By ProPublica

If former Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has faced his share of criticism for his rocky tenure, Jesse Eisinger says, his new book makes clear that most of it should be borne by his old boss, President Obama.
Following up on his unsparing examination of the book, Stress Test, last week, Eisinger joins Steve Engelberg for ProPublica’s newest podcast to expand on Obama’s missed opportunities in the wake of the financial crisis.
Among the highlights:
* “I consider the Obama appointment of Geithner to be the single worst political mistake Obama made,” Eisinger says, pointing out that as a former head of the New York Federal Reserve under President Bush, Geithner linked Obama politically to the status quo on financial regulation.

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Posted on May 30, 2014

By Justin Elliott/ProPublica

An amendment adopted by a House committee would, if enacted, take a step toward removing the National Security Agency from the business of meddling with encryption standards that protect security on the Internet.
As we reported with the Guardian and the New York Times last year, the NSA has for years engaged in a multi-front war on encryption, in many cases cracking the technology that is used to protect the confidentiality of intercepted communications.
Part of the NSA’s efforts centered on the development of encryption standards by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which sets standards that are adopted by government and industry.
Documents provided by Edward Snowden suggest that the NSA inserted a backdoor into one popular encryption standard, prompting NIST to launch an ongoing review of all its existing standards.

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Posted on May 27, 2014

By Steve Rhodes

How Chicago’s New Pot Law Is Bogus, How Roosevelt University’s New Study Is Bogus, And How The Media Covers The Bogosity. With Tracy Siska of the Chicago Justice Project. Plus: The Week In Juvey.

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Posted on May 25, 2014

By Lois Beckett/ProPublica

Two Congressional Democrats are unveiled legislation Wednesday that would restart the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s gun violence research efforts.
Since 1996, when a small CDC-funded study on the risks of owning a firearm ignited opposition from Republicans, the CDC’s budget for research on firearms injuries has shrunk to zero.
The result, as we’ve detailed, is that many basic questions about gun violence – such as how many Americans are shot each year – remain unanswered.

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Posted on May 23, 2014

Flaws Replicated Across Departments

Examining the new book by former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Jesse Eisinger writes for ProPublica’s “The Trade” and The New York Times’s “DealBook” that the reluctance to push for serious change in the financial system after the 2008 meltdown can be traced to the very top: President Obama.
The flaws we thought we were seeing during Mr. Geithner’s tenure turn out to have replicated themselves in other Obama departments, Eisinger writes. And they have persisted after Mr. Geithner left.
He goes on to note:

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Posted on May 21, 2014

By The Roderick And Solange MacArthur Justice Center

A settlement has been reached in a 2012 lawsuit alleging unconstitutional treatment of hundreds of Illinois youth imprisoned annually without access to an attorney for alleged technical parole violations. The suit charged the youths’ parole revocation hearings amounted to a “kangaroo court” system. The Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center has issued the following news release about the settlement. – Jim Bray
Illinois officials have agreed to major reforms aimed at protecting children in the state’s parole system. These reforms will resolve a class-action lawsuit that alleged due process restrictions have been denied to children in Illinois’ parole revocation hearings. The reforms include state-funded lawyers to represent youth returned to prison for alleged parole violations.
Filed by the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center and the Uptown People’s Law Center in October 2012, the class action challenged the “arbitrary detention and imprisonment” of more than 1,000 young people each year through actions of the Illinois Prisoner Review Board and Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice. In agreeing to resolve the lawsuit, the PRB and the DJJ did not admit to the allegations contained in the complaint.

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Posted on May 19, 2014

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

Technology companies are privy to our most sensitive information: our conversations, photos, location data, and more. But which companies fight the hardest to protect your privacy from government data requests?
Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation releases its fourth annual Who Has Your Back report, with comprehensive information on 26 companies’ commitments to fighting unfair demands for customer data. The report examines the privacy policies, terms of service, public statements, and courtroom track records of major technology companies, including Internet service providers, email providers, social networking sites, and mobile services.
“The sunlight brought about by a year’s worth of Snowden leaks appears to have prompted dozens of companies to improve their policies when it comes to giving user data to the government,” said EFF Activism Director Rainey Reitman. “Our report charts objectively verifiable categories of how tech companies react when the government seeks user data, so users can make informed decisions about which companies they should trust with their information.”

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Posted on May 16, 2014

By Lois Beckett/ProPublica

How many Americans have been shot over the past 10 years? No one really knows. We don’t even know if the number of people shot annually has gone up or down over that time.
The government’s own numbers seem to conflict. One source of data on shooting victims suggests that gun-related violence has been declining for years, while another government estimate actually shows an increase in the number of people who have been shot. Each estimate is based on limited, incomplete data. Not even the FBI tracks the total number of nonfatal gunshot wounds.
“We know how many people die, but not how many are injured and survive,” said Dr. Demetrios Demetriades, a Los Angeles trauma surgeon who has been studying nationwide gunshot injury trends.
While the number of gun murders has decreased in recent years, there’s debate over whether this reflects a drop in the total number of shootings, or an improvement in how many lives emergency room doctors can save.

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Posted on May 14, 2014

By Steve Rhodes

“On Oct. 6, 2010, less than a month before the election, Gov. Pat Quinn stood alongside congressmen Bobby Rush and Danny Davis to announce he was plowing $50 million in state funds into an anti-violence program for Chicago neighborhoods,” Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown wrote Tuesday.
“As far as I can tell, the newspapers never even reported it at the time. All I can find are the press releases.
“I have no memory of the announcement myself, but would guess most reporters figured it for an election year repackaging of existing state programs and ignored it. That was probably a mistake on our part.”
As far as you can tell? Your memory? Look it up!
I did.
(And “probably” a mistake by reporters who “figured” it was an election-year repackaging of existing state programs? Ho-hum, reporters are so easily bored. They just “figure” stuff. Like, what’s the big deal about the state spending $50 million to stop violence in the city? It’s “probably” nothing. Oh, gotta go. Another dead kid. Hope she died holding a teddy bear. Now, about that code of silence . . . )
Like I said, I did Brown’s job for him – just put the check in the mail, Mark – and looked it up.

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Posted on May 8, 2014

By Nikole Hannah-Jones/ProPublica

For decades, federal desegregation orders were the potent tool that broke the back of Jim Crow education in the South, helping transform the region’s educational systems into the most integrated in the country.
Federal judges, often facing down death threats and violence, blanketed Southern states with hundreds of court orders that set out specific plans and timetables to ensure the elimination of racial segregation. Federal agencies then aggressively used the authority of the courts to monitor hostile school systems, wielding the power of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to strip federal dollars from districts that refused to desegregate.
The pace of the change wrought by the federal courts was breathtaking. In 1963, about 1 percent of black children in the South attended school with white children. By the early 1970s, the South had been remade – fully 90 percent of black children attended desegregated schools. Court orders proved most successful in the South, but were also used in an attempt to combat de facto segregation in schools across the country, from New York to Michigan to Arizona.
Today, this once-powerful force is in considerable disarray.

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Posted on May 5, 2014