Transparency

Chelsea Manning Defends Her Conduct

September 17, 2017 Staff, www.Ap.org Uncategorized Chelsea Manning, CIA, Secrecy, Secuity State, Transparency, Wikileaks

By Staff for Associated Press. Manning's second public appearance since being released from a military prison in May. "I believe I did the best I could in my circumstances to make an ethical decision," she told the crowd when they asked if she was a traitor. The 29-year-old Manning is a transgender woman who was released from a military prison in May after serving seven years of a 35-year sentence, which was commuted by President Barack Obama in his final days in office. Several audience members said they were intrigued to hear from Manning. Sara O'Reilly, a Nantucket resident who has attended several past conferences, said the speakers are typically a "little edgy." She said she doesn't judge Manning and other people have done "far worse" things. Manning said Harvard's decision signaled to her that it's a "police state" and it's not possible to engage in political discourse in academic institutions. "I'm not ashamed of being disinvited," she said. "I view that just as much of an honored distinction as the fellowship itself."

Former CIA Intelligence Analyst Says Whistleblowers Are Vital To A Transparent Democracy

July 24, 2017 Mark Karlin, www.truth-out.org Resist! CIA, Democracy, Intelligence, Transparency, Whistleblowers

By Mark Karlin for Truthout - Melvin A. Goodman: I spent 24 years at the CIA as a Soviet analyst in the directorate of intelligence. I was not drawn to the agency by idealism, but by a fascination with the incredible repository of intelligence that is held within the entire community. I received an early introduction to this collection as a US Army cryptographer in the 1950s. There have been many intelligence failures over the past 70 years since the creation of the CIA, but virtually all of them have been due to analytical failures, either politicization of intelligence from above (e.g., missing the decline of the Soviet Union; Iraqi weapons of mass destruction) or simply poor analytic tradecraft (e.g., October War of 1973; 9/11 attacks; Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968). These failures were not due to inadequate collection. In fact, the collection of intelligence was sufficient to prevent every one of these failures, including 9/11. If I had been more idealistic then, perhaps I would have paid more attention to the CIA's role in the conduct of covert action, particularly the illegal and immoral activities prior to my entry into the CIA, including the overthrow of the Mossadegh government in Iran, the attempt to assassinate Lumumba in the Congo, and the efforts to overthrow Castro in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Transparency Needed, But Fought, Over NYPD Spying

June 23, 2017 Josmar Trujillo, www.fair.org Resist! NYPD, spying, Transparency

By Josmar Trujillo for FAIR - Last week, the New York City Council held hearings on proposed legislation calling on the New York Police Department to be more transparent with how they surveil and spy on the public. Police officials, as they often do, proceeded to tell local lawmakers to get lost. Requests for more information and possibly a public comment period on NYPD spying tactics, which have reached sci-fi levels, were called “insane” and met with suggestions that ISIS terrorists would be given a “roadmap” to attacking the city. Conservative media outlets, predictably, came out shrieking in defense of the police and of surveillance. The New York Post (6/18/17) published the department’s testimony from the hearing and called it an op-ed, literally regurgitating the police line word for word for its readers. Not to be left behind by their fellow Rupert Murdoch employees, editorialists at the Wall Street Journal (“A Terrorist’s Guide to New York City: The Left Would Show Jihadists How the Cops Prevent Attacks,” 6/19/17) chimed in with admiration for police and full-throated disgust at those pushing the legislation

To Federal Employees: If You See Something, Leak Something

January 14, 2017 Staff, www.theintercept.com Resist! Corruption, Media, Transparency, Whistleblowers

By The Intercept. IF YOU’RE A public servant in Washington, you may be worried about what your job will look like after January 20 — who you’ll be working for, what you’ll be asked to do. You might be concerned that the programs you’ve developed will be killed or misused. Or that you’ll be ordered to do things that are illegal or immoral. You may be thinking you have no choice — or that your only alternative is to quit. But there is another option. If you become aware of behavior that you believe is unethical, illegal, or damaging to the public interest, consider sharing your information securely with us. History shows the enormous value of government workers who discover abuses of power collaborating with journalists to expose them.

How To Leak To ProPublica

January 8, 2017 Staff, www.propublica.org Resist! Accountability, Media, Transparency, Whistleblowers

By ProPublica. We are a team of investigative journalists devoted to exposing abuse of power. If you’ve got evidence showing powerful people doing the wrong thing, here’s how to let us know while protecting your identity. Our job is to hold people and institutions accountable. And it requires evidence. Documents are a crucial part of that. We are always on the lookout for them — especially, now. Have you seen something that troubles you or that you think should be a story? Do you have a tip about something we should be investigating? Do you have documents or other materials that we should see? We want to hear from you. Here are a few ways to contact us or send us documents and other materials, safely, securely and anonymously as possible.

Open Data Projects Fuel Fight Against Police Misconduct

October 30, 2016 Alice Speri, www.theintercept.com Create! Criminal Justice System, Police abuse, Racism, Transparency

By Alice Speri for The Intercept. SAMANTHA SEDA’S CLIENT, a 16-year-old foster child from Far Rockaway, New York, had no criminal history when he was arrested in September, accused of having pulled out a gun and fired one shot in the air. Even though he had no priors and no relatives who could post bail, a judge set the amount at $100,000, and as he sat in jail for over a month, the boy lost his spot at the foster home where he had been living. Seda, a Legal Aid attorney representing adolescents charged as adults in Queens, thought the allegations against her client were dubious and was looking for a way to get him out on bail. That’s when she decided to look into the officers named in the complaint against him. What she discovered stunned her.

Newsletter – On 9/11, Facing The Truth

September 11, 2016 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.popularresistance.org Newsletter #NoDAPL, 9/11, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Government, Open Debates, Pipelines, Prison Labor, TPP, Transparency

By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese. Today is the fifteenth anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Centers in New York where 3,000 people died. The immediate responses to the attack were panic, grief and ultra-nationalism, followed by illegal attacks on Afghanistan and then Iraq. Perhaps now that 15 years has passed, we should look back at the events and review decisions that were made in hopes of avoiding mistakes in the future. The leading presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, seem stuck on the same path we have been on for 15 years -- is more militarism the right path? Have war and military attacks made the region more stable, the United States more secure, reduced terrorism, prevented instability in Europe due to the refuege crisis? Or, has the path of militarism made all of this worse?

Auditor: U.S. Military Fudged Accounts By Trillions

August 21, 2016 Scot J. Paltrow, www.reuters.com Educate! Budget, Department of Defense, Transparency, Wars and Militarism

By Scot J. Paltrow for Reuters. The United States Army’s finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced. The Defense Department’s Inspector General, in a June report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up. As a result, the Army’s financial statements for 2015 were “materially misstated,” the report concluded. The “forced” adjustments rendered the statements useless because “DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions.”

Release The 28 Pages On Saudi Role In 9/11 Sung To White House

June 26, 2016 Richard Ochs, www.PopularResistance.org Resist! 28 Pages, 9/11, Saudi Arabia, Transparency

By Richard Ochs for Popular Resistance. For the last two months the 28 Pages Coalition have been holding weekly protests at the White House, US House of Representatives and the Senate in Washington, DC. They have been calling for the release of 28 pages that have been kept secret by both the Bush and Obama administrations. The pages come from a joint committee of the House and Senate that reviewed the 9/11 attacks. Reportedly the pages implicate Saudia Arabia in the attacks. This week members of the 28 Pages Coalition held a banner and signs in front of the White House on Wednesday, June 22 at 5 PM. The banner read: “Open the 28 Pages.” Musicians will accompany protesters in singing “We want to read those 28 pages." As of now, 70 members of Congress are co-sponsoring bills H.R.14 and S-1471 to declassify these redacted pages. Former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham has called the redaction of the 28 pages part of "an aggressive deception."

Is Funding Transparency Enough To Prevent Billionaire Influence

June 9, 2016 Anthony Cody, www.livingindialogue.com Educate! Education, Funding, Journalism, Transparency

By Anthony Cody for Living in Dialogue - Here is where we stand with the revived controversy over the Los Angeles Times’ 2010 “investigation” into teacher effectiveness. In 2009, Teachers College, which sponsors The Hechinger Report, received a grant from the Gates Foundation in the amount of $652,493 in order “to support the development of high quality education coverage in the nation’s leading newspapers and magazines.”

Why So Secret? Take Action To Stop Trans-Pacific Partnership

June 8, 2016 Flush the TPP, www.popularresistance.org Resist! Obama, TPP, Trade, Transparency

By Flush the TPP. Open government groups and others have been calling for the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) to be more transparent about the agreements that it negotiates on behalf of all of us. That seems reasonable, doesn't it? Apparently not. The administration's response to requests for transparency have been to obfuscate. When asked to create a Transparency Officer, the USTR chose its legal counsel, Timothy Reif, the person in charge of defending its secrecy. Members of Congress say that Reif seemed to interpret his new responsibilities as finding ways to avoid being transparent. Last week, in response to a request from last July for Clinton's emails about the TPP negotiations, the State Department suddenly decided that it would not cooperate with the request until after the November election. Hmmmmm....... what are they hiding?

Newsletter – US Democracy Crisis: Illegitimate System

June 4, 2016 Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, www,.popularresistance.org Newsletter 2016 Elections, Corruption, Democracy, oligarchy, Plutocracy, Revolution, TPP, Transparency

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers. Two years ago we wrote that the task of the movement is to build national consensus. We have shown in previous articles that national consensus is being reached on many issues, but the government is not responding to the public consensus. We have also reported on research that shows the US is really an oligarchy operating in the worst democracy in the western world. The government's lack of responsiveness to the people and elected officials who fail to represent the people’s views are resulting in a crisis of democracy. This week the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs reported on that crisis. They found the legitimacy of US government has disappeared

MIT Historian Suing CIA For Transparency On Nelson Mandela

May 20, 2016 Ken Klippenstein, www.readersupportednews.org Resist! CIA, Nelson Mandela, Transparency

By Ken Klippenstein for Reader Supported News - This weekend, The Sunday Times reported that a former CIA agent confessed to having been responsible for the arrest of Nelson Mandela in 1962. The arrest led to Mandela spending 27 years in prison. The CIA agent, Donald Rickard, issued the confession in an interview conducted just two weeks before his death. Though embarrassing for the CIA, Rickard’s admission may prove a boon for historian Ryan Shapiro’s lawsuit against the Agency, which seeks to liberate CIA records pertaining to Mandela via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Dark Money Group Attacking CFP Bureau

May 1, 2016 LibWatson, www.sunlightfoundation.com Educate! Dark money, Propaganda, Transparency

By Libby Watson for the Sunlight Foundation. Since it formed in 2011, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has been under siege from financial institutions. Senate Republicans tried very hard to stop it from functioning at all, and since then they’ve tried to “tighten the leash” on the agency. Nearly five years since it officially opened, a new dark money group is taking aim at the agency — and no one has any idea who's behind it. Protect America’s Consumers is a 501(c)(4) group that incorporated in November 2015. Its registered agent is North Rock Reports LLC, located at the same address in Warrenton, Va., as the law firm Holtzman Vogel Josefiak Torchinsky. According to Politico, “The firm specializes in untraceable pressure groups for conservative causes.” I

The Honorable History Of Whistleblowing

April 24, 2016 Sam Smith, www.prorevnews.com Resist! Accountability, Government, Transparency, Whistleblowers

By Sam Smith of Progressive Review. Your editor has just returned from a meeting of the Fund for Constitutional Government which helps to support the Government Accountability Project, a big friend of government whistleblowers, including Edward Snowden. I asked GAP's sainted Louis Clark how many whistleblowers they were handling these days and his estimate was 50, with another 50 being assisted in some way. The media, embedded as it is in the official version of Washington life, doesn't let the public know how important whistleblowing is to decent government, not infrequently implying that revealing the truth is some sort of dirty - or disloyal - trick. This list of whistleblowers over the years, compile by GAP, may help to counterbalance the Washington view.

«1 2 3 4 5 6 »

Daily movement news and resources