and political. This party-corporate complex is only going to expand as most state-owned enterprises, inefficient holdovers from the old economy, are being supplanted by the fast-growing private sector. [Source] © Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Chinese media, communist party, journalism, private sector, Think Tanks, Xi JinpingDownload Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall21 Feb

The Eyeopener from CBC Radio Calgary (Highlights)


Eyeopener Podcast for Feb. 24, 2017 - Today's podcast: Canmore developer looks to build Lady MacDonald gondola; Terry O’Reilly on his new book; John Swales wins the World’s Greatest Horseman competition.23 Feb
Eyeopener Podcast for Feb. 23, 2017 - Today's podcast: Red Deer Islamic Center extends an olive branch; Paul McLoughlin on Alberta politics; Calgary’s first cat cafe set to open.22 Feb
Eyeopener Podcast for Feb. 22, 2017 - Today's podcast: Calgary lawyer pushes for asylum policy change; Toronto school bans cell phones during school hours; Non-Muslim women try wearing hijabs; we ask our Unconventional Panel if curling is cool.21 Feb
Eyeopener Podcast for Feb. 21, 2017 - Today's podcast: Jen Magnus on why she resigned from the Calgary Police Service; High River needs a new slogan; we look at vaccination rates in southern Alberta; talking to people named Donald about their name.20 Feb
Eyeopener Podcast for Feb. 16, 2017 - Today's podcast: Aviation expert comments on MRU plane crash; Lexin Resources forced to shut down; a conversation with Measha Brueggergosman; Calgary Police Commission chair Brian Thiessen.15 Feb
Eyeopener Podcast for Feb. 14, 2017 - Today's podcast: 70th anniversary of Leduc No. 1; jury deliberations set to begin in Douglas Garland trial; we ask if diamonds are losing their lustre for millennials.13 Feb
Eyeopener Podcast for Feb. 13, 2017 - Today's podcast: Calgary test pilot could become Canada’s next astronaut; cleaning up the environment with fungi; 89-year-old Calgary yodeler; budget travel suggestions for the upcoming Family Day long weekend.12 Feb
Eyeopener Podcast for Feb. 10, 2017 - Today's podcast: John Gilchrist reviews OEB Breakfast Co.; Eya-Hey Nakoda performs at the Block Heater festival; Crown presents closing arguments at Garland trial; parents upset over changes to school programs. 9 Feb
Eyeopener Podcast for Feb. 9, 2017 - Today's podcast: How to use a naloxone kit; Sylvan Lake Mayor Sean McIntyre; Calgary judge to decide whether junior hockey lawsuit can proceed; Tom Keenan on cell phone plans and prices. 8 Feb
Eyeopener Podcast for Feb. 8, 2017 - Today's podcast: Brian Pincott decides against running for re-election; Earls on Stephen Avenue moves away from mandatory tipping; This is That co-host Pat Kelly. 7 Feb

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Daily Kos


Open thread for night owls: Trump's anti-immigrant fervor continues to generate airport chaos - The new administration's zealotry in "screening" visitors with any connection to majority-Muslim nations continues to generate anti-American headlines around the globe. This time, immigration officials’ target was Egyptian-born French historian Henry Rousso, who was detained 10 hours after flying to Texas to give a lecture at a Texas A&M symposium. He was reportedly brought to an interrogation room for a “random check” after he was pulled aside by immigration officials without an explanation. According to his own account of what happened, Rousso was questioned about his travel documents and accused of flying to the United States to work on an illegal visa, before he was interrogated about his family, subjected to a body search, and forced to take an oath. Rousso was released only after Texas A&M officials intervened on his behalf; he later tweeted that his "situation was nothing compared to some of the people I saw who couldn't be defended as I was." Rousso was apparently singled out in the screening because he was born in Egypt—but his family fled that country over a half-century ago, in 1956, to escape anti-Semitic persecution by that nation's government. Rousso’s scholarship focuses on the memory of the Vichy regime, the darkest chapter in modern French history, when the government of unoccupied France collaborated with Nazi Germany in World War II. Vichy authorities are particularly infamous for assisting the Germans in rounding up and deporting tens of thousands of Jews from France during the Holocaust, which Rousso once called “the past that does not pass.” Rousso's detention comes on the heels of similarly abusive treatment towards Australian author Mem Fox, who says she will likely not return to the United States after her own experiences in Los Angeles. A Calendar of Resistance Events & Resistance in Your Backyard TWEET OF THE DAY xHow to effectively fact-check politicians like @POTUS: here's what @GeorgeLakoff recommends https://t.co/74LZ85mEBD https://t.co/m4gYJLtDH8— Reliable Sources (@ReliableSources) February 26, 2017 BLAST FROM THE PAST At Daily Kos on this date in 2005—MT's Schweitzer Leads Charge Against Bush on Prescription Drugs: Around these parts, Montana's new Democratic governor Brian Schweitzer has come in for a lot of (well-deserved) adulation. So it was with special interest that I read this story today about Schweitzer taking the lead in the fight to bring low-cost prescription drugs to his constituents, who of course live along the Canadian border: The Bush administration cites public safety in trying to block admission of cheaper prescription drugs from Canada, but has agreed to expand imports of Canadian beef and cattle despite cases of mad cow disease, Montana's Democratic governor complained Saturday. "President Bush was recently here in Montana and we had just one question for him," Gov. Brian Schweitzer said in his party's weekly radio address. "Why allow bad beef to enter the U.S. from Canada and not allow safe medicine?" THE WEEK’S HIGH IMPACT STORIES • HIGH IMPACT STORIES • TOP COMMENTS 20:30
Tom Hayden's final 'Hell No!' - It seems we need to begin to resign ourselves to the reality of the Trump presidency. We are more than one month in, and no one has rescued us from his stumbling around the oval office like the proverbial bull in the china shop crashing into the delicately balanced institutions of our democracy. Absent some political miracle, such as Republicans recognizing that they are supposed to serve the country and not their own power, he could conceivably remain in office for at least four years.  We should not allow those for years to pass quietly. It may often seem that demonstrations, protests, and even general strikes serve no immediate, concrete purpose, but they do. They make it clear to Trump that he does not have the support of all of the American people, and it also makes it clear to our congressional representatives. And to our allies overseas who are increasingly concerned about our new direction. More importantly, they confirm that we are not alone in our disgust with the vulgarian in chief. In Hell No: The Forgotten Power of the Vietnam Peace Movement, Tom Hayden reminds us of just how powerful a protest movement can become. Sadly, as time passes, the reason for the protests remain vivid in our history, but the protests themselves, and the victories they achieved, are being slowly erased from our collective memory. As Hayden writes, Truth, it is said, is war’s first casualty. Memory is its second. Hell No is his final attempt to remind us. And in many ways he succeeds. 19:00
Trump's Navy secretary pick withdraws, citing an inability to separate himself from his businesses - Another Trump pick is out. This time it's his nominee for Navy secretary, Philip Bilden, who is withdrawing because he couldn’t meet the requirements of federal ethics laws. Sources in the White House and the Navy told USNI News that Bilden’s extensive financial holdings would likely not meet the Office of Government Ethics standards to serve in the position. In order to serve he would have to divest much of his foreign holdings, USNI News understands. According to Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Bilden's decision was "driven by privacy concerns and significant challenges he faced in separating himself from his business interests." Trump's pick for secretary of the Army, billionaire Vincent Viola, withdraw a few weeks ago citing a similar inability to disentangle himself from his businesses. It turns out giving up most or all of your business holdings in order to go work for Donald Trump, who has not divested from his own, is not as appetizing a deal as the White House may have made it out to be in the pep talks. Especially considering, you know, the whole "this administration has been in power for a month and has already decayed into a smoke-belching dumpster fire" thing. As an aside: It was just eight days ago that Press Secretary Sean Spicer condemned reports that Bilden would withdraw, tweeting that he was “100% committed” to the job. 17:44
While Kansas tries to dump job-killing, budget-busting GOP tax policy, Democratic California booms - Since Brownback’s tax cuts took effect, Kansas has fallen behind on job creation.What’s the matter with Kansas? That phrase has been around a while, thanks to Thomas Frank’s book that explored why the state is so conservative. Now, however, the question applies in a more direct sense, as in: why is the state’s budget in the crapper, and why is its economy one of the worst performing in the country, both in terms of jobs and overall growth? (Kansas’s economy actually contracted in the last two quarters of 2016—when the state fell, in technical terms, into recession.)  The answer is simple: conservative Republicans got their way. Now the Jayhawk is coming home to roost. In early 2013, an array of tax cuts—including straight-up doing away with taxes on profits for more than 100,000 businesses—took effect in Kansas, with the largest benefits flowing to upper-income households. The arch-conservative governor, Sam Brownback, assured Kansans that these cuts—along with the removal of regulations he pushed through—would unleash economic growth and thus pay for themselves. This was perhaps the purest example of conservative, supply-side tax and budget policy implemented at any level in this country. Brownback’s party not only controlled the state house, but he himself had helped oust moderate Republicans and replace them with more conservative ones who voted for his plans. Meanwhile, in California ... 17:40
Why a terrorist attack is more likely with a weak president - Islamic terrorists want an Islamic holy war. They believe in a clash of civilizations and want to unite all Muslims in a war against the West. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who founded al-Qaeda in Iraq, said before he was killed: The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify … until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq. Their propaganda recalls an old prophecy that Islamic armies will rise up to meet the forces of “Rome” (or the West) on the fields of Dabiq in Syria. Victory in Dabiq will signal the caliphate’s conquest of the West. This all seems scary until you realize that the number of Islamic state terrorists is estimated at between 80,000 and 100,000. Recent estimates have put it at closer to between 15,000 and 20,000. If we take the highest estimate, that’s still at least 16,000 less than the current population of Peoria, Illinois. In other words, they have a problem: there are not many of them. The final battle they want isn’t going to look very good if they can be defeated by the population of Peoria.  How are they trying to deal with this recruiting problem?  16:20
Has there ever been a bigger coward than so-called 'President' Donald Trump? - While we all celebrate that Donald so-called Trump will not, thank heavens, be attending the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner, we're still allowed to laugh at his team's reasons. It's because the press is MEAN to them! Nobody told Donald the press would be MEAN to him! “You know, one of the things we say in the South [is] ‘If a Girl Scout egged your house, would you buy cookies from her?’ I think that this is a pretty similar scenario,” [spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders] added. “There’s no reason for him to go in and sit and pretend like this is going to be just another Saturday night.” Donald Trump has been in office a month, and it's been clear since the first weekend that he's mentally not fit to do the job. His narcissistic obsession with battling those that would say even the slightest word against him consists the near-entirety of his day job, as he whines about leaks from his own administration, and the horror of reporters reporting on the leaks coming from his administration, and the double-horror of reporters reporting that despite what ol' snuffleface has been yelling there are indeed multiple investigations into the actions of Trump's campaign team vis-a-vis that whole Russia tampering with our elections business. The man who launched his political career claiming that the then-current president was not even a real American has been completely crippled with rage that, after gaining the same office, people are saying nasty things about him. He was unprepared for Saturday Night Live to make fun of him. He was flummoxed by reporters wanting to ask him questions about things other than his own greatness. He was sent into spasms of tiny-fingered rage over someone, somewhere in Washington, not agreeing with his latest baffling pronouncements. And now the whole of the White House appears to be engaged in one long round of babysitting the manchild through each one of his tantrums. If it means bashing the notion of a free press, they'll do it. If it means lying to the public about things that are trivially disproven fifteen minutes later, they'll do it. Don't ask the manchild's administration hard questions, American reporters, or by gum maybe we just won't have press briefings at all anymore, you meanies. All in an effort to protect Donald Freaking Trump from having hurt fee-fees. Good God, what a pathetic little child. Scratch that—it's the whole White House. There's apparently not a single inch of backbone to be found in the manchild's entire team. Forget reporters, we need to send in a team of top scientists to study this new species of somewhat-sentient snowflakes! 15:43
For Democrats to win back the House in 2018, the first step is believing they can - Daily Kos Elections is pleased to present this guest post from longtime community member and political science doctoral candidate Jacob Smith. Earlier this month, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel urged Democrats to “‘take a chill pill’ and realize they are not going to win national power anytime soon.” While many Democrats are apt to disdain such pessimistic sentiments, these kinds of remarks are more than just talk—they’re potentially harmful to the party’s ability to win back a congressional majority in 2018. My academic research suggests that comments like Emanuel’s can turn into a self-fulfilling prophesy because if stronger candidates don’t believe that their party can win a majority, they may be less likely to even run in the first place. I’ve examined a phenomenon I call “minority party hardship” that helps explain how pessimism can affect electoral outcomes, though it doesn’t hinge on the tenor of public statements by party leaders. Rather, it looks at two conditions: political polarization in a given legislative body, and the probability of the minority party winning back that body. When we see conditions of high political polarization in a legislative body—that is to say, votes on most legislation break down along party lines, meaning the majority party has little interest in the opinions and votes of minority members—and a low probability of the minority party winning a majority in the next election, that yields a condition of high hardship. On the flipside, where partisan control of the chamber is up for grabs, and/or lower polarization makes bipartisan legislation more common, you end up with much lower hardship. (You can read my dissertation here for more technical details about this measure.) Under such conditions of high hardship, service in a legislative body isn’t a whole lot of fun for the minority, particularly in institutions like the U.S. House of Representatives, where the majority controls almost everything of consequence. Minority members in the House spend all day fighting losing battles against policy proposals put forth by the majority and are typically unable to advance their own preferred policies. Furthermore, House members need to spend considerable time raising money not just to win their own races, but for their party, too. The DCCC once even advised new incumbent House members to spend at least four hours a day, every day on the phone raising money, something that Democratic Rep. John Larson referred to as "the most painful thing.” Adding insult to injury, the majoritarian nature of the House can make this unpleasant endeavor feel almost pointless unless the minority is able to win 218 seats in the next election, since the minority continues to be unable to advance its legislative aims no matter how much money its members raise. 15:03
Father of slain Navy SEAL demands investigation into 'stupid mission' that killed his son - Bill Owens, the father of the Navy SEAL killed in Donald Trump's first approved military mission wants answers. It was the first military counter-terrorist operation approved by the new president, who signed the go-ahead Jan. 26 — six days into his term. "Why at this time did there have to be this stupid mission when it wasn’t even barely a week into his administration? Why? For two years prior, there were no boots on the ground in Yemen — everything was missiles and drones — because there was not a target worth one American life. Now, all of a sudden we had to make this grand display?" [...] “Don’t hide behind my son’s death to prevent an investigation,” said the elder Owens, pointing to Trump’s sharp words directed at the mission’s critics, including Sen. John McCain. “I want an investigation. … The government owes my son an investigation,” he said. Owens refused to meet with Trump when his son's body was returned to the United States. The mission was almost immediately the subject of criticism, after it became public; Trump apparently approved the raid during dinner after being briefed on it by the now-departed Flynn, and critics have charged Trump approved it with only cursory consideration to the complexities and risks involved. But Bill Owens wants answers, and Bill Owens is willing to say so publicly. This goes directly against the whines of Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who snuffed that anyone who questioned the "success" of the raid was doing a "disservice" to the man that died. That mean-spirited dodge isn't going to fly. 14:22
Trump's travel expenses hurt more than just our wallets - In one of his first interviews after being elected, Donald Trump tried to sound like the voice of benevolence when he told Lesley Stahl of CBS’ 60 Minutes that he would take only $1 of the $400,000 annual U.S. presidential salary. What a bargain for America, right? Except those savings of $399,999 are chump change compared with what U.S. taxpayers are shelling out for Trump and his family and their jet-setting ways. Estimates are at $10 million to $11.3 million for three weekend trips (so far) to Mar-a-Lago. Several hundred thousand dollars have also bene spent for Secret Service protection and lodging on business trips for sons Donald Jr. and Eric as they fly to various countries around the world to ink hotel and other business deals. Don’t forget that we’re also footing the bill for protecting first lady Melania and son Barron at Trump Tower in New York City. This has all been reported on and written about before, including here at Daily Kos—but wait! There’s more! Add to all of those expenses the way Trump & Co. are hurting small businesses in Florida near his “Southern White House” and New York businesses near Trump Tower. The only business that isn’t hurting is Trump Inc., which is making a profit in a variety of ways. Membership fees at the invitation-only Mar-a-Lago have doubled to $200,000 and give members “exclusive” access while those monies go to Trump. The Defense Department and the Secret Service are considering renting space at Trump Tower, so that money also would go back to Trump. CNN quoted a leasing agent who estimated that renting a floor in Trump Tower can cost about $1.5 million a year. In this sense, having Donald Trump as president is a drag on the economy, in terms of both public and private dollars. The only place extra dollars are going is into Trump’s pocket. 13:40
Sean Spicer searching his staff's personal phones in attempt to find White House leakers - The White House is in full meltdown mode over the leaks of unflattering information about Donald Trump coming from inside their own building. Now we learn White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer is searching his staff's personal phones in an attempt to find the leakers. Last week, after Spicer became aware that information had leaked out of a planning meeting with about a dozen of his communications staffers, he reconvened the group in his office to express his frustration over the number of private conversations and meetings that were showing up in unflattering news stories, according to sources in the room. Upon entering Spicer’s second floor office, staffers were told to dump their phones on a table for a “phone check," to prove they had nothing to hide. What a nice work environment that sounds like. You don't just have to spend your days constantly fluffing Donald Trump. You don't just have to work for Sean Spicer, a man who would lie about whether or not he was standing right there in front of you if lying about it would make your Pumpkinfuhrer feel better about himself, but you get summoned to Spicertown to prove that you aren't his personal enemy. Outstanding. Hey, guess what happened next: Spicer also warned the group of more problems if news of the phone checks and the meeting about leaks was leaked to the media. Oh well. I guess even your own team just doesn’t respect you, Sean. Can’t imagine why. Imagine if the Republican Party was a tenth as eager to investigate the connections between the Donald Trump campaign and Russian intelligence, or any dozen of the worst Trump conflicts of interest caused by his eager mix of business and government interests, or whether Trump's taxes really do show collusion between himself and Russian-tied organized crime, as the Trump White House is to root out anyone who says mildly bad things about them. Wouldn't that be a hoot. 13:00

Democracy Now!


NFL Star Michael Bennett on Refusing to Go to Israel, Black Lives Matter & His Love for Angela Davis - In a Democracy Now! exclusive, we speak with Seattle Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett, who made headlines when he pulled out of an Israeli government-sponsored trip to Israel for NFL players. We are also joined by Dave Zirin, sports editor for The Nation magazine. The two discuss the role of sports in politics, including Olympian John Carlos, as well as Colin Kaepernick’s support for the Black Lives Matter movement that inspired players throughout the country at all levels to take similar actions.24 Feb
John Dean: The Difference Between Trump & Nixon is Trump Says Publicly What Nixon Said on Wiretap - We compare President Donald Trump’s attitude toward the media to that of President Richard Nixon with Nixon’s former counsel, John Dean. "The big difference is, Trump is doing this right out and challenging the First Amendment, one of our most important because it involves freedom of the press and freedom of speech," Dean says. "Anything that he doesn’t like, any reporting, he calls being an enemy of the people … It’s just ludicrous. And it’s troublesome that he would try to sway the press by using the bully pulpit of his office to intimidate them."24 Feb
As Calls Grow to Impeach Trump, Former Nixon Counsel John Dean Sees "Echoes of Watergate" - President Trump has been in office for only 36 days, and there is already a growing chorus of voices calling for his impeachment. This comes as CNN and The New York Times report White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus sought unsuccessfully to have the FBI refute news reports that Donald Trump’s campaign advisers were in frequent contact with Russian intelligence agents ahead of November’s election. The allegations have drawn comparisons to former President Richard Nixon’s 1972 discussion with aides who used the CIA to push the FBI away from investigating the Watergate burglary that later led to his resignation. We speak to someone who has been at the center of the unraveling of a presidency and a vote for impeachment: President Richard Nixon’s White House counsel, John Dean. He is the author of several books, including "The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It," "Conservatives Without Conscience" and "Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches."24 Feb
Headlines for February 24, 2017 - North Dakota: Police Raid Pipeline Resistance Camps, Arresting 33DHS Secretary Denies Deportations are a Military Operation, Contradicting TrumpTrump Suggests He Will Seek to Expand U.S. Nuclear ArsenalJustice Department to Reverse Obama's Hands-Off Policy on MarijuanaDOJ Will Reverse Obama Plan to Phase Out Private Prison ContractsTop Trump Adviser Steve Bannon Makes Rare Appearance at CPACKansas: Indian Man Shot Dead by Man Shouting Racial SlursCustoms Agents Demand IDs from Passengers on Domestic FlightMalaysia: Banned Nerve Agent VX Used in Assassination of Kim Jong-namCNN: Reince Priebus Sought FBI's Refutation of Russia ReportPentagon Plan Would Extend U.S. Troop Deployment in Iraq IndefinitelyChief Digital Officer Gerrit Lansing Dismissed After Failing FBI CheckPhilippines Police Arrest Senator Critical of Bloody Drug WarFormer CIA Officer Arrested in Portugal for Kidnapping ClericJapan: Okinawan Activist Opposed to U.S. Military Base Denied BailPuerto Rican Students Strike Ahead of Looming Cuts to Education24 Feb
Madison, Wisc. to Pay $3.3M to Family of Tony Robinson, a Black Teenager Shot by Police - IIn Madison, Wisconsin, attorneys for the family of an American-American teenager who was shot dead by a city police officer have reached a $3.35 million settlement. Nineteen-year-old Tony Robinson was unarmed when officer Matt Kenny forced his way into an apartment following a "disturbance" in 2015. He was shot seven times. Prosecutors declined to charge Kenny, and he was cleared by the Madison Police Department’s Internal Affairs unit. This week’s settlement is the largest ever for an officer-involved killing in Wisconsin.23 Feb
Days After Pruitt Becomes EPA Head, Newly Released Emails Show His Ties to Koch Bros. & Energy Firms - Thousands of pages of newly released emails reveal how EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt closely collaborated with oil, coal and gas companies backed by the Koch brothers to roll back environmental regulations during his time as Oklahoma attorney general. The documents were released just days after Pruitt was sworn in as the new head of the EPA, the agency tasked with curtailing pollution and safeguarding public health. Last week, Senate Democrats unsuccessfully attempted to postpone Pruitt’s final confirmation until the emails were released, but Republicans pressed forward and confirmed him in a 52-46 vote, largely along party lines. As Oklahoma attorney general, Pruitt sued the EPA 14 times. The trove of new documents shows how energy companies drafted language for Pruitt’s Attorney General’s Office to use to sue the EPA over environmental regulations. We speak to Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, which successfully sued for the emails to be released.23 Feb
We Have to Keep Fighting: Water Protectors Vow Continued Resistance to #DAPL as Main Camp Is Evicted - In North Dakota, the main resistance camp set up by Lakota water protectors fighting the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline has been largely vacated after protesters were ordered to leave the camp on Wednesday. Police arrested around 10 people. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the North Dakota governor had imposed a noon eviction deadline for the hundreds of water protectors still living at the resistance camp. Prayers ceremonies were held on Wednesday, and part of the camp was set on fire before the eviction began. Water protectors say the resistance camp sits on unceded Sioux territory under the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie and that they have a right to remain on their ancestral land. A couple dozen people remain at the camp. The ongoing encampments in North Dakota were the largest gathering of Native Americans in decades. At its peak, more than 10,000 people were at the resistance camp. Earlier this month, construction crews resumed work on the final section of the pipeline, after the Trump administration granted an easement to allow Energy Transfer Partners to drill beneath the Missouri River. We go to Standing Rock to speak with LaDonna Brave Bull Allard and Linda Black Elk.23 Feb
"Kids Will Be Harmed by This": Trump Admin Rolls Back Protections for Transgender Students - The Trump administration has rescinded key protections for transgender students in public schools. The move reverses President Obama’s landmark decision last May to order public schools to let transgender students use the bathrooms matching their chosen gender identity. The Obama administration had threatened to withhold funding for schools that did not comply. According to press accounts, there was a split in the Trump administration over the issue between Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. The New York Times reports Devos initially resisted signing off and told Trump that she was uncomfortable because of the potential harm that rescinding the protections could cause transgender students. At a meeting on Tuesday in the White House, the president sided with Sessions and pushed DeVos to drop her opposition, which she did. We speak to Chase Strangio, staff attorney with the ACLU’s LGBT & AIDS Project.23 Feb
Headlines for February 23, 2017 - North Dakota: Eviction of Pipeline Resistance Camp UnderwayTrump Administration Rescinds Protections for Transgender StudentsWhite House Delays New Ban on Refugees and Muslim TravelersMexico's Foreign Minister Blasts U.S. Immigration PolicyMexican Man Commits Suicide Minutes After His Deportation from U.S.Texas: ICE Removes Woman with Brain Tumor from HospitalRepublican Lawmakers Face More Angry Constituents at Town HallsEmails Show Cozy Relationship Between EPA Head and Energy ExecutivesSupreme Court Halts Execution of Texas Prisoner, Citing RacismAnaheim, California: Off-Duty Officer Fires Pistol Near 13-Year-OldIraq: U.S. Forces Join Fight to Capture Western Mosul from ISIS  U.N. Requests $5.6 Billion in Aid to Prevent Famine for 20 MillionWhite House Tries to Shield Top CIA Official from Torture TestimonyThousands Evacuate Homes in San Jose, California Amid Heavy FloodingRichmond, California Approves Trump Impeachment Resolution23 Feb
White House Refuses to Condemn Rise of Islamophobia as Radical Right Enters Political Mainstream - The Southern Poverty Law Center has revealed the number of anti-Muslim groups in the United States tripled last year from 34 in 2015 to 101 last year. The Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups have said hate groups have been energized by the candidacy and then election of Donald Trump. On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer dodged a question about why Trump has not spoken out against anti-Muslim attacks. We speak to Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center.22 Feb

John Perkins


This Spring: A Special Webinar for Writers - How to Write a Bestseller in Times of Crises: Using the Power of Story to Accelerate Change By John Perkins We’ve entered the greatest revolution in history: The Consciousness Revolution. People around the world are waking up to the fact that we are facing huge crises. We must change. What is your role in this revolution? If you are a writer, you have an incredible opportunity to spread important messages, share thought-provoking ideas, and inspire revolutionary change through the power of story. Fiction and non-fiction. In addition to doing my own writing, I decided to create a small community of writers who intend to use their medium to accelerate change. We will come together in this Spring’s webinar: How to Write a Bestseller in Times of Crises: Using the Power of Story to Accelerate Change. Limited to just 2 dozen participants, this course is uniquely designed to help you hone your skills through writing exercises and discussions in an intimate salon. As a New York Times bestselling author, I will share my experiences of decades of writing bestsellers to help you improve your skills, get published, and reach large audiences. The webinar will take place every Tuesday evening over the course of one month, making it easy for you to journey into this portal of writing your bestseller. You will learn how to: Hone your skills to inspire, entertain, and motivate audiences; Open your heart and soul to the muses of writing; Utilize effective techniques to captivate audiences – as well as agents and publishers; Learn the pros and cons of marketing tools, including the use of publicists and social networking; Work with an intimate salon of talented writers; and Much more. You will have the option of breaking into smaller groups to discuss and critique each other’s work and spend an additional hour-long session with me. At the end of the course, you will also have the opportunity to arrange to join me in private mentoring sessions. Session Dates & Times: Session 1: Tuesday May 30 – 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM EST Session 2: Tuesday June 6 – 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM EST Session 3: Tuesday June 13 – 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM EST Session 4: Tuesday June 20 – 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM EST This webinar is for people who want to be part of a powerful salon of writers and who intend to channel their passions and skills into articles, books, and blogs that will inspire transformation. If you are such a person, please sign up now. Space is limited. Cost:  $780 for all 4 sessions. To see the course syllabus and purchase your tickets, click here. 9 Feb
How to Be a Democracy Under Trump - I watched President Trump’s inauguration from an airport TV in Guatemala. I’d just finished leading 22 people on a pilgrimage to live, study and participate in ceremonies with Mayan shamans at sacred sites. For me, it was the first leg of a two-month working-journey. I am still in Latin America, teaching and speaking at a variety of venues. In the days since that inauguration, I, like so many, have felt the horror of the emerging Trump policies. Latin Americans cannot understand why so few of us voted in the last election and why so many who did, voted for Trump. A larger percentage of people vote in most Latin American countries than in the US; in several countries, voter turnout exceeds 90%. Many of these countries have a history of brutal dictatorships. Once free of these dictatorships, they revel in their rights to hold democratic elections; they see their ability to vote for their leaders as both a responsibility and a privilege. They wonder why such a relatively small percentage of voters would elect a potential dictator. And moreover, why those non-voters did not vote against him. The participants on the Guatemala trip ranged from successful business executives to community organizers and healers – with lots of other professions in between. They came from Canada, Ecuador, England, France, Indonesia, Italy, the United States, and Guatemala. Many – especially those from the US – arrived in Guatemala feeling disenfranchised, disempowered, depressed, and – yes, horrified – by the election. However, as we moved through the shamanic ceremonies, they grew increasingly convinced that the election is a wakeup call for Americans. We have been lethargic and allowed our country to continue with policies that hurt so many people and destroy environments around the world (including Washington’s involvement in the genocidal Guatemalan Civil War against the Mayas that raged for more than three decades). This election exposed a shadow side. It stepped us out of the closet. Many people expressed the realization that Americans had failed to demand that President Obama fight harder to end the wars in the Middle East, vacate Guantánamo, reign in Wall Street, confront a global economic system where eight men have as much wealth as half the world’s population, and honor so many of the other promises he had made. They recognized that he was up against strong Republican opposition and yet it was he who continued to send more troops and mercenaries to the Middle East and Africa, brought Wall Street insiders into his inner circle, and failed to inspire his party to rally voters to defeat Trump and what is now a Republican majority in both houses. We talked about how throughout the world, the US is seen as history’s first truly global empire. Scholars point out that it meets the basic definition of empire: a nation 1) whose currency reigns supreme, 2) whose language is the language of diplomacy and commerce everywhere, 3) whose economic expansions and values are enforced through military actions or threats of action, and 4) whose armies are stationed in many nations. The message became clear: we must end this radical form of global feudalism and imperialism. Those who had arrived in Guatemala disillusioned and depressed now found themselves committed to transforming their sense of disempowerment into actions. At the end of WWII, Prime Minister Churchill told his people that England could choose the course of empire or democracy, but not both.  We in the US are at such a crossroads today. For far too long we have allowed our leaders to take us down the path of empire. President Franklin Roosevelt ended a meeting with union leaders by telling them that now they knew he agreed with them, it was their job to get their members to force him to do the right thing. FDR understood that democracy depends on We the People insisting that our leaders do what they promise to do. We failed with our last president. Let’s not repeat that mistake with the new one. It is extremely important that We the People force Trump and his band of corporatocracy henchmen to keep the promises we heard in his inaugural address.  Let us hear “making America great” as “making America a true democracy!”  Let us hear “we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People” and “we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to follow” as an echo of Prime Minister Churchill’s contention that a country cannot be both a democracy and an empire. It is up to us to insist upon democracy. It is essential that we continue to demonstrate and march, to bombard Trump and our other elected officials with tweets, posts, phone calls, and emails; to rally, clamor, and shout; and in every way to get out the word that we must end the wars, feudalism, economic and social inequality, and environmental destruction; we must become the model democracy the world expects of us. When General George Washington was hunkered down with extremely depressed troops at Valley Forge in the bleak winter of 1777, he ordered that an essay by Thomas Paine be read to all his men. Some of the most famous lines are as applicable today as they were then: These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he who stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.  .  . A generous parent should say, “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace” . . .I love the man who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection.  By perseverance and fortitude we have the prospect of a glorious future. We have arrived at such a time again. We must each do our part. Let’s here and now commit to taking positive actions. I commit to writing and speaking out at a wide variety of venues. I commit to supporting the Love Summit business conference, a powerful event that is committed to bringing love and compassion into business and politics, to transforming a Death Economy into a Life (Love) Economy. What are your commitments? We have arrived at a time that tries our souls. We must gather strength from distress, grow brave by reflection, and know that by perseverance and fortitude we can achieve a glorious future. Let’s make sure that the combined legacies of Presidents Obama and Trump will create the opportunity – indeed the mandate – to show the world how a country can be a true democracy. These are the times. . . Featured Event: Writing a Bestseller: How to Tell & Sell Your Story with John Perkins 4 Sessions | May 30-June 20, 2017 | Limited to 24 Participants | Register Here31 Jan
What Will 2017 Bring? - It’s a question on many minds as we begin this new year. It is perhaps asked more now than ever before in my life-time – and that spans 7 decades. All we can say for sure is that we are in for big changes . . . on many fronts. Each of us is faced with the decision: Will we sit back and accept changes imposed by Washington, Moscow, Beijing, and Big Business? Or will we take actions that guide humanity to a saner world? I’ve had the opportunity to travel across this magnificent planet, speaking at a wide variety of events and talking with individuals from a multitude of jobs and lifestyles. Everywhere, I encounter more and more people who are committed to taking actions that will change consciousness. They realize that consciousness change is the key to altering what we call objective reality. They know that the big events in this world are molded by the ways we perceive ourselves and our relationship to all that is around us. By changing perceptions, we change the world. In a few days, I leave for a two-month journey that will take me to venues in the United States, Guatemala, Costa Rica, the Bahamas, and Ecuador. I will be speaking at the Conscious Life Expo, the Heartbeat Summit, and many other places. Every one of these is oriented toward using changes in our perceived reality to influence the way human beings impact each other and the world. What will 2017 bring? That depends on you. I encourage each and every one of you to make a New Year’s resolution right now that will commit you to taking the path that leads to action. The events of this past year, including those in the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, and the US serve as wakeup calls. One of the facts we awaken to is that business is the driving force behind politics and governments. Whether a leader’s name is Trump or Putin, Merkel or Xi Jinping, he or she serves at the pleasure of banks and other global corporations. And those banks and corporations depend on us – you and me – to buy their goods and services, work for, manage, and invest in them. Without us, they go the way of Woolworth’s, Polaroid, Pan Am, Bethlehem Steel, and so many others that have become corporate dinosaurs. However you feel about the new Oval Office occupant, know that his power base is the business community. However you feel about climate change, pipelines, vanishing forests, urban violence, wars, and just about every other issue, know that the twists and turns of that issue are shaped by business. However you feel about Monsanto, Exxon, Nike or any other business know that that business depends on its customers, workers, managers, and investors – us. Consumer movements work. They ended apartheid, installed seat belts, cleaned up polluted rivers, labelled fats, sugars, calories, and proteins in our foods, opened corporate doors wider to women and minorities, and so much more. In each of these areas we need to go further and we also need to expend these movements. We must insist that every company we support in any way be committed to serving us, the public, the world, future generations – not simply the bottom line. We must change the perception of what it means to be successful. That is our job and our pleasure. You have the power. Social networking makes it easier – and more fun – than ever to launch campaigns that will change the perception of what it means to be “successful.” It’s time for you and me to use all the tools at our disposal to show those who would drive us down a path of distraction, lethargy, depression, and mayhem that we simply will not stand for it. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for and we are here now. 2017 is our year! It will bring what we demand. Best wishes, John The Love Summit organized by the nonprofit Dream Change that John founded nearly 30 years ago is a powerful example of a movement that is going global to change businesses. 1 Jan
Message from the Legendary Elder Siblings - I write this in-flight, returning from a magical trip to the Kogi of Colombia. I write this having seen and heard the airport TV reports of the trauma that continues to dominate US politics, as well as those in many other countries. Last year my Ecuadorian partner, Daniel Koupermann, and I took a group to the amazing lands of the Kogi – people who have a message for us all. They came down from their mountain hideaways to meet us and to spread their message of the need for change. They were so impressed by the deep spirituality and commitment of that 2015 group that they invited us to bring another similar group – and this time to be the first ever to live among them, to sleep in their community, and to sit in their sacred ceremonial lodges. For the 19 of us it was a life-changing trip. We were surrounded by breathtaking scenes: the emerald Caribbean and palm-fringed beaches, the Sierra Nevada mountains that rise 18,000 feet up from the ocean to glacier-covered peaks, the rain forests, and the sparkling rivers that cascade from the glaciers into the Caribbean. But most of all it was the Kogi who impressed us! I have to admit that I was shocked – ecstatically – by the extent to which the Kogi invited us to share their lives and ceremonies. These up-til-now illusive people totally opened the doors to their homes and hearts to us. They invited us to come and learn from their Mamos (wise elders/teachers/shamans/spiritual leaders), to answer a call that dates back to a time when their forefathers retreated from the onslaught of Spanish conquistadors and the destructive nature of European cultures. Their Mamos told us of how their ancestors had fled up the valleys of the glacial rivers into the mountains. Choosing to remain isolated for centuries, they developed a new dream of the Earth, a revelation that balances the brilliant potential of the human mind, heart and spirit with all the forces of nature. To this day they remain true to their ancient laws and traditions—the moral, ecological, and spiritual dictates of a force they identify as “the Mother”—and are still led by sacred rituals. In the late 1900s, their Mamos understood that they are the Elder Siblings and that they had to come down and share that powerful message with the modern world, the people they call the Younger Siblings – us. They have shared their history with others. What was unique this time was their enthusiasm for embracing this group on very personal levels. I write this while flying home and it is all too close to me to be able to express in detail at this moment (a book to come, I think!) but I will say that the bonding we all felt is symbolized by a ceremony when a Mamo and his wife in whose community we had spent the night invited us to witness their 5-year-old son training to become a Mamo. We traveled many miles down from their community and stood with them on the bank of a glacial river where it meets the Caribbean while the young man gently offered the river the commitments we had all made and blown into tiny pieces of cotton from a local plant. The Kogi message, although similar to the one I received more than 40 years ago when I was a Peace Corps volunteer living with the Shuar in the Amazon and then again 20 years later from the Achuar, is more urgent now than ever. It is the message that birthed nonprofits, including Dream Change and the Pachamama Alliance. It is the message of the North American indigenous people and all those who join them at Standing Rock. It is a message that now has issued forth from indigenous cultures and organizations around the world. It is a message of hope, one that says we can transformer ourselves from societies that adhere to systems that threaten to destroy us to ones that will sustain us and future generations. I’ve written many times about the necessity to move from a Death Economy, based on warfare and ravaging the very resources upon which it depends, to a Life Economy, based on cleaning up pollution, regenerating destroyed environments, and developing new technologies that recycle and life-styles that give back more than they take from our Living Earth. Now, flying back from the Kogi, I feel rejuvenated and recommitted to spreading the message that is the underlying principle behind that economic shapeshift that needs to happen. We know we are facing severe crises. We know the climate is changing and that we humans are devastating the air, water, and land that support all life on this planet. We know that our government is incapable or unwilling to turn things around. It is easy to be discouraged. EXCEPT we also now know what our Elder Siblings understood long ago, that We the People must transform ourselves and our institutions. That is the message of the Kogi. It is the message of the Shuar, the Achuar, the people at Standing Rock and all our brothers and sisters around the globe. It is the message of the rising oceans, flooding rivers, melting glaciers, the hurricanes, the political traumas, and all the other crises. We are blessed to be hearing this message, to be inhabitants of this incredible organism that is our Living Earth and to be able to understand that the crises are themselves the message that it is time for us to come out of our isolation and create the change we want and know in our hearts, minds, and souls is necessary.13 Dec 16

Channel NewsAsia Singapore News


16 nabbed for allegedly cheating bank of more than S$189,000 - The suspects had allegedly put in fraudulent loan applications, defaulted on their loan repayment and could not be reached after, police say. 20:30
Singapore's Ai-Ling Lee misses out on Oscars for La La Land - She was nominated in two categories for her sound work on La La Land, which received a record-equalling 14 nominations.20:14
Video of teen killed in Orchard Central fall leaked online - The video appears to show a boy and a girl chatting at a linkbridge between Orchard Central and Orchard Gateway. Moments later, the boy vaults over the railing. 10:10
Malaysia rolls out red carpet as Saudi king kicks off Asia tour - Malaysia welcomed Saudi Arabia's King Salman on Sunday for the start of a rare, month-long Asian tour, where the monarch will build ties and seek to draw more investments to the oil-rich gulf nation.09:07
New Safe Riding Programme to be launched by July - The programme has been expanded to include users of personal mobility devices and will take participants through the new rules that were passed in Parliament last month. 08:50
Video of teen killed in Orchard Central fall leaked online - The video appears to show a boy and a girl chatting at a linkbridge between Orchard Central and Orchard Gateway. Moments later, the boy vaults over the railing. 08:45
Swimming: Schooling smashes third record in three days - Swimming the first leg, Joseph Schooling clocked 42.24 seconds in his split to help the Texas Longhorns set their new meet record of 2 minutes 48.66 seconds at the Big 12 meet.08:32
Singapore has consistently abided by 'One China policy': DPM Teo - Singapore and China have a common interest in building a peaceful and growing region, and this is 'much greater than any occasional differences of views', DPM Teo says.07:17
Drunk driver rammed people at Yio Chu Kang Grassroots Club; police investigating - The driver honked and yelled vulgarities before swerving his car and hitting six or seven people who were on the pavement, says Richard Tan, who was part of the group.06:06
Drunk driver rammed people at Yio Chu Kang Grassroots Club; police investigating - The driver honked and yelled vulgarities before swerving his car and hitting six or seven people who were on the pavement, says Richard Tan, who was part of the group.04:15

Channel NewsAsia Front Page News


Moonlight wins Best Picture Oscar after announcement confusion - In a highly unusual mishap, presenter Warren Beatty initially announced that musical "La La Land" had won, causing confusion and uproar on Hollywood's biggest night. 28 min
Casey Affleck wins best actor Oscar for 'Manchester by the Sea' - Casey Affleck won the best actor Oscar on Sunday for his role as a grief-stricken father in family drama "Manchester by the Sea."29 min
Emma Stone wins best actress Oscar for 'La La Land' - Emma Stone won her first Oscar on Sunday for her lead role as a struggling actress who falls in love with a jazz musician in musical romance "La La Land."30 min
Casey Affleck wins best actor Oscar for 'Manchester by the Sea' - Casey Affleck won the best actor Oscar on Sunday for his role as a grief-stricken father in family drama "Manchester by the Sea."55 min
Emma Stone wins best actress Oscar for 'La La Land' - Emma Stone won her first Oscar on Sunday for her lead role as a struggling actress who falls in love with a jazz musician in musical romance "La La Land."55 min
Singapore, China hold Joint Council for Bilateral Cooperation meeting - Held in Beijing, the top-level forum was the countries' first after a one-year hiatus. 59 min
US blockchain, securitization industry groups join forces - The lobby group for Wall Street's structured finance companies has partnered with the trade association for the blockchain industry to explore ways blockchain technology can streamline the US$1.9 trillion U.S. securitization market.22:10
Chazelle becomes youngest directing Oscar winner for 'La La Land' - Damien Chazelle became the youngest ever winner of a best directing Oscar on Sunday after picking up the prize for his third feature film, musical "La La Land."22:05
Damien Chazelle wins best director Oscar for 'La La Land' - Damien Chazelle won the best director Oscar on Sunday for his romantic musical "La La Land."21:55
Drug charge all but ends O'Connor's Wallabies hopes - Two weeks after declaring himself "mature" and ready to reclaim his Wallabies jersey, James O'Connor's international hopes turned to dust in the holding cell of a Paris police station at the weekend.21:55

Channel NewsAsia World News


Man who intervened in Kansas shooting 'more than happy' to risk life - A Kansas man wounded when he intervened in a bar room shooting that killed an Indian engineer and injured another said on Sunday he was glad he risked his life in an incident U.S. authorities are investigating as a possible hate crime.21:53
Trump budget plan boosts Pentagon, trims State Dept, EPA - officials - The White House will send federal departments a budget proposal on Monday containing the defence spending increase President Donald Trump promised, financed partly by cuts to the U.S. State Department, Environmental Protection Agency and other non-defence programs, two officials familiar with the proposal said.21:20
South Korea's acting president declines to extend corruption probe - South Korea's acting president Hwang Kyo-ahn will not extend the current special prosecutor's investigation into an influence-peddling scandal that could topple President Park Geun-hye, Hwang's office said on Monday.20:15
At least three dead, 19 missing as floods hit central Chile - At least three people are dead and 19 others missing after heavy rains struck Chile over the weekend during the country's usually dry summer months, causing mudslides and water outages in the South American nation, officials said on Sunday.19:55
Trump budget plan boosts Pentagon, trims State Dept, EPA - officials - The White House on Monday will send federal departments a budget proposal containing the defence spending increase President Donald Trump promised, financed partly by cuts to the U.S. State Department, Environmental Protection Agency and other non-defence programs, two officials familiar with the proposal said.19:20
Three dead, 19 missing as floods hit central Chile - Three people are dead and 19 others are missing after heavy rains struck Chile over the weekend during the country's usually dry summer months, causing mudslides and water outages in the South American nation.19:07
South Korea acting president declines to extend special prosecution probe - South Korea's acting president Hwang Kyo-ahn will not extend the current special prosecutor's investigation into a graft scandal involving President Park Geun-hye beyond the Feb. 28 deadline, Hwang's office said on Monday.18:50
South Korea acting president declines to extend special prosecution probe - South Korea's acting president Hwang Kyo-ahn will not extend the current special prosecutor's investigation into a graft scandal involving President Park Geun-hye beyond the Feb. 28 deadline, Hwang's office said on Monday.18:15
Thousands of Romanians form EU flag at anti-government rally - Thousands protested in the Romanian capital Bucharest on Sunday against the Social Democrat government that tried to weaken a crackdown on corruption earlier this month.16:45
Orange is the new splat: Fruit battle in Italian town - The juicy battle in Ivrea is part of the town's yearly carnival, which recreates a centuries-old revolt by commoners against the monarchy.16:40

Channel NewsAsia Asia Pacific News


Singapore, China hold Joint Council for Bilateral Cooperation meeting - Held in Beijing, the top-level forum was the countries' first after a one-year hiatus. 59 min
Indonesian police capture suspect after blast in Bandung government building - Earlier, an exchange of gunfire could be heard on Indonesian TV footage filmed from outside the building in West Java. 21:44
South Korea acting president declines to extend special prosecution probe - South Korea's acting president Hwang Kyo-ahn will not extend the current special prosecutor's investigation into a graft scandal involving President Park Geun-hye beyond the Feb. 28 deadline, Hwang's office said on Monday.20:25
South Korea's acting president declines to extend corruption probe - South Korea's acting president Hwang Kyo-ahn will not extend the current special prosecutor's investigation into an influence-peddling scandal that could topple President Park Geun-hye, Hwang's office said on Monday.20:15
China's top diplomat Yang Jiechi to visit US - China's top diplomat will visit the United States this week, the most senior Chinese official to do so since President Donald Trump took office on January 20, state news agency Xinhua said.20:08
South Korea's major opposition party to seek PM's impeachment - Yonhap - South Korea's main opposition Democratic Party said on Monday it and other parties would seek the impeachment of the prime minister, Yonhap News Agency reported after the premier said an investigation into a corruption scandal would not be extended.19:45
Working mum's death highlights South Korea's low birth rate challenge - Trying to raise the world's lowest birth rate is among the missions of South Korea's welfare ministry - a challenge starkly illustrated when one of its own working mothers died at her office.18:51
Malaysia rolls out red carpet as Saudi king kicks off Asia tour - Malaysia welcomed Saudi Arabia's King Salman on Sunday for the start of a rare, month-long Asian tour, where the monarch will build ties and seek to draw more investments to the oil-rich gulf nation.18:50
South Korea acting president declines to extend special prosecution probe - South Korea's acting president Hwang Kyo-ahn will not extend the current special prosecutor's investigation into a graft scandal involving President Park Geun-hye beyond the Feb. 28 deadline, Hwang's office said on Monday.18:50
Taiwan restaurant industry bucks the trend despite economic uncertainties - The number of eateries on the island has topped 120,000 as more and more Taiwanese choose to eat out. 18:20

Media Monarchy


#PumpUpThaVolume: February 24, 2017 - Media Monarchy plays His Name Is Alive, Blooded The Brave, Lusine and more on #PumpUpThaVolume for February 24, 2017. ♬24 Feb
#MorningMonarchy: February 24, 2017 - Thought control, Oscars so what and CERN-inspired psych rock + this day in history w/Grey Tuesday and our song of the day by His Name Is Alive on your Morning Monarchy for February 24, 2017.24 Feb
Calling All Believers of CERN-Inspired Psych Rock - What happens when a scientist at CERN asks musicians to make an album about the Large Hadron Collider? You get a pulsating piece of psychedelic concept rock called "Patterns Of Light" by long-running Michigan band, His Name Is Alive.24 Feb
#NewWorldNextWeek: CIA Operative “Blind Sheik” Dies in Prison (Video) - This week on the New World Next Week: CIA operative the “Blind Sheik” dies in prison; a lone hero stands up to unconstitutional speed cameras; and a bite mark victim bites back against the pseudoscience.23 Feb
#NewWorldNextWeek: Bye Blind Sheik, Traffic Tickets, Bite Mark Truthers (Audio) - This week on the New World Next Week: CIA operative the "Blind Sheik" dies in prison; a lone hero stands up to unconstitutional speed cameras; and a bite mark victim bites back against the pseudoscience.23 Feb
#PumpUpThaVolume: February 23, 2017 - Media Monarchy plays Beans, Trapist, Middle Kids and more on #PumpUpThaVolume for February 23, 2017. ♬23 Feb
#MorningMonarchy: February 23, 2017 - Firing up HAARP, normalizing cannibalism and reading three letters + this day in history w/Iwo Jima and our song of the day by Jens Lekman on your Morning Monarchy for February 23, 2017.23 Feb
#PumpUpThaVolume: February 22, 2017 - Media Monarchy plays The Jay Vons, PVT, The Mourning After and more on #PumpUpThaVolume for February 22, 2017. ♬22 Feb
#MorningMonarchy: February 22, 2017 - Overwhelmed cafes, meal deals and euthanasia agents + this day in history w/Best New Artist and our song of the day by Surfer Blood on your Morning Monarchy for February 22, 2017.22 Feb
#PumpUpThaVolume: February 21, 2017 - Media Monarchy plays Diet Cig, Alex Lahey, Wozniak and more on #PumpUpThaVolume for February 21, 2017. ♬21 Feb

NATO Latest News


Statement by the NATO Secretary General on the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia¹ - At the Warsaw Summit in July 2016, NATO urged all political leaders in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to fully implement their commitments under the Przino Agreement, as the framework for a sustainable solution to the political crisis.05:00
NATO develops telemedicine system to save lives in emergencies - NATO has developed a multinational telemedicine system, enabling medical specialists to provide real-time recommendations to first responders at emergency scenes or in combat zones. On Friday (24 February 2017), a high-level conference at NATO headquarters marked the completion of this project, supported by the NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme.24 Feb
Visit to NATO by the President of the Republic of Armenia - NATO Secretary General, Mr. Jens Stoltenberg, will meet with the President of the Republic of Armenia, H.E. Mr. Serzh Sargsyan at NATO Headquarters on Monday, 27 February 2017.24 Feb
Progress in the reform of professional military education in Armenia - The NATO Defence Education Enhancement Programme (DEEP) expert team visited Armenia’s Ministry of Defence in February 2017 to bring forward consultations on defence education.23 Feb
Support for reform of professional military education in Mauritania - A NATO expert team visited the National Staff College (École nationale d’état-major de la Mauritanie - ENEM) in Nouakchott, in February 2017, to chart progress and plans for the Defence Education Enhancement Programme (DEEP) in Mauritania.23 Feb
Strengthening NATO-EU-OSCE security dialogue on arms control - On 10 February 2017, NATO convened an informal workshop on how to reinforce security dialogue in the Euro-Atlantic region. It focused more specifically on the importance of three major regional organisations – NATO, the European Union (EU) and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) – in supporting each other to improve existing arms control mechanisms.22 Feb
Visit to NATO by the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Romania - NATO Deputy Secretary General, Ms. Rose Gottemoeller will meet with the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Romania, Mr. George Ciamba, at NATO Headquarters on Wednesday, 22 February 2017.21 Feb
Visit to NATO by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the United Arab Emirates - NATO Secretary General, Mr. Jens Stoltenberg will meet with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the United Arab Emirates, H.H. Sheikh Abdulla bin Zayed al Nahyan, at NATO Headquarters on Wednesday, 22 February 2017.21 Feb
Secretary General welcomes US Vice President to NATO headquarters - NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed US Vice President Mike Pence to NATO Headquarters on Monday (20 February 2017), and thanked him for America’s unwavering commitment to the transatlantic bond.20 Feb
NATO Parliamentary Assembly visit to NATO Headquarters - On Monday, 20 February 2017, the Members of the Standing Committee of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly will visit NATO Headquarters for the annual joint meeting with the North Atlantic Council.17 Feb

National Post



Greg Palast


Millions of fraudulent voters, my a**! Palast follows The Donald’s money - A Facebook Event  Get the non-fake info with investigative reporter Greg Palast. Palast says, "It’s no joke—and it’s far more sinister than a mere "lie." "The US press has done a good job exposing President Trump’s looney-toons claim that millions of votes were cast against him. "But what’s missing is what’s behind Trump’s claim — and it’s not just his cranky, whining ego looking to erase the embarrassment of losing the popular vote. "We are witnessing the crafting of a systematic plan to steal the 2018 midterm election." And that’s not all: Did anyone notice that in the middle of Trump’s psycho-drama of a press conference, he said, "…I want to thank Paul Singer for being here and coming up to the Oval Office." Those are the most dangerous words Trump has uttered since Inauguration Day. Get the facts (and watch the cartoon!) during this special Facebook Live event. And Palast lets you in on the follow-up to his Rolling Stone investigation. He’s digging, and the worms are crawling up the shovel. And we’ll talk about how YOU can take part in the investigation. We have a lot to talk about, and a lot to expose. * * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Rent or buy the film from Amazon Vimeo. Support The Palast Investigative Fund and keep our work alive. Or support us by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Sustainable Markets Foundation for the benefit of The Palast Investigative Fund and you get a tax-deduction!More info. GregPalast.com The post Millions of fraudulent voters, my a**! Palast follows The Donald’s money appeared first on Greg Palast.22 Feb
Join NAACP Voter Fund for Facebook LIVE broadcast of my film on How Trump Stole It - I have a simple request. I’m asking that, this Thursday, at 8pm ET/5pm PT, you join the NAACP-National Voter Fund, Rainbow/PUSH, Josh Fox of Climate Revolution and many, many more–and “share” the Facebook LIVE broadcast of my documentary–the film that exposes exactly how Trump and his cronies attacked the voting rights of a million minority voters to steal the White House. That’s all we are asking: Between 8pm and 9pm Eastern, on Inauguration Eve, you “share” the live-stream with your Facebook followers. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, follows my crew’s undercover investigations for Rolling Stone and BBC-TV. "...Mainstream journalism has often struggled to cover the manipulation of data and the distortion of reality driven by billionaires like the Koch brothers or even Donald Trump... Palast slices through all the B.S.”- The Village Voice Pass this on to your friends, your organizations, and anyone who wants to get un-stupid about the theft of the 2016 election. I’ll be leading an online discussion right after the broadcast: What do we do now? Starting now you can share the trailer on Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/GregPalastInvestigates/videos/10154917384607128/ And share the trailer on Twitter simply by retweeting this tweet:https://twitter.com/Greg_Palast/status/820218502405619712 Please also indicate that you are "going" to our virtual event on Facebook — and share it with your friends: https://www.facebook.com/events/980244978772589/ On Thursday, January 19 at 8pm ET, go to https://www.facebook.com/GregPalastInvestigates/. (If you’re late, you can scroll back to the beginning.) The film (with the help of my friends Rosario Dawson, Shailene Woodley Ice-T, Willie Nelson and more), tells the story of the GOP’s weapon of mass vote destruction – and exposes the billionaires behind Trump and the vote trickery. The film was updated just this week. I guarantee: you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll get revved up to resist. Trump didn’t win––his billionaire backers swiped it. We can take it back. Will you join me? - Greg Palast and the investigations team Make a tax-deductible donation to our Stolen Election Investigation *  *  *  *  * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie.Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Support The Palast Investigative Fund and keep our work alive. Or support us by shopping with Amazon Smile.AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Sustainable Markets Foundation for the benefit of The Palast Investigative Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com The post Join NAACP Voter Fund for Facebook LIVE broadcast of my film on How Trump Stole It appeared first on Greg Palast.17 Jan
I get the Blues too… - A note to all who’ve made a donation to our Investigative Fund You are not only keeping us alive financially, but emotionally. Eventually, our stories make national news, but, in those months while the mainstream resists, your encouragement really means a lot. People ask me how I keep my sense of humor when I see all these horrors, from lost votes to lost lives. The truth is, I get the blues too. Support, good wishes, and remembering the tough world I came from are what gets me back on track. And here’s something they can’t steal from us:  a Happy New Year, from my family to yours. Thank you, Greg Palast, reporting Make a tax-deductible donation to our Stolen Election Investigation *  *  *  *  * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie.Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Support The Palast Investigative Fund and keep our work alive. Or support us by shopping with Amazon Smile.AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Sustainable Markets Foundation for the benefit of The Palast Investigative Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info.   The post I get the Blues too… appeared first on Greg Palast.30 Dec 16
A note in the snow - Last week, I flew to Detroit with my team at the request of a major west coast publication. When I landed, they got cold feet; assignment cancelled. Without funding to continue, I should have headed home. But I was getting tips of nasty doings with the ballots in Motown. I could get the evidence that Trump’s victory was as real as his tan. So I tucked my long-johns under my suit, put on my fedora, and headed out to meet the witnesses, see the evidence and film an investigative report on the Theft of Michigan. With almost no sleep (and no pay), my producer David Ambrose and I put together an investigative film—and donated it, no charge, to Democracy Now! and several other outlets. As to the airfares, hotels, cars, camera batteries, sound equipment, local assistants and the rest, the bills have piled high as the snow and uncounted ballots. So, here I was, literally out in the cold, hoping you'd see the value of top-flight investigative reporting. So, buddy, can you spare a dime? Or $100 or so? For that, I’ll send you my new film, the one that, back in September, told you exactly how Trump would steal it. Or a signed copy of the book that goes with it: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a tale of billionaires and ballot bandits. I want to thank all of you who donated to get me to Washington DC to testify at the ad hoc Congressional hearing and to speak with the Justice Department about the suppression of minority votes. (On Monday, I was joined at the Washington Press Club by the nation’s top voting rights attorney, Barbara Arnwine; civil rights legend Ruby Sales; Muslim activist Sameera Khan. They announced plans to take legal and political action against Crosscheck, the Trumpistas’ latest Jim Crow tactic, the one our team uncovered for Rolling Stone. Khan joined me at Justice to present them 50,000 signatures (we unloaded reams of paper on them) gathered by 18 Million Rising, the Asian American advocacy group, to light a fire under Justice. On Tuesday, I joined the presidents of the NAACP chapters of Michigan and Wisconsin and other front-line voting rights leaders, to plan next steps for this week, for this year, for this decade. My presentation to Justice, to Congressmen and rights advocates, to the press, was so much more powerful because I arrived in DC with the goods, the evidence, the film, the facts from Michigan, from the scene of the electoral crime. So, in the end, my assignment wasn’t cancelled: I went to work for YOU. Because I have faith that my readers agree that this work is important, that I’m not on some fool’s errand. The US media doesn’t want to cover the vote theft—because, hey, the count is over—and we should get over it. I am not over it. I am standing my ground. Let me know if you think I’ve made the right decision. Feed the team. I have nothing to offer you in return except some signed discs and books (or the Combo)— and the facts. Continue Supporting the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation because it ain’t over and we’re not done. – Greg Palast   * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post A note in the snow appeared first on Greg Palast.18 Dec 16
The Republican Sabotage of the Vote Recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin - By Greg Palast for Truthout Photo of Michigan ballot with bubble. (Image courtesy of Palast Investigative Fund, 2016)Michigan officials declared in late November that Trump won the state's count by 10,704 votes. But hold on – a record 75,355 ballots were not counted. The uncounted ballots came mostly from Detroit and Flint, majority-Black cities that vote Democratic. According to the machines that read their ballots, these voters waited in line, sometimes for hours, yet did not choose a president. Really? This week, I drove through a snowstorm to Lansing to hear the official explanation from Ruth Johnson, the Republican secretary of state. I was directed to official flack-catcher Fred Woodhams who told me, "You know, I think when you look at the unfavorability ratings that were reported for both major-party candidates, it's probably not that surprising." Sleuthing about in Detroit, I found another explanation: bubbles. Bubbles? Michigan votes on paper ballots. If you don't fill the bubble completely, the machine records that you didn't vote for president. Susan, a systems analyst who took part in the hand recount initiated by Jill Stein, told me, "I saw a lot of red ink. I saw a lot of checkmarks. We saw a lot of ballots that weren't originally counted, because those don't scan into the machine." (I can only use her first name because she's terrified of retribution from Trump followers in the white suburb where she lives.) Other ballots were not counted because the machines thought the voter chose two presidential candidates. How come more ballots were uncounted in Detroit and Flint than in the white 'burbs and rural counties? Are the machines themselves racist? No, but they are old, and in some cases, busted. An astonishing 87 machines broke down in Detroit, responsible for counting tens of thousands of ballots. Many more were simply faulty and uncalibrated. I met with Carlos Garcia, University of Michigan multimedia specialist, who, on Election Day, joined a crowd waiting over two hours for the busted machine to be fixed. Some voters left; others filled out ballots that were chucked, uncounted, into the bottom of machine. When the machine was fixed, Carlos explained, "Any new scanned ballots were falling in on top of the old ones." It would not be possible to recount those dumped ballots. This is not an unheard of phenomenon: I know two voters who lost their vote in another state (California) because they didn't fill in the bubble – my parents! Meet mom and dad in my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: How did Detroit end up with the crap machines? Detroit is bankrupt, so every expenditure must be approved by "emergency" overlords appointed by the Republican governor. The GOP operatives refused the city's pre-election pleas to fix and replace the busted machines. "We had the rollout [of new machines] in our budget," Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey said. "No money was appropriated by the state." Same in Flint. GOP state officials cut the budget for water service there, resulting in the contamination of the city's water supply with lead. The budget cuts also poisoned the presidential race. The Human Eye Count There is, however, an extraordinary machine that can read the ballots, whether the bubbles are filled or checked, whether in black ink or red, to determine the voters' intent: the human eye. That's why Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, paid millions of dollars for a human eyeball count of the uncounted votes. While labeled a "recount," its real purpose is to count the 75,355 votes never counted in the first place. Count those ballots, mostly in Detroit and Flint, and Trump's victory could vanish. Adding to the pile of uncounted ballots are the large numbers of invalidated straight-ticket votes in Detroit. In Michigan, you can choose to make one mark that casts your vote for every Democrat (or Republican) for every office. Voters know that they can vote the Democratic ballot but write in a protest name – popular were "Bernie Sanders" and "Mickey Mouse" – but their ballot, they knew, would count for Clinton. However, the Detroit machines simply invalidated the ballots with protest write-ins because the old Opti-Scans wrongly tallied these as "over-votes" (i.e., voting for two candidates). The human eye would catch this mistake. But Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette stymied Stein's human eye count. The Republican pol issued an order saying that no one could look at the ballots cast in precincts where the number of votes and voters did not match – exactly the places where you'd want to look for the missing votes. He also ordered a ban on counting ballots from precincts where the seals on the machines had been broken – in other words, where there is evidence of tampering. Again, those are the machines that most need investigating. The result: The recount crews were denied access to more than half of all Detroit precincts (59 percent). I met with Stein, who told me she was stunned by this overt sabotage of the recount. "It's shocking to think that the discounting of these votes may be making the critical difference in the outcome of the election," she said. This story was repeated in Wisconsin, which uses the same Opti-Scan system as Michigan. There, the uncounted votes, sometimes called "spoiled" or "invalidated" ballots, were concentrated in Black-majority Milwaukee. Stein put up over $3 million of donated funds for the human eye review in Wisconsin, but GOP state officials authorized Milwaukee County to recount simply by running the ballots through the same blind machines. Not surprisingly, this instant replay produced the same questionable result. Adding Un-Votes to the Uncounted Stein was also disturbed by the number of voters who never got to cast ballots. "Whether it's because of the chaos [because] some polling centers are closed, and then some are moved, and there's all kinds of mix-ups," she said. "So, a lot of people are filling out provisional ballots, or they were being tossed off the voter rolls by Interstate Crosscheck." Interstate Crosscheck is a list that was created by Donald Trump supporter and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to hunt down and imprison voters who illegally voted or registered in two states in one election. An eye-popping 449,092 Michiganders are on the Crosscheck suspect list. The list, which my team uncovered in an investigation for Rolling Stone, cost at least 50,000 of the state's voters their registrations. Disproportionately, the purged voters were Blacks, Latinos and that other solid Democratic demographic, Muslim Americans. (Dearborn, Michigan, has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the US.) The Michigan Secretary of State's spokesman Woodhams told me the purpose of the mass purge was, "to clean our voter lists and ensure that there's no vulnerability for fraud. We've been very aggressive in closing vulnerabilities and loopholes to fraud." While Woodhams did not know of a single conviction for double-voting in Michigan, the "aggression" in purging the lists was clear. I showed him part of the Michigan purge list that he thought was confidential. The "double voters" are found by simply matching first and last names. Michael Bernard Brown is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Anthony Brown. Michael Timothy Brown is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Johnnie Brown. Woodhams assured me the GOP used the Trump-Kobach list with care, more or less. He said, "I'm sure that there are some false positives. But we go through it thoroughly, and we're not just canceling people." As to the racial profiling inherent in the list? Did he agree with our experts that by tagging thousands of voters named Jose Garcia and Michael Brown there would be a bias in his purge list? The GOP spokesman replied, "I've known a lot of white Browns." Jill Stein didn't buy it. Responding to both Michigan's and Trump's claim that voter rolls are loaded with fraudulent double voters, Stein said, "It's the opposite of what he is saying: not people who are voting fraudulently and illegally, but actually legitimate voters who have had their right to vote taken away from them by Kris Kobach and by Donald Trump." Crosscheck likely cost tens of thousands their vote in Pennsylvania as well. "It is a Jim Crow system, and it all needs to be fixed," Stein concluded. "It's not rocket science. This is just plain, basic democracy." * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Support the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation After investigating the REAL story of the recount, we stopped by the Department of Justice and handed them our Crosscheck petition, signed by 50,000 people. We have a lot more work to do and thankfully, our efforts are starting to get notice. We're not done... Join us bySupporting the Stolen Election Investigation Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post The Republican Sabotage of the Vote Recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin appeared first on Greg Palast.18 Dec 16
Palast Report for Democracy Now!:By Rejecting Recount, Is Michigan Covering up 75,000 Ballots Never Counted? - Investigative reporter Greg Palast has just returned from Michigan, where he went to probe the state’s closely contested election. Trump won Michigan by fewer than 11,000 votes out of nearly 4.8 million votes cast. Green Party presidential contender Dr. Jill Stein attempted to force Michigan to hold a recount, but a federal judge ordered Michigan’s Board of Elections to stop the state’s electoral recount. One big question remains: Why did 75,335 ballots go uncounted? Support the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation My team and I just returned from Michigan to report the REAL story of the recount. I’ve also been responding to urgent requests in the recount states for our technical files and analysis. We're in Washington and stopped by the Department of Justice yesterday and handed them our Crosscheck petition, signed by 50,000 people. Join us by Supporting the Stolen Election Investigation Last stop for Democracy • PLEASE, say, "Count me in to count the votes" by supporting the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation for a donation of any size no matter how small or large • Stay informed and get a signed DVD of my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a signed copy of the book with the same title or better still - get the Book & DVD combo  • Be listed as a producer ($1,000) or co-producer ($500) in the credits of the broadcast version of the updated, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:  THE THEFT OF 2016. * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post Palast Report for Democracy Now!:By Rejecting Recount, Is Michigan Covering up 75,000 Ballots Never Counted? appeared first on Greg Palast.13 Dec 16
Crosscheck Is Not Just Crooked, It’s Criminal - After reading my report on the Kobach/Koch/Trump operation, which has removed tens of thousands of minority voters from the rolls in the swing states that surprisingly shifted to Trump, former federal judge (and now Congressman) Alcee Hastings told me Crosscheck is a criminal violation of federal law. Hastings has called for criminal indictments and written an official Congressional member letter to ask for investigation. hastings-crosscheck-letter-to-ag-lynch Hastings’ demand for justice is backed by a petition to expose and end Crosscheck’s racist attacks on voting rights. So far it's been signed by 50,000 people, including 29,507 members of 18 Million Rising, the Asian-American rights group. The group is joined by co-signers Rep. Keith Ellison, Bill Gallegos of Climate Justice, Martin Luther King III and others. On Tuesday, December 13 I will join the leaders of 18 Million rising in Washington, D.C. to present the petition to Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Stopping Crosscheck is the Standing Rock of racist vote suppression.  If we don’t open the investigations now, by January 21, Kris Kobach will be Homeland Security chief and Jeff Sessions Attorney General. Demand an investigation into Crosscheck, sign our petition — and then share it! For the full story, see the film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, the story of my investigation of Crosscheck. * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. The post Crosscheck Is Not Just Crooked, It’s Criminal appeared first on Greg Palast. 5 Dec 16
The No-BS Inside Guide to the Presidential RecountSorry, no Russian hacker hunt - by Greg Palast for Truthout There's been so much complete nonsense since I first broke the news that the Green Party would file for a recount of the presidential vote, I am compelled to write a short guide to flush out the BS and get to just the facts, ma'am. Nope, they’re not hunting for Russian hackers To begin with, the main work of the recount hasn't a damn thing to do with finding out if the software programs for the voting machines have been hacked, whether by Putin’s agents or some guy in a cave flipping your vote from Hillary to The Donald. The Green team does not yet even have the right to get into the codes. But that's just not the core of the work. The ballots in the electoral “dumpster” The nasty little secret of US elections, is that we don't count all the votes. In Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania—and all over America—there were a massive number of votes that were simply rejected, invalidated, and spoiled. They were simply, not counted.  Officially, in a typical presidential election, at least three million votes end up rejected, often for picayune, absurd reasons. The rejects fall into three big categories:  provisional ballots rejected, absentee and mail-in ballots invalidated and in-precinct votes “spoiled,” spit out by a machine or thrown out by a human reader as unreadable or mis-marked. So, as Robert Fitrakis, lead lawyer for the recount tells me, their first job is to pull the votes out of the electoral dumpster—and, one by one, make the case for counting a rejected provisional, absentee or “spoiled” ballot. Spoiled:  over-votes and under-votes How does a vote spoil? Most fall in the categories of “over-votes” and “under-votes.” In Michigan, the Green team has found a whole lot of people who voted for TWO candidates for President.  These are the “over-vote”—votes that will count for neither candidate. How odd.  While the schools in Detroit are not stellar, its graduates do know that they can only have one president. Then, some folks didn’t vote at all.  They are the “under-voter.” But, Fitrakis and team suspect, many of these under- and over-voters meant to vote for a candidate but the robot reader couldn’t understand their choice. Here’s how it happens.  Voters in Michigan and Wisconsin fill in bubbles next to their choice.  The cards, filled up with darkened bubbles for each race, are gathered and fed through an “optical scanner.” These robotic eyeballs mess up all the time. This is what Fitrakis, an old hand at vote-machine failures (both deliberate and benign), calls “the calibration problem.” Are machines calibrated with a Republican or Democratic bias? No, that's not how it works. But just as poor areas get the worst schools and hospitals, they also get the worst voting machines. The key is an ugly statistic not taught in third grade civics class:  According to the US Civil Rights Commission, the chance your vote will be disqualified as “spoiled” is 900% more likely if you’re Black than if you’re white. So the Green Party intends to review every single one of the six million bubble-filled cards. They’ll use the one instrument that can easily tell one bubble from two, or one bubble from none: the human eye. As you can imagine, This will require several thousand eyes.  The good news is, Fitrakis reports, that well over a thousand volunteers have already signed up.  Training by Skype begins Tuesday morning. Support the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation The team and I are off to Ground Zero:  Michigan. Wisconsin. Pennsylvania. To report the REAL story of the recount. I’m also responding to urgent requests in the recount states for our technical files and analysis. And then it’s on to Washington—to the Department of Justice—while there’s a bit of Justice left. Join us by Supporting the Stolen Election Investigation Last stop for Democracy Provisional or “placebo” ballots According to the US Elections Assistance Commission (EAC), Americans cast 2.7 million provisional ballots in the last presidential election.  About a million were simply discarded.  What?! Yes.  Discarded, not counted.  You show up at your normal polling station and they can’t find your name, or they don’t like your ID, or you’re supposed to vote in another precinct.  Instead of letting you vote on a regular ballot, you fill out a “provisional” ballot and place it in an envelope, sign your name, and under penalty of jail time for lying, affirm you’re a properly registered voter. The polls close—then the magic begins.  It’s up to highly partisan election officials to decide if your vote counts.  Hillary Clinton only won one swing state, Virginia, notably, the only one where the vote count was controlled by Democrats.  She lost all swing states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida—where the GOP set the rules for counting these ballots and their hacks acted as the judge and jury on whether a ballot should be counted. Wisconsin generally rejects votes cast in the wrong precinct, even if they’re legal voters—and, says Fitrakis, “even if their official precinct was just another table in the same high school gym—and they were mis-directed by poll workers.” (That’s why I sometimes call “provisional” ballots “placebo” ballots.  They let you feel you’ve voted, even if you haven’t.) In Wisconsin, provisional ballots were handed to voters—mostly, it appears, students—who didn’t have the form of ID required under new Wisconsin law. These ballots were disqualified despite zero evidence even one voter was an identity thief. Fitrakis says the Stein campaign will fight for each of these provisional votes where this is clearly no evidence the vote is fraudulent. Mail-in, Early and Absentee Ballots go Absent If you’ve gone postal in this election, good luck!  According to EAC data, at least half a million absentee ballots go absent, that is, just don’t get counted.  The cause: everything from postage due to “suspect signature.” Fitrakis told me that in his home state of Ohio, you need to put your driver’s license number on the envelope, “and if you don’t have a driver’s license and leave the line blank—instead of writing ‘no driver’s license’—they toss your ballot. From Palast's book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits by Ted Rall It’s a “gotcha!” system meant to knock out the ballots the officials don’t want to count.  (Remember, your mail-in ballot is anything but secret.)  Team Green will try to fight for each absentee ballot rejected for cockamamie reasons. If the recount doesn’t change the outcome, can we feel assured the election was honest? Sadly, no.  As Fitrakis says, “If a student is given a provisional ballot because they didn’t have the right ID, or the state simply lost their registration, we can fight for the ballot to be counted.  But most students who voted off campus didn’t know their right to get a provisional ballot and most probably didn’t get offered one. Students and others were discouraged from voting because they lacked the proper ID (300,000 by the estimate of the experts with the ACLU—that’s thirty times Trump’s plurality).  But if you didn’t cast any ballot, provisional or otherwise, no one can fight for it. And final decisions may come down to the vote of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, God forbid.  As Norman Stockwell, the editor of Madison-based The Progressive explained to me, formerly, elections law adjudications were made by a panel of non-partisan judges.  These were replaced by this new commission of partisan shills appointed by GOP Governor Scott Walker. Trump says millions voted illegally. Is he crazy? Crazy like a fox.  There’s a method in his madness that affects the recount. While the media dismisses Trump’s claim that there are "millions of people that voted illegally," they have not paid attention to the details of his claim.  Trump explains that millions of people are “voting many, many times,” that is, voting in two states in the same election. Trump’s claim is based on a list of “potential duplicate voters” created by his operative, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.  Kobach (a top dog in Trump’s transition team)  directs a program for hunting down fraudulent voters using a computer system called, “Crosscheck.” It’s quite a computer:  Crosscheck identified a breathtaking 449,922 Michiganders who are suspected of voting or registering in a second state, a felony crime, as are 371,923 in Pennsylvania. I spent two years investigating the Trump/Kobach claim for Rolling Stone.  We obtained the “confidential” suspect list of several million citizens accused of voting twice.  In fact, it was no more than a list of common names—Maria Hernandez, James Brown, David Lee—that is, common to voters of color.  Read: Democrats.  A true and typical example: Michael James Brown of Michigan is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Kendrick Brown of Georgia. Page from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (FREE) Comic book penned by Keith Tucker About 54,000 voters in Michigan, five times Trump’s plurality, lost their right to vote based on this nutty double-voter accusation.  In Pennsylvania, about 45,000 were purged. The problem for Fitrakis:  While he eventually plans to file suit against Crosscheck purges, in the meantime, it’s not clear he can challenge someone whose lost their vote because of a false accusation of double voting.  And those who found their names missing and didn’t demand a provisional ballot—there’s no hope at all of recovering their vote. Is Jill Stein going to get rich? Fitrakis laughs at this one.  “The FEC [Federal Elections Commission] has very strict rules on recounts. The donations for the recount are sequestered in a specially designated account and all spending is restricted to the recount.” The big problem is that the cost is somewhat out of Stein’s control.  Each state will bill the campaign for the “pro-rated salaries and benefits” of its county and state officials working on the recount. To add to the cost and just plain drive the Green team crazy, the Wisconsin Election Board announced on Monday that each separate county elections clerk will decide if they’ll even let the Green volunteers directly view the ballots.  Fitrakis and partners will have to get a court order to get into each county.  How does one recount ballots without seeing them?  (Hmm, is the Wisconsin board, stooges appointed by the GOP Governor, fearful that the viewing the ballots will expose the game?) Hillary joins the fray What will the Clinton camp add to the recount? “Lawyers,” said Fitrakis, though he’s yet to see them.  The Clinton campaign is apparently helping find one voter in each Pennsylvania county, as one is required in each jurisdiction to file for a recount of that state. And what about that hack job? While Fitrakis is not looking for Russkies in the computer code, he says, “We’re more concerned with the private companies that control the keys to the kingdom—to match what’s on paper to the official count.”  The “keys” are the little machines, memory cards and other electronic gewgaws that are used to suck the data from the voting machine—which are carried off to another state for tabulation by a private contractor.  Will these tabulations at each step match what the volunteers find in the on-the-ground recount? One problem is that the tabulation software is “proprietary.”  A private company owns the code to the count—and the privateers will fight fiercely, with GOP help, to keep the ballot counting code their commercial secret. Push and Pray Pennsylvania In the end, the single biggest impediment to a full and fair recount is that 70 percent of Pennsylvania voters used what are called, “Push and Pray” voting machines—Direct Recording Electronic touch-screens.  Push the screen next to your choice and pray it gets recorded. Pennsylvania is one of the only states that has yet to require some form of VVPAT (“vee-pat”) or voter-verified paper audit trail that creates an ATM-style receipt. Therefore, the Keystone State recount will have to rely on hopes of access to the code, statistical comparisons to counties that used paper ballots—and prayer. Maybe it IS the Russians The possibility that a Putin pal hacked the machines was championed by University of Michigan computer sciences professor J. Alex Halderman who proposed, “The attackers would probe election offices well in advance in order to find ways to break into their computers…and spread malware into voting machines.” I imagine some squat, middle-pay-scale civil servant in chinos and a pocket protector who works in the Michigan Secretary of State’s office approached, one late overtime night, by some FSB agent in high heels and a slinky dress split halfway up her thigh. The svelte spy would lean against the bureaucrat provocatively and whisper, “My handsome dahling, would you mind sticking this little thumb drive into that big old computer of yours?” Professor Halderman, if you want to help the recount, put down the James Bond novels and pick up some Opti-Scan ballots.  We’ve got a lot of bubbles to read.  End PLEASE, say, "Count me in to count the votes" by supporting the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation for a donation of any size no matter how small or large Stay informed and get a signed DVD of my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a signed copy of the book with the same title or better still - get the Book & DVD combo Be listed as a producer ($1,000) or co-producer ($500) in the credits of the broadcast version of the updated, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:  THE THEFT OF 2016. * * * * * Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!  Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. GregPalast.com   The post The No-BS Inside Guide to the Presidential RecountSorry, no Russian hacker hunt appeared first on Greg Palast.30 Nov 16

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Multinational Capability Development Campaign Military Strategic Communication Handbook Draft - Cell phones, smart phones, the Internet, and GPS are increasingly available and are changing the nature of conflict, even in remote areas. Information can now reach out in new ways to global audiences because of the revolution in Information Technology (IT), particularly using cell phones and smart phones. The revival of hybrid warfare manifested in recent developments in the international security environment – such as the Arab Spring, the Ukrainian crisis, the rise of Jihadist-Salafist terrorism, and the European migrant crisis – demonstrates the power of communication, broadly based on IT advantages: messages and perceptions become predominant of physical engagements and strongly impact the behaviour of people. Orchestrated activities carry messages and have a crucial effect on 55 public opinions, decision-making processes, and domestic support. From a communication perspective, military operations are part of a vicious circle (see Figure 1): they  result from political decisions, are part of state-funded activity, and are under constant observation of the media who strongly affect public opinion, which in turn influences political discussion and decision-making. Military success can be either directly aided or challenged by activities in the Information Environment. Military communicators need to convey the message that operations are in line with political decisions and serve the interest of the involved nations and their populace. In this respect, they may act as guardians of the political Narrative, ensuring that political will is reflected in words and deeds throughout operations planning and execution. Today’s military operations are also challenged with a fragmentation of communication capabilities and insufficient integration of communication with operations planning, resulting in fragmented Information Activities by multinational partners, insufficiently harmonised for achieving objectives in the Information Environment that support common strategic objectives. In the last decades the multinational community of communication practitioners struggled to overcome this challenge by introducing coordination mechanisms. For instance, the military Info Ops function and later StratCom were designed to provide an analysis, advice, coordination and oversight capacity for communication capabilities at various levels. However, relying solely on the coordination of capabilities and actions treats the symptom more than it constitutes a solution to the underlying problem. In addition, there is still a lack of consideration of the comprehensive scope of non-media activities that may help to create desired effects from a communication perspective. Coalition partners need to be able to gain enhanced situation awareness in the Information Environment; develop and issue timely, relevant and feasible communication guidance; implement communication plans in a consistent, transparent and flexible manner; and take emerging communication practices and technology into account. All this finally led to the concept of integrated communication and communication management – an approach to adequately respond to and shape developments in the Information Environment from a multinational coalition and comprehensive approach perspective. … 25 Feb
(U//FOUO) DHS-FBI-NCTC Bulletin: Terrorists Call for Attacks on Hospitals, Healthcare Facilities - (U//FOUO) Recent calls over the past year for attacks on hospitals in the West by media outlets sympathetic to the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS) highlight terrorists’ perception of hospitals as viable targets for attack. Targeting hospitals and healthcare facilities is consistent with ISIS’s tactics in Iraq and Syria, its previous calls for attacks on hospitals in the West, and the group’s calls for attacks in the West using “all available means.” While we have not seen any specific, credible threat against hospitals and healthcare facilities in the United States, we remain concerned that calls for such attacks may resonate with some violent extremists and lone offenders in the Homeland because of their likely perceived vulnerabilities and value as targets. » (U//FOUO) The pro-ISIS Nashir Media Foundation released a series of messages on 29 December 2016 encouraging lone offenders in the West to conduct attacks on hospitals, cinemas, and malls. In early June 2016, ISIS called for a “month of calamity,” encouraging followers in Europe and the United States to attack schools and hospitals in an audio message released via Twitter. Additionally, in its January 2016 issue of Rumiyah magazine, ISIS provided tactical guidance and encouraged lone offenders to conduct arson attacks on hospitals. » (U) ISIS, through its Amaq news agency in November 2016, took credit for an attack on a hospital in Quetta, Pakistan that resulted in at least 74 deaths and 100 injuries. Aid organizations and coalition governments have alleged since early 2015 that ISIS has systematically targeted hospitals, healthcare facilities, patients, and healthcare workers in Iraq and Syria, resulting in hundreds of deaths and injuries and reducing the overall capacity of healthcare delivery infrastructure. (U) Possible Indicators of the Targeting of Hospitals and Healthcare Facilities (U//FOUO) Some of these activities may be constitutionally protected, and any determination of possible illicit intent should be supported by additional facts justifying reasonable suspicion. These activities are general in nature and any one may be insignificant on its own, but when observed in combination with other suspicious behaviors—particularly advocacy of violence—they may constitute a basis for reporting. » (U//FOUO) Consumption and sharing of media glorifying violent extremist acts in attempting to mobilize others to violence; » (U//FOUO) Loitering, parking, standing, or unattended vehicles in the same area over multiple days with no reasonable explanation, particularly in concealed locations with optimal visibility of potential targets or in conjunction with multiple visits; » (U//FOUO) Photography or videography focused on security features, including cameras, security personnel, gates, and barriers; » (U//FOUO) Unusual or prolonged interest in or attempts to gain sensitive information about security measures of personnel, entry points, peak days and hours of operation, and access controls such as alarms or locks; » (U//FOUO) Individuals wearing bulky clothing or clothing inconsistent with the weather or season, or wearing official uniforms or being in unauthorized areas without official credentials; » (U//FOUO) Individuals presenting injuries consistent with the use of explosives or explosive material without a reasonable explanation; and » (U//FOUO) Unattended packages, bags, and suitcases. (U) Possible Mitigation Strategies » (U//FOUO) Limit access in restricted areas and require employees to wear clearly visible identifications at all times; » (U//FOUO) Ensure personnel receive training and briefings on active shooter preparedness, lockdown procedures, improvised explosive device (IED) and vehicle-borne IED awareness and recognition, and suspicious activity reporting procedures; and » (U//FOUO) Conduct law enforcement and security officer patrols in loading, waiting, and patient triage areas, and around drop-off and pick-up points where there are large numbers of people concentrated in restricted spaces.20 Feb
U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office: Russia’s Military Strategy Impacting 21st Century Reform and Geopolitics - Russia is a nation that has always been blessed with creative minds, whether it be literary giants like Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy, artists such as Peter Carl Faberge, composers such as Pyotr Tchaikovsky, or the military genius of an Aleksander Svechin or Aleksander Suvorov. Russia also has been blessed with the work of innovators in military equipment, such as Mikhail Kalashnikov, who created the world-renowned AK-47. Today’s military innovators are the modern-day scientists and engineers who assist in the creation of contemporary and new concept weaponry; and the military theorists who study changes in the character of war. Digital specialists understand how to develop and employ the capabilities of electronic warfare equipment, satellite technology, and fiber optic cables. While Kalashnikov’s fame is imbedded in Russia’s culture, it may be harder to find a current digital entrepreneur whose legacy will endure as long as his: there are simply too many of them, and their time in the spotlight appears to be quite short, since even now we are about to pass from the age of cyber to that of quantum. It is difficult to predict whose discoveries will be the most coveted by tomorrow’s military-industrial complex, not to mention the decision-making apparatus of the Kremlin and General Staff. Military theorists are playing an important role as well. They are studying how new weaponry has changed the correlation of forces in the world, the nature of war, and the impact of weaponry on both forecasting and the initial period of war. Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov noted in March 2015 that the military’s main tasks are to maintain the combat readiness of the Armed Forces and to ensure the Russian Federation’s defensive capability. Russia’s military heritage will assist this process tremendously. Combat readiness includes updated strategic thought, new equipment revelations, and future-war projections. Defensive capability includes not just protecting Russia’s territory, but also the security of the nation’s national interests and conduct of geopolitics. Capturing the essence of these developments is the goal of this book. In the process a few templates for understanding Russian military thought and actions are offered for further consideration and use. The work is divided into three parts. They address Russian methods of approaching strategy, future war (focusing on new weapons and organizations), and geopolitics. All three are important for foreign analysts to consider when attempting to predict the vector (s) in which Russian military capabilities and actions are heading. It is vital to remember that events that have transpired over the past 25 years have greatly affected Russia’s view of the world today and its strategic thought. Both the military and President Vladimir Putin’s colleagues in the Russian security complex are keen to overcome what they perceive as feelings of national humiliation and insecurity that they say were imposed upon them by the West. Part One of this book contains three chapters. They are focused on the personality of President Vladimir Putin, the development of Russian strategic thought over the past several decades, and contemporary military thought on the use or non-use of force, to include how Russian military officers think. Chapter One provides details on how Putin thinks and how he has been affected by specific issues. Ideology, politics, and military issues affecting his decision-making are discussed. Included in the assessment are several thoughts from some US and Russian specialists with key insights into political thought in Moscow. Chapter Two represents a detailed look at the development of Soviet and now Russian military strategy. The chapter examines strategic thought from the time of Svechin to the present, highlighting, in particular, those elements of strategic thought that continue to influence how forces will be used even today. Chapter Three offers a look at how Russia utilizes indirect, asymmetric, and nonmilitary operations, as well as how this differs from most Western interpretations of the General Staff’s use of strategy. In particular, the chapter examines how Russian military officers think and offers commentary on cross-domain deterrence thinking in Russia, which is a topic usually discussed only as a nuclear issue. Here several other potential adaptations of deterrence theory are reviewed. The chapter offers a differing view than some on the issue of hybrid war as a Russian concept and ends with a look at Russian reflexive control theory. Part Two examines Russia’s preparation for future wars. Included in the discussion are new military equipment and aerospace developments, future-war organizations, and digital expertise. Chapter Four deals with several new items of equipment that are now in the Russian inventory, including an extensive look at Russian unmanned aerial vehicles and electronic warfare equipment. Chapter Five is dedicated to the new Aerospace Force and the Strategic Rocket Forces. Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu has stated, “Their creation was prompted by a shift of the ‘center of gravity’ in combat struggle to the aerospace sphere.” The discussion includes the rationale behind Russia’s decision to integrate the Air Force, Air Defense Forces, and Space Forces into an Aerospace Force and to declare aerospace a new theater of military operations. The continued development of the Strategic Rocket Forces is covered, since it has found new impetus from the strategic guidance of President Putin. Chapter Six considers several organizational aspects of future-war thought, including equipment under development, organizational and doctrinal changes, and future-war thinking. Equipment under development includes robotics and laser research. Organizationally there is a look at Russia’s new science companies and the Advanced Research Foundation (the Russian military’s DARPA equivalent), followed by a summary of several articles discussing the future contours of conflict and the changing character or war. Chapter Seven discusses Russia’s cyber thinking and organizational development. This includes a review of a Russian-authored cyber book, recent cyber developments in Russia, treaties that Russia has made with other nations, and several policy efforts directed by the Kremlin and the Federal Security Service (FSB) to monitor cyber compliance. A section on military thinking on cyber issues is included, along with Russian efforts to control the international cyber environment. China is a main partner of Russia in this regard. Part Three is an examination of the application of military power and strategy to Putin’s geopolitical goals, specifically as applied to military operations in the Arctic and Ukraine. Chapter Eight investigates the ongoing militarization of the Arctic. The two goals of the military in the region appear to be to establish an overarching monitoring capability and a quick response, powerful military deterrent. Russia has continued to improve its military presence and infrastructure in the region. The buildup includes two light brigades, two airborne divisions that are on-call, new Borei- and Yasen-class nuclear missile submarines, rebuilt airfields, and new aerospace defense units. Meanwhile, Russian administration officials are working feverishly with the United Nations and other organizations to establish legal claims to the Arctic. Putin has made the Arctic a region of his personal interest, noting that the Arctic has been under “our sovereignty for several years. This is how this will be in the future.” This does not bode well for the future of the Arctic’s peaceful development. Chapter Nine discusses how and why Russia became engaged in the conflict in Ukraine, to include the interventions into both Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Russia’s strategy and use of new concepts (new reality, self-determination, use of surrogates, nonmilitary issues, indirect and asymmetric thinking, etc.) are examined. The end of the chapter focuses on Russian actions in Crimea, as it appears Russia is doing one of two things there with its massive military buildup: either it is ensuring that Crimea can never be given back to Ukraine due to all of the military equipment it now has stationed there; or it is preparing a bridgehead from which it can launch a pincer operation against Mariupol or advance quickly on Odessa or Transdniester. Chapter Ten provides conclusions drawn from this study. … 12 Feb
(U//FOUO) DHS-FBI Intelligence Assessment: Baseline Comparison of US and Foreign Anarchist Extremist Movements - (U//FOUO) This joint DHS and FBI Assessment examines the possible reasons why anarchist extremist attacks in certain countries abroad and in the United States differ in the frequency of incidents and degree of lethality employed in order to determine ways US anarchist extremists actions might become more lethal in the future. This Assessment is intended to establish a baseline comparison of the US and foreign anarchist extremist movements and create new lines of research; follow-on assessments will update the findings identified in the paper, to include the breadth of data after the end of the reporting period (as warranted by new information), and identify new areas for DHS and FBI collaboration on the topic. This Assessment is also produced in anticipation of a heightened threat of anarchist extremist violence in 2016 related to the upcoming Democratic and Republican National Conventions—events historically associated with violence from the movement. By comparing violence in the United States with Greece, Italy, and Mexico—countries historically exhibiting anarchist extremist violence targeting persons—from January 2010–July 2014, we identified factors that could explain differences in targeting and tactics by selected foreign anarchist extremists and United States. The study examines 110 anarchist extremist incidents occurring within the United States and these selected foreign countries. Only those incidents determined to be violent (i.e., involving threats of bodily harm) were included in the dataset. Our ability to analyze relevant details of attacks depended heavily on the quality of sourcing for these incidents—which almost solely derived from the media. Additionally, although US anarchist extremist attacks noted in this study occurred in multiple states, the majority of incidents occurred in the Pacific Northwest region. (U//FOUO) This Assessment was produced to assist federal, state, local, and tribal government agencies and private sector infrastructure and security officers in the deterrence, prevention, preemption of, or response to terrorist attacks against the United States conducted by anarchist extremists. Some of the activities described in the study may involve activities that are, by themselves, lawful or constitutionally protected, and the study’s findings should be considered within the existing framework of laws, regulations, and operating procedures that govern a particular enforcement entity. Additionally, conduct deemed potentially suspicious and indicative of terrorist activity should be taken in conjunction with other indicators and possible preoperational activity. (U) Key Judgments (U//FOUO) Our examination of anarchist extremist violence in the United States and in Greece, Italy, and Mexico revealed several prominent features that may inform strategies to counter domestic terrorism: » (U//FOUO) DHS and FBI assess the primary factor explaining the difference in targets between foreign and US anarchist extremists is foreign anarchist extremists’ focus on specific economic and governance issues relative to their geographic area, while US anarchist extremists tend to focus on symbols of capitalism. We assess the likely primary factor explaining foreign anarchist extremists’ greater willingness to use more violent tactics than their US counterparts is that these foreign anarchist extremist movements are often more organized—allowing for more complex attacks—and have a well-established tradition of lethal violence not currently seen in the United States. » (U//FOUO) The vast majority of US anarchist extremist attacks targeted property likely due to the location’s accessibility and as a symbol of capitalism and globalization. Most foreign anarchist extremist attacks targeted persons likely because of the cohesiveness of the movement and greater emphasis on issues that can be blamed on local, individual targets. US anarchist extremists targeted the banking/finance sector most often, as these perceived soft targets of capitalism are possible to attack with tactics that are non-lethal yet cause significant economic damage and pose significant public safety risks. Foreign anarchist extremists most often targeted government entities, likely due to the emphasis placed on local domestic issues by foreign anarchist extremists and their capabilities to commit attacks against hardened targets. » (U//FOUO) Arson was the most common violent tactic used by US anarchist extremists—approximately 70 percent (19 of 27) of attacks—while foreign anarchist extremists used arson in only a third of their attacks. US anarchist extremists likely use this tactic based on their intention to cause economic and property damage, which can be accomplished by arson with relatively limited resources and specialized skills. Unlike US anarchist extremists, foreign anarchist extremists frequently used explosives, likely due to their capability to develop more advanced explosive devices as a result of their more organized structure, having a history of using such tactics, and because their targets are hardened. … (U) Social Justice (U//FOUO) Social justice issues––specifically opposition to gentrification and opposition to perceived racism and fascism––were the second most common driver of violence for US anarchist extremists, as they accounted for 26 percent (7 of 27) of attacks. Social justice issues accounted for 12 percent of violent foreign anarchist extremist attacks, although these incidents occurred only in Greece and were all against perceived fascism. Although social justice issues can motivate anarchist extremists to violence, they are often a driver for violence if a social justice issue occurs within a location that also has an anarchist extremist presence. (U//FOUO) Social justice issues often result in legal protest activities, and historically, in both the United States and abroad, anarchist extremists have been known to co-opt legal protests as a cover to commit violence against their targets. However, a review of data in this study indicated in the seven social-justice motivated violent incidents committed by US anarchist extremists, only one of those incidents exploited otherwise legal protest activity. The reasons for this finding are currently a reporting gap. … (U//FOUO) Signposts of Change—How US Anarchist Extremists Could Become More Lethal (U//FOUO) We assess the following future occurrences could potentially lead US anarchist extremists to adopt more violent tactics: » (U//FOUO) Fascist, nationalist, racist, or anti-immigrant parties obtain greater prominence or local political power in the United States, leading to anti-racist violent backlash from anarchist extremists. » (U//FOUO) A charismatic leader emerges among US anarchist extremists advocating criminal activity and unifies the movement, possibly increasing motivation to commit violence. » (U//FOUO) Incendiary or explosive devices constructed by anarchist extremist(s) become more sophisticated. » (U//FOUO) Anarchist extremist(s) retaliate violently to a violent act by a white supremacist extremist or group. » (U//FOUO) Anarchist extremist(s) retaliate to a perceived act of violence or lethal action by law enforcement during routine duties, creating a martyr for the movement. » (U//FOUO) Anarchist extremist(s) with financial means travel abroad where they learn and acquire more violent tactics and return to teach others and/or conduct actions on their own. » (U//FOUO) Anarchist extremists acquire or arm themselves with legal and/or illegal weapons. » (U//FOUO) Multinational corporation or bank becomes involved in public scandal, leading to focused targeting campaign by US anarchist extremists against the entity. » (U//FOUO) A successful US or foreign anarchist extremist event disruption such as at the 1999 Seattle WTO riots motivates copycat and/or follow-on actions domestically. » (U//FOUO) A foreign intelligence service attempts to foment US unrest by facilitating anarchist extremist violence domestically. … 4 Feb
(U//FOUO) U.S. Army FM 2-22.2 Counterintelligence - This manual provides doctrinal guidance, techniques, and procedures for the employment of counterintelligence (CI) special agents in the Army. It outlines— • CI investigations and operations. • The CI special agent’s role within the intelligence warfighting function. • The importance of aggressively countering foreign intelligence and security services (FISS) and international terrorist organizations (ITO). • The roles and responsibilities of those providing command, control, and technical support to CI investigations and operations. • The need for effective dissemination of CI reports and products and the importance of cross-cueing other intelligence disciplines. • The significance of cultural awareness as a consideration to counter the foreign intelligence threat. This manual expands upon the information in FM 2-0 and supersedes FM 34-60. It is consistent with doctrine in FM 3-0, FM 5-0, FM 100-15, and JP 2-0. When published, FM 2-22.2 will provide further information on CI activities when Army forces are employed in tactical operations. … ARMY COUNTERINTELLIGENCE 1-1. CI focuses on negating, mitigating, or degrading the foreign intelligence and security services (FISS) and international terrorist organizations (ITO) collection threat that targets Army interests through the conduct of investigations, operations, collection, analysis, production, and technical services and support. 1-2. CI analyzes the threats posed by FISS and the intelligence activities of nonstate actors such as organized crime, terrorist groups, and drug traffickers. CI analysis incorporates all-source information and the results of CI investigations and operations to support a multidiscipline analysis of the force protection threat. COUNTERINTELLIGENCE SPECIAL AGENT 1-3. The CI special agent has the distinct mission of detecting, identifying, countering, and neutralizing FISS and ITO threats directed towards the Army through the execution of all CI functions. CI special agents should not be confused with human intelligence (HUMINT) collectors, military occupational specialty (MOS) 35M, and warrant officer (WO) area of concentration (AOC) 351M. They are specifically trained and certified for, tasked with, and engage in the collection of information from individuals (HUMINT sources) for the purpose of answering HUMINT-specific requirements. Although CI and HUMINT personnel may use similar methods, their missions are separate and distinct. Commanders should not use them interchangeably. Using CI personnel for HUMINT missions degrades the Army’s ability to protect its forces, information, and critical technology that provides the Army operational and technological superiority over existing and future adversaries. … COUNTERINTELLIGENCE MISSION 1-17. The mission of Army CI is to conduct aggressive, comprehensive, and coordinated operations, investigations, collection, analysis and production, and technical services. This CI mission is conducted worldwide to detect, identify, assess, counter, exploit, or neutralize the FISS and ITO collection threat to the Army and DOD to protect the lives, property, or security of Army forces. Army CI has four primary mission areas: • Counterespionage (CE). • Support to protection. • Support to research and technology protection (RTP). • Cyber CI. COUNTERESPIONAGE 1-18. CE detects, identifies, counters, exploits, or neutralizes the FISS and ITO collection threat targeting Army and DOD equities or U.S. interests. CE programs use both investigations and collection operations to conduct long-term operations to undermine, mitigate, or negate the ability of FISS and ITO to collect effectively on Army equities. CE programs also affect the adversarial visualization and decisionmaking concerning the plans, intentions, and capabilities of U.S. policy, goals, and objectives. The goal of CE is to— • Limit the adversary’s knowledge of U.S. forces, plans, intentions, and capabilities through information denial. • Limit the adversary’s ability to target effectively U.S. forces by disrupting their collection capability. COUNTERINTELLIGENCE SUPPORT TO PROTECTION 1-19. CI support to protection ensures the survivability and mission accomplishment of Army and DOD forces. 1-20. CI’s objective in supporting protection is to— • Limit the compromise and exploitation of personnel, facilities, operations, command and control (C2), and operational execution of U.S. forces. • Negate, mitigate, or degrade adversarial planning and targeting of U.S. forces for exploitation or attack. • Support the war on terrorism. SUPPORT TO RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY PROTECTION 1-21. Support to RTP is focused on preventing the illegal diversion or loss of critical technology essential to the strategic advantage of the U.S. 1-22. CI’s objective in supporting RTP is to— • Protect critical technology information from adversarial countermeasures development. • Ensure U.S. technological overmatch against existing and future adversaries. CYBER COUNTERINTELLIGENCE 1-23. Cyber CI protects information networks and provides an offensive exploitation capability against adversarial networks to ensure information superiority of U.S. forces. 1-24. CI’s objective in conducting cyber CI activities is to— • Maintain U.S. forces information dominance and superiority over existing and future adversaries. • Protect critical information networks from adversarial attack or exploitation. • Undermine adversarial information operations, systems, and networks. … COUNTERINTELLIGENCE INVESTIGATION OBJECTIVES 2-4. CI investigations are essential to counter threat collection efforts targeting Army equities. CI places emphasis on investigative activity to support force and technology protection, homeland defense, information assurance, and security programs. CI investigations focus on resolving allegations of known or suspected acts that may constitute national security crimes under U.S. law or the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). 2-5. The initial objective of CI investigations is to identify people, organizations, and other entities engaging in national security crimes and to determine the full nature and extent of damage to national security. The intent is to develop information of sufficient value to permit its use in the appropriate civil or military court. However, investigations should not be limited to the production of evidence. Investigative reports should include all relevant information as it pertains to the person or incident involved in the investigation. CI investigations are conducted to— • Identify people, organizations, and other entities engaging in national security crimes that impact Army equities. • Determine the full nature of national security crimes within the authority and jurisdiction of Army CI. • Prove or disprove allegations or indications that person or persons are engaged in national security crimes or incidents of CI interest. • Prevent the loss, control, or compromise of sensitive or classified defense information and technology. • Protect the security of Army personnel, information, operations, installations, and technology. • Acquire and preserve evidence used to support exploitation, prosecution, or any other legal proceedings or punitive measures resulting from CI investigations. • Detect and identify terrorist activities that may present a threat to Army, DOD, and national security. 2-6. CI investigations must conform to applicable U.S. laws and DOD and DA regulations. CI special agents must report information accurately and completely. They maintain files and records to allow transfer of an investigation without loss of control or efficiency. Coordination with other CI or law enforcement organizations ensures that investigations are conducted as rapidly as possible. It also reduces duplication and assists in resolving conflicts when jurisdictional lines are unclear or overlap. CI investigative activity must be discreet, ensuring the rights and privacy of individuals involved, as well as the preservation of all investigative prerogatives. This is required to protect the rights of individuals and to preserve the security of investigative techniques. 2-7. CI special agents need to have a thorough understanding of all investigative techniques and planning, approval processes, and legal requirements before requesting and initiating any type of CI investigative activity. A lack of understanding in any one of these areas may potentially invalidate any investigation from a prosecutorial standard and may jeopardize the ability to exploit a threat to the United States. … PRIMARY AUTHORITY 2-12. Army CI has investigative primacy for the national security crimes and incidents of CI interest listed below when they are committed by persons identified as subjects. If either the subject, potential subject, incident, or crime falls outside Army CI jurisdiction, Army CI may still retain joint investigative responsibilities. • Sedition. • Aiding the enemy by providing intelligence to the enemy. • Spying. • Espionage. • Subversion. • Treason. • Terrorism activities or materiel support to a known or suspected terrorist organization or person (DCS G-2, G-2 Memorandum (S//NF), 24 August 2005). • Incidents of CI interest. … INCIDENTS OF COUNTERINTELLIGENCE INTEREST 2-17. The following is not an all-inclusive list of incidents of CI interest: • The activities of ITO or material support to an ITO or person. Terrorist organizations are specified in DCS, G-2 Memorandum (S//NF), dated 13 February 2007, Operational Planning List (OPL) 2005 (U), as revised. • Unreported contact with foreign government personnel, persons or groups involved in foreign terrorism or intelligence, or unauthorized requests for classified or sensitive unclassified information. • Unauthorized disclosure of classified information or material. Not all incidents in this category may meet the threshold for a CI investigation. However, those that do will often include other indicators of espionage that are identified associated with the incident or when there are acts which are known methods of operations of FISS and ITO entities. Investigations are conducted to ascertain those entities involvement. CI special agents may also act to secure classified material and to determine if the actions of the subject were an act of omission or commission. The command requirements to report compromises or conduct inquiries as specified in AR 380-5, chapter VI, may also apply to these incidents. • Matters developed as a result of counterintelligence scope polygraph (CSP) examination as specified in AR 381-20. • Military personnel or DAC employees who perform unofficial travel to those countries designated in the operational planning list, who have unauthorized contact with official representatives of foreign countries, or who contact or visit foreign diplomatic facilities without authorization. • Attempts by authorized users of information systems to gain unauthorized access. • Known, suspected or attempted intrusions into classified or unclassified information systems when there is reasonable suspicion of foreign involvement or it has not been ruled out. • Unauthorized removal of classified material or possession of classified material in unauthorized locations. • Special category absentees (SCAs), which include those absent without leave (AWOL), deserters defectors, and military absentees who have had access to TS, SCI, SAP information, or TS cryptographic access or an assignment to a special mission unit within the year preceding the absence. CI special agents will conduct investigations of the circumstances surrounding the absences of SCA personnel using the guidelines presented in this manual. • Army military, civilian, or overseas contractor personnel declared AWOL and deserters who had access within the preceding year to TS, SCI, critical military technology as defined in AR 381-20, chapter 7, SAPs; personnel who were assigned to a special mission unit; personnel in the DA Cryptographic Access Program (DACAP); and personnel with access to critical nuclear weapons design technology. • Army military, civilian, or overseas contractor personnel who go absent without authority, AWOL, or deserters who do not have assignments or access; however, there are indications of FISS and ITO contact or involvement in their absence. • DA military and civilian personnel who defect and those persons who are absent without authorization and travel to or through a foreign country other than the one in which they were stationed or assigned. • DA military and civilian personnel detained or captured by a government, group, or adversary with interests inimical to those of the United States. Such personnel will be debriefed upon return to U.S. control. • Attempted or actual suicide or suspicious death of a DA member if they have an intelligence background, were assigned to an SMU, or had access to classified information within the year preceding the incident, or where there are indications of FISS and ITO involvement. • Suspected or actual unauthorized acquisition or illegal diversion of military critical technology, research and development information, or information concerning an Army acquisition program. If required, Army CI will ensure all appropriate military and civilian intelligence and LEAs are notified. Army CI will also ensure Army equities are articulated and either monitor the status of the agency with primary jurisdiction or coordinate for joint investigative authority. • Impersonation of intelligence personnel or unlawful possession or use of Army intelligence identification, such as badge and credentials. • Communications security (COMSEC) insecurities, except those which are administrative in nature. (See AR 380-40, chapter 7.) • Suspected electronic intrusions or eavesdropping devices in secure areas which could be used for technical surveillance. DA personnel discovering such a device will not disturb it or discuss the discovery in the area where the device is located. • Willful compromise of clandestine intelligence personnel and CI activities. … DECEPTION IDENTIFICATION AND DETECTION (BIOMETRICS) 6-38. Biometrics as a characteristic is a measurable biological and behavioral characteristic that can be used for automated recognition. Biometrics as a process is an automated method of recognizing a person based on a physiological or behavioral characteristic. Among the features measured are face, fingerprints, hand geometry, handwriting, iris, retinal, vein, and voice. Biometric technologies are becoming the foundation of an extensive array of highly secure identification and personal verification solutions. As the level of security breaches and transaction fraud increases, the need for highly secure identification and personal verification technologies is becoming apparent. 6-39. Identification specific mission areas that CI detection and identification processes and technologies support include, but are not limited to, the following: • Countering foreign intelligence through the detection, identification, and neutralization of espionage activities. • Support to military readiness and conduct of military operations through protection, including— • Surveillance of air, land, or sea areas adjacent to deployed U.S. forces, sufficient to provide maximum warning of impending attack. • Indication of hostile intelligence penetration or attempts at penetration. • Support to law enforcement efforts to suppress CT. • Identification and affiliation of terrorist groups. • Assessment of group capabilities, including strengths and weaknesses. • Locations of terrorist training camps or bases of operations. • Weapons and technologies associated with identified terrorist elements. … COMPUTER FORENSICS 6-43. Computer forensics is conducted to— • Discover and recover evidence related to espionage, terrorism, or subversion against the Army. • Develop CI investigative leads. • Collect and report intelligence. • Support exploitation efforts. 6-44. Processing and examining digital media evidence is a tedious and time-consuming process which requires specialized training and equipment. Failure to properly process and examine digital media evidence could corrupt the evidence or yield the evidence inadmissible during future legal proceedings. Due to the complexities of cyber investigations, computer forensics support to CI investigations will only be conducted by specially trained and qualified personnel assigned to cyber CI elements in each theater. 6-45. Requests for computer forensic support will be made through the appropriate ATCICA. Requests for assistance will include detailed descriptions of the digital media evidence to be seized and examined and will be germane to the approved CI investigative objectives. 6-46. Every CI special agent is responsible for identifying the need for computer forensics support to their investigations. Computer forensics examinations involve a methodical process which, depending on the size and complexity of the digital media evidence, may take a significant amount of time to complete. Computer forensic operations cannot be rushed and therefore investigative time lines may need to be adjusted to accommodate the time required to complete the support. If a CI special agent is in doubt about the capabilities of, or when to leverage, cyber CI units, the agent should contact his ATCICA for guidance. … COUNTERINTELLIGENCE NETWORK INTRUSION INVESTIGATIONS 7-10. CI network intrusion investigations involve collecting, processing, and analyzing evidence related to adversarial penetrations of Army information systems. These specialized CI investigations are generally conducted independently of other traditional CI investigations. However, given the jurisdictional issues which involve the Internet, network intrusion investigations may require coordination with other U.S. and foreign government intelligence and law enforcement entities. 7-11. Threats to Army information systems can range from exploitation of vulnerabilities in information systems which allow adversaries to penetrate Army computers and collect critical information, to trusted insiders who either willingly or unwittingly enable adversarial forces to exploit these critical infrastructure resources. Any adversary with the motive, means, opportunity, and intent to do harm poses a potential threat. Threats to Army information resources may include disruption, denial degradation, ex-filtration, destruction, corruption, exploitation, or unauthorized access to computer networks and information systems and data. Cyber CI units are uniquely qualified to investigate and counter these threats. 7-12. All CI network intrusion investigations will be coordinated, to the extent necessary, with the USACIDC, specifically the Cyber Criminal Investigations Unit (CCIU). This coordination is necessary to ensure that investigative activities are not duplicated and that each organization does not impede or disrupt each other’s investigative or prosecutorial options. 7-13. A CI network intrusion investigation may be initiated under, but not necessarily be limited to, the following circumstances: • Known, suspected, or attempted intrusions into classified or unclassified information systems by unauthorized persons. • Incidents which involve intrusions into systems containing or processing data on critical military technologies, export controlled technology, or other weapons systems related RDT&E data. • Intrusions which replicate methods associated with foreign intelligence or adversary collection or which involve targeting that parallels known foreign intelligence or adversary collection requirements. 7-14. The purpose for conducting a CI network intrusion investigation will be to— • Fully identify the FISS and ITO entity involved. • Determine the FISS and ITO objectives. • Determine the FISS and ITO tools, techniques, and procedures used. • Assist the appropriate authorities with determining the extent of damage to Army and Department of Defense equities. … 7-32. The trusted insider is the most serious threat to DOD information systems security. The following list of indicators that could be associated with an insider threat should be addressed during threat briefings to CI customers: • Unauthorized attempts to elevate privileges. • Unauthorized sniffers. • Suspicious downloads of sensitive data. • Unauthorized modems. • Unexplained storage of encrypted data. • Anomalous work hours and/or network activity. • Unexplained modification of network security-related operating system settings. • Unexplained modification of network security devices such as routers and firewalls. • Malicious code that attempts to establish communication with systems other than the one which the code resides. • Unexplained external physical network or computer connection. • Unexplained modifications to network hardware. • Unexplained file transfer protocol (FTP) servers on the inside of the security perimeter. • Unexplained hardware or software found on internal networks. • Network interface cards that are set in a “promiscuous” or “sniffer” mode. • Unexpected open maintenance ports on network components. • Any unusual activity associated with network-enabled peripheral devices, such as printers and copiers.29 Jan
U.S. Army War College Strategic Cyberspace Operations Guide - 1. This publication provides a guide for U.S. Army War College students to understand design, planning, and execution of cyberspace operations at combatant commands (CCMDs), joint task forces (JTFs), and joint functional component commands. It combines existing U.S. Government Unclassified and “Releasable to the Public” documents into a single guide. … 1. This guide follows the operational design methodology and the joint operation planning process (JOPP) and applies these principles to the cyberspace domain. Cyberspace is a global domain within the information environment consisting of the interdependent networks of information technology infrastructures and resident data, including the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers. Cyberspace operations (CO) are the employment of cyberspace capabilities where the primary purpose is to achieve objectives in or through cyberspace. Commanders must develop the capability to direct operations in the cyber domain since strategic mission success increasingly depends on freedom of maneuver in cyberspace (see Figure 1-1). 2. The President and the Secretary of Defense (SecDef) provide strategic guidance to the joint force. This guidance is the common thread that integrates and synchronizes the planning activities and operations. It provides purpose and focus to the planning for employment of military force. 3. The commander and staff develop plans and orders through the application of the operational design methodology and by using JOPP. Operational design results in the commander’s operational approach, which broadly describes the actions the joint force needs to take to reach the end state. The commander and staff translate the broad operational approach into detailed plans and orders using JOPP.5 Planning continues during execution, with an initial emphasis on refining the existing plan and producing the operations order and refining the force flow utilizing employed assigned and allocated forces. 4. Commanders integrate cyberspace capabilities at all levels and in all military operations. Plans should address how to effectively integrate cyberspace capabilities, counter an adversary’s use of cyberspace, secure mission critical networks, operate in a degraded environment, efficiently use limited cyberspace assets, and consolidate operational requirements for cyberspace capabilities. While it is possible that some military objectives can be achieved by CO alone, CO capabilities should be integrated into the joint force commander’s plan and synchronized with other operations during execution. … 29 Jan
Department of State International Security Advisory Board Report on Gray Zone Conflict - The study addresses the challenges facing the United States from the increasing use by rivals and adversaries – state and non-state alike – of what have come to be called “Gray Zone” techniques. The term Gray Zone (“GZ”) denotes the use of techniques to achieve a nation’s goals and frustrate those of its rivals by employing instruments of power – often asymmetric and ambiguous in character – that are not direct use of acknowledged regular military forces. The report is organized according to the specific subjects the ISAB was directed to consider by the Terms of Reference (TOR) – Characteristics of GZ Operations, Policy Options and Concepts, and Deterrence/Dissuasion. I. Characteristics of GZ Conflict Perhaps the most widely used definition of Gray Zone conflict is that established by the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM): “gray zone challenges are defined as competitive interaction among and within state and non-state actors that fall between the traditional war and peace duality. They are characterized by ambiguity about the nature of the conflict, opacity of the parties involved, or uncertainty about the relevant policy and legal frameworks.” Read too broadly, this definition would embrace practically all international interaction, most of which is directed in some degree at affecting the actions or view of other countries. However, it is possible to describe the problem without seeking a universal and precise definition. The term “Gray Zone” may be new; the phenomenon is not. Although many of the techniques used now are based on modern technology, notably cyber and networked communication, many are as old as history. What are now being called GZ methods have been conducted in the past under such names as “political warfare,” “covert operations,” “irregular or guerrilla warfare,” “active measures,” and the like. In some sense, the Cold War was one protracted GZ campaign on both sides on a global scale. The Trojan Horse exploited many of the instruments of a GZ operation – creating confusion and division in enemy opinion, extending ostensible inducements, implanting hidden military forces, deception, and clandestine infiltration of enemy territory. The central characteristic of GZ operations is that they involve the use of instruments beyond normal international interactions yet short of overt military force. They occupy a space between normal diplomacy and commercial competition and open military conflict, and while often employing diplomacy and commercial actions, GZ attacks go beyond the forms of political and social action and military operations with which liberal democracies are familiar, to make deliberate use of instruments of violence, terrorism, and dissembling. Moreover, they often involve asymmetry in magnitude of national interests or capabilities between the adversaries. GZ techniques include: Cyber, information operations, efforts to undermine public/allied/local/ regional resistance, and information/propaganda in support of other hybrid instruments; Covert operations under state control, espionage, infiltration, and subversion; Special Operations Forces (SOF) and other state-controlled armed units, and unacknowledged military personnel; Support – logistical, political, and financial – for insurgent and terrorist movements; Enlistment of non-governmental actors, including organized criminal groups, terrorists, and extremist political, religious, and ethnic or sectarian organizations; Assistance to irregular military and paramilitary forces; Economic pressures that go beyond normal economic competition; Manipulation and discrediting of democratic institutions, including electoral system and the judiciary; Calculated ambiguity, use of /covert/unacknowledged operations, and deception and denial; and Explicit or implicit threat use, or threats of use of armed force, terrorism, and abuse of civilian populations and of escalation. Currently, the United States can reasonably be said to face GZ campaigns in a range of theaters: Russia has mounted a variety of GZ operations, not only in Ukraine where it actually employed thinly disguised military force and support for local militias as well as other instruments, but also targeting the Baltics, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the United States, and a range of European countries with a massive campaign (including expansive use of cyber) to spread its narratives, undermine confidence in legal, economic, and electoral systems, and manipulate political action, exemplified by the FSB/GRU cyber operation that hacked into networks used by U.S. political figures and organizations in what is assessed by the U.S. intelligence community and the FBI as an effort intended to influence the recent U.S. presidential election. China is aggressively advancing its disputed maritime claims in the South and East China Seas, by both incremental establishment of “facts on the ground,” by construction and occupation of disputed features, providing material incentives to accommodate to Chinese desires, and undermining confidence in U.S. credibility by an extensive media effort. Iran in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, and from Daesh and other radical Islamist groups in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere using terror, exploiting sectarian and ethnic divisions, and otherwise seeking to disrupt the established order in the region. North Korea has over the years, repeatedly used ostensibly deniable violence, political infiltration, intimidation by threats of massive escalation, and hostage-taking to divide the Republic of Korea and the United States and protect its failing system. 28 Jan
(U//FOUO) DHS Intelligence Note: Germany Christmas Market Attack Underscores Threat to Mass Gatherings and Open-Access Venues - (U) A 25-ton commercial truck transporting steel beams from Poland to Germany plowed into crowds at a Christmas market in Berlin at about 2000 local time on 19 December, killing at least 12 people and injuring 48 others, several critically, according to media reporting citing public security officials involved in the investigation. The truck was reportedly traveling at approximately 40 miles per hour when it rammed the Christmas market stands. Police estimate the vehicle traveled 80 yards into the Christmas market before coming to a halt. (U) German authorities are calling the attack a terrorist incident, with the attacker still at large. German authorities are warning that it is unclear if the attacker was a lone offender, acted as part of a cell, or if he received any sort of direction by a FTO, and expressed concern that additional attacks are possible. An individual who was initially detained on 19 December was released on 20 December, and is no longer considered a suspect, according to German police. The truck may have been stolen or hijacked with the original driver overpowered or murdered. The original driver, found dead in the truck cab, appears to have died from stabbing and shooting wounds, according to media reporting citing law enforcement officials. The truck tracking location system indicated repeated engine stalls in the time leading up to the attack, leading the owner of the vehicle to speculate this was unlikely if a veteran driver was operating the truck, unless there was some sort of mechanical trouble. In response to the incident, German authorities, as part of their heightened security posture, will place concrete barriers around access points at Christmas markets across Germany. … (U//FOUO) Vehicle Ramming Featured in Recent Terrorist Messaging (U//FOUO) I&A assesses that the 19 December likely terrorist attack at one of the largest Christmas markets in Berlin highlights terrorists’ continued use of simple tactics and is consistent with recent calls by the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) for attacks in the West using “all available means.” In an early December audio statement, ISIL spokesman Abu Hassan al-Muhajir called for attacks in “their homes, markets, street gatherings and anywhere they do not think of.” Vehicle ramming has been featured in recent violent extremist publications and messaging—including in ISIL’s al Rumiyah magazine and al-Qaʻida in the Arabian Peninsula’s (AQAP) Inspire magazine—especially since the mid-July vehicle ramming attack in Nice, France. The early-November third issue of Rumiyah highlighted applicable targets for vehicle ramming attacks such as “large outdoor conventions and celebrations, pedestrian-congested streets, outdoor markets, festivals, parades, and political rallies.” The most recent Homeland attack featuring this tactic occurred at Ohio State University in Columbus on 28 November, where Abdul Razak Ali Artan ran over pedestrians and then continued the attack with an edged weapon after the vehicle came to a stop. (U//FOUO) On 20 December, ISIL’s A’maq News Agency called the attacker “an Islamic State soldier” consistent with previous instances of quickly posting claims of credit for operations. While the attack bears the hallmarks of ISIL’s tactics and targets, we have not been able to determine a definitive link to the group at this time. … (U//FOUO) I&A has no information indicating a specific or credible threat against individuals, locations or events in the Homeland, but several recent plots and attacks in the United States and overseas involving shopping malls, mass transit, and mass gatherings, including sporting events, have shown that homegrown violent extremists (HVEs) and terrorist groups are interested in attacking these types of targets. I&A assesses that commercial facilities—such as festivals, concerts, outdoor events, and other mass gatherings—remain a potential target for terrorists or HVEs, as they often pursue simple, achievable attacks with an emphasis on economic impact and mass casualties. The most likely tactics in a hypothetical terrorist attack against such events likely would involve edged weapons, small arms, vehicular assaults, and possibly improvised explosive devices. The 19 December events underscore the difficulties the private sector and law enforcement face in securing venues that are pedestrian-friendly, particularly in light of the large number of such areas.16 Jan
National Intelligence Council Global Trends Assessment: Paradox of Progress - We are living a paradox: The achievements of the industrial and information ages are shaping a world to come that is both more dangerous and richer with opportunity than ever before. Whether promise or peril prevails will turn on the choices of humankind. The progress of the past decades is historic—connecting people, empowering individuals, groups, and states, and lifting a billion people out of poverty in the process. But this same progress also spawned shocks like the Arab Spring, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, and the global rise of populist, anti-establishment politics. These shocks reveal how fragile the achievements have been, underscoring deep shifts in the global landscape that portend a dark and difficult near future. The next five years will see rising tensions within and between countries. Global growth will slow, just as increasingly complex global challenges impend. An ever-widening range of states, organizations, and empowered individuals will shape geopolitics. For better and worse, the emerging global landscape is drawing to a close an era of American dominance following the Cold War. So, too, perhaps is the rules-based international order that emerged after World War II. It will be much harder to cooperate internationally and govern in ways publics expect. Veto players will threaten to block collaboration at every turn, while information “echo chambers” will reinforce countless competing realities, undermining shared understandings of world events. Underlying this crisis in cooperation will be local, national, and international differences about the proper role of government across an array of issues ranging from the economy to the environment, religion, security, and the rights of individuals. Debates over moral boundaries—to whom is owed what—will become more pronounced, while divergence in values and interests among states will threaten international security. It will be tempting to impose order on this apparent chaos, but that ultimately would be too costly in the short run and would fail in the long. Dominating empowered, proliferating actors in multiple domains would require unacceptable resources in an era of slow growth, fiscal limits, and debt burdens. Doing so domestically would be the end of democracy, resulting in authoritarianism or instability or both. Although material strength will remain essential to geopolitical and state power, the most powerful actors of the future will draw on networks, relationships, and information to compete and cooperate. This is the lesson of great power politics in the 1900s, even if those powers had to learn and relearn it. The US and Soviet proxy wars, especially in Vietnam and Afghanistan, were a harbinger of the post-Cold War conflicts and today’s fights in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia in which less powerful adversaries deny victory through asymmetric strategies, ideology, and societal tensions. The threat from terrorism will expand in the coming decades as the growing prominence of small groups and individuals use new technologies, ideas, and relationships to their advantage. Meanwhile, states remain highly relevant. China and Russia will be emboldened, while regional aggressors and nonstate actors will see openings to pursue their interests. Uncertainty about the United States, an inward-looking West, and erosion of norms for conflict prevention and human rights will encourage China and Russia to check US influence. In doing so, their “gray zone” aggression and diverse forms of disruption will stay below the threshold of hot war but bring profound risks of miscalculation. Overconfidence that material strength can manage escalation will increase the risks of interstate conflict to levels not seen since the Cold War. Even if hot war is avoided, the current pattern of “international cooperation where we can get it”—such as on climate change—masks significant differences in values and interests among states and does little to curb assertions of dominance within regions. These trends are leading to a spheres of influence world. … Competing Views on Instability China and Russia portray global disorder as resulting from a Western plot to push what they see as self-serving American concepts and values of freedom to every corner of the planet. Western governments see instability as an underlying condition worsened by the end of the Cold War and incomplete political and economic development. Concerns over weak and fragile states rose more than a generation ago because of beliefs about the externalities they produce—whether disease, refugees, or terrorists in some instances. The growing interconnectedness of the planet, however, makes isolation from the global periphery an illusion, and the rise of human rights norms makes state violence against a governed population an unacceptable option. One consequence of post-Cold War disengagement by the United States and the then-USSR, was a loss of external support for strongmen politics, militaries, and security forces who are no longer able to bargain for patronage. Also working against coercive governments are increased demands for responsive and participatory governance by citizens no longer poor due to the unprecedented scale and speed of economic development in the nonindustrial world. Where political and economic development occurred roughly in tandem or quick succession, modernization and individual empowerment have reinforced political stability. Where economic development outpaced or occurred without political changes—such as in much of the Arab world and the rest of Africa and South Asia—instability ensued. China has been a notable exception. The provision of public goods there so far has bolstered political order but a campaign against corruption is now generating increasing uncertainty and popular protests have grown during the past 15 years. Russia is the other major exception—economic growth—largely the result of high energy and commodity prices—helped solve the disorder of the Yeltsin years. US experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown that coercion and infusions of money cannot overcome state weakness. Rather, building a stable political order requires inclusiveness, cooperation among elites, and a state administration that can both control the military and provide public services. This has proved more difficult than expected to provide. … 15 Jan
DoD Cybersecurity Discipline Implementation Plan February 2016 - Inspections and incidents across the Department of Defense (DoD) reveal a need to reinforce basic cybersecurity requirements identified in policies, directives, and orders. In agreement with the Secretary of Defense, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the DoD Chief Information Officer (CIO) identified key tasks needed to ensure those requirements are achieved. The DoD Cybersecurity Campaign reinforces the need to ensure Commanders and Supervisors at all levels, including the operational level, are accountable for key tasks, including those identified in this Implementation Plan. The Campaign does not relieve a Commander’s and Supervisor’s responsibility for compliance with other cybersecurity tasks identified in policies, directives, and orders, but limits the risk assumed by one Commander or Supervisor in key areas in order to reduce the risk to all other DoD missions. As part of the Campaign, this Implementation Plan is grouped into four Lines of Effort. The requirements within each Line of Effort represent a prioritization of all existing DoD cybersecurity requirements. Each Line of Effort focuses on a different aspect of cybersecurity defense-in-depth that is being exploited by our adversaries to gain access to DoD information networks. The four Lines of Effort are: 1. Strong authentication – to degrade the adversaries’ ability to maneuver on DoD information networks; 2. Device hardening – to reduce internal and external attack vectors into DoD information networks; 3. Reduce attack surface – to reduce external attack vectors into DoD information networks; and 4. Alignment to cybersecurity / computer network defense service providers – to improve detection of and response to adversary activity In conjunction with this Implementation Plan, a DoD Cybersecurity Scorecard effort led by the DoD CIO includes prioritized requirements within these Lines of Effort. Although similar to and supportive of one another, they maintain two distinct reporting mechanisms with two distinct targets. Commanders and Supervisors at all levels will report their status with the requirements in this Implementation Plan via the Defense Readiness Reporting System (DRRS), allowing leadership to review compliance down to the tactical level. In contrast, the Cybersecurity Scorecard is a means for the Secretary of Defense to understand cybersecurity compliance at the strategic level by reporting metrics at the service tier. Securing DoD information networks to provide mission assurance requires leadership at all levels to implement cybersecurity discipline, enforce accountability, and manage the shared risk to all DoD missions. By including cybersecurity compliance in readiness reporting, this campaign forces awareness and accountability for these key tasks into the command chains and up to senior leadership, where resourcing decisions can be made to address compliance shortfalls. The Cybersecurity Discipline Implementation Plan and Cybersecurity Scorecard efforts are critical to achieving the strategic goal of Defending DoD information networks, securing DoD data, and mitigating risks to DoD missions as set forth in the 2015 DoD Cyber Strategy. The aforementioned line of efforts and associated tasks shall be linked to DoD Cyber Strategy implementation efforts whenever possible. The DoD Cybersecurity Campaign, reinforced by the USCYBERCOM Orders, will begin as soon as possible. Reporting on cybersecurity readiness in the scorecard and DRRS will begin as soon as possible.15 Jan

Sunlight Foundation Blog


Today in OpenGov: A heavy public records delivery - Today’s look at #OpenGov news, events, & analysis, including a heavy delivery of public records out of Atlanta… What’s the deal with federal open data? Earlier this month a host of datasets including “legally mandated White House payroll reports to Congress, budget documents, White House visitor records and public response documents…were removed from the White House Open Data portal.” It is unclear if the new administration intends to replace the missing data. The White House is legally mandated to report some pieces, but others — including the White House visitor logs, which technically belong to the Secret Service — were shared voluntarily by the Obama Administration: Alex Howard, Sunlight’s Deputy Director, shared his take, noting that”from the perspective of anyone who thinks that the greatest opportunity afforded by modern technology is for the government to inform people directly, not just simply through the lens of the press — that’s something this administration has talked a lot about — that’s leaving a lot of informed public opportunity on the table…” That said, he expressed optimism that the documents would eventually be updated and returned to the web. (NBC News) Meanwhile, data from President Obama’s White House is still available via the National Archives. (The Outline) Several agencies including NOAA and NASA have made it clear that they have not removed any data and do not intend to do so (Wired). So far, the only confirmed data removal since President Trump took office stemmed from a lawsuit involving the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. Some, but not all of the effected data has been replaced. (KJZZ) There is reason to hope that open data more broadly may have a place in the Trump Administration. Open data has traditionally been a bipartisan issue and OMB Director Mick Mulvaney “sounded enthusiastic about open data initiatives…” at his confirmation hearing. Meanwhile, continued support for open data programs appears to exist at numerous agencies. (Federal Computer Week) In The Hill Joshua New made a strong argument for Congress to support the OPEN Data Act to ensure that open data remains a part of federal policy even if it is not a high priority in the Trump Administration. “Rather than wait for the Trump administration to change course, Congress should move quickly to adopt the bipartisan OPEN Data Act and permanently codify an open data policy for the U.S. government.” State of the States The Columbia Journalism Review has an interesting story about the City of Atlanta’s recent decision to release 1.47 million pages of documents related to “a federal investigation into more than $1 million in bribes for city contracts.” The catch? The city printed them out. Our take: That’s not optimal in 2017. When a government agency or city hall doesn’t release a database of documents online & enable the public to search them, the choice does have a direct relationship to the accountability and accessibility of whatever they describe. (Read more on our Facebook page) Government Technology gave an overview of Sunlight’s recent white paper on responsible municipal data management, specifically highlighting our recommendations to encrypt sensitive data and communications, take an inventory, publicly document all policies, and limit individual employees’ discretion on data-sharing. Read the entire white paper with all of our recommendations here. Massachussets has a new public records law that provides benefits to citizens and municipalities. Under the law, municipalities have “up to 25 business days to produce records while state agencies have up to 15 business days. But municipalities and state agencies can also petition the supervisor of records for one extension per request. Municipal agencies can get up to 30 extra business days, and state agencies can get up to 20.” MuckRock has a list and analysis of all the petitions filed so far. Marin County, California and Chapel Hill, North Carolina have new open data portals! Best Practice: @chapelhillgov official held an event in a library to introduce its #opendata portal & get feedback. https://t.co/yLsxSyyuvc pic.twitter.com/KnFX3z77d6 — Sunlight Foundation (@SunFoundation) February 23, 2017 Daily dose of Trump Eliza Newlin Carney takes aim at President Trump’s “business conflicts and tendency to treat the presidency as a cash machine” in the American Prospect, noting that “Trump is in clear violation of the Constitution’s “emoluments” clause, legal experts, watchdogs, and many Democrats argue. Article 1, Section 9 specifically bars the president from receiving money or anything of value from a foreign government or head of state.” Impeachment is unlikely to come from the Republican controlled House of Represenatatives, but other forms of oversight may be emerging from both sides of the aisle. University of Virginia law Professor George M. Cohen shared a unique idea to ease potential conflicts of interest for President Trump, “a public trust, created by Congress, to manage the [President’s] companies and channel profits to the U.S. treasury…” (Government Executive) We’ve been tracking President Trump’s reported conflicts of interest here.   Tired of your boss/friend/intern/uncle forwarding you this email every morning? You can sign up here and have it delivered direct to your inbox! Please send questions, comments, tips, and concerns to todayinopengov@sunlightfoundation.com. We would love your feedback! 24 Feb
Today in OpenGov: This Week in Corruption - Today’s look at #OpenGov news, events, & analysis, including more on President Trump’s potential conflicts of interest… Pay to stay. Pay to play. Pay to sway.@POTUS‘ choice not to disclose & divest enables a global engine for influencehttps://t.co/5DxuIuPzDn pic.twitter.com/8BJpQyu7S1 — Sunlight Foundation (@SunFoundation) February 22, 2017   State of the states “Big Data” is a buzzword, but applying data to improve communities is real, as this new article by Brett Goldstein explores. “Data analytics should not be about getting a write-up in the press, it should be about making the hard, nitty-gritty work of government more efficient. Simple analysis can drive tremendous impact in government. People want to see their tax dollars spent more wisely, and that starts with analyzing the data we have now with techniques that are proven and well-established.” The trend in local governments towards more accessible and higher quality data can make it easier for municipalities to perform low-effort, high-impact analysis on their operations, as illustrated here. (Data-Smart City Solutions) Marin County, California is the latest local government to embrace open data by working with Socrata to launch an open data portal “designed to make county budget information and public health and safety statistics more accessible.” (Government Technology) San Francisco is in the market for a new Chief Information Officer. (GovFresh) your daily dose of trump Democrats in the House of Representatives have introduced a “resolution of inquiry” aimed at forcing “disclosure of President Donald Trump’s potential ties with Russia and any possible business conflicts of interest” but the GOP is unlikely to let the plan anywhere near the House floor. “Seeking to avoid a full House vote on the so-called ‘resolution of inquiry’ — a roll call that would be particularly embarrassing and divisive for the right — Republicans will send proposal by Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) to the House Judiciary Committee for a panel vote on Tuesday, two Democratic sources said. The GOP-controlled committee is expected to kill the resolution.” (POLITICO) “Sen. Susan Collins said she thinks the Intelligence Committee could subpoena President Donald Trump’s tax records as part of its investigation into Russian interference in last year’s election if that’s where the evidence leads.” She also expressed plans to ask the Committee to call former national security adviser Michael Flynn to testify. (Roll Call) Despite his rhetoric on the campaign trail, President Trump has tapped numerous Wall executives for jobs in his administration and moved to roll back regulations opposed by the financial industry. Democrats are reportedly aiming to use this contradiction to their political advantage. (Washington Post) After a decade long fight President Trump was granted a trademark for his name in China. The timing of the news, coming shortly after the President signaled his commitment to the ‘One China Policy’ sparked “speculation about conflicts of interest. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, for instance, wasted little time in declaring the new trademark unconstitutional.” However, the story is a little more complicated than it may appear at first glance. (The Atlantic) This week in corruption The GovLab shared a new paper by Carlos Santiso and Ben Roseth published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The paper finds that “Open data can put vast quantities of information into the hands of countless watchdogs and whistleblowers. Big data can turn that information into insight, making corruption easier to identify, trace, and predict.” Analytics represent the key to driving data driven anti-corruption efforts.  Alabama Governor Robert J. Bentley is embroiled in a controversy involving explicit conversations, misused funds, sudden dismissals and more. Now it looks like his recent appointment to replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the Senate may land him in more hot water. Luther Strange, former Alabama Attorney General and newly minted United States Senator, spent months in charge of the investigation into the governor’s conduct and many view Strange’s appointment as an attempt to undermine the inquiry. (New York Times) “Hong Kong’s former chief executive, Donald Tsang, was sentenced to 20 months in prison for misconduct in office…” becoming the first former leader of Hong Kong to ever be convicted of a crime. (Bloomberg) Thursday’s leaks “Billionaire Peter Thiel’s company Palantir helped support the National Security Agency’s controversial spy program XKeyscore, according to a report in The Intercept citing previously undisclosed documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.” Thiel has been a close supporter and adviser of President Trump, breaking from many of his Silicon Valley peers. (The Hill) The Center for Public Integrity relies on “concerned citizens to lead us to stories of waste, fraud, abuse, corruption and malfeasance of all kinds.” This post details a couple of secure ways to get in touch with particularly sensitive materials.   Tired of your boss/friend/intern/uncle forwarding you this email every morning? You can sign up here and have it delivered direct to your inbox! Please send questions, comments, tips, and concerns to todayinopengov@sunlightfoundation.com. We would love your feedback! 23 Feb
Today in OpenGov: Tracking Trump’s Conflicts - Today’s look at #OpenGov news, events, & analysis, including follow up from yesterday’s section on leaks and some good news out of Iowa… Opening Up in Iowa Congratulations to the City of Des Moines, Iowa,  for passing a resolution establishing their #opendata program. Sunlight’s Noel Isama was proud to join city officials and our partners in What Works Cities to mark the historic occasion. We look forward to seeing improved access to information and civic outcomes for Iowans! Tracking trump’s conflicts A number of news organizations have taken creative approaches to tracking President Trump’s potential conflicts of interest. Notably, “NPR…created an entirely new initiative to cover possible conflicts of interest. They tapped veteran business editor Marilyn Geewax to lead the Conflicts Team, which has three full-time staffers and an intern.” (Poynter) The team even launched a dedicated tool, the Trump Ethics Monitor to track commitments made by the President and his associates to address some conflicts of interest and ethical concerns. All Things Considered talked to one of the journalists behind the tool. Meanwhile, “Even as Donald Trump was kicking lobbyists off his presidential transition team, he was quietly cashing checks from them.” (The Center for Public Integrity) dump duns Ending the federal government’s reliance on the proprietary DUNS Number to track huge range of entities that it does business with has long been a priority of the Sunlight Foundation. Recent developments provide some hope that the goal may be closer than ever. “By 2018, the General Services Administration will have paid Dun & Bradstreet more than $131 million over the last eight years for access and use of the Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS)…This may be the last time D&B receives this type of contract from the government.” (Federal News Radio) Last week the GSA put out a Request For Information on alternatives to the DUNS Number and will be taking public comments until March 13. (DATA Coalition, Government Executive) elsewhere The Electronic Privacy Information Center “scored a pair of legal wins Tuesday in a court battle with the FBI over access to studies the law enforcement agency has done of how its own record-keeping systems could impact personal privacy.” (POLITICO) Ajit Pai has moved to shake up the Federal Communications Commission in his first month as chairman. Several moves seem to trend towards transparency, but observers caution “…the changes could backfire, by working in lobbyists’ favor, slowing down the commission, or putting its rulings in a legally precarious position. Some also questioned how committed Pai was to transparency, pointing out that he’s been less than forthcoming about the commission’s most controversial actions.” (The Verge) POLITICO Magazine profiled Don McGahn, the former FEC commissioner and President Trump’s current White House Counsel. The article focuses on Mr. McGahn’s time at the FEC… “Years later, McGahn’s FEC tenure is instructive as he settles into his role as the White House counsel, advising Trump on conflicts of interest, national security, executive orders, campaign finance, regulations and, most recently, Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch.” Leaks in context A reader pointed out that The New Yorker piece we shared yesterday has received some vigorous criticism, including a comprehensive breakdown of Malcom Gladwell’s “good leaker theory” by the Electronic Frontier Foundation… “But whistleblowers should be judged on whether they brought seriously improper and illegal government or corporate activities to light, not based on who they are or where they sit in an elite hierarchy. That doesn’t mean that there can never be any potential consequences for whistleblowing. But making public something that people in a functioning democracy deserve to know should take a whistleblower firmly out of the reach of the Espionage Act or other serious felonies that the government put in its indictment against Mr. Snowden.” We want to thank the reader for sharing this important context and encourage everyone to do the same if you know of a story that we’re not covering or context that we missed. Let us know what you’re reading at todayinopengov@sunlightfoundation.com   Tired of your boss/friend/intern/uncle forwarding you this email every morning? You can sign up here and have it delivered direct to your inbox! Please send questions, commetns, concerns, and tips to todayinopengov@sunlightfoundation.com, we would love your feedback! 22 Feb
Today in OpenGov: New year, new format, same great OpenGov news - Today in OpenGov is back after a brief hiatus to start 2017. We are experimenting with new formats to dig deeper into the major stories of the day while still giving you all of the latest news from Washington, the states, and around the world. We want to know what you think. If you have any feedback please drop us a line at todayinopengov@sunlightfoundation.com Trump vs. the media Late last week, President Trump escalated his anti-press rhetoric. On Friday, he Tweeted that the media, including outlets like the New York Times, “is the enemy of the American people” (Buzzfeed). The President doubled down at a campaign-style rally in Florida on Saturday, again calling the media “the enemy” and seeming to indicate that he is more concerned about opposition from the media than the Democratic party. (Wall Street Journal) White House chief of staff Reince Priebus defended the President’s attack on the press on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday (Politico). He specifically criticized journalists’ use of anonymous sources. Meanwhile, Senators Lindsay Graham and John McCain distanced themselves from Trump’s comments while supporting the role of a free press in American democracy. On a related note:  A newspaper in Colorado is threatening to sue a State Senator who characterized them as “fake news” after the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel published a column criticizing him and supporting a bill that would boost public records access appeared in the paper. If pursued, the suit could set precedent and lead to some unintended consequences that may not be ideal for the press.(NPR) Drip, Drip, Drip. “Anonymous sources have always been a source of tips for reporters, but they’ve been especially prominent in the first days of the Trump administration.” (NPR) President Trump is hitting back against leaks from the intelligence community that eventually lead to the resignation of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, reportedly asking the Justice Department to investigate (Buzzfeed). Meanwhile, Congress is getting involved with their own requests to the DoJ IG and the FBI. (Government Executive, Politico) The leaks have led to a renewed focus on the so-called “deep state…the secret-keepers in the United States, people who have security clearances, who have spent 10 to 20 to 30 years working in and around secrets.” (NPR) It is important to remember that leaks have a long history in American politics and a clear place in American democracy. The Atlantic has a timely look at “America’s first great leak investigation.” On a related note: We recommend Malcom Gladwell’s recent piece in The New Yorker, “Daniel Ellsburg, Edward Snowden, and the Modern Whistle-Blower“. Fec shake up Ann Ravel, a Democrat and outspoken supporter of more robust campaign finance regulation, announced her resignation from the Federal Election Commission over the weekend (Politico, the Hill). In her resignation letter to President Trump — posted to Medium — she reminded him of campaign trail statements that appeared to favor campaign finance reform. She has also made it clear that she is not giving up on the idea of campaign finance reform, but will instead be taking it on from a new perspective outside the government. (Center for Public Integrity) The FEC is not allowed to have a majority from either major political party. Traditionally Ravel’s seat would be filled by another Democrat, however there is speculation that the President could choose a Libertarian or Independent who is in favor of deregulation (Election Law Blog). This would break the longstanding deadlock at the agency, while leading to even more money in the already flooded system. Where is all the data going? “A group of coders, librarians, scientists, storytellers and others passionate about data came together at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., this weekend to preserve federal data that some worry could disappear under different Trump administration priorities.” (FedScoop) Sunlight has been supporting efforts to preserve federal data, working with DataRefuge, tracking open data that has disappeared since the start of the Trump administration, and publicly discussing missing data — including the recent disappearance of Obama-era White House visitor logs. It’s not open season on open data just yet, but we are watching carefully. Tired of your boss/friend/intern/uncle forwarding you this email every morning? You can sign up here and have it delivered direct to your inbox! Please send questions, comments, concerns, and/or tips to todayinopengov@sunlightfoundation.com, we would love your feedback! 21 Feb
Online search for Obama-era White House visitor logs goes offline - Over the past eight years, the White House visitor logs represented a meaningful window, if a flawed one, into what was happening at the White House. The data enabled reporters like Sunlight’s Paul Blumenthal to report on the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying in 2010, lobbying on healthcare reform, and who visited former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. More recently, reporters used the visitor logs to as evidence to report on Google’s relationship with the Obama administration. Today, the Web-based interface for the archive of the Obama White House’s visitor logs hosted by the National Archives is gone. The embedded Web application, which was provided by Seattle-based Socrata, is now a broken plug-in. The logs are still available as open government data on the Obama White House archive, compressed into ZIP files that expand into comma-separated value data sets. If you have Excel or can set up a database, you can search through them. (Google Spreadsheets and Apple Pages can’t handle a million row data set.) Given the continued availability of the open data on the page, we have not added this to our list of data removed from the Internet, but the change is still significant. What’s now missing reduces the accessibility of this open data for non-technical users. It’s no longer possible to simply visit a Web page, enter in the name of an individual and see when he or she visited the White House, who was visited, and when. You have to download the data to do so. In practice, this represents a reduction in government transparency. It may be that this change is the result of mistake, a technical error, the result of the National Archives not continuing a contract with Socrata as part of their budget for keeping archived websites online. We’ve asked NARA for comment and will update this post if and when we receive an answer. Putting the issue of this broken embed aside, it remains unclear if the Trump administration will continue the practice of disclosing visitor logs as open government data on the Internet, or indeed to continue disclosing them at all. A line about data coming “soon” at the new open.whitehouse.gov and a dedicated section on the disclosure section of the Trump White House website suggest data is coming, someday. As of today, however, we can neither trust nor verify today that will be the case in April, nor has the Trump White House used its blog or social media platforms to inform the public of its plans in this area or on other open government questions. “We hope to see the Trump Administration make full use of the White House’s open data platform,” Hudson Hollister, the executive director of the Data Coalition, told Sunlight. “In addition to visitor logs, staff lists, and financial data sets, like those the Obama administration published, White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney suggested in his confirmation hearings that he wants to publish an open data version of the President’s proposed budget that matches the DATA Act’s format so that it can be electronically compared to the previous year. We’d love that, too.” Sunlight join Hollister in hoping that the Trump administration will see the value of open government data in the 21st century and continues the standard for disclosure set to date. 17 Feb
The crisis of public trust in the presidency of Donald J. Trump - In 1932, President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt confronted a nation in crisis. Some 25% of Americans were unemployed and many Americans had lost faith in their economy and institutions. Roosevelt knew his Administration would have to take bold steps to maintain America’s stability and get the country back on trade. He decided he could not act without gaining the trust of the American people, as measured by confidence in his reliability and ability. Roosevelt’s subsequent efforts to build trust, his empathy for the American people, and his focus on collective solutions to shared problems contrasts dramatically with the distrust and dissension fomented by President-elect Donald J Trump. Rooselvelt recognized that many Americans feared big government and such fears could undermine his Administration’s efforts on their behalf. Some Americans thought he was a radical socialist, while others thought socialism was the only answer to capitalism’s peaks and valleys. Thus, he knew he must build trust in his integrity and his actions. Roosevelt told the public he would be honest about the nation’s economic peril. He declared himself open to trying a wide range of solutions to stimulate growth. He argued that he had taken similar steps as Governor of New York, and these policies had helped New Yorkers. Moreover, he signaled that he would not take their trust for granted. He made it clear that voters could hold him to account by rejecting him if his plans failed to help them. To Roosevelt, trust was a confidence and competence feedback loop. If he could gain Americans’ confidence, they would be willing to risk the new ideas he proposed. If he could show government was competent, they would accept a more activist role for government in the economy. To that point, Roosevelt proposed that the United States government employ Americans in temporary jobs such as building roads or teaching the arts. Although these new jobs would directly benefit only a few Americans, they would have important spillovers for the economy and social stability. As the newly employed gained income, these workers would buy more goods and services, and in so doing, would encourage private firms to hire more personnel as well. In turn, these private sector employees would purchase more goods and services. Society as a whole would benefit from greater consumer demand. In short, by collaborating, Americans could create a cycle of growth and confidence. President Donald J. Trump also wants to bring change, but in contrast with Roosevelt, Trump has fomented distrust and division. He has bullied a wide range of corporations, by his actions and tweets. He has signaled that the president will be the main negotiator and sole authority. He has put forward plans for massive deregulation of the economy and to eliminate the centrality of the United States as a global force for democracy, free markets, and political stability. He has refused to make his business interests or tax returns public, ignoring potential conflicts of interests and making it almost impossible for citizens to hold him to account. Moreover, he creates distrust among Americans by fostering hostility among various ethnic, racial and interest groups. By constantly criticizing longstanding institutions, whether trade agreements, American intelligence agencies, or historical alliances, he effectively says our government has failed us. He signals that he is the only one who can fix these problems because while others are losers, he is confident and competent. But he never fully delineates how his ideas such as replacing trade agreements with protectionism, fomenting distrust of intelligence agencies, or ending membership in the United Nations or North Atlantic Treaty Organization will make Americans more prosperous and secure. Not surprisingly, many Americans remain unconvinced of his confidence and competency. On January 3, 2017 the polling organization Gallup reported that as only 46% of Americans polled are confident in his ability to handle an international crisis. Only 47% think he would use military force wisely. Trust in the Trump presidency has fallen in the month since. Presidents Obama, Bush and Clinton, in contrast, received confidence ratings of 70% regarding crises and the use of force. Roosevelt set his Presidency on a path to success from the beginning by working to build trust among government officials and the people they serve. Trump puts his future Presidency at grave risk by his inexplicable failure to build trust. By fomenting distrust and dissonance, he guarantees many Americans with respond with gridlock and animosity, unwilling to take a leap of faith in his ideas. Susan Ariel Aaronson is Research Professor and Cross Disciplinary Fellow at the George Washington University, where she teaches corruption and good governance. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation.13 Feb
Protecting Data, Protecting Residents - Today, the Sunlight Foundation is publishing a new white paper that lays out ten principles for responsible municipal data management for local government employees who want to be responsible stewards of sensitive data for their communities. Individual residents’ citizenship status, nationality, and religion have all become much more politically salient in 2017. Sharing data with the federal government pertaining to vulnerable members of a community creates new potential risks for local residents. Our principles aim to help local governments craft thoughtful practices and policies to protect their residents in difficult times through appropriately protecting their data. The creation of this resource was driven by increased interest from civil servants about their role and responsibilities under the Trump administration.  If upheld by the courts, President Donald Trump’s January 25 Executive Order: Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States would change the relationship between the federal government and state and local governments on immigration enforcement. Local governments will need to quickly identify the right way to balance local policy obligations and the preferences of their communities with the Trump administration’s expectations for local assistance for federal immigration enforcement. While it’s easy to find an executive order when it’s posted online, processing the actual content of this order is much more complicated. Responding to it will require some immediate and thoughtful work from local governments. We appreciate the magnitude of what local governments and their communities are being called on to do. We hope that this resource proves helpful in that work. We are very grateful to many partners who provided their comments and thoughts on this resource, including staff from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Civil Liberties Union, the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology, Center for Popular Democracy, Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Datamade, and MuckRock. You can read, download and share our paper below. 10 Feb
You don’t have to be tech-savvy to benefit from open data - Open data can help you even if you know nothing about data, because it can power tools and resources that are usable by anyone. This was on clear display recently at TransportationCamp, an unconference that focuses on the intersection of transportation and technology. Several developers from Mapzen ran a session presenting some of the open-source mapping tools they’ve been working on recently. One in particular, the Mobility Explorer, allows users to visualize and understand local transportation networks. For example, here’s a map of all transit lines around Washington, D.C.: Note that this map is showing routes across multiple transit agencies — this is possible thanks to all transit providers using a common data standard for their schedule and route data. My favorite feature is the isochrone generator. Isochrones show you how far you can travel from a given point in a given amount of time. Isochrone maps can be used by businesses, other organizations, and residents to make location decisions — and they can even be considered maps of your freedom. For example, here at Sunlight, we were recently deciding on a new office location. One thing we wanted in our office was accessibility to both current and prospective employees who live all over the city and region. Here’s Mobility Explorer’s isochrone map for our new office: The successive color rings show 15-, 30-, 45- and 60-minute travel times on a weekday morning. So this map shows where in the region employees can live and have a reasonable commute time. What if we had instead located ourselves in suburban Tysons Corner? Our isochrone map would look like this: Our office would be transit-accessible to significantly fewer employees, potentially limiting our hiring pool. These maps could also help someone who’s moving to the region decide where to live based on what jobs and other opportunities they’ll be able to access, or they can tell a prospective business owner what kind of a customer pool would be able to access a given store location. Mobility Explorer can also generate isochrones for driving, biking and walking, and can be produced for any time or day. Here’s the thing: all of these features are powered by open data, but you don’t need to worry about that data! You don’t need to know what GTFS or CSVs are to be able to use these tools. We definitely need to keep working to make open data more accessible to the public, but we should also remember that just because the public may not be directly looking at a certain data set, that doesn’t mean it’s not useful or valuable to the public. Here on Sunlight’s Local team, we’re trying to increasingly focus on open data for impact and not just open data for open data’s sake — so we’re excited to see practical, user-friendly tools that anyone can use, like Mobility Explorer. 7 Feb
State of Open Corporate Data: Wins and Challenges Ahead - For many people working to open data and reduce corruption, the past year could be summed up in two words: “Panama Papers.” The transcontinental investigation by a team from International Center of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) blew open the murky world of offshore company registration. It put corporate transparency high on the agenda of countries all around the world and helped lead to some notable advances in access to official company register data. The Panama Papers is the biggest data leak of our time to date, comprised of 2.6 terabytes of data with 11.5 million files containing information about more than 210,000 companies in 21 offshore jurisdictions. The top jurisdictions for registering shell companies were the British Virgin Islands, Panama, Bahamas, Seychelles, Niue, Samoa, British Anguilla, Nevada, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom. While most companies are created and operated for legitimate economic activity,  there is a small percentage that aren’t. Entities involved in corruption, money laundering, fraud and tax evasion frequently use such companies as vehicles for their criminal activity. “The Idiot’s Guide to Money Laundering from Global Witness” shows how easy it is to use layer after layer of shell companies to hide the identity of the person who controls and benefits from the activities of the network. The World Bank’s “Puppet Masters” report found that over 70% of grand corruption cases, in fact, involved the use of offshore vehicles. For years, OpenCorporates has advocated for company information to be in the public domain as open data, so it is usable and comparable.  It was the public reaction to Panama Papers, however, that made it clear that due diligence requires global data sets and beneficial registries are key for integrity and progress. The call for accountability and action was clear from the aftermath of the leak. ICIJ, the journalists involved and advocates have called for tougher action on prosecutions and more transparency measures: open corporate registers and beneficial ownership registers. A series of workshops organized by the B20 showed that business also needed public beneficial ownership registers. Progress in 2016 Last year the UK became the first country in the world to collect and publish who controls and benefits from companies in a structured format, and as open data. Just a few days later, we were able to add the information in OpenCorporates. The UK data, therefore, is one of a kind, and has been highly anticipated by transparency skeptics and advocates advocates alike. So fa,r things are looking good. 15 other countries have committed to having a public beneficial ownership register including Nigeria, Afghanistan, Germany, Indonesia, New Zealand and Norway. Denmark has announced its first public beneficial ownership data will be published in June 2017. It’s likely to be open data. This progress isn’t limited to beneficial ownership. It is also being seen in the opening up of corporate registers . These are what OpenCorporates calls “core company data”. In 2016, more countries started releasing company register as open data, including Japan, with over 4.4 million companies, Israel, Virginia, Slovenia, Texas, Singapore and Bulgaria. We’ve also had a great start to 2017 , with France publishing their central company database as open data on January 5th. As more states have embracing open data, the USA jumped from average score of 19/100 to 30/100. Singapore rose from 0 to 20. The Slovak Republic from 20 to 40. Bulgaria wet from 35 to 90.  Japan rose from 0 to 70 — the biggest increase of the year. The rise of open company data to power investigations At OpenCorporates, we are passionate about the potential for open corporate data to create a hostile environment for criminal use of companies and to power investigations, whether into corruption, fraud, organised crime, or asset recovery. Here are some of the highlights. Shortly after the Panama Papers came out, journalists from El Pais broke a story that led to the resignation of José Manuel Soria, the Minister for Trade & Industry of Spain. The story (see details here and here) is that Soria was discovered in the Panama Papers, but denied any connection to the Bahamas company in referenced in them. It turns out that a company of the same name, UK Lines Limited, had been incorporated in the UK, with officerships linked to him and his family. Further investigation into this company and another UK one, Oceanic Lines Limited, used company filings and shareholder documents to show that these were indeed connected with Soria and his family. Newspaper El Mundo nailed the case, showing Soria was also director of a Jersey company when he was already a politician. While the main credit goes to the journalists who tracked the story down, there is an irony in Soria being brought down in part by open data. The Spanish Company Register is locked behind a paywall! You can’t even search to see if a company exists without giving your credit card. They have been adamant that they will not open up the register, much less make it available as open data. Not surprisingly they score zero on the Open Company Data Index. Research by Thomson Reuters and Transparency International UK using OpenCorporates data, data from World-Check, Offshore Leaks from the ICIJ, and the UK Land Registry) found that there is no data available on the real owners of more than half of the 44,022 land titles owned by overseas companies in London. This is concerning. Nine out of ten of these properties were bought through jurisdictions like those found in the Panama Papers. Another powerful story was from La Presse Canada. By running the records of video lottery terminal licenses through the OpenCorporates data, they found organized crime controls parts of the Québec’s video lottery terminal (VLT) industry.  There are an disproportionate amount of terminals in vulnerable communities. This story went viral and led to the government committing to investigate it further. Setbacks Despite such investigations, calls for more transparency into the affairs of the corporate world, and some significant advances, company data continues to be one of the least open datasets in the world. The work of OpenCorporates is changing that, country by country. While we saw many significant advances in access to data in 2016,  there have also been a few backwards steps. This year, for example, Gibraltar and Tanzania shut down their doors to transparency, with the latter moving behind a paywall. With Gibraltar, it’s even worse: not only is it no longer possible to access data from Gibraltar corporate register, they’ve also made it difficult to access gazettes anymore. Gazettes are supposed to be public notices! It’s a highly irregular move. This action should be a red flag to anyone doing business with Gibraltar-incorporated companies. Spain remains a black hole for public access to company data. In October, Spain hosted the International Open Data Conference. Spanish civil society had been skeptical of this move because of the lack of movement from Spain on open data. Despite revelations in Panama Papers and campaigning from civil society , however,  the company register remains closed. Spains open data portal lacks any substantive open data sets and has many PDFs, the lowest form of open data. Despite the signs of lack of commitment and poor performance we observed, speakers from Spanish government at the conference insistedthat  Spain was one of the best performers in Europe. OpenCorporates, Web Foundation, Transparency International joined many Spanish civil society groups, including Civio and Info Access, on an open letter to ask Spain to do more. No official response has been received to this day, despite the letter being hand delivered — twice. In the area of beneficial ownership, often talk by politicians has not been failed followed by actions. After the European Commission recommended that beneficial ownership registers should be public in every European member state as part of the revision to the 4th Anti-Money Laundering Directive, the national governments watered it down.  Notably, the removed mandatory public access, thus enabling precisely the sort of behavior the Panama Papers exposed. This makes life easier for criminals, corrupt politicians and fraudsters, and more difficult for legitimate business. It’s so critical that the world continues to push for genuine corporate transparency and access to company registers as open data in 2017. Hera Hussein is the Community and Partnerships Manager at OpenCorporates, the world’s largest open database of company information. She’s an advocate for open data and open culture. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation. Interested in writing a guest post for Sunlight? Email us at guestblog@sunlightfoundation.com 7 Feb
How Data Refuge works, and how YOU can help save federal open data - Editor’s Note: Last week, Sunlight joined Abbie Grotke, a digital library project manager at the Library of Congress, and professor Bethany Wiggin, from the University of Pennsylvania, at a Transparency Caucus briefing in the U.S. House of Representatives to discuss archiving federal open government data. (You can watch video of the event online.) At the event, Wiggin shared what’s happening with Data Refuge, a distributed, grassroots effort around the United States in which scientists, researchers, programmers, librarians and other volunteers are working to preserve government data.  Her prepared remarks are below. Thank you for inviting me; it is an honor to be here. I am an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach a seminar on censorship and technology in history; and I also research and write about Philadelphia’s urban waters—including the great lack of much environmental data about those waters. I am also the Founding Director of Penn’s Program in Environmental Humanities. This academic program works at the intersection of the natural and human sciences, otherwise known as the humanities. We take an integrated, interdisciplinary approach spanning the arts and sciences to understand how humans have profoundly remade the natural world, fundamentally altering earth systems. Working at the intersection of academic disciplines, we can foster resilience in era of human-caused global climate change. Public engagement lies at the very heart of the program’s mission. One recent example of our public engagement work is the project called Data Refuge. What is Data Refuge? Working with partners, especially with our librarians at Penn, Data Refuge aims to accomplish three goals: Use our trustworthy system to make research-quality copies of federal climate and environmental data. The types of public data we copy range from satellite imaging to PDFs, and we augment the work of webcrawling by our partners at End of Term Harvest and the Internet Archive by developing tools to download and describe “uncrawlables” that can be put in the public server space available at www.datarefuge.org Advocate for environmental literacy with storytelling projects that showcase how federal environmental data support health and safety in our local communities; and advocate for more robust archiving of born-digital materials as well as for more reliable access to them. They are, after all, paid for by American taxpayers. Build a consortium of research libraries to scale data refuge’s tools and practices to make copies of other kinds of federal data beyond the environment. This budding consortium, supported by the Association of Research Libraries, will supplement the existing system of federal depository libraries, where printed documents are “pushed.” This new consortium could actively “pull” public materials, i.e., copy them, from federal agencies. How much data has Data Refuge archived? Data Rescue events have downloaded roughly 4 terabytes of data. Related libraries’ efforts have captured petabytes of open data. Data Rescue events, as of 1/31/17, have also seeded more than 30,000 urls to put into the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine. As of 1/31/17, some 800 people have participated in Data Rescue events. Since beginning this project in November of last year, we have helped support six data rescue events, including a two-day event in Philadelphia, the first to tackle data that cannot go into the Wayback Machine. We’ve now supported a seventh in Cambridge, Mass; an eighth at UC Davis; a ninth in Portland, OR; a tenth in NYC. Data Refuge organizers hosted a webinar for future event organizers attended by well over one hundred participants. More than twenty additional Data Rescue events in locations ranging from the SF Bay area, to Atlanta, Austin, two additional Boston events, Boulder, Chapel Hill, DC, Denver, Haverford (PA), Miami, another NYC event, Seattle, Twin Cities, and Wageningen, Netherlands. How do we know how to prioritize the data to save? Since December, with the help of the Union of Concerned Scientists, we have circulated a survey that invites researchers to identify those data sets most valuable for their work. It also asks them to consider how vulnerable those data sets might be. If they are stored in multiple locations, they are less vulnerable; if in only one location, it is far easier to limit or even block their access. Data Rescue events also use a comprehensive approach to webcrawling developed by the Environmental Data Governance Initiative, a newly-formed coalition of individual researchers: surveying climate and environmental data across multiple locations. (I serve on the steering committee). This method allows people without deep content knowledge to participate in data rescue events, as does the work of the storytelling teams. What happens at a Data Rescue event? Participants select one of “Four Trails” through the Refuge. These trails are in essence working groups, with trained Trail Guides coordinating the work across the different local Data Rescue events. The Trails are: Feed Internet Archive Federal Internet materials that can go to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine go there. Feed Data Refuge Suspected “uncrawlables” are added to a master list on a spreadsheet the Data Refuge team manages and project participants do additional research. (An app will soon replace the spreadsheet and the associated workflow with its multiple checks for quality assurance.) Storytellers and Documentarians Create social media about data rescuers and events. Develop use cases in partnership with city and municipal government partners as well as other community partners and NGOs. The Long Trail Build a library consortium and advocacy for better policy on federal open data management Why good copies of data are so important Data Refuge Rests on a Clear Chain of Custody. The documentation of a clear “chain of custody” is the cornerstone of Data Refuge. Without it, trust in data collapses; without it, trustworthy, research-quality copies of digital datasets cannot be created. Libraries always say: “Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe” (LOCKSS). That’s very true. But consider what happens if a faulty copy is made — whether by accident or technical error or deliberate action–and then proliferates. Especially in a digital world, an epidemic can be the result. Instead of keeping “stuff safe,” we have spread lots of bad copies. Factual-looking data can in fact easily be fake data. But how do we safeguard data and ensure that a copy is true to the original? Especially if the original is no longer available, we must find another way to verify the copy’s accuracy. This is where a clear, well-documented “chain of custody” comes in. By documenting this chain–where the data comes from originally, who copied them and how, and then who and how they are re-distributed–the Data Refuge project relies on multiple checks by trained librarians and archivists providing quality assurance along every link in the chain. Consider this extreme case: What happens if an original dataset disappears, and the only copy has passed through unverified hands and processes? Even a system that relies on multiple unverified copies can be gamed if many copies of bad data proliferate. This practice of documenting whose hands have been on information goes back across hundreds, even thousands, of years. Instilling trust in information is a universal human concern. Unfortunately, it’s imperfect. The workflow devised for data refuge is similarly not 100% foolproof. But we can increase our trust in the copies by including librarians trained in digital archiving and metadata as the final instance of quality control before we make anything public. At this end link in the chain, we verify the quality with the Data Refuge stamp of approval. How we verify data for Data Refugue After the data is harvested, it gets checked against the original website copy of the datay by an expert who can answer: “Will this data make sense to a scientist or other researcher who might want to use it.” This guarantees the data are useable. Then, digital preservation experts check the data again, make sure that the metadata reflect the right information, and create a manifest of technical checksums to enclose with the data in a bagit file so that any future changes to the data will be easily recognizable. The bagit files move to the describers who open them, spot check for errors, and create records in the datarefuge.org catalog, adding still more metadata. Each actor in this chain is recorded. Each actor in effect signs off, saying yes, this data matches the original. And each actor also checks the work of the previous actor and signs off on it. This is the best way we have to ensure this copy is the same as the original, even if the original goes away. Libraries Today, building on decades of work, many libraries are taking fast action to advocate for open data and to promote better access. Many libraries have hosted Data Rescue events and are working quickly with their communities to harvest and save data. But, the fragility of government information on the internet is a problem that has already gained considerable traction in the library community. Coordinated efforts, like EoT, but also less well-known consortia are actively working to map the landscape of new government information. Together, with various research communities, we are strategizing on how to manage that information landscape responsibly and systematically. This will require deep and sustained collaboration of the type that is difficult to create quickly. Nonetheless, Data Refuge has done much to accelerate, responsibly, those collaborations. Last week, with two librarians from Penn, I met with the Association of Research Libraries headquartered here in Washington. In response to the overwhelming number of requests that we’ve received from colleagues at universities across the US who want to help, we propose an additional scaling strategy: Leveraging existing capacity within libraries — in staff and expertise — to archive web sites immediately. Many academic research libraries have web archiving systems in place with knowledgeable librarians engaged in this work. If a fraction of those skills and systems are directed to address a small slice of this challenge, together we can make substantive and critical progress toward preserving federal websites. You can learn more about out Data Refuge at ppehlab.org, including how to get involved as an individual. If you want to host a Data Rescue event, check our guide “How to Host a Data Rescue Event” which also includes a useful Toolkit. Bethany Wiggin is the Founding Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Program in Environmental Humanities and holds appointments in German, English, and Comparative Literature. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation. Interested in writing a guest blog for Sunlight? Email us at guestblog@sunlightfoundation.com 6 Feb
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