Much of the attention on WikiLeaks has focused on its mysterious mastermind, Australian hacktivist Julian Assange. He’s been hailed as a fearless fighter for transparency, but his emergence from the shadows has also revealed him to be as prickly about unwanted disclosures as any of his powerful targets. When David Kushner wrote about Assange’s fascinating blend of [...]
WikiLeaks’ commitment to what might be called extreme transparency also means that it won’t turn away documents that have questionable news value or are just plain dishy. It’s posted Sarah Palin’s hacked emails and Wesley Snipes’ tax returns, as well as fraternity initiation manuals and a trove of secret Scientology manuals. According to WikiLeaks’ credo, [...]
Filed in Journalism
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Also tagged Censorship, Cryptome, Daniel Ellsberg, Documents, Intelligence, John Young, Julian Assange, Leaks, Pentagon, Sarah Palin, Scientology, Sweden, Whistleblowers, Whistleblowing, Wikileaks
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The Fed has finally came clean. It now admits it bailed out Bear Stearns – taking on tens of billions of dollars of the bank’s bad loans – in order to smooth Bear Stearns’ takeover by JPMorgan Chase. The secret Fed bailout came months before Congress authorized the government to spend up to $700 billion [...]
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Rachel Maddow takes a look at Koch Industries, the private conglomerate that pumps more money into climate-denial campaigns than Exxon Mobil does.
Amnesty International on Tuesday challenged the Chinese authorities to reveal how many people they execute and sentence to death, as the organization published its world overview of the death penalty for 2009. The report, Death Sentences and Executions in 2009, reveals that at least 714 people were executed in 18 countries and at least 2001 [...]
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
A little-noticed provision in the health reform bill will shed significant light on the payments drug and device companies make to doctors and teaching hospitals in California and the rest of the nation. The section of the law started as the Physician Payment Sunshine Act, a bill introduced by Sens. Herb Kohl, D-Wisc., and Chuck [...]
By this reasoning, every time a newspaper encourages a whistleblower to recount his experiences or to share a document that confirms them, the journalists are engaging in a criminal act. This suggests that the Pentagon’s copy of the U.S. Constitution is missing the First Amendment, or perhaps that the Defense Department has secured another one [...]
The Sunlight Foundation has launched a campaign to pressure all levels of government in the U.S. to put more information online. The foundation, a nonpartisan advocate for open government and transparency, launched the Public=Online campaign Thursday at Google’s Washington, D.C., office. About 100 people attended the event, and they came from a wide range of the political [...]
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
When the state-friendly Russian oil company Surgutneftegas held its annual shareholders meeting in the Siberian city of Surgut two years ago, the proceedings in the shabby auditorium started off as tightly scripted as a Politburo meeting. That is, until the moderator called for questions and Alexei Navalny took the stage. In front of some 300 [...]
Thursday, February 4, 2010
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkAxuqrVNBM[/youtube] In the grand tradition of his predecessor Eliot Spitzer, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is generating tons of publicity by whacking Wall Street with a big fat stick. But even if you are predisposed to dismiss the civil fraud suit his office filed Thursday against former Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis and former [...]
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Exposing this entirely legal labyrinth of ownership took years of interagency pick-and-ax work. In the end it demonstrated how nefarious activity — even as high profile as this — can go on for years, right under authorities’ noses. It’s also meant that tenants of the prestigious Manhattan property have been paying millions in rent to [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Alavi Foundation, Bank Melli, Banking, Business, Cayman Islands, Corporatism, Corruption, Delaware, Drug Trafficking, Financial Secrecy, Financial Sector, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, IMF, Iran, Law, Money Laundering, Offshore Banking, Panama, Semion Mogilevich, Shell Companies, Shell Corporations, Sinaloa, Switzerland, Tax Evasion, Tax Havens, Terrorism Funding, Victor Bout
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Democracy requires at least three parts: Important decisions are made in the open. The public and its representatives have an opportunity to debate and influence them. And those who make the big decisions are accountable to voters. But these principles are in retreat. The Troubled Assets Relief Program began with a virtual blank check from [...]
When it comes to Obama transparency, Electronic Frontier Foundation privacy attorney Kurt Opsahl points out that the chief executive told the American public one thing Wednesday night and a federal appeals court another just a few weeks ago. The issue at hand surrounds lobbying. “It’s time to require lobbyists to disclose each contact they make [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Barack Obama, Courts, DOJ, EFF, Kurt Opsahl, Lobbyists, Retroactive Immunity, Surveillance, Telecoms, Warrantless Wiretapping, Wiretapping
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Wednesday, January 13, 2010
It’s a question that rarely gets asked: from where does the Obama administration locate the legal authority to launch missiles from the CIA’s unmanned drones into Pakistani (and, this week, Afghan) territory? The ACLU wants to know. The civil liberties group today filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA and the Departments [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged ACLU, Afghanistan, CIA, DOD, DOJ, FOIA, Iraq, Law, Pakistan, Predator Drones, State Department, Yemen
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What we don’t know will hurt us, and quite possibly on a more devastating scale than any Qaeda attack. Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no [...]
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Under-performing banks that are politically connected received more bailout funds, according to a study by the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. According to the report (.pdf), banks located in districts with House members serving on financial committees had a 26 percent increase in the funding they received under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. [...]
There’s no doubt that oil and coal money sways votes like few other industries. If you want to keep track of which fossil fuel companies are lining the pockets of which US congress members, you need to check out FollowTheOilMoney.org and FollowTheCoalMoney.org. via FollowTheOilMoney.org Shows What Corps Are Buying Which Congress Members : TreeHugger.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
A federal appeals court in New York ruled on Wednesday that US government agencies may refuse to confirm or deny the existence of records when faced with a Freedom of Information Act request that might disclose sensitive intelligence activities, sources, or methods. The ruling by a three-judge panel of the Second US Circuit Court of [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Accountability, Attorney Client Privilege, Courts, Detainees, Espionage, FOIA, Guantanamo, Intelligence, Law, Nondisclosure, NSA, Privacy, Secrecy, Surveillance, TSP
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Thursday, December 24, 2009
There are two components to our definition of open: open technology and open information. Open technology includes open source, meaning we release and actively support code that helps grow the Internet, and open standards, meaning we adhere to accepted standards and, if none exist, work to create standards that improve the entire Internet (and not [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Business, Collaboration, Freedom, Google, Innovation, Internet, Open, Open Source, Science, Technology, Vint Cerf
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Monday, December 21, 2009
President Barack Obama plans to deal with a Dec. 31 deadline that automatically would declassify secrets in more than 400 million pages of documents from the Cold War era by ordering government-wide changes that could sharply curb the number of government records concealed from the public. In an executive order the president is likely to [...]
Friday, December 11, 2009
Excessive government secrecy is an enemy of human rights and the rule of law. President Obama deserves praise for rejecting the underlying policies that caused the United States so much harm during the Bush years. But in withholding photos of detainee abuse, preventing legal challenges to torture and warrantless surveillance, and thwarting impartial hearings into [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Barack Obama, CIA, DEA, Detainees, DOJ, Eric Holder, FOIA, Guantanamo, Human Rights, Law, National Security, Public Trust, Secrecy, Secret Prisons, State Secrets Privilege, Torture
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Friday, November 20, 2009
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_vWPAiieHU[/youtube] On The ED Show, Rep. Alan Grayson discusses the bill to audit the Fed, which passed out of the Financial Services Committee on November 20, 2009. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8EKGtf_YrY[/youtube] Rep. Alan Grayson, on November 19, 2009, argues in support of the Paul-Grayson amendment, which would subject the Federal Reserve to a complete audit. The amendment later [...]
Thursday, October 1, 2009
For the last two months, while we’ve been testing the Google Wave developer preview, we have been talking amongst ourselves about how this thing could change (or add to) what we do. So, here’s a list of a few wild ideas we had for using Wave. via How Google Wave could transform journalism | Technology [...]
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