By Dustin Volz/Reuters

The secretive U.S. Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court did not deny a single government request in 2015 for electronic surveillance orders granted for foreign intelligence purposes, continuing a longstanding trend, a Justice Department document showed.
The court received 1,457 requests last year on behalf of the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for authority to intercept communications, including email and phone calls, according to a Justice Department memo sent to leaders of relevant congressional committees on Friday and seen by Reuters. The court did not reject any of the applications in whole or in part, the memo showed.
The total represented a slight uptick from 2014, when the court received 1,379 applications and rejected none.

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Posted on April 30, 2016

By Cynthia Gordy/ProPublica

When the blood-testing company Theranos opened to the public in 2013, founder Elizabeth Holmes made bold claims of having revolutionized the diagnostic-lab business.
With just a few drops of blood pricked from a finger (as opposed to several vials drawn from a syringe in the arm), the company said it could not only run the full range of laboratory tests, but also turn around results within hours, all at a low cost.
Theranos received fawning early media coverage, but last October Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou took a more critical look. With descriptions of unreliable equipment, skeptical employees and deficient practices, he reported that the company’s PR blitz outpaced its actual medical technology.
On this podcast, Carreyrou talks with ProPublica senior reporter Charles Ornstein about why he decided to look into Theranos in the first place, the problems with the company’s claims, and the recent actions from federal inspectors and Walgreens that lend credence to his investigation.
[NOTE: After the recording of this podcast, the Wall Street Journal reported that Walgreens threatened to terminate its retail partnership with Theranos unless it addresses mounting problems.]

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Posted on April 29, 2016

By The Chicago Republican Party

Chris Cleveland, 43rd Ward Republican Committeeman, was re-elected Chairman of the Chicago Republican Party last night. The Republican ward committeemen in Chicago gathered in a conference room of a Loop law firm to select a chairman for a four-year term.
Cleveland won with 94% of the weighted vote, up from 74% when he was first elected a year ago to fill the unexpired term of his predecessor Adam Robinson.
Cleveland is credited with revitalizing the Party over the last few years, having led a team that recruited candidates across the city, raised money, and supported Governor Rauner’s effort to raise the Republican vote in Chicago in his successful 2014 campaign.

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Posted on April 27, 2016

By Adam Harris/ProPublica

If you dine out regularly, chances are you’ve seen “farm-to-table,” “locally sourced” and “sustainable” options on the menu. But are those claims true? Tampa Bay Times food critic Laura Reiley wanted to find out. And she discovered that often these labels are bogus. In one case, a meal advertised as veal schnitzel may have been frozen pork chops and sliced pork.
In the aftermath of her investigation, several restaurants changed their menus and chalkboards to reflect true food sourcing. I spoke with Reiley about the investigation and how what’s going on at Tampa Bay restaurants might be happening at places near you.

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Posted on April 26, 2016

Rebuffs Key Question From Bipartisan Lawmakers Even As He Demands Renewal Of Surveillance Programs

“A bipartisan group of lawmakers is none too happy that the executive branch is asking them to reauthorize two key surveillance programs next year without answering the single most important question about them,” the Intercept reports.
“The programs, authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, are called PRISM and Upstream. PRISM collects hundreds of millions of internet communications of ‘targeted individuals’ from providers such as Facebook, Yahoo, and Skype. Upstream takes communications straight from the major U.S. internet backbones run by telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon and harvests data that involves selectors related to foreign targets.
“But both programs, though nominally targeted at foreigners overseas, inevitably sweep up massive amounts of data involving innocent Americans.
“The question is: How much? The government won’t answer.”

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Posted on April 25, 2016

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

A federal judge has unsealed her ruling that National Security Letter provisions in federal law – as amended by the USA FREEDOM Act – don’t violate the Constitution. The ruling allows the FBI to continue to issue the letters with accompanying gag orders that silence anyone from disclosing they have received an NSL, often for years. The Electronic Frontier Foundation represents two service providers in challenging the NSL statutes, who will appeal this decision to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
“Our heroic clients want to talk about the NSLs they received from the government, but they’ve been gagged – one of them since 2011,” said EFF deputy executive director Kurt Opsahl. “This government silencing means the service providers cannot issue open and honest transparency reports and can’t share their experiences as part of the ongoing public debate over NSLs and their potential for abuse. Despite this setback, we will take this fight to the appeals court, again, to combat USA FREEDOM’s unconstitutional NSL provisions.”

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Posted on April 23, 2016

By Josh Smith/Reuters

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – Drones fired more weapons than conventional warplanes for the first time in Afghanistan last year and the ratio is rising, previously unreported U.S. Air Force data show, underlining how reliant the military has become on unmanned aircraft.
The trend may give clues to the U.S. military’s strategy as it considers withdrawing more troops from the country, while at the same time shoring up local forces who have struggled to stem a worsening Taliban insurgency.
U.S. President Barack Obama said in 2013 that the Afghan drawdown after 2014 and progress against al-Qaeda would “reduce the need for unmanned strikes,” amid concerns from human rights groups and some foreign governments over civilian casualties.
On one level, that has played out; the number of missiles and bombs dropped by drones in Afghanistan actually fell last year, largely because the U.S.-led NATO mission ceased combat operations at the end of 2014 and is now a fraction of the size.
Yet as the force has shrunk, it has leant on unmanned aircraft more than ever, the Air Force data reveal, with drone strikes accounting for at least 61 percent of weapons deployed in the first quarter of this year.

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Posted on April 21, 2016

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit Tuesday against the Justice Department to shed light on whether the government has ever used secret court orders to force technology companies to decrypt their customers’ private communications, a practice that could undermine the safety and security of devices used by millions of people.
The lawsuit argues that the DOJ must disclose if the government has ever sought or obtained an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court requiring third parties – like Apple or Google – to provide technical assistance to carry out surveillance.
The suit separately alleges that the agency has failed to turn over other significant FISC opinions that must be declassified as part of surveillance reforms that Congress enacted with the USA FREEDOM Act.

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Posted on April 20, 2016

By Steve Rhodes

In a 2001 Op-Ed in the Tribune titled “Liberty And The Permanent Congress,” current Chicago Public Schools chief Forrest Claypool and then lawyer and former chief of the Chicago Parks District wrote:
“Novelist Ayn Rand said there is only America, meaning only one true exemplar of individual and economic freedom in a world given to regulating human activity.”
A Cook County Democratic apparatchik citing libertarian hero Ayn Rand? Oh, it goes much deeper than that. Let’s take a look.

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Posted on April 19, 2016

By Andrea Germanos/Common Dreams

Using an “opaque and secretive network” of subsidiaries in tax havens, top American corporations have stashed $1.4 trillion offshore, a new report from Oxfam shows.
With “a range of tricks, tools, and loopholes,” for tax avoidance, the 50 largest U.S. companies, including well-known names like Goldman Sachs, Verizon Communications, Apple, Coca-Cola, IBM and Chevron, raked in $4 trillion in profits globally between 2008 and 2014, are contributing to inequality, the anti-poverty group said.
The report, “Broken at the Top,” states that such tax dodging is one of the “profit-making strategies of many multinational corporations.”
As noted in the report:

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Posted on April 18, 2016