By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Internet Archive published a formerly secret national security letter (NSL) Thursday that includes misinformation about how to contest the accompanying gag order that demanded total secrecy about the request. As a result of the Archive’s challenge to the letter, the FBI has agreed to send clarifications about the law to potentially thousands of communications providers who have received NSLs in the last year-and-a-half.
The NSL issued to the Archive said the library had the right to “make an annual challenge to the nondisclosure requirement.” But in 2015, Congress updated the law to allow for more than one request a year, so that communications providers could speak out about their experience without unneeded delay. Represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Archive informed the FBI that it did not have the information the agency was seeking and pointed out the legal error. The FBI agreed to drop the gag order in this case and allow the publication of the NSL.

Read More

Posted on December 3, 2016

By Ronnie Cohen/Reuters

Mexico’s soda tax is on course to prevent diabetes, heart attacks and strokes in more than 200,000 adults and to save nearly $1 billion in healthcare costs over a decade, a new study suggests.
The research bolstered arguments in favor of soda taxes approved this month in three Northern California cities as well as in Boulder, Colorado and Cook County, Illinois. The taxes were designed to wean consumers off sugar-sweetened beverages, to curb a worldwide surge in obesity and diabetes, an epidemic fueled by soda, public health experts say.

Read More

Posted on December 2, 2016

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

CREDO Mobile representatives confirmed Wednesday that their company was at the center of the long-running legal battle over the constitutionality of national security letters (NSLs), and published the letters the government sent three years ago.
Until now, CREDO was under a gag order preventing company officials from acknowledging or discussing he case. In March, a district court found that the FBI had failed to demonstrate the need for this gag, and struck it down pending an appeal by the government. But in November, the government decided to drop its appeal of that order, leaving CREDO free to talk about why the legal challenge is important to the company and its customers.
“A founding principle of CREDO is to fight for progressive causes we believe in, and we believe that NSLs are unconstitutional,” CREDO CEO Ray Morris said.

Read More

Posted on December 1, 2016

By The Illinois PIRG Education Fund

Small business in Illinois would have to shoulder an extra $5,789.31 in taxes to make up for the revenue lost due to the abuse of offshore tax havens by multinational corporations, according to a new report by Illinois PIRG Education Fund.
As a new administration takes office and the possibility of tax reform again enters the national conversation, the report highlights how it’s small domestic businesses and ordinary Americans that have to shoulder the burden of multinational tax avoidance.
“The amount of cash corporations book to offshore tax havens is only growing, and it’s not because these corporations are actually conducting prolific amounts of business in the Cayman Islands,” said Abe Scarr, Illinois PIRG Education Fund director.
“Our tax code is balanced in favor of big multinational corporations, and that means here at home we’re losing out on lower individual tax rates, more funding for public programs, or decreasing our national debt.”

Read More

Posted on November 30, 2016

By Jesse Eisinger and Justin Elliott/ProPublica

If the government ends up approving the $85 billion AT&T-Time Warner merger, credit won’t necessarily belong to the executives, bankers, lawyers and lobbyists pushing for the deal. More likely, it will be due to the professors.
A serial acquirer, AT&T must persuade the government to allow every major deal. Again and again, the company has relied on economists from America’s top universities to make its case before the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission.
Moonlighting for a consulting firm named Compass Lexecon, they represented AT&T when it bought Centennial, DirecTV, and Leap Wireless; and when it tried unsuccessfully to absorb T-Mobile. And now AT&T and Time Warner have hired three top Compass Lexecon economists to counter criticism that the giant deal would harm consumers and concentrate too much media power in one company.
Today, “in front of the government, in many cases the most important advocate is the economist and lawyers come second,” said James Denvir, an antitrust lawyer at Boies, Schiller.

Read More

Posted on November 29, 2016

By Robert Speel/The Conversation

In November 2000, newly elected New York Senator Hillary Clinton promised that when she took office in 2001, she would introduce a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College, the 18th-century, state-by-state, winner-take-all system for selecting the president.
She never pursued her promise – a decision that must haunt her today.
In this year’s election, she won at least 2 million more votes than Donald Trump, but lost by a significant margin in the Electoral College.
In addition to 2016, there have been four other times in American history – 1824, 1876, 1888 and 2000 – when the candidate who won the Electoral College lost the national popular vote. Each time, a Democratic presidential candidate lost the election due to this system.

Read More

Posted on November 28, 2016

By A.C. Thompson and Ken Schwencke/ProPublica

Over the past month, more than 564,000 unique visitors have spent time on the Daily Stormer, a website that takes its name from a Hitler-era German tabloid, Der Stürmer.
The site bills itself as “America’s #1 Most Trusted Republican News Source” and features headlines such as “Jew Billionaires Meet To Overthrow Trump Government,” “Faggots And Jews Whining About Bannon Appointment,” and “Yes, Trump Really Can Make America White Again.”
Throughout Donald J. Trump’s ultimately successful run for the presidency, many worried that he had, willfully or recklessly, emboldened racists across the country. On Tuesday, Trump told the New York Times that had not been his intent.

Read More

Posted on November 26, 2016

By Eric Umansky/ProPublica

Journalist Masha Gessen has spent years reporting on Vladimir Putin’s rule in Russia. She has written that the focus on Russian influence over now President-elect Donald Trump has been overstated and the result of a failure of imagination: the inability to imagine that the president would profoundly break with the norms of our country’s political discourse and practices.
A few days after Trump’s win, Gessen wrote about what citizens should be on the watch for with the incoming administration. ProPublica’s Eric Umansky and Jesse Eisinger sat down with Gessen to talk about how exactly journalists should be covering Trump.

Read More

Posted on November 24, 2016

By George Michael/The Conversation

In recent months, far-right activists – which some have labeled the “alt-right” – have gone from being an obscure, largely online subculture to a player at the very center of American politics.
Long relegated to the cultural and political fringe, alt-right activists were among the most enthusiastic supporters of Donald Trump. Earlier this year, Breitbart.com executive Steve Bannon declared the website “the platform for the alt-right.” By August, Bannon was appointed the CEO of the Trump campaign. In the wake of Trump’s victory, he’ll be joining Trump in the White House as a senior advisor.
I’ve spent years extensively researching the American far right, and the movement seems more energized than ever.

Read More

Posted on November 23, 2016

By Daniel Golden/ProPublica

When Georgetown University announced plans in September to make amends for its historical participation in the slave trade, President John J. DeGioia drew a curious parallel. The descendants of 272 slaves sold by the university in 1838 to pay off debts, he said, would receive the same advantage in admissions as the children of its alumni.
He seemed unaware of the irony. Alumni children at prestigious universities like Georgetown tend to be white and to come from affluent families. In other words, DeGioia was equating a remedy for past racism with a policy, known as legacy preference, that itself discriminates against low-income and minority students.
“If Georgetown really wants to come to grips with its discriminatory past and present, it would also end admissions policies like legacy preference that unconscionably favor the already privileged,” said Michael Dannenberg, director of strategic initiatives for policy at Education Reform Now, a think tank affiliated with the advocacy group Democrats for Education Reform.

Read More

Posted on November 22, 2016