Secrecy Media Articles
Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on secrecy from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.
Hired in 2001 by the National Security Agency to help it catch up with the e-mail and cellphone revolution, Thomas A. Drake became convinced that the government’s eavesdroppers were squandering hundreds of millions of dollars on failed programs. He contacted a reporter for The Baltimore Sun. Today, because of that decision, Mr. Drake, 53, ... faces years in prison on 10 felony charges involving the mishandling of classified information and obstruction of justice. The indictment of Mr. Drake was the latest evidence that the Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks. In 17 months in office, President Obama has already outdone every previous president in pursuing leak prosecutions. His administration has taken actions that might have provoked sharp political criticism for his predecessor, George W. Bush. Mr. Drake was charged in April; in May, an F.B.I. translator was sentenced to 20 months in prison for providing classified documents to a blogger; this week, the Pentagon confirmed the arrest of a 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst suspected of passing a classified video of an American military helicopter shooting Baghdad civilians to the Web site Wikileaks.org.
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The Daily Beast reports that Pentagon investigators are trying to track down Julian Assange, the elusive Australian-born founder of WikiLeaks, who they believe is preparing to publish several years of State Department cables allegedly passed by the 22-year-old Manning, now being detained in Kuwait. The cables contain "information related to American diplomatic and intelligence efforts in the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq," and they could do "serious damage to national security" if made public, government officials told the Beast. But even if they find him, it's not clear what they could do to stop publication. Daniel Ellsberg says Assange "is in danger." Meanwhile, Wired's Threat Level blog, which broke the Manning story, is reporting that Assange ... is arranging Manning's legal defense and says Manning is no spy. Assange, who first gained notoriety as a computer hacker, canceled an appearance today at an International Reporters and Editors conference in Las Vegas.
Note: For more of Daniel Ellsberg's assessment of the personal dangers to Assange from the Pentagon's manhunt for him, click here.
When the operators of Southern Seaplane in Belle Chasse, La., called the local Coast Guard-Federal Aviation Administration command center for permission to fly over restricted airspace in [the] Gulf of Mexico, they made what they thought was a simple and routine request. A pilot wanted to take a photographer from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans to snap photographs of the oil slicks blackening the water. The response from a BP contractor who answered the phone late last month at the command center was swift and absolute: Permission denied. “We were questioned extensively. Who was on the aircraft? Who did they work for?” recalled Rhonda Panepinto, who owns Southern Seaplane with her husband, Lyle. “The minute we mentioned media, the answer was: ‘Not allowed.’ ” Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials. Scientists, too, have complained about the trickle of information that has emerged from BP and government sources. Three weeks passed, for instance, from the time the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20 and the first images of oil gushing from an underwater pipe were released by BP.
Note: For revealing reports from major media sources on government and corporate corruption and collusion, click here and here.
The Department of Defense announced that Specialist [Bradley] Manning, of Potomac, Md., had been arrested and was under investigation [for leaking a video of a US helicopter attack on civilians in Baghdad to a whistleblower website, Wikileaks]. The leak of the helicopter video, which Wikileaks titled “Collateral Murder,” caused serious consternation at the Pentagon, where senior officials are increasingly concerned about technology that makes it easier to anonymously post documents, photographs and videos online. But opponents of the Iraq war have said that the video provided irrefutable evidence of a military blunder, and that it should not have been classified. The episode also drew wide attention to Wikileaks, a once-fringe Web site that aims to bring to light secret information about governments and corporations. It was founded three years ago by Julian Assange, an Australian activist and journalist, and has published documents about toxic dumping in Africa, protocols from Guantánamo Bay and e-mail messages from Sarah Palin’s personal account.
Note: In case the above video disappears, click here to view it on one of our websites. The only reason this event made news is because the two cameramen killed were Reuters staff. US forces then fired on an unarmed van with children in it, which was attempting to bring the dead and wounded out of the combat zone. How many innocent civilians are killed like this and never make the news? Please spread this important video and help others to wake up and work together to stop the cruelty of some of the US forces. The Pentagon is working hard to shut down Wikileaks, the organization which secured this powerful video.
After half a century of investigation, a former nuclear physicist -- who worked on fission and fusion rockets for companies like Westinghouse and Aerojet General Nucleonics -- is convinced that not only are UFOs real, the government has known about them since 1947. "Some UFOs are intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft," Stanton Friedman told AOL News, calling the vast cover-up of their existence "the biggest story of the millennium." In 1958, UFOs caught his attention, and Friedman has since lectured about this subject at more than 700 colleges and professional groups in all 50 states and around the world. "After 53 years of investigation, I'm convinced we're dealing here with a cosmic Watergate," he [said]. "That means a few people within major governments have known since at least 1947 that some UFOs are alien spacecraft." In Friedman's new book, Science Was Wrong: Startling Truths About Cures, Theories, and Inventions "They" Declared Impossible, co-authored with Kathleen Marden, he wrote, "There's been no shortage of strong, negative proclamations from debunking groups and individuals who refuse to examine the evidence ... to support the notion that some UFOs are of extraterrestrial origin.
Note: For the full article at AOL News, click here.
The Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials. Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia. Plans exist for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world. Obama, one senior military official said, has allowed "things that the previous administration did not." Special Operations commanders have also become a far more regular presence at the White House than they were under George W. Bush's administration. The Special Operations capabilities requested by the White House go beyond unilateral strikes and include the training of local counterterrorism forces and joint operations with them. Obama has made such forces a far more integrated part of his global security strategy. He has asked for a 5.7 percent increase in the Special Operations budget for fiscal 2011, for a total of $6.3 billion, plus an additional $3.5 billion in 2010 contingency funding.
Note: For an analysis, click here. For lots more from reliable sources about the war crimes committed ongoingly by the US military and Special Forces worldwide, click here.
Images and reports of oil-drenched wildlife that's dead or slowly dying are starting to emerge. At least one cleanup worker alleges that BP is trying to keep such disturbing pictures out of the public eye. CBS News has gut-wrenching video of oil-covered birds in distress, including the brown pelican, Louisiana's state bird, which for many years was on the Endangered Species List. An unidentified cleanup worker took a New York Daily News reporter on a clandestine tour of the hidden wildlife carnage in Louisiana, accusing the BP of keeping the media at bay. "There is a lot of coverup for BP. They specifically informed us that they don't want these pictures of the dead animals. They know the ocean will wipe away most of the evidence. It's important to me that people know the truth about what's going on here," the contractor said. "The things I've seen: They just aren't right. All the life out here is just full of oil. When you see some of the things I've seen, it would make you sick," the contractor said. "No living creature should endure that kind of suffering." More oil-soaked birds arrived at cleaning stations today, as Louisiana officials continued to patrol the marshes and beaches.
Note: For revealing reports from major media sources on government and corporate corruption and collusion, click here and here.
The thing about the Bilderberg groups top secret meetings: you never know quite what is going on behind the police checkpoints. Across the world, secretaries to the rich and the powerful have blocked out the next three days in their bosses calendars for their annual gathering, this time at the Dolce in Sitges, one of Spains most exclusive resorts. Normally, every minute of their working lives is accounted for but, each year, a couple of hundred of the worlds financial elite and the more business-friendly members of the political class disappear from view. It is all terribly confidential breathe a word about it and youre out of the club but the Bilderberg watcher Daniel Estulin claims to have a copy of the agenda. The big question this time around is whether the euro will survive. They are afraid that the countries in trouble will leave and the euro will fall apart, said Mr Estulin. The Bilderbergers are nervous that the erosion of the euro could nudge the world back into recession while public services cuts could trigger unrest and radicalise the political climate.
Note: For more information from reliable sources on Bilderberg, click here. For lots more on powerful secret societies that make decisions in total secrecy that affect the whole world, click here.
As BP makes its latest attempt to plug its gushing oil well, news photographers are complaining that their efforts to document the slow-motion disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are being thwarted by local and federal officials working with BP who are blocking access to the sites where the effects of the spill are most visible. More than a month into the disaster, a host of anecdotal evidence is emerging from reporters, photographers, and TV crews in which BP and Coast Guard officials explicitly target members of the media, restricting and denying them access to oil-covered beaches, staging areas for clean-up efforts, and even flyovers. Last week, a CBS TV crew was threatened with arrest when attempting to film an oil-covered beach. On Monday, Mother Jones published this firsthand account of one reporters repeated attempts to gain access to clean-up operations on oil-soaked beaches, and the telling response of local law enforcement.
Note: To see some of the devastating photos from this tragic spill, click here. For an abundance of revealing articles from major media sources on government and corporate collusion and corruption, click here and here.
Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of [Israel's] possession of nuclear weapons. The "top secret" minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa's defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel's defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them "in three sizes". The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that "the very existence of this agreement" was to remain secret. The documents, uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky ... provide evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons despite its policy of "ambiguity" in neither confirming nor denying their existence. The Israeli authorities tried to stop South Africa's post-apartheid government declassifying the documents at Polakow-Suransky's request.
Note: A New York Times article states that Isreal has strongly denied this story. Yet even this articles states, "Israel has a longstanding policy of nuclear ambiguity, neither confirming nor denying that it has nuclear weapons, though it is widely believed to have developed a large arsenal."
Gary McKinnon has received a double boost in his five year battle against being extradited to America to face computer hacking charges. Home Secretary Theresa May [has] decided to halt the legal process so she [can] re-examine [the] impact of extradition on Mr McKinnons health. The coalition Government also confirmed in its formal agreement it would conduct a comprehensive review of the controversial extradition treaty under which Mr McKinnon was set to be extradited. Mr McKinnon, 44 ... is challenging a US bid to extradite him on charges of hacking into highly sensitive military computers eight years ago. Mr McKinnon was accused in 2002 of using his home computer to hack into 97 American military and Nasa computers, causing damage that the US government claims will cost more than $700,000 dollars ... to repair. He admits breaching the systems but denies causing damage and claims he was looking for evidence of UFOs.
Note: For more on Gary McKinnon's fascinating reasons for hacking into US military computer systems, click here and here.
BP, the company in charge of the rig that exploded last month in the Gulf of Mexico, hasn't publicly divulged the results of tests on the extent of workers' exposure to evaporating oil or from the burning of crude over the gulf, even though researchers say those data are crucial in determining whether the conditions are safe. Moreover, the company isn't monitoring the extent of the spill and only reluctantly released videos of the spill site that could give scientists a clue to the amount of the oil in the gulf. BP's role as the primary source of information has raised questions about whether the government should intervene to gather such data and to publicize them and whether an adequate cleanup can be accomplished without the details of crude oil spreading across the gulf. The company also hasn't publicly released air sampling for oil spill workers although Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the agency in charge of monitoring compliance with worker safety regulations, is relying on the information and has urged it to do so.
Note: For lots more from major media sources on corporate and government collusion and corruption, click here and here.
The gusher unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico continues to spew crude oil. There are no reliable estimates of how much oil is pouring into the gulf. But it comes to many millions of gallons since the catastrophic blowout. Mike Williams, one of the last crewmembers to escape the inferno ... says the destruction of the Deepwater Horizon [oil rig] had been building for weeks in a series of mishaps. The tension in every drilling operation is between doing things safely and doing them fast; time is money and this job was costing BP a million dollars a day. But Williams says there was trouble from the start - getting to the oil was taking too long. Williams said they were told it would take 21 days; according to him, it actually took six weeks. With the schedule slipping, Williams says a BP manager ordered a faster pace. Williams says there was an accident on the rig that has not been reported before. He says, four weeks before the explosion, the rig's most vital piece of safety equipment was damaged ... the blowout preventer, or BOP. The spill has cost BP about $500 million so far. But consider, in just the first three months this year, BP made profits of $6 billion. There are plenty of accusations to go around that BP pressed for speed, Halliburton's cement plugs failed, and Transocean damaged the blowout preventer. Through all the red flags, they pressed ahead.
Note: For lots more from major media sources on corporate and government collusion and corruption, click here and here.
Top military officials have continued to rely on a secret network of private spies who have produced hundreds of reports from deep inside Afghanistan and Pakistan. Earlier this year, government officials admitted that the military had sent a group of former Central Intelligence Agency officers and retired Special Operations troops into the region to collect information some of which was used to track and kill people suspected of being militants. Many portrayed it as a rogue operation that had been hastily shut down once an investigation began. But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials and businessmen, and an examination of government documents, tell a different a story. Not only are the networks still operating, their detailed reports on subjects like the workings of the Taliban leadership in Pakistan and the movements of enemy fighters in southern Afghanistan are also submitted almost daily to top commanders and have become an important source of intelligence. Pentagon officials said that ... the supervisor who set up the contractor network, Michael D. Furlong, was now under investigation. But a review of the program by The New York Times found that Mr. Furlongs operatives were still providing information using the same intelligence gathering methods as before.
Note: For revealing reports on the secret and extra-legal operations of the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq, click here.
There are around 450 criminal gangs around the world making money from images of child sex abuse, the UK's Internet Watch Foundation has said. The watchdog's annual report says that the 10 most prolific of these account for more than 650 web pages. But despite these gangs being well-established online, the IWF says the the industry is not growing. To help obscure their movements, they move their distribution networks regularly between different providers and countries. Most of the gangs operate a pay-per-view system, charging a monthly fee of around 55 for access to images and videos. Critics have accused the IWF of being ineffective, partly because it is separate from the police and partly because much of the illegal material online does not originate from the UK. IWF spokeswoman Sarah Robertson admits that it is not a policing body but denies that means it cannot act. "The amount of child abuse content hosted in the UK has fallen from 18% to 1% in the last seven years," she said. It is important to remember the serious nature of the content the IWF polices, she said, and that behind every image is a child being abused. Some 44% of the content highlighted to the IWF last year depicted the rape of a child and 23% of it featured children below the age of six.
Note: For powerful evidence that this kind of abuse is much more widespread than believed, and even goes to the highest level of government, click here.
Last-minute maneuvering in the Senate allowed the Federal Reserve to sidestep legislation that would have exposed its interest-rate decision-making to congressional auditors. Pressure from the Obama administration led Senate lawmakers to alter a provision pushed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) that was gaining momentum despite opposition from the Treasury and the Fed. It would have largely repealed a 32-year-old law that shields Fed monetary policy from congressional auditors. Thursday's Senate showdown came after senators on the left and right joined forces to support Mr. Sanders' provision. "At a time when our entire financial system almost collapsed, we cannot let the Fed operate in secrecy any longer," Mr. Sanders said. "The American people have a right to know." But Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke ... said in a letter to Congress the Sanders measure would "seriously threaten monetary policy independence, increase inflation fears and market interest rates, and damage economic stability and job creation."
Note: For an abundance of deep reporting on the hidden realities of Wall Street's shadowy operations, click here.
Capitalism is dead. The economy has a new Invisible Hand, the Goldman Conspiracy of Wall Street bankers. This transfer of power happened suddenly. As recently as late 2008 the Invisible Hand was on life support, near death. Suddenly, miraculously the Treasury secretary, Goldman's former CEO, transferred the power into a new Invisible Hand of God, the free-market ideology of Reaganomics ... a power absolutely essential to the survival of Wall Street's mega-bonus culture. Yes, that's why the Goldman Conspiracy must kill financial reforms ... why they will kill effective reform with the backroom support of Obama. This was predicted back in late 2008, even before the bailouts, back when we thought Reaganomics dead. Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein warned: "Free market ideology has always been a servant to the interests of capital ... During boom times it's profitable to preach laissez faire, because an absentee government allows speculative bubbles ... When those bubbles burst, the ideology becomes a hindrance and goes dormant while big government rides to the rescue," then a neo-Reaganomics "ideology will come roaring back when the bailouts are done. The massive debts the public is accumulating to bail out the speculators will then become part of a global budget crisis," setting up a new bubble, bigger meltdown, and the Great Depression 2 the world narrowly avoided in 2008.
Note: For a wealth of key reporting on the hidden realities of the Wall Street's shadowy operations, click here.
The Obama administration is seeking to compel a writer to testify about his confidential sources for a 2006 book about the Central Intelligence Agency, a rare step that was authorized by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. The author, James Risen, who is a reporter for The New York Times, received a subpoena on [April 26] requiring him to provide documents and to testify May 4 before a grand jury in Alexandria, Va., about his sources for a chapter of his book, State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration. The chapter largely focuses on problems with a covert C.I.A. effort to disrupt alleged Iranian nuclear weapons research. Mr. Risen referred questions to his lawyer, Joel Kurtzberg, ... who said that Mr. Risen would not comply with the demand and would ask a judge to quash the subpoena. He intends to honor his commitment of confidentiality to his source or sources, Mr. Kurtzberg said. We intend to fight this subpoena. The subpoena comes two weeks after the indictment of a former National Security Agency official on charges apparently arising from an investigation into a series of Baltimore Sun articles that exposed technical failings and cost overruns of several agency programs that cost billions of dollars.
Note: For many key major media articles on the efforts of the government to maintain secrecy, click here.
Mystery surrounds the U.S. military's Orbital Test Vehicle, the X-37B OTV, which launched into space ... from the Cape Canaveral Air Station in Florida. Is it an aircraft? Is it the next generation space shuttle? How much does it cost? And why is it such a secret? The X-37B OTV is a classified Air Force project that has never been fully explained by the Pentagon. Some worry it may be the start of military operations in space -- that the plane might some day carry weapons to shoot down enemy satellites. Some are concerned it may be used as a quick-response vehicle that could be sent very quickly with weapons to a danger spot, said Victoria Samson of the Secure World Foundation. Unlike the re-usable space shuttle, the X-37B is unmanned and much smaller. It is controlled from ground stations. It can stay in space for 270 days, but the Air Force won't say how long it's staying up this time or what exactly it will be doing other than testing out its high tech guidance and navigation. The Air Force won't even say how many billions of dollars it's spending on the program. The OTV is the first vehicle since NASA's shuttle orbiter that has the ability to return experiments to Earth for further inspection and analysis, the Air force said.
Before Wikileaks, or even the Internet, there were just plain leaks. Two weeks ago, Wikileaks.org released a classified video showing a United States Apache helicopter killing 12 civilians in Baghdad. The reaction was so swift and powerful an edited version has been viewed six million times on YouTube that the episode provoked many questions about how such material is now released and digested. Put another way: if someone today had the Pentagon Papers, or the modern equivalent, would he still go to the press, as Daniel Ellsberg did nearly 40 years ago and wait for the documents to be analyzed and published? Or would that person simply post them online immediately? Mr. Ellsberg knows his answer. I wouldnt have waited that long, he said in an interview last week. I would have gotten a scanner and put them on the Internet. Today, he says, there is something enticing about being independent not at the whim of publishers or government attempts to control release. The government wouldnt have been tempted to enjoin it, if I had put it all out at once, he said. We got this duel going between newspapers and the government.
Note: For many key reports from reliable sources on government secrecy, click here.
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