Jacques Henno, French news reporter

"Big Blue" confronts students with concrete problems, before hiring the best ones

The interest from big companies for Second Life: virtual worlds can be used for business (marketers can use metaverses to project a cool image of products; retail outlets can use them to sell real-world goods; business teleconferencing...) and employee relations (meetings; social-networking...).

"Robert Delorme is one of the World's leading developers of complex systems theory for application in the social sciences. Building on the contributions of Herbert Simon, he has created a highly original theoretical framework concerning 'effective complexity' to deal with ill-structured problem situations that are very frequently encountered in the real world."

"Network neutrality" and other issues surrounding network carriers' proposals to charge for higher priority traffic

The future of advertising: how technology will affect commercials on TV, radio, mobile phone, billboards, in shops, video games, newspapers, etc.

The high performance computer market + US, Japanese, Chinese and French supercomputers projects aiming at breaking the petaflop computing barrier.

02/1992 - 03/2003: Prisma-Presse, Paris, France.
News reporter and, then, manager.

Prisma-Presse is a subsidiary of the German Bertelsmann group and is France's second largest magazine press group.

I have occupied 4 different positions with Prisma-Presse:
o 03/2000-03/2003: deputy editor of Web Magazine, the leading French monthly magazine dedicated to the internet and multimedia, with a paid circulation of more than 100,000 copies and an audience of more than one million readers on average per issue. Responsibilities included:
- keeping people on schedule and within budget (130,000 euros per year under my control)
- management of 15 people and training of 10 people
- search for commercial partners (e.g.: a phone company to set up a SMS service for our readers)
- planning, rewriting and editing, each month, of 60 to 80 pages
- marketing (lay-out of the front page of the magazine, writing of the press releases sent to other newspapers, recording of the advertisements put on radio stations)
- public relations (I have been interviewed by several French radio and TV stations: Europe 1, France Info, RMC, TF1, France 2; I gave a lecture to second-year students of Sciences-Po Paris, one of the French most distinguished universities ).

o 1994-2000: news reporter, in charge of a department of Capital, the leading monthly business magazine in France, with a paid circulation of 410,000 copies per month. Responsibilities included:
- management and training of 5 news reporter
- planning, rewriting and editing of cover stories requiring up to 2 months of preparation. Performance: 390,000 to 470,000 copies sold.
- interview of American and Japanese businessmen: Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple), Andy Grove (Intel), Michael Dell (Dell computers), Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of the Mario video games, published by Nintendo)…

o 1993-1994: news reporter, in charge of the "Management" section of Capital. Wrote, for example, as a special correspondent, ten articles about the Silicon Valley companies, in California.

o 1992-1993: news reporter, Capital. My investigations were often the most popular ones, according to the surveys made by Prisma-Presse among the subscribers of Capital.

1990 - 1992: PA Consulting Group, Paris, France.
Consultant, specialized in recruitment and head-hunting.PA Consulting is an English consulting firm operating worldwide.
Prospected human resources directors and selected candidates. For example, I recruited the manufacturing director of Larousse, a leading French publishing companies.

1986 - 1990: "Valeurs actuelles", Paris, France.
Financial analyst.
"Valeurs actuelles", a weekly, very well-known among French businessmen, is published by a subsidiary of the Dassault Group.
Financial analysis of French companies listed on the stock market.

PUBLISHED BOOKS

Tous Fichés : l'Incroyable Projet Américain pour Déjouer les Attentats Terroristes

November 2005, ed. Telemaque, Paris, a book about intelligence, data mining and commercial databases: US project to design an early-warning system that mine intelligence databases, but also commercial databases, for telltale signals of terrorist plots. Impacts on privacy.

"Tous fiches : l'incroyable projet américain pour déjouer les attentats terroristes" can be translated by "Files on all of us: the amazing US project to deter terrorism".
This survey describes a US Intelligence program aimed at discovering terrorist plots: the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program. In 2003, US Congress banned use of TIA against US citizens but allowed it against aliens/foreigners outside US.

TIA is designed as an early-warning system that mine intelligence databases, but also airline databases (the data of all passengers arriving to USA or flying over USA are screened), private databases of credit card records and other transactions, for telltale signals of terrorist plots.

In this book, I also describe how Acxiom, a US marketing databases company, is a US Pentagon contractor ; and how all marketing information gathered by Acxiom outside the US can be used by the US Intelligence Community (many countries are targeted as Acxiom has subsidiaries in UK, France, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, Portugal, Poland, Australia and New Zealand).

This is NOT science-fiction: the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping, authorized by George W Bush proves that this agency is collecting and data-mining information intercepted from thousands of people. US newspapers are now writing articles about TIA and related research programs (Novell Intelligence from Massive Data, Advanced Capabilities for Intelligence Analysis program...). For example, see: http://govexec.com/dailyfed/0106/012006nj1.htm

Here are a few examples of people I have interviewed for this book:

• Steven Aftergood, director, project on government secrecy, Federation of American Scientists

• Jennifer Barrett, Acxiom chief privacy officer

• Bryce Benjamin, CEO, Language Weaver

• Susan Binns, European Commission director (previously in charge of personal data protection)

• Jean-Paul Brodeur, Professor of Criminology, director of the ICCC (International Centre for Comparative Criminology )
University of Montreal (Canada)

• Andreas Dietl, director, EDRI (European Digital Right)

• Lara Flint, CDT (Center for Democracy and Technology)

• Edward Hasbrouck, travel technology expert

• Chris Hoofnagle, EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center)

• Rajeev Motwani, Stanford university professor, data mining expert

• Timothy Quillin, analyst, Security and Defense Information technology research department, Stephens Inc

• Derek Smith, CEO, ChoicePoint Inc.

• David Spenhoff, marketing vice president, Inxight

• Jeffrey Ullman, Stanford university, professor (emeritus), data mining expert

Here is the English translation of an article about TIA which I wrote for the January 28, 2004 issue of Les Echos, the leading business daily newspaper in France.

You can buy this book on Fnac.com

Les Enfants Face aux Ecrans : Pornographie, la Vraie Violence.

November 2004, ed. Telemaque, Paris, a book about the impacts on children of violent and pornographic images from TV, video games and the internet: desk research, interviews of senior experts (media specialists, psychiatrists, sociologists, historians…), writting of 200 pages. The aim of this book is to explain to a large audience the impacts of violent and porn pictures on children and the social and psychological contexts of this issue. You can read sample pages -in English- (Do Screens Serve as Scapegoats?) of this book by clicking here.

After the publication of this book, I belonged to a team assembled by the French Social Services Ministry and in charge of exploring the issues raised by the use of Internet by children. I also gave a lecture on Children and Pornography to a team of experts assembled by the French Sport minister.

My book was given to all the French Deputies and I emailed them an open letter requesting a better protection of children using the Internet, thanks to better content filtering software. I also sent comments to the public consultation launched in Spring 2007 by the European Commission about Safer Internet and Online Technologies for Children.

You can buy this book on Fnac.com

"Video games", August 2002, in the "Idées reçues" collection of Le Cavalier bleu, a French publishing house. You can read sample pages -in English- (Do Video Games alter our mind?) of this book by clicking here.