News Items

  • Media Advisory: Whistleblowers to Speak About Surveillance and Cyber Issues

    “President Barack Obama is set to sign an executive order on Friday aimed at encouraging companies to share more information about cybersecurity threats with the government and each other, a response to attacks like that on Sony Entertainment. … Obama will sign the order at a day-long conference on cybersecurity at Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley.”

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  • Delegation of U.S. and UK Whistleblowers in London: News Conference on “Special Surveillance Relationship” — News Advisory

    Whistleblowers from four American and British “national security” agencies will hold a news conference in London on November 21 in a direct challenge to surveillance policies of the U.S. and UK governments. The whistleblowers — from the NSA, FBI, State Department and GCHQ — will speak about the effects of their governments’ policies on freedom of the press and democracy. They are traveling as a delegation co-sponsored by the U.S.-based organizations RootsAction.org and ExposeFacts, a project of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The news conference is being hosted by the Foreign Press Association.

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  • In Response to the Government’s Lynching of James Risen

    It has been a sharp learning curve for Jim Risen, but by having numerous grand juries and two administrations relentlessly hounding him, he has learned how deeply the government’s malevolence descends. But there was always one steadfast assertion he wound not compromise, Jim Risen assured his sources, from the very start of their first encounter, that he would never divulge their identities nor what information they provided him with.

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  • Militarization of U.S. Police: Ferguson, Mo.

    Community policing reforms came about as a corrective to the 1950-60s professional police model which created a large gulf between police and citizens. Few noticed that underlying all the CP rhetoric was a little noticed yet foretelling trend of para-militarism as found in SWAT teams. What we’re witnessing today, though, with the influence of the Dept. of Homeland Security since 9/11 — along with growing emphasis on military hardware and tactics — is the expansion of police militarization throughout entire police departments — and indeed, the entire police institution.

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  • Unconstitutional acts of war in Iraq

    President Obama ignored the wise direction of President George Washington when he casually told the nation — and Congress — that U.S. military forces will engage in acts of war in Iraq for an extended period of weeks and maybe months. Bombing, he said in a brief statement last week, is needed here and there, but he promised there will be no U.S. boots on the ground. … The announcement seemed almost an afterthought as the president headed for vacation in Martha’s Vineyard. He neglected to seek approval of Congress before authorizing bombardment of the military forces of ISIS, the…

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  • News Conference: Edward Snowden’s Passport, Political Asylum and Related Issues

    Ray McGovern, Coleen Rowley and Norman Solomon spoke at this news conference, sponsored by RootsAction.org and hosted by the Institute for Public Accuracy.

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  • NSA Veterans and Whistleblowers Respond to Obama Speech

    Minutes after President Obama’s major address on NSA surveillance on Friday, Jan. 17, the Institute for Public Accuracy held a news conference with noted NSA veterans and whistleblowers.

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  • The War on Poverty at Fifty

    Fifty years after Lyndon B. Johnson made it the centerpiece of his first State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, the War on Poverty remains one of the most embattled—and least understood—of Great Society initiatives.

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  • Edward Snowden: Profile in Courage

    Edward Snowden may go down in history as one of this nation’s most important whistleblowers. He is certainly one of the bravest.

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  • Obama’s Economic Race Legacy

    From the start, President Barack Obama has shown little interest or loyalty in the issues that affect the poor, working class and people of color in the United States. For almost his entire first term he didn’t utter the words poor or poverty. Early on he reminded African Americans: ‘I’m not the president of black America. I’m the president of the United States of America…’

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  • Effects of the Medicaid “Unwinding” on Children

    As of August 23, at least 5,366,000 Medicaid enrollees have been disenrolled since states began the process of disenrolling people from Medicaid after a three-year pause during the Covid-19 pandemic, when people could not be kicked off the program.

  • “The U.S. Says No to Affirmative Action — Until It’s Time for War”

    “It’s well established that military recruiters target low-income schools and youth of color. The U.S. invests exponentially more in its military than in education, and according to the New York Times, ‘majority-minority schools are nearly three times as likely as majority-white schools to have a JROTC [Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps] program.’ In some schools –…

  • Artificial Intelligence for Mental Health?

    Woebot Health, a mental health company that uses artificial intelligence, is testing a new functionality using large language models (LLM). Some psychotherapists critique the trial.

  • King’s Dream and Economic Exploitation

    “The name of the march was The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. King and others were looking at the economic conditions. He himself spoke of how ‘America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”‘

  • Homelessness and Opioid Deaths

    Deaths among people experiencing homelessness in Denver have spiked nearly 50 percent since last year.

  • Overtime Hours for Bullshit Pay

    “FedEx CEO Frederick Smith has the largest stockpile in the Low-Wage 100. His personal holdings have grown 65 percent to more than $5 billion since January 2000. By contrast, FedEx median worker pay fell by 20 percent to $39,177 (including $9,267 in health benefits) between 2019 and 2022.”

  • Tale of Two Espionage Act Cases – Donald Trump and Jeffrey Sterling

    The prosecution of Sterling was based entirely on circumstantial evidence, and he continues to profess his innocence. In his new piece, Sterling wrote that the Espionage Act’s “non-specific language creates an overly broad net that the government and the Department of Justice casts, unfettered in any direction it so chooses. How the Espionage Act is…

  • Maui and Predatory Realtors and Lawyers

    I have a recent graduate whose entire family was displaced by the fire. As you can imagine, there are significant issues that need to be addressed to help Maui. There are deep historical injustices that are bubbling to the surface, particularly as it relates to land and water, in West Maui. Predatory realtors and lawyers…

  • The Palestine Laboratory: X/Twitter Reportedly Working with Israeli Surveillance Firm

    “What happens in Palestine is being exported around the world to over 130 nations in the last decades. Israel is now the world’s 10th biggest arms dealer, selling some of the most sophisticated forms of surveillance to democracies and dictatorships. From India to Saudi Arabia and Rwanda to Greece, Israel’s occupation tools are ubiquitous in…

  • Axis of War? The Japan-Korea-U.S. Trilateral Alliance

    During the Obama administration, U.S. officials (like Blinken) tried to create an alliance with Tokyo and Seoul by encouraging the two countries to end their long-running dispute over Imperial Japan’s cruel exploitation of Korean sex slaves known as ‘comfort women.’

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