Transparency

What Has Happened To Police Filmed Hurting Protesters?

July 31, 2020 By Zipporah Osei and Mollie Simon, Pro Publica. Educate! Accountability, Police violence, Rebellion2020, Transparency

It has been almost two months since a Los Angeles Police Department patrol car accelerated into Brooke Fortson during a protest over police violence. She still doesn’t know the name of the officer who hit her or whether that person is still policing the city’s streets. The officer did not stop after hitting Fortson and instead turned around, nearly hitting other demonstrators in the process, and sped off. The LAPD almost surely knows who the officer is. The squad car’s number is clearly visible in one of the multiple videos that captured the incident.

Calls For Video Related To John Neville’s Death Persist

July 29, 2020 By Lee Anne Denyer, WXII. Resist! Black Lives Matter (BLM), Police violence, Prisoner rights, Transparency

Protesters made new demands of Forsyth County elected officials Tuesday, calling for a general increase in transparency from county leaders, and specifically, the release of video pertaining to the death of an inmate at the Forsyth County Detention Center. "We're fighting for truth, justice, dignity, humanity, economic justice, social justice," said Tony Ndege, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Winston-Salem. "We stand against state violence, but we also stand for social and economic justice." Demonstrations began in Winston-Salem weeks ago and groups like Black Lives Matter Winston-Salem say they plan to continue calling for change. While the group wants fairness and equality for the entire community, its demonstrations are largely focused on advocating for minority communities.

Transparency International Silent On Jailed Transparency Journalist Assange

July 26, 2020 Patrick Maynard, The Grayzone. Educate! Julian Assange, NGO Complex, Transparency, Wikileaks

Berlin, Germany - On a cool July day, the Berlin neighborhood where Transparency International’s global headquarters is situated feels a thousand miles away from London’s Belmarsh Prison. But it is not just the pleasant setting a few blocks from the Spree River that makes the influential NGO seem so detached from the maximum security penitentiary’s most famous inmate, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Transparency International has been vocal in defending jailed opposition activists in states like Zimbabwe, Russia, and Venezuela.

Juneteenth #BlueLeaks: Millions Of Police And FBI Documents Made Public

June 24, 2020 Andy Greenberg, Wired. Resist! BlueLeaks, Hacking, Police, Transparency

It's been the better part of a decade since the hacktivist group Anonymous rampaged across the internet, stealing and leaking millions of secret files from dozens of US organizations. Now, amid the global protests following the killing of George Floyd, Anonymous is back—and it's returned with a dump of hundreds of gigabytes of law enforcement files and internal communications. On Friday of last week, the Juneteenth holiday, a leak-focused activist group known as Distributed Denial of Secrets published a 269-gigabyte collection of police data that includes emails, audio, video, and intelligence documents, with more than a million files in total. DDOSecrets founder Emma Best tells WIRED that the hacked files came from Anonymous

‘ANTIFA’ Twitter Account Actually Run By White Nationalist Group Identity Evropa

June 6, 2020 Aaron Holmes, Business Insider. Educate! AntiFa, Transparency, Twitter, White Nationalism

A Twitter account that claimed to represent a national antifa organization and that urged protesters to loot "white" neighborhoods was actually run by white nationalist group Identity Evropa, according to a Twitter spokesperson. The account, which posted under the handle "@ANTIFA_US," falsely aligned itself with ongoing Black Lives Matter protests nationwide. One tweet that called for protesters to "move into residential areas" and "take what's ours" was retweeted hundreds of times as of Sunday night. The account was removed Monday for breaking Twitter's rules against platform manipulation, spam, and inciting violence, NBC News first reported.

Chicago: Police Investigation Into Officer Covering Up Name Tag, Badge Number

June 6, 2020 Jonathan Ballew, The Chicago Reporter. Educate! Chicago, Police, Rebellion2020, Transparency

After one of the most volatile mass protests in the city’s recent memory sparked by the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, Chicago police are investigating at least one officer for covering up his badge number and name tag. Images and video circulating on social media show police officers who appear to have either taped over the name tags on their uniforms and badge star numbers or removed them entirely. In a statement to the The Chicago Reporter Wednesday evening, the Chicago Police Department condemned the practice. “All Chicago Police Officers are required to wear their unit assignment designator, nameplate and prescribed star so that they are clearly visible.

Unmarked Security Forces In DC Spark Fear

June 5, 2020 By Katie Bo Williams, Defense One. Educate! Militarization, Police abuse, Transparency, Washington DC

The presence of unmarked federal law enforcement officers, dressed in paramilitary uniforms and wearing no identifying insignia, quickly spread among protesters marching through Washington, D.C.’s streets on Tuesday and Wednesday, causing concerned protesters and officials to ask: Who are they? In some locations, security personnel refused to identify themselves to journalists and protesters who asked which agency sent them, answering only that they worked for the federal government. In other places, they identified themselves as working for the Department of Justice. Some carried rifles, or were equipped with body armor, riot shields, and pepper spray canisters. Two such clad security members in Washington on Tuesday night identified themselves to Defense One as part of a specialized emergency response force run by the Bureau of Prisons — part of the Justice Department — to help maintain security at correctional facilities. They and others are part of what’s known as the bureau’s Special Operations Response Teams, or SORTs.

Fighting Local Surveillance: A Toolkit

May 20, 2020 ACLU Northern California. Organize! Civil Liberties, Mass Surveillance, Tools, Transparency

In 2019, San Francisco passed a landmark law banning government facial recognition and requiring public oversight for local decisions related to the acquisition and use of other surveillance technologies such as cameras, drones, and more. That effort, led by the ACLU in deep partnership with civil rights partners, is part of a bigger movement afoot in the U.S. In more than a dozen cities and counties, communities have passed laws ensuring that decisions about high-tech surveillance are made by the community through the democratic process, not in secret by police and surveillance companies acting alone. Together, we are achieving important victories against secret and dangerous surveillance. We are raising awareness of how surveillance technology like drones, stingrays, and facial recognition exacerbate discriminatory policing, suppress dissent, and facilitate harm to immigrants and people of color.

The Big Lie: 102 Years Ago, Leaders Downplayed The Devastation Of The Spanish Flu

April 13, 2020 Mark Washburn, The Charlotte Observer. Educate! Media, Pandemic, Spanish Flu, Transparency

For 102 years, that lie has gone unchallenged. But now, spurred by curiosity amid a new pandemic, an examination of archived Mecklenburg County death certificates by The Charlotte Observer and a parsing of century-old news accounts reveal that Charlotte leaders — enabled by an acquiescent press and accepting public — systematically under-reported the 1918 death toll by half. In fact, at the height of the epidemic, when citizens were dying at the rate of more than 10 a week, they under-reported the scope of the crisis by two-thirds. To research the issue, the Observer examined official Mecklenburg County death certificates, held in an archive managed by Ancestry.com and accessed through the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library system, from September 1918 through January 1919 and compared the results to public statements about the scope of the crisis made by officials during the same time.

Pentagon Asks To Keep Future Spending Secret

April 1, 2020 Steven Aftergood, Federation of American Scientists. Educate! Budget, Congress, Pentagon, Transparency

The Department of Defense is quietly asking Congress to rescind the requirement to produce an unclassified version of the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP) database. Preparation of the unclassified FYDP, which provides estimates of defense spending for the next five years, has been required by law since 1989 (10 USC 221) and has become an integral part of the defense budget process. But the Pentagon said that it should no longer have to offer such information in an unclassified format, according to a DoD legislative proposal for the pending FY 2021 national defense authorization act. “The Department is concerned that attempting publication of unclassified FYDP data might inadvertently reveal sensitive information,” the Pentagon said in its March 6, 2020 proposal.

Court Upholds Landmark Berkeley Cell Phone Radiation Right To Know Ordinance

July 5, 2019 By, Staff, Environmental Health Trust Create! Cell Phones, Transparency

A landmark 9th U.S. Circuit Court panel has upheld the City of Berkeley’s cell phone right to know ordinance. That ordinance requires retailers to inform consumers that cell phones emit radiation that can exceed federal cell phone radiation limits when close to the body. In upholding this decision, the panel concluded that the public health issues at hand were “substantial” and that the “text of the Berkeley notice was literally true,” and “uncontroversial.” The panel held that Berkeley’s required disclosure simply alerted consumers to the safety disclosures that the Federal Communications Commission required, and directed consumers to federally compelled instructions in their user manuals providing specific information about how to avoid excessive exposure.

GM Crops, Pesticides, Corporate Duplicity

January 13, 2019 Colin Todhunter, Global Research. Educate! Bayer, Corporatism, Monsanto, Transparency

Tireless campaigner and environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason has just written an open letter to Werner Baumann, the chief executive of Bayer CropScience. It is in direct response to Bayer CropScience’s advertisement that was placed in Politico and the Farmers’ Guardian on 19/12/2018 which reads: “Transparency creates trust. At Bayer, we embrace our responsibility to communicate how we assess our products’ safety — and we recognize that people around the world want more information around glyphosate. This month, we published more than 300 study summaries on the safety of glyphosate on our dedicated transparency website. “

A Battle For Transparency: Putting Names And Numbers To The US Drone War

April 20, 2018 By Jack Serle, Thebureauinvestigates.com Educate! Drones, Transparency, Wars and Militarism

The phenomenal assassination tool that is the attack drone was born of frustration – the inability of the US to kill Osama bin Laden. The CIA and its Afghan militia allies were pretty sure they knew where he was, training would-be suicide bombers in his Afghan hideout. Whenever they did get a read on his location, albeit briefly, it was thanks to the CIA’s small fleet of surveillance Predator drones. They could fly high and for more than 12 hours on end, constantly filming the scene below them and sending the footage back to the US. But the CIA could never pin down his location long enough for bombers or cruise missiles to be called in to do anything about it. The solution? Add anti-tank missiles to the remotely piloted drones. By arming its drones, the US could get a fix on a target, show the video feed to lawyers in real time so they could assess if it was lawful, and wait to take the shot when there were no bystanders around to get hurt.

U.S. Media Suffered Most Humiliating Debacle In Ages

December 11, 2017 Glenn Greenwald, theintercept.com Educate! Corporate Media, Journalism, Propaganda, Transparency

Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened. The spectacle began on Friday morning at 11 a.m. EST, when the Most Trusted Name in News™ spent 12 straight minutes on air flamboyantly hyping an exclusive bombshell report that seemed to prove that WikiLeaks, last September, had secretly offered the Trump campaign, even Donald Trump himself, special access to the DNC emails before they were published on the internet. As CNN sees the world, this would prove collusion between the Trump family and WikiLeaks and, more importantly, between Trump and Russia, since the U.S. intelligence community regards WikiLeaks as an “arm of Russian intelligence,” and therefore, so does the U.S. media.

Supreme Court Rules Against Private Prisons

October 11, 2017 Staff, www.ccrjustice.org Resist! Corporations, Private Prisons, Supreme Court, Transparency

By Staff of CCRJustice - October 10, 2017, New York, NY – Today, the Supreme Court denied a petition by private prison corporations seeking to block the release of government documents about their immigration detention practices. In a case brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and Detention Watch Network (DWN), under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a federal district court ruled in July 2016, that the government must release details of its contracts with private prison corporations. The government chose not to appeal; instead, the country’s two largest private prison corporations, GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), recently rebranded as “CoreCivic,” intervened to appeal the decision to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which dismissed their petition in February. GEO then petitioned the Supreme Court for a full review of the case, asking for the right to prevent the government from releasing information under the FOIA. The Supreme Court’s decision lets stand the February ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which rejected the private contractors’ unusual attempt to fight for government secrecy when the government itself had acceded to the court’s ruling.

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