TSA carry-on gun confiscation data

2012 FULL-YEAR ANALYSIS TSA finds 1,525 guns at check-in — average of four a day. Complete wrapup, with data, charts, tables. Data below compiled from weekly TSA Blog updates on the number and type of weapons confiscated during carry-on searches at airports. Data is updated weekly (current data through May 9, 2013). (Download CSV file). The number of confiscations was up 14% in the first quarter of this year compared to a year earlier, with … (Continue reading . . .)

Global Warning wins prestigious Online Journalism Award

 Global Warning, a Medill National Security Journalism Initiative graduate student project, has won a prestigious 2011 Online Journalism Award. Winners were announced on Sept. 24 at the Online News Association annual conference in Boston. Global Warning was a finalist in the “Multimedia Feature Presentation, Student” category. Graduate students in NSJI’s inaugural Specialization Program in National Security Reporting last Fall traveled the globe, investigating the effects of climate change on national security. They produced a powerful … (Continue reading . . .)

The Privacy Project

At the request of the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative, journalism graduate students at Northwestern University’s Medill School spent 10 weeks this summer exploring how to best connect consumers with important online content in new and innovative ways. The team presented its findings and unveiled its products, business plan and research to the Medill community and interested business leaders on Aug. 24 in Evanston. (For a video archive of the August, 2011 presentation, please visit … (Continue reading . . .)

New more favorable FOIA focus at Defense Department?

Getting documents from the Department of Defense might get a little easier, thanks to an updated DOD directive (see document below) that declares a “presumption in favor of disclosure” for Freedom of Information Act requests.

The directive says DOD will “respond promptly to all requests in a spirit of cooperation” and will “take affirmative steps” to maximize what’s made available.

President Obama in an executive order on Jan. 21, 2009 ordered “presumption in favor of disclosure” and asked agencies to “harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.” (Continue reading . . .)

Highlights from NSJI’s 2011 conference on military beat coverage

Journalists who cover the military beat around the country participated in briefings at the Pentagon and panel discussions and presentations with a variety of experts on topics ranging from medical care for veterans to national security law during a June conference organized by the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative. About 30 journalists chosen from a pool of applicants gathered June 23-24 for the “Covering the Military at Home and Abroad,” sessions in Washington, D.C. Many … (Continue reading . . .)

2011 Conference Agenda

Agenda the from June, 2011 “Covering the Military At Home and Abroad” conference in Washington.

Tools to monitor governments shutting off the Internet

On Friday, Syria joined the Arab Spring uprising trend of besieged government bureaucrats temporarily shutting down the Internet to try and mute protests.
The first news I saw on this was early in the day in my Twitter feed — but it wasn’t a tweet of a news story or someone quoting a news story or government official.

My news came from a tweet based on raw Google data.

In my feed, @BrianBoyer of the Chicago Tribune retweeted fellow Chicagoan @therealfitz with news that Syria had apparently gone dark, based on Google data — and that was two hours before Google itself tweeted about it.

The source: Google’s Transparency Report, which shows near- real-time data for use of Google services by country/region and “visualizes disruptions in the free flow of information, whether it’s a government blocking information or a cable being cut.”

(Continue reading . . .)

Global hot spots for Internet filtering

A new United Nations report aggregates a number of efforts to measure Internet filtering by governments around the world and concludes “national regulation of the Internet is taking place on a wide scale, despite ambiguity over appropriate policy and uncertainty over its implementation, and risks to freedom of expression.”

Not surprisingly, East and Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa were found to house states with the most filtering. The most extensive filtering of the 47 surveyed nations was found in China, Cuba, Myanmar (Burma), Oman, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Yemen. (See full interactive map).

Government interference with the internet has been a very high-profile issue in recent months, particularly with the Arab Spring uprisings and the role of the internet in the unrest (and government attempts to stop or inhibit the internet as an enabling tool). The report from UNESCO (United Nations Education, Cultural and Scientific Organization) does not cover political filtering alone, however. The studies it cites also measured filtering for social (e.g., pornography), security and other reasons. (Continue reading . . .)

National Security Watchdog Workshop sold out

Registration has closed for an intensive one-day hands-on training workshop for national security reporters, focusing on data, documents and the Internet. The session, featuring trainers from IRE’s National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting, will be hosted by Medill’s National Security Journalism Initiative. The program is set for Saturday, June 25, and will run from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at  Medill News Service, 1325 G St. NW, Washington, DC. There is a $50 registration fee.  Instructors … (Continue reading . . .)

A helpful new guide to spending on the war on terror since 9/11

A fresh analysis by the Congressional Research Office provides a bounty of sliced and diced data for journalists writing about the war on terror and how much the federal government has spent in the past decade on its military efforts.

“The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11″ (document embedded below) details the $1.3 trillion spent through this year. This will hit $1.4 trillion if the 2012 budget requests are approved. The current “burn rate,” as they say in business: $6 billion a month. The Department of Defense has spent 94% of the money, the report says.

The largest share of spending has been in Iraq (66%) followed by Afghanistan (35%) and for enhanced base security (2%). CRS couldn’t account for about $5 billion.

The report isn’t just a dry recitation of numbers; it offers insights and analysis over time by theater and type of spending; dissection of cost trends for (Continue reading . . .)