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Civil Liberties News Stories

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on the erosion of our civil liberties 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.

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Sort articles by: Article Date | Date Posted on WantToKnow.info | Importance

We can't let the coronavirus lead to a 9/11-style erosion of civil liberties
2020-03-23, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
Posted: 2020-03-30 02:16:32
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/23/coronavirus-civil-liber...

My adulthood has been punctuated by severe national emergencies. The first my generation experienced was the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. The government quickly responded by attempting to achieve two things: one, expanding executive power, and two, transferring public wealth into private corporations. The second national emergency my generation experienced was the 2008 housing bubble collapse and subsequent recession. Again the federal government ... sought to exploit the crisis to move vast wealth from the public treasury into private bank accounts. A staggering $14tn was transferred from taxpayers to private hands. [The] latest iteration is the Covid-19 pandemic. Once again, the federal government appears poised to exploit this emergency to expand executive power and move wealth from the public treasury into private bank accounts. As we witnessed with the authoritarian reactions to 9/11, emergency violations of civil liberties are not easily rolled back, and often aggregate over time. In the wake of 9/11, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which gave sweeping powers to the executive branch. In 2012, Obama signed an expanded version into law, which gave the president the power to hold individuals, including US citizens, in military detention indefinitely, which means for life. We must reject such authoritarian measures wholly.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the erosion of civil liberties from reliable major media sources.


Inside the Military's Top Secret Plans if Coronavirus Cripples the Government
2020-03-18, Newsweek
Posted: 2020-03-23 19:25:52
https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-inside-militarys-top-secret-plans-if-coron...

Even as President Trump says he tested negative for coronavirus, the COVID-19 pandemic raises the fear that huge swaths of the executive branch or even Congress and the Supreme Court could also be disabled, forcing the implementation of "continuity of government" plans. Above-Top Secret contingency plans already exist for what the military is supposed to do if all the Constitutional successors are incapacitated. Standby orders were issued more than three weeks ago to ready these plans, not just to protect Washington but also to prepare for the possibility of some form of martial law. The various plans codenamed Octagon, Freejack and Zodiac are the underground laws to ensure government continuity. Under these extraordinary plans, "devolution" could circumvent the normal Constitutional provisions for government succession, and military commanders could be placed in control around America. Since Hurricane Katrina in 2006, no emergency has triggered any state to even request federal military aid under these procedures. Part of the reason, the senior officer involved in planning says, is that local police forces have themselves become more capable, acquiring military-grade equipment and training. And part of the reason is that the governors have worked together to strengthen the National Guard, which can enforce domestic law when it is mustered under state control.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus pandemic from reliable major media sources.


Trump administration's family separations at Mexico border are torture, doctors find
2020-02-25, The Independent (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
Posted: 2020-03-16 21:40:58
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-family-se...

A new NGO report has found that the treatment suffered by families forcibly separated at the US-Mexico border meets the definition of torture. Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) says its report provides the first medical and psychological evidence of the long-lasting harm associated with family separation. The report, You Will Never See Your Child Again: The Persistent Psychological Effects of Family Separation ... describes findings from in-depth psychological evaluations of 26 asylum seekers, nine of them children and 17 parents. All the children and all but two of the adults showed the symptoms of various psychological problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), major depressive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder. The policy of separating children and parents who crossed the Mexican border without documents including asylum seekers began after the Trump administration moved to a zero-tolerance approach to border crossings. Donald Trump signed an executive order to end the practice in June 2018. However, the administration has continued to pursue hardline immigration policies since then, including ones that would affect families, and the separations continued after Trump signed his order. More than 1,110 families have been separated since then. In September 2019, a federal judge rejected new regulations that would have allowed the government to detain children and their parents indefinitely.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.


Saudi Arabia is imprisoning our relatives, while Mike Pompeo and the U.S. cozy up to the king
2020-02-20, NBC News
Posted: 2020-03-03 01:58:50
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/saudi-arabia-imprisoning-our-relatives-...

Last summer, when the American rapper A$AP was tried in a Swedish court on assault charges, President Donald Trump dispatched his special envoy for hostage affairs to Sweden. This week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has traveled to Saudi Arabia, where our family members are just some of the U.S. citizens and relatives of U.S. citizens being held by the government on spurious charges, denied due process and even tortured. Why is there no sign the hostage envoy is accompanying Pompeo on his trip to Riyadh? We join Republican and Democratic members of Congress who have urged Pompeo to raise the case of Saudi American physician Walid Fitaihi who after a brutal detention has been barred, along with his family, from leaving the kingdom until after his trial on vague charges relating to his obtaining of U.S. citizenship and alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. But we want pressure and attention to be brought to our loved ones, as well. Pompeo has pledged to raise human rights with the Saudis. But the U.S. government has shown little willingness to go beyond lip service for these hostages of the Saudi regime. U.S. officials seem to assume Americas long-term interests are too valuable to risk alienating or weakening the Saudi royal family, which enjoys close ties with Trumps inner circle. Indulging this autocratic and unstable regime not only punishes the domestic activists who most uphold American values, it also undermines the very reliability of any joint military or business undertakings.

Note: Saudi Arabia's recent attempts to silence its critics have included intimidation and murder. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.


In the Face of Rising White Supremacist Violence, Police Continue to Investigate Victims and Activists
2020-01-20, The Intercept
Posted: 2020-01-27 02:41:41
https://theintercept.com/2020/01/20/political-surveillance-police-activists-t...

As white supremacists have carried out a growing number of deadly attacks in recent years, the FBI has come under mounting criticism for its failure to address the threat posed by far-right extremist ideologies, whose adherents account for most of the politically motivated violence in the U.S. At the same time, the bureau has also been heavily criticized for devoting large resources to surveilling political dissent by groups and individuals, often of color, who pose no threat but are critical of the government because they oppose official immigration policies or demand police accountability. The FBIs preoccupation with policing nonviolent critical ideologies while neglecting to investigate ideologies tied to real, and increasing, violence was perhaps best captured in an infamous 2017 threat assessment report warning law enforcement agencies of the supposed rise of a black identity extremist movement targeting police. The black identity extremism category was a product of the FBIs imagination. Last year ... bureau officials told legislators that they were doing away with a set of earlier domestic terrorism categories in favor of four larger ones. The FBIs fictional black identity extremists would now be lumped together with white supremacists under a new racially motivated violent extremism category. That false equivalence made it virtually impossible for the public to know whether the FBI was devoting resources to investigating real threats of racist violence or social and racial justice groups critical of government.

Note: Read a revealing essay on COINTELPRO, the FBI program that targeted civil rights and anti-war activists from 1965-1975. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on civil liberties from reliable major media sources.


A long time to wait: Virginia passes Equal Rights Amendment in historic vote
2020-01-15, Washington Post
Posted: 2020-01-20 21:34:43
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/2020/01/15/0475d51a-36...

Both chambers of Virginias General Assembly passed the Equal Rights Amendment Wednesday, fulfilling a promise that helped Democrats seize control of the legislature and marking a watershed moment in the nearly century-long effort to add protections for women to the U.S. Constitution. Numerous legal hurdles still have to be cleared before the ERA, which prohibits discrimination based on sex, would become part of the Constitution. First proposed in 1923, the ERA was reintroduced in every session of Congress until it passed in 1972. U.S. lawmakers set a deadline of March 22, 1979, for three-quarters of the states to ratify the amendment, a measure ERA supporters now say is unconstitutional because it was not included in the amendment text. As that deadline approached, Congress extended it to June 30, 1982. Because only 35 of the needed 38 state legislatures ratified the ERA by that time, the amendment was declared a failure. Subsequently, legislatures in Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, Tennessee and South Dakota rescinded their ratifications. ERA supporters say there is no provision for rescissions in the Constitution, and therefore they do not count. No federal court has conclusively ruled on that question. Since 2017, Nevada and Illinois have ratified the ERA, which put Virginia in place as the final state needed for ratification, if the five withdrawals are not counted. But the U.S. Justice Department last week issued a finding that the amendment ... could no longer be ratified.

Note: For those who don't know, the text of the ERA amendment reads simply "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on civil liberties from reliable major media sources.


US listed climate activist group as extremists alongside mass killers
2020-01-13, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
Posted: 2020-01-20 21:28:22
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/13/us-listed-climate-activis...

A group of US environmental activists engaged in non-violent civil disobedience targeting the oil industry have been listed in internal Department of Homeland Security documents as extremists and some of its members listed alongside white nationalists and mass killers, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal. The group have been dubbed the Valve Turners, after closing the valves on pipelines in four states carrying crude oil from Canadas tar sands on 11 October 2016. It was described as the largest coordinated action of its kind and for a few hours the oil stopped flowing. The five climate activists ... cut their way through fencing and turned the valves. The activists notified the energy companies whose pipelines were being disrupted and posted videos of their protest online and waited patiently to be arrested. The groups actions attracted the attention of the DHS. In a recent intelligence bulletin evaluating domestic terrorism threats between 2018 and 2020, the department included the Valve Turners and described the group as suspected environmental rights extremists. The document points to an uptick in sabotage attacks conducted ... against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016. In addition to providing an overview of domestic terrorism threats the document includes an appendix summarizing select incidents. Two of the Valve Turners are listed alongside violent white supremacists such as Dylann Roof and James Fields, who have both been convicted of murdering innocent civilians.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the erosion of civil liberties from reliable major media sources.


Ed Dwight Was Set to Be the First Black Astronaut. Heres Why That Never Happened.
2019-07-16, New York Times
Posted: 2019-12-31 02:37:37
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/us/ed-dwight-was-set-to-be-the-first-black...

The bone-rattling trip to the upper reaches of Earths atmosphere used to require a steady hand, a powerful jet and the precision of an airman ready to dodge enemy fire. It was just the sort of challenge that a chiseled 29-year-old aspiring astronaut named Ed Dwight was after. In 1962, he piloted an F-104 Starfighter, essentially a chrome javelin ... designed to go very fast and very high. A massive engine took up one end; the other was occupied by the pilot. Dwight only made a handful of flights like this, but all told he spent 9,000 hours in the air. A former altar boy turned airman, he was among the pilots training to become astronauts at the Aerospace Research Pilot School, helmed by Chuck Yeager at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Unlike every other pilot in the program, he was black. From Day 1, Dwight said, Yeager wanted him gone. Dwight said he immediately felt he was not welcome, that he was not of the group. Every week, right on the dot, Dwight recalled, hed call me into his office and say, Are you ready to quit? This is too much for you and youre going to kill yourself, boy. Calling me a boy and Im an officer in the Air Force. Dwight ... felt his treatment was so unfair that he later took bias charges to higher-ups. Yeager ultimately graduated him. In October 1963, the agency held a news conference in Houston to announce the astronauts selected for the next class. The 14 chosen men, including the future moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, filed onstage. Dwight was not there. He was not among the chosen.

Note: Don't miss the excellent 13-minute NY Times documentary on this great man. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on civil liberties from reliable major media sources.


The civil rights leader almost nobody knows about gets a statue in the U.S. Capitol
2019-09-20, Washington Post
Posted: 2019-11-19 01:10:33
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/09/20/civil-rights-leader-almost-...

Standing Bear was born sometime between 1829 and 1834 in the Ponca tribes native lands in northern Nebraska. In 1876 ... Congress declared that the Poncas would be moved to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. More than a third of the Poncas died of starvation and disease including Standing Bears sister and his beloved son. Standing Bear and his burial party evaded capture while they traveled home but were caught and detained after visiting relatives at the Omaha reservation. The man who caught them, Brig. Gen. George Crook ... was moved by Standing Bears reasons for leaving the Indian Territory and promised to help him. The civil rights case that resulted was called Standing Bear v. Crook. The U.S. attorney argued that Standing Bear was neither a citizen nor a person. On the second day, Chief Standing Bear was called to testify, becoming the first Native American to do so. He raised his right hand and, through an interpreter, said: My hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be the same color as yours. The same god made us both. I am a man. The judge agreed, ruling for the first time in U.S. history that the Indian is a person and has all the rights and freedoms promised in the Constitution. The judge also ordered Crook to free Standing Bear and his people immediately. Standing Bear ... buried his son alongside his ancestors. When he died there in 1908, he was buried alongside them, too.

Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.


The FBI Spends a Lot of Time Spying on Black Americans
2019-10-29, The Intercept
Posted: 2019-11-04 20:31:15
https://theintercept.com/2019/10/29/fbi-surveillance-black-activists/

The FBI has come under intense criticism after a 2017 leak exposed that its counterterrorism division had invented a new, unfounded domestic terrorism category it called black identity extremism. A number of civil rights groups have filed public records requests to try to better understand who exactly the FBI is investigating under that designation. The latest batch of FBI documents ... reveals that between 2015 and 2018, the FBI dedicated considerable time and resources to opening a series of assessments into the activities of individuals and groups it mostly labeled black separatist extremists. This designation was eventually folded into the category of black identity extremism. Assessments differ from full-blown investigations - or predicated investigations, in the bureaus lingo - because they do not need to be predicated on a factual basis. As a new report by the civil liberties group Defending Rights & Dissent notes, when choosing targets for an assessment, agents are allowed to use ethnicity, religion, or speech protected by the First Amendment as a factor, as long as it is not the only one. As the report notes, Even though the standards for opening an assessment are extraordinarily low, the FBI is allowed to use extremely intrusive investigative techniques in performing them, including physical surveillance, use of informants, and pretextual interviews. The bureau has in recent years shifted its target from those espousing separatist views to the much larger group of those protesting police violence.

Note: Read more about the FBI's use of "Black Identity Extremism" as a label in its terrorism investigations. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the erosion of civil liberties from reliable major media sources.


Women At Ernst & Young Instructed On How To Dress, Act Nicely Around Men
2019-10-21, Huffington Post
Posted: 2019-11-04 20:24:50
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/women-ernst-young-how-to-dress-act-around-men_...

When women speak, they shouldnt be shrill. Clothing must flatter, but short skirts are a no-no. After all, sexuality scrambles the mind. Women should look healthy and fit, with a good haircut and manicured nails. These were just a few pieces of advice that around 30 female executives at Ernst & Young received at a training held in the accounting giants gleaming new office in Hoboken, New Jersey, in June 2018. The 55-page presentation, used during the day-and-a-half seminar on leadership and empowerment, was given to HuffPost by an attendee who was appalled by its contents. Full of out-of-touch advice, the presentation focused on how women need to fix themselves to fit into a male-dominated workplace. The training, called Power-Presence-Purpose or PPP ... was billed to participants as advice on how to be successful at EY, according to Jane, a training attendee and former executive director at the firm. Attendees were even told that womens brains are 6% to 11% smaller than mens, Jane said. She wasnt sure why they were told this, nor is it clear from the presentation. Womens brains absorb information like pancakes soak up syrup so its hard for them to focus, the attendees were told. Mens brains are more like waffles. Theyre better able to focus because the information collects in each little waffle square. The only reason to talk to women about their size of their brains is to make them feel inferior to men, said Bruce McEwen, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.


Whistleblowers say aloud what many of us think in silence. Its a relief.
2019-10-07, Washington Post
Posted: 2019-10-22 01:40:46
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/were-living-in-the-golden-age-of-whis...

Principled insiders have been busy in recent years blowing the whistle on wrongdoing from Big Pharma to Wall Street to Washington. Without whistleblowers, wed probably never have heard about the lead-laced water in Flint, Mich., Jeffrey Epsteins under-the-table funding of MIT, fraud at Guantanamo, corner-cutting at Boeing and the FAA, or the dubious dealings by President Trump in Ukraine that the House has put at the center of an impeachment inquiry. But ... it has become harder than ever to speak truth to power. What has led us here? A rise in institutional corruption and normalized fraud. Healthy organizations tend to self-correct, fixing problems long before they explode in public. Where they dont, healthy governments intervene via independent regulators. Whistleblowing only becomes necessary when organizations become more interested in silence and loyalty than in ethics or public welfare, or when government watchdogs have been muzzled or euthanized. Anti-whistleblower pressure intensified with the Obama administrations implementation of Insider Threat programs throughout government. These programs, a response to the WikiLeaks disclosures, frequently portray lawful disclosures by public employees as criminal acts and lump legitimate whistleblowers together with spies and criminals. Despite these barriers, whistleblowers keep coming forward, because the voice of the individual conscience grows stronger as fraud becomes normalized.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.


Revealed: how the FBI targeted environmental activists in domestic terror investigations
2019-09-24, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
Posted: 2019-10-22 01:37:29
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/23/revealed-how-the-fbi-targeted...

Helen Yost, a 62-year-old environmental educator, has been a committed activist for nearly a decade. Yost may not fit the profile of a domestic terrorist, but in 2014 the FBI classified her as a potential threat to national security. According to hundreds of pages of FBI files obtained by the Guardian through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, and interviews with activists, Yost and more than a dozen other people campaigning against fossil fuel extraction in North America have been identified in domestic terrorism-related investigations. The investigations, which targeted individual activists and some environmental organizations, were opened in 2013-2014, at the height of opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline. In 2010, the DoJs inspector general criticized the FBI for using non-violent civil disobedience as grounds to open domestic terrorism investigations. US citizens swept up in such investigations can be placed on terrorism watchlists and subjected to surveillance and restrictions on international travel. In recent years, Donald Trump has approved construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, and his administration has also advocated for stiffer penalties against activists who engage in non-violent direct action targeting fossil fuel infrastructure. Meanwhile, in the wake of the Standing Rock protests, seven states have passed legislation making it a crime to trespass on property containing critical infrastructure.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the erosion of civil liberties from reliable major media sources.


More than 1,000 US polling sites closed since supreme court ruling
2019-09-11, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
Posted: 2019-09-23 15:51:10
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/11/us-polling-sites-closed-repor...

Jurisdictions once monitored by the justice department for racially discriminatory voting practices have collectively closed more than 1,000 polling places since a watershed 2013 US supreme court ruling released the jurisdictions from oversight, according to a new watchdog report. In 757 counties and county equivalents that formerly had to pre-clear voting practice changes with Washington, 1,173 polling places disappeared between 2014 and 2018, a study by the Leadership Conference Education Fund, part of the nations oldest and largest civil rights coalition, found. The closures could disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color, especially when combined with restrictive voter ID laws, gerrymandering and aggressive voter roll purges, the report warned. Last month, a separate study found that US election jurisdictions with histories of egregious voter discrimination have been purging voter rolls at a rate 40% beyond the national average. Closing polling places has a cascading effect, leading to long lines at other polling places, transportation hurdles, denial of language assistance and other forms of in-person help, and mass confusion about where eligible voters may cast their ballot, the report said. For many people, and particularly for voters of color, older voters, rural voters and voters with disabilities, these burdens make it harder and sometimes impossible to vote.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on elections corruption from reliable major media sources.


US judge: Terror watchlist violates constitutional rights
2019-09-04, ABC/Associated Press
Posted: 2019-09-16 17:58:05
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/us-judge-terror-watchlist-violates-consti...

The government's watchlist of more than 1 million people identified as "known or suspected terrorists" violates the constitutional rights of those placed on it, a federal judge ruled Wednesday. The ruling from U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga grants summary judgment to nearly two dozen Muslim U.S. citizens who had challenged the watchlist with the help of a Muslim civil-rights group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. But the judge is seeking additional legal briefs before deciding what remedy to impose. The watchlist is disseminated to a variety of governmental departments, foreign governments and police agencies. "There is no evidence, or contention, that any of these plaintiffs satisfy the definition of a 'known terrorist'," Trenga wrote. And the alternate standard for placement that of a "suspected terrorist" can easily be triggered by innocent conduct that is misconstrued, he said. The watchlist, also known as the Terrorist Screening Database, is maintained by the FBI and shared with a variety of federal agencies. Customs officers have access to the list to check people coming into the country at border crossings, and aviation officials use the database to help form the no-fly list, which is a much smaller subset of the broader watchlist. The watchlist has grown significantly over the years. As of June 2017, approximately 1.16 million people were included on the watchlist, according to government documents filed in the lawsuit. In 2013, the number was only 680,000.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on civil liberties from reliable major media sources.


Landmark US case to expose rampant racial bias behind the death penalty
2019-08-25, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
Posted: 2019-09-02 18:09:02
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/24/landmark-us-case-to-expose-ramp...

The dark secret of Americas death penalty the blatant and intentional racial bias that infects the system, distorting juries and throwing inordinate numbers of African Americans on to death row will be laid bare next week in North Carolina. Some of the countrys top capital lawyers will gather on Monday at the state supreme court in Raleigh. The courts seven judges will be asked to address a simple question. Will they allow men and women to be condemned to die despite powerful evidence that prosecutors deployed racially discriminatory tactics to put them on death row? At the heart of the case are four inmates facing execution: three African American men and a Native American woman. Over the past seven years Marcus Robinson, Quintel Augustine, Tilmon Golphin and Christina Walters have been on an extraordinary judicial roller coaster that has seen them taken off death row on grounds that their sentences were racially compromised, only to be slapped back on to it following a partisan backlash by the Republican-controlled state legislature. In all four cases, a review of their trials found racial bias had been an overwhelming feature of how death sentences were secured. In particular, the juries had been bleached. Black potential jurors were systematically struck off consciously and intentionally at a rate far higher than their white equivalents. As a result, juries were produced that were almost exclusively, or in Augustines case entirely, white.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on judicial system corruption from reliable major media sources.


The Trump Administration Is Using the Full Power of the U.S. Surveillance State Against Whistleblowers
2019-08-04, The Intercept
Posted: 2019-08-26 15:52:35
https://theintercept.com/2019/08/04/whistleblowers-surveillance-fbi-trump/

While we all live under extensive surveillance, for government employees and contractors - especially those with a security clearance - privacy is virtually nonexistent. Everything they do on their work computers is monitored. Even when they try to outsmart their work computer by taking photos directly of their screen, video cameras in their workplace might be recording their every move. Government workers with security clearance promise never [to] divulge classified information to anyone who is not authorized to receive it. But for many whistleblowers, the decision to go public results from troubling insights into government activity, coupled with the belief that as long as that activity remains secret, the system will not change. The growing use of the Espionage Act, a 1917 law that criminalizes the release of national defense information by anyone with intent or reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation, shows how the system is rigged against whistleblowers. Government insiders charged under the law are not allowed to defend themselves by arguing that their decision to share what they know was prompted by an impulse to help Americans confront and end government abuses. The act is blind to the possibility that the publics interest ... might outweigh the governments interest, Jameel Jaffer, head of the Knight First Amendment Institute, wrote recently. It is blind to the difference between whistle-blowers and spies.

Note: The above article includes the stories of four whistleblowers charged under the Espionage act. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.


FBI and police monitoring Oregon anti-pipeline activists
2019-08-08, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
Posted: 2019-08-26 15:44:42
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/08/fbi-oregon-anti-pipeline-jord...

Law enforcement groups, including the FBI, have been monitoring opponents of a natural gas infrastructure project in Oregon and circulated intelligence to an email list that included a Republican-aligned anti-environmental PR operative, emails obtained by the Guardian show. The South Western Oregon Joint Task Force (SWOJTF) and its members were monitoring opponents of the Jordan Cove energy project, a proposal ... to build the first-ever liquefied natural gas export terminal on the US west coast, as well as a new 232-mile pipeline that would carry fracked natural gas to the port of Coos Bay. Jordan Cove opponents have raised concerns about the projects significant environmental impacts. An email distribution list associated with the taskforce included addressees in the FBI, the Bureau of Land Management, the Department of Justice (DoJ), the National Forest Service (NFS), Oregon state police (OSP), and various Oregon municipal police and sheriffs departments. But some of its recipients are outside any government agency, most notably Mark Pfeifle, the CEO of the political consultancy Off The Record Strategies. Pfeifle was previously a Bush administration PR adviser. Pfeifle previously described his work with law enforcement at Standing Rock during a 2017 presentation to oil, gas and banking executives. A lot of things that we were doing were being done to put a marker down for the protesters. And, OK, if youre going to go protest somewhere? Theres going to be consequences from it.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on civil liberties from reliable major media sources.


FBI director says white supremacy is a 'persistent, pervasive threat' to the US
2019-04-04, CNN News
Posted: 2019-07-28 18:24:58
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/04/politics/fbi-director-wray-white-supremacy/ind...

FBI Director Christopher Wray said Thursday that white supremacy presents a "persistent" and "pervasive" threat to the United States. Wray also spoke out against hate crimes and was asked by Democrats what the FBI was doing to crack down on hate crimes, which they say have ticked up during Trump's presidency. "We are determined not to tolerate hate-filled violence in our communities, so we're going to aggressively investigate those cases," Wray said, adding that there has been an increase in "the reporting of hate crimes," but that this doesn't automatically mean more hate crimes were happening. FBI efforts to encourage the public to report hate crimes could be yielding benefits, he said. These comments aren't exactly in line with what Trump has said about the topic of white nationalism. Trump, who appointed Wray in 2017, has downplayed the danger of white nationalism and even praised some of the Nazi sympathizers who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. After the New Zealand mosque massacre last month, where a right-wing extremist killed 50 Muslim worshippers, Trump said he didn't consider white nationalism to be a rising global threat. "I think it's a small group of people that have very, very serious problems, I guess," Trump said. An FBI assessment released last year found that there was a 17% spike in reports of hate crime incidents in 2017, compared to 2016.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on civil liberties from reliable major media sources.


'Red Summer' of 1919: Hundreds of Black Americans Were Killed by White Mobs
2019-07-23, NBC News
Posted: 2019-07-28 18:22:49
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/national-international/Red-Summer-Black-Death...

America in the summer of 1919 ran red with blood from racial violence, and yet today, 100 years later, not many people know it even happened. Hundreds of African American men, women and children were burned alive, shot, hanged or beaten to death by white mobs. Thousands saw their homes and businesses burned to the ground and were driven out, many never to return. It was branded "Red Summer" because of the bloodshed and amounted to some of the worst white-on-black violence in U.S. history." There are no national observances marking Red Summer. History textbooks ignore it, and most museums don't acknowledge it. The reason: Red Summer contradicts the post-World War I-era notion that America was making the world safe for democracy, historians say. "Ethnic cleansing was the goal of the white rioters," said William Tuttle, a retired professor of American studies at the University of Kansas. "They wanted to kill as many black people as possible and to terrorize the rest until they were willing to leave and live someplace else." The violence didn't start or end in 1919. Some count the era of Red Summer as beginning with the deaths of more than two dozen African Americans in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917 and extending through the Rosewood Massacre of 1923, when a black town in Florida was destroyed. All told, at least 1,122 Americans were killed in racial violence over those six years.

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