Chicago - A message from the station manager

By Steve Rhodes

One is a series of updates about your country.
“For a quarter of a century, the rules were followed and the NSA stayed out of trouble, but following the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration decided to illegally bypass the court and began its program of warrantless wiretapping,” James Bamford reports in the New York Review of Books.
“‘Basically all rules were thrown out the window and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans,’ I was told by Adrienne J. Kinne, who in 2001 was a twenty-four-year-old voice intercept operator who conducted some of the eavesdropping. She or her superiors did not have to get a warrant for each interception.

“It was incredibly uncomfortable to be listening to private personal conversations of Americans,” she said. “And it’s almost like going through and stumbling and finding somebody’s diary and reading it.”

“All during this time, however, the Bush administration was telling the American public the opposite: that a warrant was obtained whenever an American was targeted. ‘Anytime you hear the United States government talking about a wiretap, it requires – a wiretap requires a court order,’ President George W. Bush told a crowd in 2004. ‘Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.’ After exposure of the operation by The New York Times in 2005, however, rather than strengthen the controls governing the NSA’s spying, Congress instead voted to weaken them, largely by codifying into the amendment to FISA what had previously been illegal.

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Posted on August 2, 2013

White House On Afghan Massacre: It’s A Secret

By Cora Currier/ProPublica

Soon after taking office, President Obama pledged to open a new inquiry into the deaths of perhaps thousands of Taliban prisoners of war at the hands of U.S.-allied Afghan fighters in late 2001.
Last month, the White House told ProPublica it was still “looking into” the apparent massacre.
Now it says it has concluded its investigation – but won’t make it public.

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Posted on August 1, 2013

About That Election Code Omnibus Bill

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:

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Posted on July 29, 2013

The [Deb Mell] Papers

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.

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Posted on July 25, 2013

NSA Says It Can’t Search Its Own E-Mails

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.

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Posted on July 23, 2013

Does The NSA Tap That? What We Still Don’t Know About The Agency’s Internet Surveillance

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.

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Posted on July 22, 2013

McDonald’s And Dunkin’ Donuts: Dumb And Dumber

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.

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Posted on July 19, 2013

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