Putin spins into spotlight as Sochi looms

Russia’s Vladimir Putin has been ready for his close-up all his political life, with not always flattering results. But his career as a cover boy slid again this month, with two satirical covers popping up on heavyweight magazines the Economist and the New Yorker.

“What better way to depict the Russian president’s predilection for self-promotional stunts, of which the winter Olympics in Sochi is merely the most prominent example?” chortled the Economist in an editor’s note.

The cover in question is slugged The triumph of Vladimir Putin, featuring a spandex-clad Vlad on an Olympic rink,  arms raised for applause, while a female figure tagged “Russia” sits sprawled on cracked ice.

The New Yorker, twisting the satirical scalpel, shows a flirtatious Putin strutting his stuff in an ice-dancing costume and eye makeup, to an approving audience of Putin clones. That’s titled Jury of his Peers.

Ouch!

Of course this sort of thing isn’t new to Putin, whose skin is thinner than the ice on which the $50 billion Sochi effort is balanced.

Economist covers (among others) have pilloried him in the past, including one titled Russia Resurgent – with a Lenin-like Putin towering above a military parade while jets form up behind him, like a wartime Soviet propaganda poster. Then there’s the Rough Guide to Hell, with Putin engulfed in a bloody inferno along with ally Bashar Assad and bad hair icon Kim Jong-un against a Dante-like backdrop of ruin.

To toss his muscular machismo in his foes’ faces, Putin has fired back with a PR campaign that outdoes Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi for sheer flamboyance: tranquillizing tigers in the wilds, riding bare-chested through the tundra, throwing opponents on the judo mat and strapping into a hang-glider to “guide” Siberian cranes on their migratory path. (I could go on, but I’m out of breath.)

In the last election campaign, Putin’s spin doctors turned his KGB past into spy appeal, recruiting scantily clad “Bond girls” to buff his image. A song was composed for women who want a man “just like Putin.”  He was even declared the “sexiest man in Russia.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

At home, of course, Putin gallops all over the opposition, jails dissidents, whistleblowers and environmentalists and presides over a regime that believes that with enough force, you really can fool all the people all of the time. Outside that Kremlin bubble, though, sometimes the people just can't resist making a fool of you.

Olivia Ward covered the former Soviet Union from 1992 to 2002 as a correspondent and bureau chief. 



 

Future shock: data trolling and predictive policing

Code pink protesters stand outside a hearing before the House (Select) Intelligence Committee last month on Capitol Hill in Washington.  Photo: Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/MCT

For Americans planning to attend a protest sometime soon – maybe an anti-pipeline demo or a grudgefest against the Big Banksters – there’s good news.

Now you can be detained without the inconvenience of turning out on a cold rainy day and standing around for hours hoisting heavy placards.

According to records obtained by the U.S. based DBA Press and Center for Media and Democracy, security officials will know what you’re thinking in advance and can send a squad car to chauffeur you to a cozy interrogation room for a friendly chat.

If you don’t pass Go you could be detained for months – or years— under anti-terrorism rules with three meals a day and free room and board. All good, no?

If you’re shaking your head, you might find the new report alarming. It says that a new technology called, euphemistically, OpenMIND, is able to access password-protected sites and is “deliberately designed to hide both the presence of inquiring analysts as well as their subjects of interest.”

OM is a virtual vacuum that sucks up, stores and collates “vast amounts of data in order to monitor shifts in public opinion and predict the possible future actions of those being monitored.” Minority Report is no longer fiction, but science.

Who’s snooping? The records show the technology is used by American law enforcement and counter-terrorism fusion centre personnel. The ones who gather and analyse vast amounts of “open source intelligence” on Internet users.

A fusion centre, BTW, is a hub of municipal, county and state counterterrorism personnel and agencies that pass along any “suspicious” data to intelligence agencies. They will create a file that could expand throughout your life, regardless of whether your behaviour is within the law.

And the “open source intelligence” they’re using is not material from old fashioned published sources, but “information trolled from citizens’ Facebook, Twitter or other online social media presence.”  In other words, anything you confide to anyone online. That could be an outburst of anger about corporate greed, big-oil muscle or shabby treatment by a government department.

The scary part is it’s “harvested” and “investigated” by spooks unknown to the users, and whose judgment determines the fate of their data – and their lives. Banal beefs can be interpreted as threats, and calls for protests as potential violence. Who makes the calls, and why, remains secret.

Although the authorities insist they are only trawling for serious threats to national security, there is ample evidence that mined data is used for the benefit of powerful corporations whose agendas might be damaged by public dissent. Governments, too, can use it to neuter potentially outspoken opponents before they have a chance to gain an audience’s ear. And just the knowledge that somebody out there is listening promotes self-censorship. Ask any former East German.

Is there any antidote to toxic data-trolling? If so it hasn't been invented yet.  In the meantime? Step away from that device.

Olivia Ward has written on international conflicts, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to the Middle East and U.S.  as well as Big Data and its effects. 


 

  

Battle of the Christmas commercials (or, time to get out the tissues)

In Britain, it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. At least on the telly.

No snow, I'm told; no festive carols (yet), no drunken revelers in the street (again, yet.) But last week saw the release of the much-anticipated - truly - John Lewis and Marks and Spencer holiday commercials. This is an event. It makes the news! 

They're as much a part of the season as awkward office parties and tacky lights on Oxford Street. But they tend to be, well, kind of wonderful.

In particular, the ads for upscale department store John Lewis are guaranteed to make you weep, unless you're heartless and unkind don't like nice things happening to nice people (or bunnies, or bears.) Watch:

 

Last year's advert featured a snowman going on a hunt for the perfect gift for his missus. Let me tell you, the highway is no place for a brave, determined, yet fragile snowperson! See what I mean:

 

In fact, the John Lewis ads are so beloved the Daily Telegraph invites you to watch five and vote for your favorite and I really couldn't recommend more forcefully that you do so.

I find this year's ad for M&S less moving. Model-of-the-moment Rosie Huntington-Whitley falls down a sewer grate and seems to lose her clothes quite frequently. (Well, M&S is known for its underwear.) And then Helena Bonham-Carter shows up: 

 

You can also vote on what Rosie's dog should be called, if you're so inclined.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed. The upshot of all this? Someone on my list is definitely getting an alarm clock this year.

 Jennifer Quinn is a foreign affairs and investigative reporter at the Star. As a journalist with the Associated Press, based in London, she wrote extensively about British politics. Follow her on Twitter @JQStar.

NSA inside story: Big Brother blurts

Who has time to go jogging when you've got a bajillion emails to sort through....?

You read it here first: an exclusive interview with a covert, clandestine, undercover operative from the ultra-secret, shadowy, under-the-radar but much publicized U.S. National Security Agency.

Q: So dude. busy times?

A: Busy?  Can the Pope swim?  Is a duck Catholic? Are you kiddin' me?

Q: According to Edward Snowden and other leakers, you've been eavesdropping on 60 million Spaniards, 46 million Italians, millions of Brazilians and Mexicans. You've skimmed data from 70 million French phone records and bugged German Chancellor Angela Merkel even before she was in office.

A: So why do you think Eddie left the agency?

Q: You mean the ethical dilemma of snooping into so many people's private lives?

A: Geddoutahere! It was the overtime. You think we enjoy doing this?  Like, one minute you're hacking into a handful of would-be-terrorists' cellphones and the next you're sucking up every bleep and blurb that's sent out over every electronic signal. Think about it.

Q: So who planned this huge spy net?

A: That's way above my pay grade. But they don't spend 24/7 with their eyes and ears glued to computers in a basement that smells like old running shoes. Sometimes I feel like my head is going to explode. And not in a good way.

Q: What have you learned from all those hacked communications?

A: There's two categories: drop-dead boring and just-shoot-me-now boring. Do you have any idea how friggin' tedious other people's stuff is? The Spanish!  Always whining about unemployment. The Italians and their ungrateful bambini. The French!  Toujours in le snit.

Q: So no smoking guns?

A: A whole bunch of people talked about wanting to kill their spouses. But that's normal.

Q: What did you learn about Angela Merkel?

A: Don't get me started. Those three-hour gabfests with Christine Lagarde about the Greek debt. The endless bickering with the Social Democrats. The dry cleaning that never came back on time. No excitement at all -- not like the Sarkozys or Dominique Strauss-Kahn. And all her sentences ran backwards.

Q:And now we hear the agency has infiltrated Yahoo and Google worldwide.

A: Tell me about it. That was the last straw. Nearly 200 million records. Who messaged who and who wrote back. And what they said. Worse than a 200-year-long rerun of Bob and Ted and Carol and Alice.

Q: Has all that snooping affected your, er, private life?

A: It's totally over. I go home at night, my wife says, "Agent 5386," (I can't tell her my real name), "you never listen to me." That's what she says. Same every night. Now she's filing for divorce and moving in with her personal trainer.

Q: And you?

A: This is my last week on the job. I'm going into a monastery. Not one of those happy-clappy places where everybody is tweeting the Pope. Somewhere there's total silence. And nothing is wired except the light bulbs.

Q: Do you think Edward Snowden is a traitor?

A: If anyone can roll back this crazy work load he can. Bring it on, I say. In the agency the guy's a hero.

Olivia Ward has covered politics, conflicts and human rights from the former Soviet Union to South Asia, the Middle East and the U.S. Her phone has been tapped in at least two countries.

 

"White Widow" Mystery Deepens

Samantha Lewthwaite as seen on a fake South African passport.   AFP / GETTY IMAGES

 

The search continues for Samantha Lewthwaite, nicknamed the "white widow" for her marriage to bomber Germaine Lindsay, who killed 26 people when he blew up a train in London’s Underground on July 7, 2005.

While Lewthwaite's whereabouts remain unknown, the stories about where she has been just keep coming.

Britain's dogged press has relentlessly covered this story since her name emerged in connection with the deadly attack on Nairobi's Westgate Mall. Interpol issued a "red notice" concerning Lewthwaite on Sept. 26, but did so at the behest of Kenyan authorities for "conspiracy to commit felony" in an unrelated 2011 event. It is uncertain if Lewthwaite was involved in the Westgate attack.

What we do know, thanks to Sky News, is that Lewthwaite at one point wrote an ode to Osama bin Laden: "Oh Sheik Osama my father, my brother. My love for you is like no other."  

The Telegraph's reporting duo of Mike Pflanz and Aislinn Laing also revealed details concerning the birth of Lewthwaite's fourth child. Apparently she paid cash to deliver in a posh suite at a private clinic in Johannesburg, South Africa. (Not exactly abiding by Al Qaeda's pledge to eschew Western luxuries.)

Along with Damien McElroy, Pflanz and Laing also reported Sunday that Lewthwaite was given a British passport in February 2011, months before she disappeared. She was linked to a bombing plot in Mombasa, on Kenya's coast, later that year. She also received a fake South African passport in 2011, the paper reported, which she used to update her Kenyan tourist visas.

Kenyan authorities may not be able to find the elusive 29-year-old, but Britain's press is hot on the trail.

 

Michelle Shephard is the Star's National Security correspondent and author of "Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism's Grey Zone." She is a three-time recipient of Canada's National Newspaper Award. Follow her on Twitter @shephardm

Journalists an endangered species correspondent tells UN

 Richard Engel, NBC News chief foreign correspondent, at the UN Security Council last week in New York.  Kathleen Carroll (R), executive editor of the Associated Press. AFP Photo/Stan Hondastan Honda/AFP/Getty Images

More than 600 journalists have been killed in the past decade – some in spectacular terrorist bombings, others covertly assassinated by people they have named and shamed.

So last week the UN Security Council – the most powerful organ of the world body – held its first meeting on protecting the media in conflict, an increasingly difficult task in a world that has long since thrown rules of war out of the window.

One reason for that, said NBC correspondent Richard Engel – famously kidnapped by a pro-Syrian militia in 2012 – is that we’ve reached a time when, in combat zones, “we’re all bloggers and punks and rebels with cameras. There is absolutely no respect for career journalists any more.”

While that may bring a sneer to the lips of the aforementioned bloggers and punks, it was not just an elitist mainstream media rant.

In an Internet-dominated age when websites, print media and TV are inundated with 24-hour reports from known and unknown sources, it’s often difficult to tell reliable reports from partisan rhetoric from regime members or rebels with a cause.

“Now, there are bloggers,” said Engel. “There are tweeters. There are freelancers who see themselves as activists. There are freelancers who join rebel groups and carry guns.

“So if the discussion today is about protecting journalists, you have to decide who gets protection. Who deserves it? And who forfeits it?”

In Syria, says Engel, who has spent a decade in the world’s worst war zones, rebels have taken up cameras as well as guns, and state media are, unsurprisingly, propagandists for the regime. Engel has a simple rule to tell them apart.

“If you cannot or will not write an article that goes against your cause you’re not a journalist and don’t deserve to be treated like one,” he told the Security Council.
 
“I’m not saying either one – the rebels with the camera or the state broadcaster – should be mistreated, but they are fundamentally different from journalists.”

The lines are blurred, and getting hazier – and not just in the eyes of rebels and dictators.

 During the 1999 Kosovo war, NATO bombed state-run Radio Television of Serbia, killing 16 of its staff. During the Iraq war an American rocket struck the al Jazeera office in Baghdad, killing correspondent Tareq Ayoub. The U.S. earlier attacked al Jazeera’s office in Kabul. Emmy-winning British cameraman James Miller was shot by Israeli forces in Gaza in 2003. 

In these and other cases, countries waging war deny they are targeting journalists. But they are also anxious to win their propaganda wars, whether or not journalists are collateral damage.

Today it is even more difficult to draw the line. Jihadists and autocrats are as attuned to the social and “informal” media as to the mainstream, and lump them together conveniently, to the peril of those who are trying to do comprehensive reporting. 

Engel pleaded for governments to make distinctions that would protect professional journalists from attack as partisans. “We’re arrested. We’re detained. We’re harassed. We’re kidnapped and we’re killed,” he said. “Like you in the diplomatic community, we need protection to be objective.”

And objectivity, clearly, is no longer a fig leaf of protection.

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to the Middle East and South Asia. She is a founder of the Canadian Committee to Protect Journalists, now Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.


   

"Airing lies" - Al Jazeera journalists resign in protest

 

Al-Jazeera YouTube video reports on the arrest of its staff members by the Egyptian military.

 

As many as 22 journalists have resigned from  Al Jazeera in protest over what they say is the influential Arab network's alleged pro-Muslim Brotherhood bias, according to reports from rival media outlets in the Middle East.

The Gulf News website reported  that Karem Mahmoud, the anchor of Al Jazeera's Egyptian station, announced that the staff quit because of  “biased coverage” of the events in the country, where a military coup last week drove the Muslim Brotherhood and its elected president from power.

“I felt that there were errors in the way the coverage was done, especially that now in Egypt we are going through a critical phase," Mahmoud told another rival network, Al Arabiya.

 Al-Arabiya quoted Al Jazeera correspondent Haggag Salama, who accused the station of “airing lies and misleading viewers"  and said that four Egyptian members of editorial staff at the network’s headquarters in Qatar had resigned as well.

Some other media reports put the number of departing journalists at only seven.

In a statement on its press website, Al Jazeera acknowledged “some Al Jazeera ... staff have decided to leave" but blamed them for holding "partisan political opinions,” according to Al- Arabiya.

It is no secret that Al-Jazeera's owners, the royal family of the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, have been vocal supporters of deposed Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi and his Brotherhood party.

That has led to a backlash against the network by the Egyptian military and repression against its journalists in recent days.

The army raided Al Jazeera's offices and arrested its news director.  and arrested other staff members. Al Jazeera complained that as many as 28 of its staff in Cairo were detained.

The  tensions appear to have spread to fellow journalists.

The Associated Press reported  last week that reporters from Al Jazeera were unceremoniously kicked out of a military news conference held in the wake of the army's shooting of pro-Morsi supporters. One journalist demanded the Al-Jazeera people leave and they departed to the chants of "Out! Out!" from the other reporters.

The embarassing resignations from Al Jazeera come as its English-language  network is about to gain "an important foothold in the United States," the  Washington Post reports.

(The network has been available on Canada on the three major cable providers since 2010.)

Al-Jazeera America will debut next month in about 50 million cable homes in the U.S., with several high-profile American journalists including former Soledad O’Brien, the former CNN host and reporter.

________
 

 Julian Sher is a foreign affairs and investigative reporter for the Star and can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @juliansher. 

 

 

Whither Snowden? whistleblower's whereabouts a guessing game

No Snowden:  packs of disappointed reporters line up for a glimpse of fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden, in Sheremetyevo airport this week.  Photo: Reuters/Maxim Shemetov

   
He’s noodling around in Hong Kong. He’s basking on the beach in Ecuador. He’s wandering a Moscow airport, like a younger, blonder redo of  The Terminal's Tom Hanks.

When it comes to America’s most wanted whistleblower, Edward Snowden, nothing, it seems, is out of the question as the news spins on hour by hour. In the latest turn, Russia’s foreign minister said he had never crossed the border, while President Vladimir Putin maintained he was in a Moscow airport transit zone. 

Where is he really? Here are a few ideas.

Beijing: in this made-in-Washington version, Snowden is a long term Chinese operative who couldn’t wait to be repatriated to his spiritual home. That would put the seal on the U.S. charge of treason, and end the whining from those Frappuccino-sipping freedom of expression types.

Of course, Snowden hasn’t done himself any favours by telling reporters about American cyber-attacks on China – or that he deliberately took a job with contractor Booz Allen Hamilton in order to get access to worldwide lists of what the National Security Agency hacked.

Moscow: in the Hollywood version, a hapless Snowden is in an old KGB holding cell in Sheremetyevo airport, being done over by Russian spooks armed with advanced truth drugs and videocams.

Upbeat ending: he escapes with the aid of a beautiful Russian cosmonaut who handily flies him to the moon.

Downbeat ending: he spills the secrets, drinks some polonium tea, and dies. Moscow informs Washington the problem is solved. All’s well that ends well – except for Snowden.

Cuba: in the Graham Greene version, Snowden disguises himself as a journalist, joins the hack hunting pack on the Moscow-to-Cuba flight, and slides into a life of threadbare freelancing, recycling tidbits from seedy Havana bars and downloading masses of American conspiracy theory websites for Castro’s secret service.

Ecuador: in the truth-or-fiction version, Snowden is lionized as a Quito hero until he reads up on the media crackdown laws, sends an open letter to President Rafael Correa and winds up in jail. Correa refuses to extradite him because he disapproves of Washington’s authoritarian stand on freedom of expression.

Mumbai: in the Bollywood version, Snowden is smuggled onto an India-bound plane with a counterfeit passport, takes a top job with a high tech company and supervises the outsourcing of every remaining IT job in North America. And he even learns to dance!

Olivia Ward has covered conflict, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to South Asia and the Middle East. Her latest World Weekly story was on Big Data: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. 

      

"They are killing journalists like flies" - Mexican writer issues call for action

 

Mexican journalist Marcela Turati has reported on the victims of Mexico's drug wars / Photo by Julian  Sher

A father walking his daughter on the street is gunned down in front of her: his crime is being a journalist.

A female reporter is strangled in her own home and the authorities never bothered to investigate it, dismissing it as a robbery.

A third journalist asks his friends to find him a pistol – not to kill the narco-traffickers he knew were coming for him but to shoot himself if they came, he explains, because he fears the inevitable torture at their hands more than death.

“We have become war reporters in our own country,” Mexican journalist Marcela Turati told a spellbound crowd of 1,200 American and foreign journalists gathered this past weekend at the Investigative Reporters and Editors annual convention in San Antonio, Texas. “On the other side of the border, they are killing journalists like flies.”

She issued a stirring call for action, urging journalists and the public in the rest of North America to take heed of war that was spreading far beyond Mexico.

“Don’t ignore us, this problems does not stop at the border,” she said. “Investigate the trafficking networks in your own country.”

A writer for the newsmagazine Proceso, Turati described how in 2007 she had set out to report on poverty and human rights, helping to create a group called Periodistas de a Pie (Journalists on Foot).

But quickly her group refocused on training and protecting journalists as the narco wars raged.

Once a group of 30 women came up to her with pictures of their missing children, victim of the spiralling drug wars between rival cartels.

Entire towns had been abandoned, she said, because of a wave of serial drug murders.

“Suddenly, we were covering massacres of young people,” she said. “Before we realized it, we were a crisis centre,” fielding phone calls from colleagues desperate for help.

“We are in the middle of war which was not about drug trafficking but for control of territory – who will hold onto the lands where the narcotics are grown and sold, who will control the business, who will appoint the mayor or the chief of police?” she explained. “In situations like this, it is central to control the press so that no one will ask the questions,” she said.

In some cases, she said, journalists are forced to attend “press conferences” held by the local cartel chief and told what to cover, even paid a salary.

“The newsrooms are infiltrated too,” she warned. “Whoever refuses has to start a new life somewhere else.”

In the past year, she said, 17 journalists have disappeared and 72 were killed – not a single one of those murders was solved.

“Too many journalists are resigned that death is our destiny,” Turati said.

Some have been forced to quit their job, reduced to working as street vendors -  “penniless, broken, terrified.” 

But Turati, who authored a book called Fuego Cruzado: Las Victimas Atrapadas en la Guerra del Narco,” (“Crossfire: Victims Trapped in the Narco-War, does not agree with removing journalists from the danger zone.

“In this way the silencers win the game,” she said. “The battle is not just for freedom of expression but for the right of the people to be informed.”

The Mexican journalist called on her North American colleagues to explore the tentacles of the Mexican drug cartels that extend north of the Mexican border.

“Follow the narco money on both sides of the border,” she urged.

 “As your friends we need you to see that you need to face this problem as your own,” she said, noting that “drug-dealers and gangs, businessmen and money-launderers” outside of Mexico were fuelling the war.

“We must do journalism because that is what we are,” she said. “We must expose the business of drugs and the arms trafficking networks. We must expose corrupt authorities.”

Journalists are a cynical bunch by nature, trained to keep their emotions in check. But by the end of her speech, Turati had the crowd of more than a thousand standing on their feet, clapping and cheering.

“Not everything is lost. Don’t abandon us in the struggle,” she said. “In the war against silence, human life is at stake.”

________

Julian Sher is a foreign affairs and investigative reporter for the Star and can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @juliansher. 

 

Kid from refugee camp becomes singing sensation on Arab Idol

                                                                    Facebook images of Mohammed Assaf

Very little good news comes out of the Middle East these days, so here's one. 

A 23-year-old kid from a refugee camp in Gaza has become a regional celebrity and a source of Palestinian pride as a contestant on Arab Idol. 

Mohammed Assaf is singing tonight in the finale of the talent show broadcast in Beirut, Lebanon as millions of fans all over the Arab world gather to watch his traditional songs. Some cafes in the West Bank city of Ramallah are even offering to text a vote for every cup of coffee that customers order, Reuters reported. 

One fan tweeted that he “unites Palestinians as the legendary Arab singers of the past once did” while another added, “he brings out the best in us.”

Assaf grew up in the Khan Younis refugee camp in the Gaza Strip where he lives with his parents and six siblings. He sings at weddings. 

Politicians are galvanizing around Assaf too, perhaps hoping a bit of his stardust will rub off.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has encouraged the Palestinian diaspora to vote for Assaf, and instructed the ministry of foreign affairs to contact its embassies around the world in an effort to mobilize support for the young star, Maan news agency in Lebanon reported. 

He has been described as charming and indeed Assaf thanked Palestinian leaders for coming to watch him perform .

"Their presence gave me more energy to move on and sing better and represent Palestine in its beautiful image," he told Maan. Assaf is up against three other contestants, including a young Syrian woman. The winner will be announced on Saturday.

 This YouTube video alone has been watched 3.4 million times. 

 

Hamida Ghafour is a foreign affairs reporter at The Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour