By Matthew Russell Lee
www.innercitypress.com/un1panopticon121409.html
UNITED NATIONS, December 14, updated -- As UN correspondents were moved over the weekend to smaller offices without floor to ceiling walls, the UN's lack of respect or understanding for independent media became clear. Directly above the journalists' cubicles, Inner City Press discovered a spherical black security camera. Even investigative journalists meeting with UN whistleblowers would be filmed under this arrangement.
One long time correspondent, when Inner City Press pointed out the camera, called it "creepy." Another asked how it is different than the UN bugging journalists' telephone conversations or reading their mail.
UN 360 degree security camera over journalists' cubicles
Those in charge of the relocation space for the media during the UN's Capital Master Plan renovation have problematic relations with independent media.
CMP chief Michael Adlerstein, for example, demanded of the Press "did you make a mistake" regarding reporting of a death at the UN, and asked "how should you be punished?" He has also barred the Press from his Town Hall meetings about the CMP.
The head of the Department of Management, Angela Kane, convened and summarized a meeting in May 2009 at which the UN's top legal officer, spokesperson and speech writer strategized on legal threats against three publications, including this one, which they sought to be removed from the Google News data base.
As one Greek correspondent has confirmed, with documents leaked from within the UN Department of Political Affairs, the UN system including the UN Development Program pays and controls many of the journalists which cover it.
But to actually monitor and film in their offices the journalists who are trying to hold the UN accountable to member states and the public is a new low. Watch this site.
Footnote: one wonders, too, if this means that Ambassadors and other diplomats will also be surveilled.
Update I: a UN official with responsibility over the swing space into which UN correspondents are being moved has argued to Inner City Press that the cameras are only there to film the doorways, to see who enters. But they are round and film 360 degrees. Watch this site.
And see, www.innercitypress.com/un1panopticon121409.html
