Jaeah Lee

Associate Interactive Producer

When Jaeah isn't making mockups, researching, or blogging for Mother Jones, she's usually reading about foreign policy, climate change, or new dinner recipes. A lover of mass transit, she can pretty much navigate the New York City subway blindfolded.

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Prior to joining Mother Jones, Jaeah worked as a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, focusing on China. Her writings have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Global Post, Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, and Movements.org.

Girl Talk: The Making of a Mashup Star

How Gregg Gillis, armed only with a laptop, came to rule the dance party.

—By Jaeah Lee

| Mon Apr. 25, 2011 4:09 AM PDT

Girl Talk in Paris, 2007.

When I arrive at the scene of a Girl Talk show in Oakland, California, one recent rainy night, front-man Gregg Gillis is just 15 minutes into his set. At center stage, Gillis is in a glowing neon light box, hunched over his laptop, T-shirt and hair soaked. He's bouncing left to right so intensely that the sweat on his hair sprays over his table. His laptop is bandaged in plastic for protection. A thick crowd of 70 people is moshing around him on stage. The air is already moist from the sweaty bodies smashing into each other.

Gillis, who has gone by the stage name Girl Talk for the last decade, fills an unconventional gap bordering rogue punk rocker, underground DJ, and international pop-star. In hip social circles, he's a household name. Many of his live shows sell out within a day. He has 22,693 Twitter followers. (He follows just one: Soulja Boy.) A few weeks after he released his latest album, All Day, the city council of Pittsburgh (his hometown) designated December 7 as Gregg Gillis Day. But by standard measure, he remains under the radar. It's not clear how many of his five albums he's sold thus far—some are sold in stores but others are downloadable with a donation. He peaked at number 14 on Billboard's ranking of "uncharted" artists, which is measured by the frequency of streamed plays, page views, and followings on sites like MySpace and YouTube.

[Read the full article]

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What We Didn't Know About Internet Controls

—By Jaeah Lee

| Thu Apr. 21, 2011 2:20 PM PDT

A new Freedom House report has uncovered increased threats to internet freedom worldwide. It's no news that politically restrained countries like China, Iran, and Burma are among the worst offenders, but as the report details, similar practices are fast spreading. Some surprising findings:

Even relatively democratic countries—notably Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey, and the United Kingdom—are seeing increased threats to internet freedom, such as "legal harassment, opaque censorship procedures, or expanding surveillance." In many cases, censors target content related to illegal gambling, child pornography, or inciting violence, but censorship incidents are also politically motivated. South Korea, for example, blocked access to some 65 websites related to North Korea, including the official North Korean Twitter account launched in August 2010.
Arrests of online activists are on the rise. In 23 of the 37 countries assessed, a blogger or other internet user was arrested for content posted online. Authorities in Vietnam sentenced four activists to a total of 33 years in prison for posting human rights violations and pro-democracy views on the internet.
In all the countries studied, governments made decisions about restricting internet content arbitrarily and without transparency. Even in democratically governed countries, censorship decisions are made without public discussion, and appealing the decisions "may be onerous, little known, or nonexistent."
If you thought Egypt's internet shutdown in January was bad...in recent years 12 of the 37 countries were known to exploit their control over telecom infrastructure to restrict access to politically relevant information.
More websites, activists, and dissidents are self-censoring. China is known for pressuring websites to censor their own content, an issue that led Google to move its search engine operations off the mainland to Hong Kong in early 2010. Since 2007 Thailand, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, and Venezuela have issued new laws or directives that put the onus of politically unfavorable comments on the media outlet. At least one editor in Thailand, for example, is facing criminal charges over comments that criticized the monarchy.

All in all, what we're seeing is "a very worrisome trend," with the state of internet freedom around the world "on the decline," and cyber attacks "against regime critics intensifying," said the report's co-editor Sanja Kelly on Monday at a panel hosted by the World Affairs Council. Alex Fowler of Mozilla, also on the panel, noted that as we celebrate the advent of Twitter, Facebook, and Google in spurring discussions of protest, "those things are centralizing information about individuals" that create "a lot of new risks."

Electronic Frontier Foundation's International Director Gwen Hinze says a company based in a more free internet country like the US can't really get around censorship rules in countries with tighter controls. She notes that expansions in US laws on wiretapping and invasion of privacy can set a bad precedent for countries around the world.

Fowler, Hinze, and Yahoo!'s Ebele Okobi-Harris add that while internet and telecom companies are bound by the laws of the countries they operate in, there are ways in which they can prevent a bad situation from getting worse: stepping up consumer protection measures by alerting users when their information is requested by authorities.

Climategate: Anatomy of a Scandal

How a hacker, some oil-funded pundits, and a credulous press undermined decades of climate research.

—By Jaeah Lee

| Thu Apr. 21, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

From the "hockey stick" graph to the hottest decade on record, a timeline of how Climategate really went down.

1988	NASA scientist James Hansen tells Congress the agency is "99% certain" record-high global temperatures are due to human activity.
1990	The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases its first report (PDF), predicts that without a significant decrease in greenhouse gas emissions, the world will warm 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit per decade in the 21st century.
1997	World leaders adopt the Kyoto Protocol, which the US later refuses to ratify.
1999	Michael Mann introduces the now-infamous "hockey stick" graph. Global warming worries 3 in 10 Americans a "great deal." 1990s confirmed as hottest decade in history.
JULY 28, 2003	Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) calls global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."
NOVEMBER 2003	Mining consultant Stephen McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick publish a critique of Mann's hockey stick (PDF), the first in a series of climate audits.
2004	Mann and a NASA climate modeler launch RealClimate, a blog "by working climate scientists."
2005	McIntyre debuts Climate Audit, a skeptics' blog, and publishes a second critique of Mann. The Wall Street Journal runs a front-page story, prompting House Republicans to launch an inquiry into Mann's research (PDF).
2006	An Inconvenient Truth features Al Gore and the hockey-stick graph. It becomes the fifth-highest-grossing documentary in the US to date. 70% of Americans believe the Earth is warming, but are divided on whether humans are the cause.
2007	Gore and the IPCC win the Nobel Peace Prize.
2007-'09	McIntyre demands data from climate researchers, including those at the University of East Anglia (UEA). One laments that the endless requests are like a "McCarthy-style investigation."
JUNE 2009	An unknown hacker attempts to break into the email accounts of five State Department employees who were working on climate change.
NOVEMBER 12-17, 2009	A hacker breaks into the CRU's server and steals more than 4,500 emails and documents from Mann and other climate scientists.
NOVEMBER 17, 2009	The hacker tries to post a link to the emails on RealClimate. Similar links appear on several prominent skeptics' blogs.
NOVEMBER 19, 2009	The story jumps from niche blogs to larger conservative echo chamber. Christopher Horner, a fellow at the oil-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), calls the scandal a "blue-dress moment" in the National Review.
NOVEMBER 20, 2009	Phil Jones, who heads the CRU, confirms the email theft. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and NPR run stories quoting portions of the emails. The Telegraph's James Delingpole picks up the term "Climategate" from the skeptic blog Watts Up With That? A few weeks later, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) says the emails are evidence of "scientific fascism."
NOVEMBER 21, 2009	CEI director Myron Ebell accuses scientists of "unethical conniving" in the Washington Post.
DECEMBER 19, 2009	The UN climate change conference in Copenhagen ends without any major international agreement on how to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
2010	Numerous independent reviews (PDF) conclude the emails were cherry-picked and misconstrued. But half of Americans now believe global warming is "generally exaggerated." Senate abandons a bill that would set the first-ever mandatory caps on US greenhouse gas emissions. The 2000s replace the 1990s as the hottest decade on record.
2011	McIntyre claims UEA is "stonewalling" requests for information on its investigation of the hack.

BP to Oil Spill Victims: Get Off My Stoop!

—By Jaeah Lee

| Fri Apr. 15, 2011 12:50 PM PDT

Almost one year since creating the worst oil spill in US history, BP is holding steadfastly to its response strategy: Duck and hope for the best. At its annual shareholder meeting in London yesterday, five Gulf residents who flew in to tell investors about their loss of livelihood were denied entry. A few tried to sneak in, among them 62-year-old Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation fisherwoman from Seadrift, Texas, who covered herself in oil to make a statement. Police arrested her for "breaching the peace," the Associated Press reports. Others who made it in were dragged out by security guards. NBC's Nightly News has more on this:

Is there any other way for a major corporation to deal with these kinds of situations but ignore protestors and feign optimism? BP's chief executive Bob Dudley doesn't seem to think so, based on what he told shareholders on Thursday:

BP remains a great company with a great history and I believe a great future...Not every company gets such an opportunity and we don't intend to squander it.

Except, er, you kind of already did squander it. For all its promises to compensate victims, many have not yet been paid out. Journalists have been barred consistently from accessing the coastal areas affected by the spill.

And why wouldn't BP ignore its victims, when few in Washington seem to care that much? Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard told us earlier this week about certain GOP Congressmen who are trying to expand off-shore drilling. And as Mac McClelland reported, Kenneth Feinberg, whom the president appointed to oversee victim compensation issues in the Gulf, was entirely unmoved by victims complaints at a recent town hall meeting in Louisiana. All of which is why the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression named the company and the Obama administration the worst First Amendment violators of 2011.

Meanwhile, some BP shareholders are increasingly frustrated about the way things are going. Investors accounting for 60 percent of shares voted yesterday against re-electing William Castell as the head of its safety committee, while about 7 percent voted against re-electing Carl-Henric Svanberg as BP chairman. Around 11 percent voted against the company's remuneration report, which awarded bonuses to Iain Conn, who oversees BP's refining activities, and Chief Financial Officer Byron Grote. BP might continue to ignore its oil spill victims, but good luck dodging your investors.

The #18DaysInEgypt Media Revolution

—By Jaeah Lee

| Fri Apr. 15, 2011 12:01 AM PDT

Feb. 11, 2011, CAIRO—As doctors and nurses march peacefully on one side of Al Qasr Al Aini Street, onlookers shoot video from their mobile phones. Even early in the demonstrations, protesters had cameras ripped from their hands and smashed on the ground, and journalists had their equipment confiscated. So the revolution was captured from their mobile phones.

Earlier this year, as the world watched tens of thousands of protesters pour into the streets of Egypt, Jigar Mehta noticed something: Many of the people in the crowds were also holding cameras. "Holy crap, people have probably been recording something over the last few days," he told himself. Mehta, a former New York Times video journalist, saw an untapped wealth of raw footage from the protests. He wanted to collect them and turn them into something bigger.

Mehta hashtagged his project #18DaysInEgypt, and sent out a call to action on Twitter, Facebook, and various email listserves. He asked people in Egypt to tag their videos and photos from the protests, and to catalog and reflect on their experiences. "All the footage is important to someone," he told me later. "What I want to know is why they chose to film at that moment."

When I first interviewed him back in February, Mehta didn't know what the end product of his crowd-sourcing media experiment would look like, but he thought it would help pioneer a new kind of storytelling. I caught up with Mehta again last week in San Francisco, where he's a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. What he showed me looked like a marriage between YouTube, Wikipedia, and Google Maps, culminating into an interactive, curated learning experience.

Take, for example, footage like this: