By Steve Rhodes

“Convicted ex-Streets and Sanitation Commissioner Alfred ‘Al’ Sanchez’s political comeback hit a major roadblock Thursday: an elections board kicked him off the Cook County ballot because he’s not done with his parole,” the Tribune reports.

(For some reason, the Tribune felt it was important to use Sanchez’s full legal name in this article for the first time since 2005; it has done so only 11 times dating back to what appears to be his first mention in the paper in 1986.)

“State law allows convicted felons to run for County Board, but Sanchez was on supervised release stemming from a city hiring fraud conviction when he filed his paperwork to secure a spot on the March 18 Democratic primary ballot.

“Sanchez attorney Dan Johnson argued that state law only required Sanchez to be finished serving his sentence by the time he would take office Dec. 1. Johnson argued Sanchez was eligible to ask to have his parole terminated in July, and the elections board should err on his side.

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Posted on January 17, 2014

By Roger Wallenstein

Andy Velez got it right.

In the spring of 2005, I was the junior varsity baseball coach at Kelvyn Park High School. I used to live a few blocks west of the school and passed by it many times. Aside from thinking it was a typical, fortress-like building housing an urban high school, I never gave the school much thought.

Andy was a sophomore. He played left field. Couldn’t hit much but he could go after a fly ball with dexterity, and as my leadoff man, he walked frequently and could steal a base. He also lived right across the street from the school in the 4500 block of West Wrightwood. If Andy was late to a game or practice, which was infrequently, I could always knock on his front door to jump start him.

Andy also was a bright kid. In a school which “did not meet federal education standards,” according to the 2013 CPS report card, Andy ranked third in his class and talked about going to college.

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Posted on January 15, 2014

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked a federal court on Friday to order the Department of Justice (DOJ) to release more thorough information about the dragnet electronic surveillance being conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA). The filing in EFF’s long-standing case, Jewel v. NSA, also argues that the DOJ must stop pretending that information revealed and publicly acknowledged about government surveillance over the last seven months is still secret.

“The government has now publicly admitted much about its mass spying, but its filings before the court still try to claim broad secrecy about some of those same admissions,” EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn said. “It’s long past time for the Department of Justice to stop using overblown secrecy claims to try to prevent an open, adversarial court from deciding whether the NSA’s spying is constitutional.”

Since the Jewel case was first filed in 2008, the government has used claims of state secrets to fight court review. Last year, documents revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden confirmed many of the case’s allegations. As a result of the Snowden disclosures, Judge Jeffrey White of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ordered the government to review all of its filings and release everything that was no longer secret. The court also ordered the government to explain the effects of the disclosures on the case.

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Posted on January 14, 2014

By Steve Rhodes

How did UNO get so clouty and corrupt? They had Democrats Rahm Emanuel, Michael Madigan and Ed Burke at their side.

Chicago magazine and the Better Government Association have the details in their new investigation.

Among the major findings, as summarized by the BGA:

• UNO has received more than $280 million in public money over the past five years but neither Chicago Public Schools nor the Illinois State Board of Education closely monitored how those funds were spent.

• A good chunk of the public money UNO collects never touches the classroom. In 2012, for example, it received $49 million from local, state and federal sources. Of that amount, more than $5 million went to management fees, nearly $3.5 million to debt interest payments, nearly $1 million to consultants and $68,200 to promotional materials.
• According to state law, charter school networks are supposed to conduct and videotape blind admissions lotteries. But two sources with direct knowledge of the process say UNO never held a “real” lottery and instead cherry-picked students based on where they live in order to build up coalitions in certain Latino neighborhoods.
• UNO has co-developed at least five senior housing developments in and around Chicago, signaling its growing business prowess, and push to diversify its interests. As is the case with its schools, taxpayers helped foot the bill. UNO and its business partner have received loans, grants and housing tax credits worth $78 million from the governments of the State of Illinois, Cook County and City of Chicago.

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Posted on January 10, 2014

The U.S. Has Bombed At Least Eight Wedding Parties Since 2001

“The Obama administration has launched an internal investigation into a Dec. 12 drone strike in Yemen that targeted an al-Qaeda militant but which local villagers say ended up hitting a wedding party, killing 12 and injuring 14 others, U.S. officials tell NBC News.

“NBC News has obtained exclusive videos and photos taken in the aftermath of the strike. The graphic images show the scorched bodies of young men who villagers say were part of a convoy on their way to the wedding celebration when they were killed in their pickups by two Hellfire missiles fired by a U.S. drone.”

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The Atlantic: If A Drone Strike Hit an American Wedding, We’d Ground Our Fleet.

The Nation: The U.S. Has Bombed At Least Eight Wedding Parties Since 2001.

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Posted on January 8, 2014

By Justin Elliott/ProPublica

Update Dec. 28, 2013: In a new decision in support of the NSA’s phone metadata surveillance program, U.S. district court Judge William Pauley cites an intelligence failure involving the agency in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks. But the judge’s cited source, the 9/11 Commission Report, doesn’t actually include the account he gives in the ruling. What’s more, experts say the NSA could have avoided the pre-9/11 failure even without the metadata surveillance program.

We previously explored the key incident in question, involving calls made by hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar from California to Yemen, in a story we did over the summer, which you can read below.

In his decision, Pauley writes: “The NSA intercepted those calls using overseas signals intelligence capabilities that could not capture al-Mihdhar’s telephone number identifier. Without that identifier, NSA analysts concluded mistakenly that al-Mihdhar was overseas and not in the United States.”

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Posted on December 30, 2013

By Cora Currier/ProPublica

President Obama has ordered an early release from prison for Clarence Aaron, who has spent 20 years there, hoping for mercy.

Aaron’s commutation is one of eight crack cocaine-related sentences commuted last week. Obama said the sentences were meted out under an “unfair system” that among other things featured a vast disparity between crack and powder cocaine cases.

The White House ordered a new review of Aaron’s petition last year after ProPublica and the Washington Post reported that the government’s pardon attorney, Ronald Rodgers, had misrepresented Aaron’s case to President George W. Bush.

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Posted on December 27, 2013

Via AP

Orwell warned us.

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Posted on December 26, 2013

Those Things He Says They’re Not Doing? They’re Totally Doing Them!

Eight arms to hold you.

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Posted on December 24, 2013

By Justin Elliott/ProPublica

The National Security Agency should not undermine encryption standards that are designed to protect the privacy of communications, the panel of experts appointed by President Obama to review NSA surveillance recommended in a report released last week.

The recommendation, among the strongest of the many suggested changes laid out by the panel, comes several months after ProPublica, the Guardian, and the New York Times reported that the NSA has successfully worked to undercut encryption. The story was based on a set of documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Encryption technologies are supposed to render intercepted communications unreadable. But the NSA conducted what one secret memo described as an “aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies.”

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Posted on December 22, 2013