By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

Mass surveillance of electronic communications is a vast, new, government intrusion on the privacy of innocent people worldwide. It is a violation of International human rights law. Without checks and balances, its use will continue to spread from country to country, corrupting democracies and empowering dictators.
That’s why, today, on February 11th, around the world, from Argentina to Uganda, from Colombia to the Philippines, the people of the Internet have united to fight back.
The Day We Fight Back’s main global action is to sign and promote the 13 Principles, a set of fundamental rules that, in clear language, tells lawmakers and governments how to apply existing human rights law to these new forms of surveillance. With the support of thousands of Net users, we’ll use your voice to demand that all governments comply with their obligation to protect privacy against unchecked surveillance.
But there’s more to today’s global action than the Principles. Hundreds of digital rights and privacy groups, thousands of individual Net users, in dozens of countries, have come together to protest surveillance by governments at home and abroad. Here’s just a sampling of the campaigns and events happening today.

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Posted on February 11, 2014

By The Day We Fight Back

A broad coalition of activist groups, companies, and online platforms will hold a worldwide day of activism in opposition to the NSA’s mass spying regime on Tuesday.
Dubbed “The Day We Fight Back,” the day of activism was announced on the eve of the anniversary of the tragic passing of activist and technologist Aaron Swartz. The protest is both in his honor and in celebration of the victory over the Stop Online Piracy Act two years ago this month, which he helped spur.
Participants including Access, Demand Progress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Free Press, BoingBoing, Reddit, Mozilla, ThoughtWorks, and more to come, will join potentially millions of Internet users to pressure lawmakers to end mass surveillance – of both Americans and the citizens of the whole world.

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Posted on February 10, 2014

By Steve Rhodes

The most ubiquitous headline in the wake of the Koschman report’s release on Tuesday seems to have been variations on the theme that “Daley, Family Did Not Try To Influence Koschman Case.”
At least in that last example, from the Tribune, the second paragraph noted that “[Special prosecutor Dan] Webb’s exhaustive examination of the April 2004 death of David Koschman found that the involvement of Daley’s nephew, Richard ‘R.J.’ Vanecko, colored the initial investigation and a later probe by Chicago police and Cook County prosecutors.”
And the third paragraph noted that “There was evidence of city officials closely monitoring the progress of the investigation even as Koschman lay comatose in a hospital and – seven years later – scrambling to exercise damage control when the Chicago Sun-Times started asking questions.”
In other words, what the report really shows is that the very reason the Koschman case was bungled almost beyond belief was because of R.J. Vanecko’s family – the Daleys.
“What’s very clear as you read this report is that no phone call needed to be made,” Koschman lawyer Locke Bowman told reporters after the report’s release. “Very early on, the Chicago Police Department, whether by intuition or by experience of the realities of life in Cook County and the city of Chicago, got the message that this was no ordinary case.”
An examination of the report – and I’m only halfway through it – bears out Bowman’s sentiment, and makes mincemeat of the notion that Daley didn’t influence the case. He may not have made a phone call – did he ever “make the phone call” while presiding over a City Hall where corruption was encoded in its very DNA? – but he (and his family) created a culture that, in the least, made it very clear that protecting the Daleys was Job 1 in this town, and anyone who violated that premise would face their wrath.

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Posted on February 6, 2014

By Lois Beckett/ProPublica

Chicago’s Cook County Hospital has one of the busiest trauma centers in the nation, treating about 2,000 patients a year for gunshots, stabbings and other violent injuries.
So when researchers started screening patients there for post-traumatic stress disorder in 2011, they assumed they would find cases.
They just didn’t know how many: Fully 43 percent of the patients they examined – and more than half of gunshot-wound victims – had signs of PTSD.
“We knew these people were going to have PTSD symptoms,” said Kimberly Joseph, a trauma surgeon at the hospital. “We didn’t know it was going to be as extensive.”
What the work showed, Joseph said, is, “This is a much more urgent problem than you think.”

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Posted on February 4, 2014