Palpable suffering: A crushing tale, beautifully told

Published in the Portland Phoenix

It’s rare that we can put a human face on American foreign policy. And even rarer that the visage belongs to a person who steps willingly into the limelight — though admittedly for other reasons. A House in the Sky, a new memoir by Amanda Lindhout and co-written by Portlander Sara Corbett (a writer for the New York Times Magazine, among other publications), splits the difference beautifully, and devastatingly.

In 2008, Lindhout, a Canadian reporter cutting her teeth in the harshest places on the planet (Afghanistan and Iraq during the wars), went to Somalia to write about the unrest there. Warlords, tribal leaders, and government officials with varying degrees of popular legitimacy were engaged in a massive tug-of-war; the US, through the “war on terror,” backed several opposing players, sometimes simultaneously.

Lindhout stays away from the geopolitics; her story is very much her own, though it is important to read it not just as a human tale of suffering, resourcefulness, and survival, but also as an object lesson about the real cost of US intervention overseas.

Four days into her trip to Somalia, Lindhout was captured by a band of militants who held her for 459 days. That’s not a spoiler: The only spoiler that could possibly exist is Lindhout’s name on the cover — which is at times the only reassurance a reader has that she actually survived the ordeal. (Also, you can meet her on Friday at the Portland Public Library.)

No matter what you imagine might become of a white Western woman kidnapped by Islamic  militants (who are mostly in their late teens) in the middle of an anarchic gangland, the reality is far worse. Seriously: This is a soul-breaking book about the daily, hourly, secondly ordeal of surviving a mental and emotional crucible that would, at many times, have been easier to exit feet-first.

With Corbett’s expert help and reporting, Lindhout’s story is told directly, vividly, without artifice, hyperbole, or euphemism. A scene in which she hears her mother being beaten, and her mom fighting back against her boyfriend, is told quietly, understatedly. She expertly seals the deal: “In the bunk below me, Nathaniel started to cry. ‘Are you scared?’ I whispered, staring at the dark ceiling. It was an unfair question. He was six years old.” Lindhout was just nine. Her stark self-awareness forms the foundation of a uniquely probing reader-author connection.

The account of her captivity, which forms the second two-thirds of the book, is an unrelenting read, detailing the range of physical, psychological, emotional, and sexual weapons employed against her in an attempt to extract a ransom, but always including elements of Lindhout’s impressive depth of spirit. She explains — often approaching detached wonder at her own resilience — what, exactly, happened to her, and how she found within herself the will, the means, the power to carry on.

During one particularly brutal assault, she describes an out-of-body experience: “From above, I could see two men and a woman on the ground. The woman was tied up like an animal, and the men were hurting her, landing blows on her body. I knew all of them, but I also didn’t. I recognized myself down there, but I felt no more connected to the woman than to the men in the room. I’d slipped across some threshold I would never understand. The feeling was both deeply peaceful and deeply sad. What I saw was three people suffering, the tortured and the torturers alike.”

It is left to us, as it is to Lindhout herself, to make sense of, or peace with, this horrific tale — and we in the US must pay special attention to the detailed personal accounting she offers of the ripple effects of American power.

Perhaps we can even start to take our lead from Lindhout, who has chosen to transcend her suffering by bringing to her tormentors not condemnation, but compassion — in the form of a foundation providing educational support to young people in Somalia, kids very like her captors.

AMANDA LINDHOUT + SARA CORBETT | at the Rines Auditorium, Portland Public Library, 5 Monument Square, Portland | September 13 @ 6:30 pm | portlandlibrary.com | Free
A HOUSE IN THE SKY | by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett | 384 pages | Scribner | $27

Crime Watch: Downtown shops ‘under siege’ from thefts

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Two prominent Commercial Street retailers are installing video-surveillance and other security equipment in the wake of a summer marred by thefts.

Late last month, both Motifs and Old Port Wine Merchants and Cigar Shop stepped up security, and are trying to get help combating crime in the high-pedestrian-traffic area around their shops.

Motifs owner Paula Jalbert says crime “has gotten aggressive this summer, very aggressive,” well beyond “normal run-of-the-mill shoplifting.” Thieves are “more organized, and it seems to be groups”
operating together.

“On July 5 my petty cash bag was stolen right out from under us,” she says, among other thefts of money and easily marketable items. “They’re looking for purses, wallets, cell phones, iPads, computers.”

The thieves are “older — they’re not young kids,” Jalbert says.

Earlier this summer, a woman selling jewelry from a sidewalk table set up to cater to cruise-ship visitors was found to not have made the pieces herself but stolen them from Motifs and at least one other Old Port shop.  When confronted while brazenly selling them in the open air just down the street from where the items had been taken, the woman packed hurriedly and left the area; she hasn’t been back, Jalbert says.

So in August, she stepped up security, or, as she puts it, “I’ve gone on lockdown.”

“Now I have security cameras and they record video;” she has added a keycode lock to her office door, and all the shop’s clothes have security tags on them, too. She says the preventive steps have resulted in a significant dropoff in thefts.

Next door at Old Port Wine, owner Jacques deVillier has also stepped up security, a move he lamented in an email to customers.

He lost several hundred dollars’ worth of wine a few weeks back, and earlier in the summer police caught a well-dressed middle-aged man with a bag full of stolen cigars from his shop.

“This street is rampant,” deVillier says. Now he has four cameras feeding live video to monitors at the cash register, as well as recording footage for later review if needed.

It’s not a move he made willingly. “With much trepidation I have wrestled with the decision to install video cameras,” deVillier wrote in an August 26 email. “I have put off doing this because I think of this store as not just a wine shop but a place where all of my friends can congregate. Placing cameras seemed to be a matter of distrust and not the message I’ve received over the last seven years in Portland or the message I wanted to communicate to my friends. I love being here and I had hoped with Portland’s growth things could remain the same; things do change unfortunately, and not always for the better.”

Both shop owners say police and city officials need to do more, though Steve Hewins, interim executive director of Portland’s Downtown District, a nonprofit comprised of businesses in the city center, says he didn’t hear anything about the topic at his group’s August membership meeting.

“We’ve got great police, but how much can they do?” deVillier says.

Jalbert, who has owned retail stores in the Old Port since she opened Communiques in 1981, says she feels “like we’ve been under siege.”

She says police officers on patrol now “make a point of walking through every store” — but that only started about three weeks ago, after offices upstairs in Jalbert’s building were hit by thieves. She says officers blame the uptick in thefts on drug users, telling her illegal “drugs are on the rise in the Portland area.”

Portland Police Department spokesman Lieutenant James Sweatt says some thefts — such as those of electronics or other easily resellable items — could be connected to the drug trade, but others — of merchandise, for example — may be because a person actually wants the item stolen.

He says, though, that “there hasn’t been a significant change whatsoever” in the number of thefts reported citywide this year, compared to 2011 and 2012. He doesn’t have data broken down by region within the city, but “we’re not seeing a trending pattern here” at the police department. Sweatt did say that “businesses that do a little bit better job at security . . . are less likely to be targeted.”

Boost your skills: And improve your job prospects

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Want a new job? Or a promotion at your existing workplace? You have to learn more, do more, get more skills. It’s as simple as that.

But first, let’s get the bad news out of the way. Many employers want new hires to have skills they haven’t yet learned, even if they’re college grads. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, these are things like efficient work practices, how to handle customers on the phone, and how to communicate effectively in a businesslike way. Some of the people competing for job openings will have experience doing that stuff; if you don’t, your chances of getting a welcome-to-the-team phone call drop through the floor.

The good news is that you can acquire these skills fairly quickly, and without spending a lot of cash. Portland Adult Education — which is open to all Mainers (though Portlanders get a discount) — has classes on a wide range of job skills, in the realm of office work as well as the skilled trades. The fall schedule just came out, so check it over carefully at portlandadulted.org.

Most classes happen a couple times a week for a few months, and cost between $85 and $125, though some are more expensive. In other words, this is a relatively cheap way to buff your CV, without taking a big chunk out of your bank account — or your schedule.

Some of the classes teach pretty basic material, but it can be good for an intro if you haven’t used a particular piece of software before (like Microsoft Access, a database-management program), or if you need to brush up on accounting, or practice public speaking.

They’re all taught by local instructors, many of whom are professional active in the fields they’re teaching about, and may be able to connect you with employers seeking people with just the skills you’re learning.

You can start new projects, taking classes in website design, or specific design applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign). Or you can give your existing knowledge a boost, with “in a day” workshops, where people with basic knowledge of a piece of software can take just a few hours to pick up more complex techniques.

PAE also has courses to introduce you to a range of trades: woodworking, welding, electrical work, and plumbing. They can be good starting points to see if you like something enough to pursue a degree or certification, without risking a lot if it turns out not to be quite what you had hoped.

If you’re really committed to professional education, you can enter one of PAE’s certificate programs, which give you an unlimited amount of time to finish taking a prescribed set of courses. The three main certificates are for being an office assistant, accounting clerk, or working in a medical office. They each carry a core of eight basic office-skills courses, plus five certificate-specific classes to get you ready to take an entry-level job. (There’s also a “Microsoft Office Applications” certificate, if you take the classes teaching the basics of the five most commonly used Microsoft programs.)

And there’s a Certified Nursing Assistant program, which can be a good starting point for a career in the medical field. It’s true that being a CNA can be one of the toughest jobs in a hospital or nursing-home environment, but positions are always open for immediate work, and you might be able to score a post that will help you out with costs of getting more education and higher certification.

The long and the short of it is, if you want to learn something new to improve your work environment or job prospects, you owe Portland Adult Education a serious look.

Are you a business owner?Check out Corporate Training

Portland Adult Education also offers custom-teaching services to local businesses, helping them teach employees new skills and boost productivity.

Business owners can meet with a PAE consultant to see what classes might best serve the company’s, and workers’, needs. Then PAE will design classes to meet the goals you’re aiming for — whether with existing employees, new workers, or a combination of both. For example, Goodwill has worked with PAE to design a class to improve non-native speakers’ English.

PAE can also connect business owners with existing classes to improve workers’ skills, individually or as a group.

Learn from home: Take free online courses from top institutions

Published in the Portland Phoenix

As long as you have a computer, you have access to some of the best classrooms in the world, for free. MIT, Stanford, Georgetown, and the University of California–Berkeley all offer massively open online courses (called MOOCs in edu-jargon) — classes that can have students numbering in the tens of thousands, all around the globe, getting course materials online, watching streaming video of the lectures, and participating in discussions in online forums. These digital learning environments are increasingly popular and accessible, so much so that the New York Times dubbed 2012 “The Year of the MOOC.”

Sadly, there aren’t many such options originating in Maine just yet. The University of Maine, the University of Southern Maine, and Bowdoin College all have nothing of the sort. Colby College’s communications staff didn’t return multiple calls and voicemails.

Bates College is in the early stages of contemplating starting such a program; Al Filreis, a pioneer of massively open online courses at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke in May to the college’s faculty about his 36,000-student course on modern poetry. Filreis, who teaches English at Penn and is also a parent of a Bates student, had students from South Africa and Pakistan, among other far-flung locations.

And in July, Bates president Clayton Spencer joined a group of about a dozen college and university presidents from around the country in discussing MOOCs and access to higher education. She was the only participant from Maine, and the only representative of a liberal-arts college. That said, the college’s public statements about those two events make clear that Bates remains protective of the “liberal arts college experience,” which counts residence in a physical academic community as one of its key values.

Global humanitiesThe University of New England has done the most so far in Maine, through its Center for Global Humanities. While the CGH doesn’t offer courses per se — in the sense of classes that have multiple lectures and discussion groups — it does have one-off events quite regularly that are open to the public both in person and online.

“We wanted to widen the notion of ‘the humanities’ to include all kinds of people,” says Anouar Majid, who not only is the founding director of the CGH and UNE’s vice-president of communications and marketing but also serves as the university’s vice-president of global affairs.
If you head to une.edu/cgh, you’ll see options for both “Seminars” and “Lectures” on the right-hand rail. The “Seminars” page lists nine upcoming talks by university faculty or other scholars, accompanying reading (often the speakers’ own books), and specific event information if you want to attend in person. For the 2013-2014 academic year, topics include health-care, international relations, history, and philosophy.

If you can’t make it, first check with your local library: many of them around the state convene groups to read the books and watch the lectures, and then have their own local discussions. There’s no credit, and no writing assignments. You just read the book, watch the lecture, and learn something new.

If your nearest library isn’t participating (and you don’t want to start a group yourself), the video is streamed live on the site during the lectures; people watching on their computers can email their questions to an on-site moderator, who will add them to the list of possible topics to address during a question-and-answer period that follows each talk.

It gets better. Past years’ seminars, back to 2009-2010, are listed and archived on the site, letting you learn from international experts on a wide range of topics. What’s more, the “Lectures” page lists two other upcoming talks, and includes an archive of other speakers’ presentations (see sidebar: “UNE Highlights”).

Top-notch schoolsIf you want something more structured, or more like an actual college class, check out these free options from leading institutions around the world.

Introduction to Computer Science three-course package (Programming Methodology, Programming Abstractions, Programming Paradigms) | Stanford University | see.stanford.edu/see/courses.aspx

Skynet University: astronomy classes, including remote control of telescopes for observations | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | skynet.unc.edu/introastro

“Edible Education: Telling Stories About Food and Agriculture,” taught by Michael Pollan | University of California–Berkeley | webcast.ucberkeley.edu

“Global Warming Science,” an overview of the processes by which the climate changes, as well as its effects | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | ocw.mit.edu

“Sets, Counting, and Probability,” a look at the math behind card games, sports, and election results | Harvard University | extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative

“Doing Business in Latin America,” a business and economics class | University of California–Los Angeles | uclaextension.edu

“The American Novel Since 1945,” a literature class | Yale University | oyc.yale.edu

“Logic and Proofs,” a course with a rationally self-explanatory title | Carnegie Mellon University | oli.cmu.edu

There are, obviously, many more options — foreign-language classes, advanced scientific topics, and much more. Explore — the world is yours for the learning. 

UNE highlightsParticularly notable or interesting talks in the online archive
From the 2012-13 series“The Trouble with Malaria in Africa,” by James Webb Jr., author of Humanity’s Burden: A Global History of Malaria (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
“On the Brink of the Grave: Early Stories of Blood Transfusion,” by Ann Kibbie, with readings from an account of medical procedures from 1896, and from Bram Stoker’s 1897 thriller Dracula.

From the 2011-12 series“What’s Happening in Yemen?” by Daniel M. Varisco, with readings from Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s Yemen: The Unknown Arabia (Overlook, 2001).
 “Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788,” by Pauline Maier, author of the book by the same name as the lecture, published by Simon and Schuster, 2010.

From the 2010-11 series“The President, Democracy, and Permanent War,” by Dana Nelson, author of Bad for Democracy:  How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
“Desperate for Some Kindness: A History of Asking for Help in Hard Times,” by Elizabeth De Wolfe, with readings from Horatio Alger and Mary Marshall Dyer.

From the 2009-10 series“The Russian Soul in the Twenty-First Century,” by George Young, with reading from James Billington’s Russia in Search of Itself (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004).
“You Are What You Read,” by Reuben Bell, with reading from Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (HarperCollins, 2007).

From past lectures“Does America (Still) Need Unions,” by Robert Zieger.
“Lessons from the Emerald Isle: The Implications of Mass Tourism,” by Eric Zuelow.

Press Releases: Billions and billions

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Billionaire John Henry bought the Boston Globe earlier this month. Billionaire Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post just days later.

They’re following a path blazed by billionaire Sam Zell, who bought the Tribune Company, including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, in 2007, and ran it into bankruptcy; billionaire Rupert Murdoch, who bought the Wall Street Journal the same year; and billionaire Warren Buffett, who in 2012 bought two groups of newspaper companies: Lee Enterprises, publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Media General, whose flagship is the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Also on that path is billionaire Donald Sussman, who bought the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, the Kennebec Journal, and the Morning Sentinel in 2012.

Folks with that kind of money often aren’t too fond of being told what to do, but they also didn’t get to the top by reinventing other people’s broken wheels. Where Sussman’s paper has paved the way, Henry and Bezos should consider following.

Here’s what these billionaires should do — not just because fellow ten-to-the-ninthers are doing it, but because it works.

First, take themselves out of the picture. Sussman, as a hedge-fund manager, is probably more used to this sort of thing than Henry, who owns media-magnet properties including the Boston Red Sox and the Liverpool Football Club. And Bezos, as founder and CEO of Amazon.com, is hardly a stranger to the spotlight. Zell, for his part, kept putting the spotlight on himself; Murdoch can’t seem to duck away. Buffett’s holdings are too far-flung for him to be in the local mix too regularly. But then, if Bezos allots his attention according to financial proportions, the Post will take up 1 percent of his time — that’s how much he spent of his $25-billion fortune to buy it.

The more the news, and the paper as a whole, are independent of the heavy hitter behind the scenes, the better for all involved. Readers will appreciate getting information through an editorial process with integrity (which should definitely include ownership disclosures in every story where that’s relevant). Journalists will dig for truth and understanding rather than spin and marketing. Advertisers will come to understand they simply don’t carry enough financial clout to sway coverage. And the owners themselves will avoid all sorts of questions about ethics, improper influence, and messing with the public trust. They should hire respectable, reputable journalistic leaders to helm their operations — whether keeping existing staff in place or seeking new blood.

Then, they should not expect to make much money. In fact, calling newspapers, as Sussman has, an “important community resource” — not a business — would probably be a good idea. ewspapers are no longer a license to print money, but they can make a modest profit. And much of the past financial pressure on newspapers was debt, of which all these papers are now free.

Next, they need to make the product better. Sussman has invested in editorial content, and it’s paying off. Witness major pieces by Colin Woodard, for example, shifting the political conversation around government hiring lobbyists to be regulators.

Sussman is also investing in internal systems improvements, smoothing the editorial process and allowing actual financial tracking in near-real-time. But those should only be in service to improving the finished product, which is what the general public sees.

Which leads to the final suggestion: The new owners must remember they still answer to the public. Amazon.com depends on having a good reputation among millions of customers — and the same is true of the Sox. With newspapers, the ownership still answers to the audience, and depends on its trust and support. These billionaires got rich by collecting other people’s money; they should not forget transparency and accountability, especially as employers of the key enforcers of those principles.

Renovations: Getting Congress (Square) to work

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Five years after launching a citywide effort to redesign Congress Square, the city of Portland is launching a citywide effort to redesign the area around and including Congress Square. But all is not as lost or absurd as that sentence may suggest. Rather, it seems a modicum of common sense may have invaded City Hall and resulted in this new twist in the saga of the city’s most beleaguered, maligned, and steadfastly defended public space.

In 2008, the City Council set up a 15-member committee, the Congress Square Redesign Study Group. As originally proposed by councilors David Marshall and Kevin Donoghue, it would have looked at not just the park but also the public and open spaces around it, including sidewalks and roads. But the council limited the group’s scope to just the park area. Now that august body has seen the sense in the initial idea.

Since 2011 the redesign study group has been the focal point of controversy over whether the city should sell a portion of the park at the corner of Congress and High streets to the new owners of the former Eastland Park Hotel, soon to reopen as the Westin Portland Harborview. (See “Congress Square’s Controversial Facelift,” by Deirdre Fulton, May 24.)

While all parties agree that something must be done to change the park’s current underused, sunken hardscape (which city officials are now terming a “plaza”), the debate has been hamstrung: As even the city’s own Parks Commission pointed out in correspondence with the City Council back in May, a proper choice would not be between the RockBridge proposal (which itself has had several major variants) and the park as it is, but
between the RockBridge idea and other real alternatives, “such as a re-designed park in the same space, a fully designed smaller plaza, and other building or architecture options.”

Which is where this new citywide effort comes in. Many ideas have come forth from many parties about what could go there instead of a privately owned event center (including our own suggestion for an amphitheater with greenspace and benches, in Calvin Dunwoody’s “Reimagining Portland,” August 24, 2012), but there hasn’t been one centralized place to view and discuss all of these proposals.

Now, at last, there is. The city is calling it a “visioning process for the redesign and programming of Congress Square,” including not just the park but also the streets at that intersection, “the public spaces in front of the Portland Museum of Art and the H.H. Hay Building, and surrounding sidewalks and traffic islands.”

City spokeswoman Nicole Clegg says the new conversation is a “holistic view,” but indicates that any outcomes will not stop negotiations with RockBridge (which the City Council has directed city staff to undertake), nor another process under way to determine whether it makes sense to make High Street a two-way road.

But it could serve as an umbrella conversation that may affect how those other efforts develop over time.

That’s the hope of Frank Turek, a leader of Friends of Congress Square Park, a group fighting the sale of the park to RockBridge. He’s  keeping “a cautious eye” this new effort. “The word is that they’re pretty set to go ahead with the park” — selling it to RockBridge, that is — Turek says. So this could be a diversion, “to sort of show that they’re open to all views but really they’re not.”

On the other hand, he hopes that city leaders are taking the advice Ethan Kent of the Project for Public Spaces gave in a talk at the Portland Museum of Art back in June. “His idea was that we should step back . . . and get an idea of what does the city want this whole area to be,” Turek says. “It’s the important question that no one’s ever bothered to ask.”

His group, which has already begun collecting suggestions for how to make the park better, will participate in the process, though Turek stresses that is not a signal of a changed position. “We want to keep the park. This isn’t a road to compromise,” he warns.

Marshall, for his part, is pleased his original idea has finally been approved by the council. And while he favors keeping the full park public, he indicated city officials may already be leaving that debate behind. “This is designed to open up the conversation to be much more than the park itself,” Marshall says. “Regardless of what happens in that little corner of Congress Square . . . we need to work on some of the issues,” including vehicle and pedestrian traffic, and the overall layout of the area.

You can contribute to the community discussion in several ways. First, and perhaps most easily, propose your own ideas, and vote on others’ suggestions, at neighborland.com/congresssq (yes, that’s three Ss).

Or take an online survey about your use of the area at portlandmaine.gov/planning (it’s in a tiny one-word link in very small print in the upper left corner of the Planning Department page, just beneath “p&d news”).

Also, tweet thoughts with the hashtag #CongressSquare.

If you’re more into meatspace, attend the public meetings that will be scheduled in August and September (check the city’s website for times and places), or go to Congress Square and write down your ideas on signs posted there.

All these ideas will be collected into a report for the public, and distilled into a request for proposals in the fall, seeking an urban-design person or company to develop a master plan of the area.

While an original timeline had data collection happening through September 6, the process is now more “rolling,” says Jeff Levine, director of the city’s planning department. “We’re trying to see which sources of input are the most fruitful,” he says. So keep the ideas coming.

The Friends of Congress Square Park will meet Tuesday, August 27, from 6 to 8 pm, at Portland City Hall, room 24.

Investigations: Book, film reveal the Third World War

Published in the Portland Phoenix

United States commandos answerable directly to President Barack Obama are killing countless innocent civilians every night in dozens of countries around the world.

Rather than fighting terrorism, these missions to kill alleged militants often come before the intended targets have ever done anything violent or illegal. And even if soldiers are lucky enough to hit their target — and often they don’t — these attacks, by covert raid or submarine- or drone-launched missile, also kill and maim innocent bystanders, turning actual and potential American sympathizers and allies into blood-feud sworn enemies of the United States.

Under the George W. Bush administration, and vastly and secretly expanded under the Obama administration, the US has created a self-perpetuating cycle of secret worldwide combat, robbing families in this country and around the globe of loved ones, peaceful futures, and the numberless benefits of security at home and abroad.

These are the theses — and the undeniable conclusions — of Jeremy Scahill’s newest book, Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield (Nation Books, $32.99) and its companion Dirty Wars film, directed by Richard Rowley, which SPACE Gallery is bringing to screen at the Portland Museum of Art four times this weekend.

In many ways the 83-minute film, distributed by indie-movie kingmakers IFC Films/Sundance Selects, is a trailer for the book. Taken on its own, the movie is a slow, dark procedural, following pieces of Scahill’s extensive multi-year investigation into how the Joint Special Operations Command, “the most covert unit in the military, and the only one that reports directly to the White House,” has taken charge in the fight against terrorism. In the process, JSOC has gotten Obama’s permission to kill anyone anywhere in the world — even US citizens — without specific allegations of wrongdoing, any functioning oversight or real spending limits, and in ways that only inflame international anti-American opinion, ensuring a steady supply of potential targets for a neverending war.

The film has compelling moments, to be sure. In the first ten minutes, for example, we meet a man who was at a party that was raided by US Special Forces, killing his wife and other family members, including an Afghan police commander who had extensively trained alongside the US military. The man tells of seeing the soldiers dig the bullets out of the bodies — even from people who were still alive — with their knives. Then the man himself was taken prisoner and held for several days. Upon his return to his village, he had been radicalized: “I wanted to wear a suicide jacket and blow myself up among the Americans,” he tells Scahill.

The corresponding scene in the book is stronger, by far. Of course it lacks the visceral video of a man dancing with friends and family only hours before he is killed by US Special Forces. It doesn’t include the actual sobs of a grieving woman. And the text also doesn’t let you hear the sweet, high-pitched voice of a six-year-old Afghan girl as she recites the names of family members Americans killed that night.

What it offers instead is page after page of an organized, sequential play-by-play of the events, explained clearly and vividly (including the important detail that the bullets were dug out of the bodies to cover up evidence that American troops had been there). The movie was filmed during Scahill’s reporting, so some quotes appear in both places, but the book uses them in better and more complete context, making reading them more effective even than seeing and hearing the tearful voices of the survivors of the attack.

And that gets at the basic difference between the two, and the reason the film is only really powerful when viewed as a selective sampler of the book. The movie is about the life and experience of being a war reporter digging this stuff up, as opposed to the book’s focus on what Scahill uncovered. And without question, the latter is more important than the former.

It’s certainly interesting to hear the inner dialogue of an investigative reporter’s brain — to hear how such simple questions (“Who were these American soldiers?”) require so much hard work to answer and untangle into a cohesive story.

Yet it is much more useful to read in full the stunning mosaic Scahill is able to put together than to watch small bits of his experience of locating the tiny pieces of that whole.

Scahill’s reporting on these issues, like his previous best-selling bookBlackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army(Nation Books, 2007; excerpted in the Portland Phoenix March 23, 2007) and his reporting in the Nation, on Democracy Now!, and elsewhere is a call to action, if not to arms, for Americans who still believe their country should be governed by its people, for its people.

What the film blasts through but the book explores — and explains — in depth is possibly the most terrifying development in the war on terror: Obama’s decision, made by him personally, that it was legal and permissible to kill American citizens overseas without trial, in direct contravention of the Fifth Amendment, which says “no person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

As Scahill notes, even John Walker Lindh, an American citizen who joined the Taliban and actually engaged in combat against US forces, was given a trial under the Bush administration after his capture in 2001. Anwar al Awlaki, who had never done anything but write and speak passionately about how he saw the world, was not given the same rights by the Obama administration before he was killed in a drone strike in 2011. (Nor was Samir Khan, another US citizen killed in the same strike that targeted Awlaki.)

And neither was Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, also a US citizen, killed a few short weeks after his father, while having lunch with some teenage buddies.

The US explained away the teen’s killing, calling it “collateral damage” of a drone strike targeting someone else, but didn’t apologize for the death. And the government downplayed the facts that the attack failed to kill any actual confirmed terrorists, and that it happened in Yemen, a country not publicly acknowledged as an American war zone.

Scahill’s conclusion is chilling: Abdulrahman al Awlaki was killed not for what he had done, but “for what he might someday become.” Even today, the American attacks continue, and continue to turn people around the world — and at home — into opponents of US government’s World War Three.

Dirty Wars | directed by Richard Rowley | 83 minutes | at Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Square, Portland | Aug 2 @ 7 pm, Aug 3 @ 2 and 7 pm, Aug 4 @ 2 pm | $7

Press Releases: Here's the RS problem

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Rolling Stone made a massive error last week when it released the image of its cover featuring accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. But to be clear, the error was not putting Tsarnaev on the cover, in a photo the young man (he turned 20 on Monday) took of himself in quieter days, in the style of so many online selfies.

The error was depriving that cover of its proper context. Yes, the image was released as part of a blog post with a selection of highlights from the upcoming story. But that wasn’t nearly enough information on which to judge the work of RS, which has a long and proud tradition of alternative journalism — featuring both entertainers and newsmakers, fan-like coverage and investigative reporting.

For those who criticize the selection of the image and say they “expected” something else of RS, I suggest that the view RS has of itself is probably different than the one harbored by occasional readers. This sort of thing happens at the Portland Phoenix, too. From time to time, people profess themselves surprised to learn that we cover important news issues, or say they’re disappointed by a viewpoint they don’t expect to see presented in our pages.

Surprising readers, providing new perspectives and provoking them to think about important topics in different ways, is what alternative journalism does, and has always done. (And those topics are intentionally wide-ranging: across music, art, film, food, and, yes, the news of the day.)

But another hallmark of alternative journalism is its context. We tell you not only what is happening, but also why you care. (At times we acknowledge you probably don’t care, and then try to persuade you otherwise.)

And that’s what was missing from the initial reveal. The RS article (which many protesters did not read before taking up arms) paints a more complete portrait of Tsarnaev than we’ve seen before, and includes the very details of his 21st-century teen life that most befuddle those who knew him best. He was, as the full story puts forth, seen and experienced by friends and coaches as a normal kid, feeling idealistic, looking dissipated, taking selfies that look like pop-culture images of rock stars.

To illustrate that with one of those images, showing if nothing else how Tsarnaev viewed himself, is a brilliant move that — when seen in its proper context — startles us into confronting our own view of the younger half of the duo who allegedly bombed the Boston Marathon finish line, killing three and injuring scores of others, some who are permanently maimed. In our minds, we see a monster; he — and those of us who look at the cover — saw a regular guy. And that’s not just the face he presented to himself — it’s the face those around him saw, as the RS story extensively documents.

It’s a truly great way to illustrate the story’s overall point: Tsarnaev really was the terrorist next door. The problem is that in attempting to promote its upcoming strong scoop, RSforgot to provide the proper context, and suffered a massive and public backlash as a result of that failing. And yes, the magazine did respond swiftly, releasing the full story online as the frenzy grew. But by then they were by definition behind the curve and playing defense. 

On an unrelated topic Would that the international press covered climate change, poverty, hunger, homelessness, and war with the breathless and undivided attention — not to mention massive expenditures — with which they cover the impending birth of a person who, like his or her grandfather, may never actually become an actual British monarch. 

As thinker and writer Esther Dyson regularly argues, people’s attention is the most limited natural resource available. The frenzy of what has been dubbed “the Great Kate Wait” is a colossal waste of that valuable supply. Media outlets that spend any time on this highly personal piece of triviality (which, yes, is very important to the immediate family) are harming their audiences by failing to tell them about actual news that will deeply affect their everyday lives.

Un-Flash: California company trades in fake spontaneity

Published in the Portland Phoenix

We know: Flash mobs are so ten years ago. But it turns out the craze whose entire point is an underground do-it-yourself surprise has gone corporate. And rather than celebrating creativity, community, and spontaneity, it’s now a business model profiting in part off the energy of unpaid performers.

Yes, there’s a company called Flash Mob America. It’s based in Los Angeles, and has produced what it calls “flash mobs” for major TV shows, including Today, Modern Family, and The Bachelorette.

FMA’s “sole purpose,” according to its marketing materials, is “creating joy through surprise.” Oh, and making money by getting hired to put on staged events largely carried out by volunteers.

That’s what’s happening here. See, FMA employs a public-relations firm, Hollywood fave MWPR, which has worked with Oprah, Martha Stewart, People, Us Weekly, and more. Some poor intern from MWPR called the Phoenix (and, apparently, other Maine media outlets) on July 18 to announce that a “flash mob” will happen at 5 pm on August 5, somewhere in Portland. Surprise!

After cutting through some promo-talk the announcement boiled down to this: Would we at the Phoenix be interested in running a story, to tell people they could volunteer to perform? The company needed these unpaid workers, or it wouldn’t be able to actually provide the service for which it had been hired by an as-yet unidentified Portland client.

Now that’s a surprise.

The original flash-mob ethos was pretty different — fully DIY and organic, often created by groups of artists. One of the earliest academic studies of flash mobs, published inFibreculture Journal in December 2005 by Judith Nicholson, then a graduate researcher at Concordia University in Montreal, found that flash mobs specifically avoided traditional media, in favor of mobile communication among participants directly.

The movement’s credo, she wrote, was “the power of many, in the pursuit of nothing.” And it was deliberately created and intended as a criticism of capitalist society, designed to empower citizens over governments and corporations. In fact, she wrote, “While flash mobbing was being popularized, a fear that someone would appoint himself leader of the mob or that the trend would be appropriated for specific political or commercial purposes was expressed frequently” by those involved. (With a leaderless reclaiming of public space for use by the people, it might be seen as a celebratory precursor to the Occupy movement.)

Of course, something can hardly be called “flash” if it’s being planned from across the country several weeks in advance. And with “more than 50 professional performers” in the mix, along with somewhere between 100 and 200 unpaid workers, it’s not quite sounding like a spontaneous fun thing. “It’s a really detailed full-scale live production,” FMA co-founder Staci Lawrence told me.

Though the event will be “in a really public place,” the audience is preselected — by the paying client. There’s “a specific group of people that we are surprising,” Lawrence says, hoping that anyone who figures out the details wouldn’t share them, for fear of ruining the closely guarded, highly manufactured spontaneity.

FMA gets permission from relevant authorities — a far cry from an upstart art form that used to call for outright cancellation of the event if property owners or police got wind of it beforehand.

But then, what should we expect from a company “founded . . . in tribute to Michael Jackson” anyway? Yes indeed, in the promo materials’ “About Flash Mob America” section is a heartwarming little gem: “In July 2009, Staci and Conroe [Brooks] — moved by Michael Jackson’s emotional memorial — produced the first American tribute to the late King of Pop by recreating Sweden’s ‘Beat It’ flash mob.”

You read that right: this is a company whose founders got their start by reenacting an actual flash mob, put on by a group of Swedish street dancers just two weeks after Jackson’s death.

And then, FMA did it again. And again. Back to the press release: “The following month they again honored Jackson with a flash mob on what would have been his 51st birthday. And then the unexpected: Universal Music Group hired the team to produce a flash mob to surprise the late pop icon’s sister, Janet Jackson.”

That led to bigger gigs, including somehow working with Oscar Mayer and Charmin, and leading to their self-description as “the industry’s flash-mob experts.” Lawrence says on big corporate jobs, she does try to make sure the non-professional mobbers get paid; for the upcoming Portland show and most others, though, “there’s not that kind of budget.”

That’s no surprise.

Extended Openings: Fundraising push on for prep space at BayOne

Published in the Portland Phoenix

After a winter and spring of increasing activity at BayOne, the Anderson Street home to the expanded Bomb Diggity Bakery and some small-scale food-production businesses, it's time for another growth phase. (See "Building a Hub for Food," by Jeff Inglis, January 11.)

Eli Cayer, who runs BayOne and its neighbor and relative, Urban Farm Fermentory, has launched a $16,000 Indiegogo campaign to pay for a couple of community-focused aspects of the project.

First, Cayer wants to raise $5000 to pay for sinks and stainless-steel tables for a set of three prep-kitchen booths, which will be available for people to rent as licensed food-prep spaces under city and state regulations. (For food carts and trucks, and other small-scale producers, home prep is no longer allowed, and a licensee needs to specify a location where prep will occur.)

"Portland is lacking a facility where startups and nano producers can legally make and package their artisanal products," Cayer writes in his Indiegogo project description.

The plumbing is in place; what's needed is money for the sinks and tables, as well as industrial track curtains that will separate the spaces as needed, but can also retract to make the area a larger space for community classes, film screenings, and other gatherings.

Cayer says he has several small startups interested in the space, as well as people wanting to start teaching classes once the space is finished.

The rewards for contributing to the Indiegogo campaign are focused on exactly those people: a $15 pledge gets a person an hour of prep time in the kitchen, and $20 the opportunity to sell wares at a booth at a market also to be held regularly in the space. For community members, a $25 pledge earns entry to a basic-skills class, or a $25 discount off an advanced-level class.

Indiegogo allows organizations to collect the money they raise, even if their campaign doesn't hit the target amount (unlike Kickstarter, which only dispenses money if a goal is achieved), and Cayer is hoping to get far more than $5000.

An additional $10,000 will pay for the setup of a greenhouse that will not only be home to herbs used by UFF and other BayOne tenants, but also to an aquaponics area that could grow in contained systems salad greens and fish for sale at the market sessions. It will be an additional site for classes and workshops, too.

Those classes and other happenings depend on another key aspect of the project, a zoning ordinance amendment that will come before the City Council at its July 15 meeting.

"We're not trying to change the ordinance. We're just trying to tweak it a little bit," Cayer says. The amendment would allow special events like "maker's markets," where people could sell art, crafts, and food — including prepared foods, which are frowned upon at the regular Portland farmers' markets — as well as lectures, musical performances, and the like.

Head to the council meeting — July 15 @ 7 pm in City Hall — and donate at igg.me/p/440350 until August 20.

You are being watched: Government surveillance is broad, deep, and dangerous

Published in the Portland Phoenix and the Providence Phoenix

The government is collecting every kind of digital communications information about you — not just the so-called "metadata" of the location, participating phone numbers, and duration of every single telephone call made in the United States, but also the content of those phone conversations, and of emails, online chats and instant messages, and text messages.

Thanks to brave leakers and reporters who have revealed the details of two major programs, one collecting telephone information, and the other vacuuming up terabytes of data from major Internet companies (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and more), we know all of those things are happening, with the possible — and only possible — exception of recording the phone calls. A former FBI agent told CNN back in May that phone conversations were being captured. The Associated Press was blunt in a June 15 report, paraphrasing Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and computer-security expert: "Just assume the government collects everything." (For an overview, see sidebar, "PRISM Primer," by Deirdre Fulton.)

Now that we know for sure that we live in a surveillance state, where do we go from here? Of course, some people will say they already expected as much, or believed so. These new revelations aren't for them — they're for everyone else, who didn't think the Panopticon had truly arrived. But now the United States itself has become 18th-century thinker Jeremy Bentham's architectural wonder of a prison, in which inmates can be observed at each and every moment, without being sure whether they are in fact being watched just now.

Rather than dismissing the alarms about government surveillance, the public at large can no longer ignore or wish away its presence. Those fearmongerers who were rudely dismissed should take heart from The Daily Show, which in the wake of the revelations about NSA spying has introduced a new segment: "Good News! You're Not Paranoid."

PRIVACY=TRUE SELF

First, a brief discussion about the importance of privacy. Many people dismiss it, saying things like "I have nothing to hide." Beyond the oft-cited "right to be left alone" definition offered by Supreme Court Associate Justice Louis Brandeis in 1928, privacy is nothing less than the right to actually be yourself.

Surveillance — intrusion on privacy — affects human psychology and action. It is the ultimate infringement on personal freedom, because it exploits an instinctual weakness of humans. When we're in private, we do things freely, as our true selves; when we're being watched, we change our behavior.

The principle Bentham articulated in 1787 is simple: "Observation and fear of detection ensures compliance," as author Charlie Canning summarized it. Think about it yourself (privately): Is there absolutely nothing you would do differently in your entire life if your partner, parent, child, boss, and best friend were watching at all times? Now expand that audience to include the only power that can by the force of arms deprive you of your freedom — the government. (There are several other important related problems; see sidebar "Debunking 'Nothing to Hide.'")

Of course, there are plenty of regular, law-abiding people who will respond, "I don't do anything wrong, so they won't watch me, and there's nothing to catch me doing." But in his 2011 book Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, civil-liberties lawyer (and occasional Phoenix contributor) Harvey Silverglate details exactly how misguided that sense of security can be. Making the argument that federal laws are overbroad, loosely interpreted, and aggressively prosecuted, Silverglate describes case after case in which innocent citizens doing their very best to behave within the law accidentally came to the attention of federal authorities — largely through personal misfortune, such as running out of gas when riding a snowmobile on US Forest Service land — and were charged with, and convicted of, felonies.

Let's just say it straight: If a federal prosecutor wants to find something you've done wrong, there's probably something that could qualify. Your main hopes to avoid prosecution are: 1) avoiding coming to authorities' attention, and 2) depriving the authorities of information that could be used against you. Since the first is mainly a matter of chance, it's best to focus on the second — which is, plainly put, privacy. How, exactly, should we do that? In her sidebar ("Counterveillance 101"), Deirdre Fulton outlines some strategies.

DOING THE NSA'S BIDDING

As best we can tell, the government is not doing direct collection of the information it's using. Rather, the NSA and the FBI are demanding — at times with the help of judges in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — that private companies disclose data those firms have already collected from us. We have offered up that information willingly in almost every case, often in exchange for services we like, such as connections with distant friends, or directions to the nearest gas station.

There are two key differences between this and what the government is doing. First is transparency: do we know the information is being collected, and by whom? And second, what could the people who have the data do with it? The specter of being tracked just by our cellphones is very real — and requires no snooping on conversations. (See sidebar, "Metadata matters.")

That said, corporate data-mining is pretty open. Most of those companies tell us — even if it's buried pages into a software license agreement — they're collecting data, and most of them make it fairly obvious they do so. For example, when we connect to Facebook, it's right in front of us that the site knows our own information and that of our friends. And we know, when we sign up for customer-loyalty programs, that we're being tracked in exchange for discounts or special deals.

And what companies can do with the data is pretty limited (or so we think). Of course, they could publish it — but apart from the fact that Facebook in particular offers publication as a benefit of its service, it's worth noting the effectiveness of public backlashes against Facebook's periodic attempts to relax privacy controls. That outcry is a limit on intentional corporate misuse of the data — and if the data is stolen or otherwise gets out unintentionally, federal and state laws offer recourse to those whose private data is compromised.

Which is not to say that corporations' use of our personal information is not invasive. But it is less of an affront because we know it's happening, assist in the data-collection process, have some recourse if policies change, and are limited in our vulnerability — at least companies can't lock us up!

Government data-mining, by contrast, is secret — until it's revealed by leakers who face prosecution for telling the truth. And the government's power is sweeping, including literal deprivation of freedom, or even life itself, through prosecution and punishment. Public outcry can only change things when we know what's happening — but too often officials hide behind the concept of classified information, even when they're involving corporations in the info-vacuum. And the so-called "public servants" are bought and paid for by special interests that conflict with our own.

Beyond being deprived of the information we need to make good decisions about our government's actions, we can't even fight back against telecom firms, which are forced to comply and protected from repercussions. A June 11 Huffington Post report details the millions of dollars spent by AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint from 2002 to 2012, including a combined $55 million on lobbying relating to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. And sure enough, the companies have gotten federal legislation enacted that gives them total retroactive legal immunity from civil lawsuits related to their participation in government surveillance programs. The immunity has been attacked, but repeal efforts have failed.

HAVING A PUBLIC CONVERSATION

It's easy to laugh about how ineffective this surveillance system might be, especially in certain cases: How did they miss the Boston-bombing Tsarnaev brothers? Why can't the feds locate NSA leaker Edward Snowden in a worldwide manhunt? "Agency Busy Spying on Three Hundred Million People Failed to Notice One Dude Working For It," wrote the New Yorker satirist Andy Borowitz. But to point out flaws, even arrogance, in the concept that data can tell us everything is to miss the point that our leaders apparently think data is all-seeing, and have taken it upon themselves to gather it without real oversight.

The biggest problem with this whole surveillance mess is that it was secret. We simply have not, as a democratic society, had the conversation about what kinds of freedoms and privacies we are willing to give up in exchange for what kinds of safety and security. As President Barack Obama put it in his false dichotomy June 7, "you can't have 100 percent security and then also have 100 percent privacy."

Nobody's asking for such a thing (nevermind that both concepts are unquantifiable) — we're asking for a clear and transparent balance between security and privacy, a balance arrived at through a public debate, both in Americans' own lives and in Congress. (Also useful would be a conversation through the courts; at present, only government attorneys are permitted to appear at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court's secret hearings, removing any possibility that government claims could be challenged or questioned.)

But it's hard to talk about the details of these programs without security clearances; whether it should be or not, most of this work is classified. That's where a post-9/11 recommendation that has finally borne fruit comes in.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board was suggested in the list of recommendations from the 9/11 Commission report, back in 2004, and was created by Congress later that year. It was never truly funded or staffed, but after a 2008 change in its authorizing law, and after years of Congressional and delays from the Bush and Obama administrations, its chairman was finally confirmed by the Senate on May 7 of this year.

That man, David Medine, has said his board will investigate the NSA program — after a classified briefing on June 11, he told the Associated Press "further questions are warranted." In addition to meeting with Obama and officials in the intelligence community, the board will also hold a public meeting slated for July 9, "that would bring together academics, experts and advocates to explore issues raised by the national surveillance programs," the Washington Post wrote on June 21.

But then again, perhaps these surveillance programs do keep us safer. As Stephen Colbert said of our enemies: "They hate us for our freedoms. The less freedom we have, the less likely they are to attack us."

There's a comforting thought.



Debunking 'nothing to hide'

'NO SECRETS' DOESN'T MEAN 'NO PROBLEM'

• Apart from the fact that you do have things to hide — or wasn't it you who posted nudie pics of yourself and your beloved online? (and was it really for the sake of living a transparent life?) — the claim that people have "nothing to hide" and that, therefore, government surveillance must be okay, is torn to pieces by George Washington University law professor Daniel Solove's 2011 book Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security (Yale University Press).

Solove argues that the problems of government surveillance go well beyond the watching and collecting. While most debate about privacy centers on themes along the lines of the all-seeing telescreens in George Orwell's 1984, Solove says a better example is Franz Kafka's The Trial, a chillingly prescient early 19th-century novel about a man arrested but not told why, and whose attempts to find explanation only result in vague information that he is being investigated by some authority for some unknown transgression.

"Government information-gathering programs are problematic even if no information that people want to hide is uncovered," Solove writes. "In The Trial, the problem is not inhibited behavior but rather a suffocating powerlessness and vulnerability created by the court system's use of personal data and its denial to the protagonist of any knowledge of or participation in the process. The harms are bureaucratic ones — indifference, error, abuse, frustration, and lack of transparency and accountability."

Beyond that, claiming "nothing to hide," Solove points out, suggests that what's hidden is bad, wrong, or illegal. But "Surveillance . . . can inhibit such lawful activities as free speech, free association, and other First Amendment rights essential for democracy," he writes.

There is also the key question of whether people own their own data. "Many government national-security measures involve maintaining a huge database of information that individuals cannot access," Solove writes. "Indeed, because they involve national security, the very existence of these programs is often kept secret." Calling this collection a "due-process problem," in which citizens are denied power over themselves and their information, Solove says this creates "a power imbalance between people and the government. . . . This issue isn't about what information people want to hide but about the power and the structure of government."

Solove also notes a key vulnerability that even law-abiding citizens have to government misinterpretation. "For example, suppose government officials learn that a person has bought a number of books on how to manufacture methamphetamine. That information makes them suspect that he's building a meth lab. What is missing from the records is the full story: The person is writing a novel about a character who makes meth. . . . Should he have to worry about government scrutiny of all his purchases and actions? He might not want to have to worry about how everything he does will be perceived by officials nervously monitoring for criminal activity. He might not want to have a computer flag him as suspicious because he has an unusual pattern of behavior."

So it's not that you have nothing to hide. It's that revealing all would leave you naked and powerless before the fearsome strength of the government — which is the very opposite of freedom.

_JI



'Metadata' matters

FOUR CALLS OR TEXTS CAN ID YOU

• If your concern is focused on whether the government is listening to your phone conversations, you're worrying about the wrong thing. Cellphone "metadata" — whom you call, when, from where, and how often — is much more interesting, and much more invasive than whether someone hears you say, "Hi. It's me. Can you please get milk?"

A study published in the online academic journal Scientific Reports in March details exactly how just four pieces of "spatio-temporal" data can "uniquely identify 95 percent of . . . individuals" without hearing any phone conversations or reading any text messages.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Catholic University in Belgium, and the Complex Systems Institute in Chile studied cellphone company data covering 1.5 million people's calls over 15 months. The data provided did not contain callers' names or addresses; it included only the time and location of the connecting cellular antenna each time a phone received or sent a call or text message.

By charting the series of antenna connections over time, the researchers were able to construct a map of each phone's movement, which they called a "mobility trace." In 95 percent of the traces, just four points of time-location data were needed to tell that trace uniquely apart from the others in the large dataset. (The most difficult traces to focus in on needed only 11 locations before becoming unique.)

While the study does admit that additional, outside, data would be needed to connect a mobility trace to a person's name, the researchers observe that many pieces of location information are a matter of public record (such as property ownership files), are disclosed voluntarily through online check-ins (Facebook, Foursquare), or are easily searchable (business addresses).

In an example offered on Democracy Now on June 12, cybersecurity expert Susan Landau said this: "When Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle, there were a number of calls that weekend before. One can imagine just the trail of calls. First the CEO of Sun and the CEO of Oracle talk to each other. Then probably they both talk to their chief counsels. Then maybe they talk to each other again, then to other people in charge. And the calls go back and forth very quickly, very tightly. You know what's going to happen. You know what the announcement is going to be on Monday morning, even though you haven't heard the content of the calls."

And even without a name attached, drawing a picture of events is simple, Landau said: "The metadata of a phone call tells what you do as opposed to what you say. If you call from the hospital . . . and then later in the day the doctor calls you, and then you call the surgeon, and then when you're at the surgeon's office you call your family, it's pretty clear, just looking at that pattern of calls, that there's been some bad news."

Bad news is right.

_JI