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By Kara Brandeisky and Stephen Suen/ProPublica
Since Edward Snowden leaked documents detailing the NSA’s sweeping surveillance programs, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was forced to admit that part of his congressional testimony was “erroneous.” Here are six claims about NSA surveillance that have been undermined by recent disclosures. Read the full story.
Posted on July 30, 2013
By The Illinois Campaign for Political Reform
On Saturday, Gov. Pat Quinn signed a new election code bill into law. The Illinois Campaign for Political Reform takes a look.
The bill, over 200 pages long, contains over two dozen separate provisions. The Illinois Campaign for Political Reform supported some of these and had concerns about others. As a result of this conflict, ICPR did not take a single, comprehensive position on the passage of the bill.
Nonetheless, we commend the legislature and Gov. Quinn for enacting positive of the bill’s provisions, including:
Posted on July 29, 2013
By Cora Currier/ProPublica
In a major national security speech this spring, President Obama said again and again that the U.S. is at war with “al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces.”
So who exactly are those associated forces? It’s a secret.
Posted on July 27, 2013
By Kara Brandeisky/ProPublica
Although the House defeated a measure that would have defunded the bulk phone metadata collection program, the narrow 205-217 vote showed that there is significant support in Congress to reform NSA surveillance programs. Here are six other legislative proposals on the table.
Posted on July 26, 2013
By Steve Rhodes
“Mayor Rahm Emanuel [Wednesday] named state Rep. Deb Mell to succeed her retiring father, longtime 33rd Ward Ald. Richard Mell, on the Chicago City Council,” the Tribune reports.
“During brief remarks introducing Rep. Mell, Emanuel referenced the possibility that her appointment will be seen as a case of nepotism. ‘Others will say what they will, but while it would not be fair to appoint Deb just because her name is Mell, it would have been equally unfair to her constituents and the city to refuse to appoint her because her last name is Deb Mell,’ Emanuel said.”
Perhaps, but what Rahm left out is that Dick Mell chose to retire in the middle of his term to ensure just this outcome – which is certainly unfair. And Rahm also left out the fact that daddy Mell engineered his daughter’s election into the statehouse to begin with, as well as a job with a “politically connected” landscaping firm before that. Has Deb Mell ever truly earned any job she’s had? Let’s take a look at that question and more.
Posted on July 25, 2013
By Justin Elliott/ProPublica
The NSA is a “supercomputing powerhouse” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second.
The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture.
But ask the NSA, as part of a freedom of information request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees’ e-mail? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology.
Posted on July 23, 2013
By Justin Elliott/ProPublica
Among the snooping revelations of recent weeks, there have been tantalizing bits of evidence that the NSA is tapping fiber-optic cables that carry nearly all international phone and internet data.
The idea that the NSA is sweeping up vast data streams via cables and other infrastructure – often described as the “backbone of the Internet” – is not new. In late 2005, the New York Times first described the tapping, which began after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. More details emerged in early 2006 when an AT&T whistleblower came forward.
But like other aspects of NSA surveillance, virtually everything about this kind of NSA surveillance is highly secret and we’re left with far from a full picture.
Posted on July 22, 2013
By Deivid Rojas/Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago
Chicago McDonald’s worker Nancy Salgado appeared [Thursday] on the Today Show and demonstrated just how out of touch McDonald’s financial planning site is and discussed what it’s really like to try to make ends meet with two kids on $11,400 a year – not $25,000 as McDonald’s estimated.
The segment also featured clips from the Chicago fast-food worker strikes in April calling for $15 an hour and the right to form a union without retaliation. After the segment, Tamron Hall remarked on McDonald’s fuzzy math, “You’d think one person would have stopped and said, ‘what’s the real world,’ right? If you’re not living in it, ask someone.”
These low-wage workers are a key reason why workers have been joining together for $15 an hour and the right to form a union without retaliation. During April and May, thousands of fast-food workers in seven cities – from coast to coast – walked off their jobs because they work hard, can’t even afford the basics and have to rely on public assistance just to scrape by while these corporations make record profits.
Posted on July 19, 2013
Also: Right To Free Speech Apparently Forfeited
The reporter is AP’s Matt Lee.
Posted on July 17, 2013
