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A Kneecap of the World

In the words of Spider Jerusalem:

Journ­alism is just a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that’s all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world.

Will what has happened change journ­alism? Maybe. Many inter­esting thoughts over at Press­Think, here.

The soundtrack to this whole thing, for me, has been a little inter­esting, or odd, depending, I suppose, on how you look at it: snatches of Arcade Fire, a chunk of Bowie’s Heathen, a Gil Scott-​Heron track, some­thing that might have been Chrissie Hynde, Stars, and part of Bitches Brew.

Flood

My browser is cur­rently grinding to a slow halt: so many stories to read related to the WikiLeaks leak (or, more accur­ately, flood) of doc­u­ments relating to the war in Afgh­anistan. And as some are sug­gesting, if there are similar doc­u­ments relating to Iraq, this might be just the beginning.

This (found here alone is enough to raise serious ques­tions about how the war is being fought:

Amer­icans fighting the war in Afgh­anistan have long harbored strong sus­pi­cions that Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insur­gency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Wash­ington for its help com­bating the mil­it­ants, according to a trove of secret military field reports made public Sunday.

The doc­u­ments, made avail­able by an organ­iz­a­tion called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostens­ible ally of the United States, allows rep­res­ent­at­ives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afgh­anistan, and even hatch plots to assas­sinate Afghan leaders.

It’s one hell of a trail of paper. And we can thank these people for organ­ising it all into such a con­venient elec­tronic format.

Now, I need to read some more of this stuff.

New Jersey Sleepers

Fant­astic story:

[…] In what law enforce­ments offi­cials por­trayed as an extraordinary takedown of a Russian espi­onage network, the Justice Depart­ment on Monday announced charges against 11 people accused of living for years in the United States as part of a deep-​cover program by S.V.R. — one of the suc­cessors to the Soviet-​era K.G.B.

[…]

According the the charges, the agents would com­mu­nicate back to Moscow using such tech­niques as stegano­graphy — including secret encrypted data in an image that could be posted on a publicly avail­able website but would appear unre­mark­able to the naked eye; radio­grams — coded bursts of data sent by a short-​wave radio trans­mitter; and setting up wireless laptop computer networks in public places.

Amus­ingly, I had listened to the BBC’s recent radio adapt­a­tion of John Le Carre’s The Secret Pilgrim just before reading that article. It’s hard to imagine that the spycraft John le Carré describes so vividly might still be in use today: the facts that con­tribute to the ver­is­mil­itude of his fic­tional worlds have become so tied up with the fictions that contain them, with their nar­rat­ives, char­ac­ters, and plot twists, as to seem, in some strange way, inap­pro­priate within “our” world. (Seeing “Moscow Centre” men­tioned in the NYT piece produced in me what could be called — and I’m striving for the right word here — a phe­nomen­o­lo­gical jolt.) Pic­turing them being bundled into cars, perhaps a little like Bill Haydn is bundled into a van at the end of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, is possible, but somehow makes it all seem less real. I do wonder, though, quite why the Russians are still going to such lengths to spy on Amer­icans; and also, more wor­ry­ingly, if the Russians are going to such lengths, what might other coun­tries, coun­tries with more pressing reasons to know what is hap­pening in America, be doing in America, or Europe?

UPDATE: There are a couple of articles (one here, one here) on the BBC News that provides more inform­a­tion about the spycraft employed by the sus­pected Russian agents.

Genuinely Dangerous

There’s a story I found on Foucault blog that is playing on my mind as I can’t quite decide how I feel about the situ­ation. Ini­tially it is straightforward:

The person who leaked the so-​called “Col­lat­eral Murder” video of the US Apache heli­copter attack on unarmed civil­ians in Baghdad, res­ulting in their deaths (including two Reuters journ­al­ists) has been arrested, according to a report in Wired.

The Wired report, which contains lots of details and inform­a­tion from friends of the man arrested, SPC Bradley Manning, says that Manning was arrested after he told a former hacker of his leaks. It also contains the news that Manning leaked other material, including 260,000 dip­lo­matic cables from the US which has not been pre­vi­ously reported, as far as I know.

But then things get quirky:

Wikileaks has denounced the news in its Twitter feed this morning, saying about the Wired reporters:

“Adrian Lamo&Kevin Poulson are notorious felons,informers&manipulators. Journ­al­ists should take care.

“State­ment: Wash­ington Post had Col­lat­eral murder video for over a year but DID NOT RELEASE IT it to the public.

“Alleg­a­tions in Wired that we have been sent 260,000 clas­si­fied US embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect.”

However, they have not yet denied the story, and claim in fact that their security pro­to­cols prevent them from even knowing the source of their leakers.

The “former hacker” men­tioned is Adrian Lamo, an intriguing char­acter. And one of the article’s writers, Kevin Poulsen (slammed by Wikileaks along with Lamo), isn’t exactly dull: he’s a “former” hacker himself and has had a book written about his exploits. So, Wikileaks is angry about the ethics of the piece, but both Lamo and Paulson (they’re acquaint­ances, probably close friends, as far as I can tell), seem to be standing by the line that the FBI were informed about the source of the leak because of the huge risk to national security:

Lamo has con­trib­uted funds to Wikileaks in the past, and says he agonized over the decision to expose Manning — he says he’s fre­quently con­tacted by hackers who want to talk about their adven­tures, and he has never con­sidered reporting anyone before. The supposed dip­lo­matic cable leak, however, made him believe Manning’s actions were genu­inely dan­gerous to U.S. national security.

Poulsen has responded to Wikileaks response to his article:

@wikileaks I’m going to “hell” for reporting on the arrest of an alleged source of yours? So military deten­tions should be kept secret?

As replies go, that one seems a little oblique. Delib­erate evasion, or is he missing what Wikileaks seem (to me) to actually be saying (very indir­ectly): that Lamo and Poulsen were com­plicit in alerting the author­ities and that it was less a case of reporting on news than of blogging about what they’d done (albeit blogging in a manner that appeared to be journ­alism). And more fun­da­ment­ally, Wikileaks are really saying it was unprin­cipled and wrong. But that might be reading too much into things. It might be as simple as one former hacker deciding to protect the interests of his country by getting in touch with the FBI and another former hacker then writing an article about what the informant did and the after­math. Whatever really is going on, I’ll be watching for developments.

Prospects Now Appear So Bleak

More news to remind us of where we’re heading:

The pro­spects of saving the world’s coral reefs now appear so bleak that plans are being made to freeze samples to preserve them for the future.

A meeting in Denmark took evidence from researchers that most coral reefs will not survive even if tough reg­u­la­tions on green­house gases are put in place.

Sci­ent­ists proposed storing samples of coral species in liquid nitrogen. That will allow them to be rein­tro­duced to the seas in the future if global tem­per­at­ures can be stabilised.

Crisis Care

This morning The Browser led me to ‘The Secret History of Hur­ricane Katrina’, an article about what happened after Hur­ricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and ‘Care During Crisis’, a series of pho­to­graphs (many by Magnum’s Paolo Pel­legrin) about health­care during the disaster. Both pieces are def­in­itely worth a look, if you get the chance. (And more gen­er­ally, I highly recom­mend The Browser, a great source of essays about, and com­mentary on, all manner of subjects.)

A pho­to­graph by Paolo Pel­legrin of Rodney Scott, “the last patient to leave the hospital in the evac­u­ation.” (Source)

Guns, Ammo, Cell Phone

TIME has just pub­lished some pho­to­graphs of the current civil unrest in Bangkok. This image caught my eye, for various reasons (look at his right hand):

Janis and Jan, Photojournalists

As Rory Cellan-​Jones notes in an entry on the BBC’s dot.life blog, Janis Krums’ pho­to­graph of the US Airways plane that landed on the Hudson River could well become “a classic of the new age of citizen journalism.”

Mean­while, Jan Grarup is using more tra­di­tional methods to document some of the human aspects of the fighting that is occuring on the other side of the world. The Wiki­pedia article on the conflict is huge.

Tunnels in Gaza

Over the last couple of days I’ve been trying to get through a hefty backlog of podcasts, some of which go back as far as the Nove­member of last year. I’m getting through them, steadily, and right now am listening to an episode of From Our Own Cor­res­pondent ori­gin­ally broad­cast on the 15th of November, 2008. The first report (there are usually two or three dif­ferent reports in each edition of FOOC) was from Gaza:

The five-​month cease­fire between Israeli and Palestinian forces is looking increas­ingly fragile. Paul Martin recently visited Gaza, where he found opinions divided and some people keen for hos­til­ities to resume.

Omar (not his real name) teaches English at a school for much of the day, but unbe­known to his pupils he is training to be a militant fighter too.

The download link to the mp3 recording of the entire pro­gramme is broken, but you can listen to it on the BBC News website, or read the tran­script.

Documentary Archive

I don’t remember when I first listened to the World Service (or to BBC Radio, period), but it was a long time ago. I’ve never liked complete silence while I’m inside a room, for some reason (I really don’t know why, but it really does spook me), and so from quite an early age I’ve used spoken word record­ings (audiobooks, radio, podcasts, etc.) as a way of filling the void. (This morning I woke up out of a dream about ele­phants to discover a podcast about ele­phants playing quietly, but audibly, over my speakers.)

The World Service has a huge doc­u­mentary archive that goes back to 2004, and after browsing it a little today, I’m fairly sure I’ll be visiting it fre­quently in the future.

They Stand Aside

Here is part of a news report by Mike Pflanz, a journ­alist cur­rently in Goma:

The United Nations has delayed sending rein­force­ments for its mission in the Demo­cratic Republic of Congo which are urgently needed to curb violence against civil­ians. Continue reading…