Rohan Jayasekera

Bruce Springsteen: 41 Years on Thunder Road from Phil Whitehead on Vimeo.

A music-video-supercut of Bruce Springsteen singing Thunder Road between 1975-2016

“Springsteen refuses to be a mercenary curator of his past. He continues to evolve as an artist, filling one spiral notebook after another with ideas.” -David Remnick, The New Yorker

One of the many shocking things about the mass sexual assaults in Germany on New Year’s was the inadequate police response to the unfolding violence despite circumstantial evidence that it had been coordinated in advance. But why was the evidence only circumstantial? Why is it still so?

Take the UK and the 2011 riots, organised via social media and encrypted messaging. It was a layered phenomena: framed on Facebook, inflated by gawkers drawn via Twitter, tactically exploited by criminals via Blackberry, and fanned by the visually arousing real-time geo-located images of YouTube.

Police across Europe listened and learnt. But the significance of monitoring putative youth violence online has taken on far greater import since. Street gangs are the recruitment spaces for tomorrow’s salafist euro-jihadis.

The link between crime and terrorism is well recognised, if under researched. It has been so for years, historically from experience in Northern Ireland to the Sahel and beyond, to today’s two-way trafficking gangs who send children north to brothels and wannabe terrorists south to the Islamic State.

It’s easy to detect the trend through the briefest look at the criminal gang records of self-styled ISIS inspired lone wolves. The killers increasingly come from a very precise sector of society, especially on mainland Europe and particularly in France, as Oliver Roy, among others, points out.

As in the UK in 2011, social media is still the means to stir the pot of disaffected criminal youth, only now the scum that rises to the top (or sinks to the bottom) are as prepared to turn to terrorism as organised gang crime. Or both.

Thus rapid interpretation of social media ‘chatter’ has become a primary tool in police and state intelligence early-warning systems. Second-generation Muslim migrants running with European street gangs must now be the most readily definable and broadly monitored community in Europe.

An emerging pattern

On New Year’s Eve attention had focused on Munich where similar areas were closed after intelligence reports indicated that Islamic State supporters planned attacks. Helsinki police staved off another incident in advance. It seems implausible that the monitors missed the chatter around the gang’s preparations for Cologne. Yet it did not trigger a pre-emptive police response.

Instead “the police were slow to respond to reports of sexual assaults, slow to admit to an emerging pattern of assault – or maybe even to piece one together at all – and say now that they are unlikely to be able to apprehend or convict any of these brazen serial sexual predators.“

“Perhaps, “ wrote Gaby Hinsliff in an insightful piece for the Guardian, “as with the mob assaults on women, including journalists covering protests in Tahrir Square, where sexual opportunism was hard to distinguish from political intimidation, this feels like a new phenomenon”.

Or perhaps the point of gathering Cologne’s scum for a local re-run of the vile gang gropes organised by Egyptian and Indian youth, say, was to deepen the pool from which jihadi commissars fish for future lone wolves?

I’ve spent months now studying the political economy of ISIS and nothing would surprise about its ability to mutate ideology and practise to suit environment and opportunity. If so perhaps German state intelligence, realising this, held their tongue to see what emerged from the pool later.

As a firm sceptic on the subject of intelligence work, I could also put it down to a failure to present covertly gathered information into actionable intelligence. This is what spooks call an “I&W” (Indications and Warning) bulletin. Often actionable information is left off the bulletin to protect the ‘integrity’ of their intelligence from police officers working outside their gilded circle.

But you probably saw the last series of Homeland, so I’ll end my sub-Russia Today-style conspiracising with a Glenn Greenwald-ready question: How much easier will it be to publicly present a surveillance clampdown on minorities now that the primary motive is to target rapists rather than activists?

Leftageddon

Anyway, no one is listening. The popularly circulated reason for this chronic failure of operational policing is not spooks over-protecting their sources, but that well-known crime against humanity, Political Correctness.

Deborah Orr, also writing in the Guardian, called it “leftageddon”. Two matters close to the progressive heart pitted against each other. “When the rights of women and a warm reception for migrants come into conflict,’ “it’s understandable if the left panics – but we have to salvage nuance”. Some hope.

Virtual gangs of angry men of a particular age and ethnicity immediately organised online. Driven by the desire to prove their victimhood is as good as any minority’s, they fell like a pack, groping at a section of society they hold in historic contempt. Their target, folk peacefully expressing themselves on their own terms in their own culture. 

Like many, Hinsliff was circumspect but frank. “Many Germans are asking why politicians, police and broadcasters seem so reluctant to discuss what happened under cover of the crowds,” she wrote, “and whether it’s because the attackers are widely described as looking Arab or north African. Which is why, of course, liberals like me are reluctant to talk about it.”

But not to do so risked, she said, miserably self-censoring, giving the “why can’t we talk about immigration?” brigade ammunition for their conspiracy theories. “Journalism isn’t really journalism when it avoids stories for fear of how some might react.” 

Hinsliff valiantly verbally slapped down a dismissive Peter Hitchins – at his most smugly patronising – on BBC R4’s World at One programme. But the opportunity to exploit the “regressive left’s” hesitating failure to square both multi-culturalism and women’s rights was too much for some to pass up.

Mercifully the inventor of the phrase ‘regressive left’ spelt it out in a well argued article for The Daily Beast. Majid Nawaz: “If liberals do not address such issues swiftly, with complete candour and courage, the far-right and anti-Muslim populist groups will get there first. They have been doing so for a while now”.

The route out of this predicament is to speak freely in defence of all women’s right to justice and protection under the law. Regardless of race, colour or creed. And frankly, if the theory is that women need the protection of modesty to deter sexually incontinent males, it’s the males who are problem.

More than 100 countries had some form of source protection framework in place in 2007 according to the Privacy International report Silencing Sources. In many of the 121 countries examined in this new study (authored by WAN-IFRA Research Fellow Julie Posetti) it was found that legal source protection frameworks are being actually or potentially:

Eroded by national security and anti-terrorism legislation, 


Undercut by surveillance – both mass and targeted,

Jeopardised by mandatory data retention policies and pressure applied to third party intermediaries (like ISPs, telcos, search engines, social media platforms) to release data, 


Outdated when it comes to regulating the collection and use of digital data. Examples include: the admissibility, in court, of information recorded without consent between a journalist and a source; the extent to which existing source protection laws also cover digitally stored material gathered by journalistic actors.

Over at Altimeter Group in San Francisco, Principal Analyst Brian Solis is sharing his list of 26 Disruptive Tech Trends for the Rest of the Decade on LinkedIn. It's everything you will expect from the author of What's the Future of Business (WTF)

But Tech Trend #3 - Digital Detox Improves Digital Productivity - is worth saving. "Digital is its own drug," he writes. "People will learn how to hack their workflow because they have to. There’s too much email, too many meetings and not enough leadership to change routines."

Ah, true. Brian’s an advocate of what he calls "individual productivity hacks," designed to "improve experiences and relationships professionally and personally". 

Everyone will need to have some sort of digital 'detox' to get the dependency on poisonous habits out of their 'systems'. That's their mind's system, not their computer's. This is the means to maintain focus, and will and/or focus.

Some will simply unplug from the Internet, others will discover and share “life hacks” such as…

Writing down distractions from tasks at hand

Checking email once a week

Scheduling meetings in 20-25 minute increments

Listening to music without lyrics

Spending 10 minutes a day on Headspace

Fasting from media

Not responding to every txt

Turning off all desktop, social and mobile notifications

All reasonable, except number two, which is berserk. In an ideal world, I'd check, reply, delete or archive email twice a day, first thing in the morning, then first thing in the afternoon - the way we used to deal with 'snail mail' (remember that?). Maybe do a quick scan of the in-box half an hour before you finish for the day, while checking off today's To-Do list and preparing tomorrow's.

Eight, “turning off all desktop, social and mobile notifications,” is a great way to stop colleagues ambushing you with essential must-see messages that turn out to involve pandas and phone cameras.

Time blocking meetings in 20 minute increments is a brilliant idea, as is, I find, blocking activities to specific time periods generally, pomodoro style. And liistening to music without lyrics is something I hadn’t really thought about, but makes perfect sense.

I didn’t get on with Headspace. As a Londoner there’s something about Headspace guru Andy Puddicombe’s Bristol accent I find distracting, which totally defeats the object. But being a lapsed Theravadan Buddhist by birth and and PTSD self-healer, I totally ‘get’ the value of mindfulness and meditation.

Holly Hunter in Broadcast News

And switching off? One of my top ten all-time movie faves is the 1985 media satire Broadcast News (Seen it? No? Do!). One of my favourite running gags in it is pathologically driven news editor Jane Craig’s (Holly Hunter) way of moving to quiet spots, switching off her phone and venting her stress in huge - but short - gulps of sobs, mixing pleasure and pain all at once.

Once upon a time Oliver Letwin was just one of a battalion of 1980s political ideologues, on the right and left, who would just dig in deeper when their half-baked theories came under attack.

Today he has to dig himself out, his historical prejudices embarrassingly exposed by the release of UK government papers after 30 years in the secret files. Honestly though, should we care? As The Independent writes, “at the time the Conservative Party — overwhelmingly male and privately educated, and at the time leading a House of Commons that was still exclusively white — was uniquely disconnected from the real world”.

Thirty years on, Letwin’s mental mix-tape of ideology and racism is weirdly anachronistic; a Kajagoogoo track on a Radio 6 Music playlist. But in the 1980s so-called Special Advisors or ‘SPADs’ like Letwin were new and shocking to political observers, not only for their youth, but also for the way they rode the authority of their patrons to drive ideology behind the scenes.

The model came from the US: Nixon’s youthful pet lawyer John Dean, nicknamed the ‘Pilot Fish’ after creatures that ride the slipstream of killer sharks. Pseudo-moral certainty fuelled the SPADs’ impact and arrogance. They were the commissars of Margaret Thatcher’s revolutionary ideology, and in Letwin’s case it seems, white English racial superiority as well.

Older Tories hated them. 1980s Tory Party Chairman Cecil Parkinson, a Lancashire grammar school lad, complained to me about the ‘bright tykes’ of Central Office running riot with ‘hare-brained schemes’ in his time. Youthful ideologues, their prejudices unchallenged, locked into a bubble of self-regard inflated by friends and colleagues of identical political opinion.

It was as hard to ignore them socially as it was politically. I spent a hideous New Year’s Eve at the Knightsbridge home of a colleague, daughter of a Tory media grandee. The Tory SPADs were there in force, in pre-arranged uniform of bowtie, dinner jacket and Dr Marten boots, sneering and jeering, pointedly singing Rule Britannia instead of Auld Lang Syne at midnight, January 1, 1985.

The revelations of that year show just how aggressively people like Letwin used ideology behind the scenes to force revolutionary change on the Conservative Party of the 1980s. Letwin, we discover, dismissed proposals by Employment Secretary Lord Young to foster a “new group of black middle-class entrepreneurs” in the inner cities, and Environment Secretary Kenneth Baker’s case for refurbishing council apartment blocks.

He was particularly hostile to the idea of so-called ‘One Nation’ Tory politics espoused by Thatcher’s great rival, Michael Heseltine, who had dealt with an earlier outbreak of inner city violence in Brixton and Toxteth.

Get funding direct to professional and independent news organisations that need investment to stay professional and independent, prioritise the role of in-house media training with local technical college back-up and give a backroom role to NGOs and donors in international media development.

Simple - or so I thought. Nobody else agreed with me, no matter how often I beat the drum. But for the record I still believe it. Here’s my pitch to a UNESCO International Conference on Freedom of Expression and Media Development in Iraq, way back in January 2007. The media’s changed since, of course. 

I’m actually here to talk about professionalising the media and institutional development and that’s what I’m going to address today and I’m going to address it by asking a very basic question to start, which is, when was it exactly that donor agencies and foreign NGOs were given the job of making good journalists?

When I trained as a journalist in the UK between 1979 and 1984, I got my training from two sources. The first were my peers. I worked in a newspaper that had internalised the principles of professionalism, then encapsulated as accuracy and responsible reporting. I had an editor and desk sub-editor who constantly questioned my professional perspective. They corrected me, sometimes line by line, and constantly questioned my assumptions about the stories that I wrote.

By working in a newspaper where accuracy, fairness and professionalism were valued, I learned the skills that I needed to make my articles meet those standards. I do not believe that there’s a media-training centre anywhere in the world that could teach a journalist more in the classroom than he or she could learn working day in, day out on a good paper.

The second source was the academic sector. Journalists also need the kind of specialist training that the university or technical college can easily provide. In my day, the classroom part of the training deliberately focused on the law as it affected the reporters’ job and functional skills such as shorthand and typing. My first newspaper sent me to college between working hours to learn these things and how to apply these lessons learned to my daily duties as a reporter.