Chicago -
By Steve Rhodes
A century-long assault on blacks by local, state and federal policy makers. Plus: Obama bin Lying; Eroding Checks & Balances; Enjoy Your Murder-Stained Nails; Prince’s Vault; Illinois Supreme Court Upholds State Constitution; White DUI Privilege; White Frat Privilege; and Loyola Beats Lewis.
Posted on May 10, 2015
By The Electronic Frontier Foundation
A federal appeals court Thursday ruled that the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records is illegal, saying Congress didn’t authorize collection of a ”staggering” amount of information on Americans. The decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S.Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit overturns a judge’s ruling dismissing ACLU’s challenge to Section 215 of the Patriot Act, ACLU v. Clapper.
”This is a great and welcome decision and ought to make Congress pause to consider whether the small changes contained in the USA Freedom Act are enough,” said Cindy Cohn, executive director of Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). ”The 2nd Circuit rejected on multiple grounds the government’s radical reinterpretation of Section 215 that underpinned its secret shift to mass seizure and search of Americans’ telephone records.
“While the court did not reach the constitutional issues, it certainly noted the serious problems with blindly embracing the third-party doctrine – the claim that you lose all constitutional privacy protections whenever a third-party, like your phone company, has sensitive information about your actions.”
Said EFF legislative analyst Mark Jaycox: “Now that a court of appeal has rejected the government’s arguments supporting its secret shift to mass surveillance, we look forward to other courts – including the Ninth Circuit in EFF’s Smith v. Obama case – rejecting mass surveillance as well.
“With the deadline to reauthorize section 215 looming, we also call on Congress to both expressly adopt the interpretation of the law given by the court and to take further steps to rein in the NSA and reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.”
Posted on May 8, 2015
By Michael Grabell/ProPublica
An injured worker featured in a ProPublica and NPR investigation into the rollback of workers’ compensation nationwide warned Illinois lawmakers on Tuesday not to make the same drastic cuts that his state has made in recent years.
John Coffell, who lost his home after hurting his back at an Oklahoma tire plant, testified as part of an eight-hour hearing on workers’ comp before the entire Illinois state assembly. The rare hearing of “the committee as a whole” was called by Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan as a preemptive strike of sorts as newly elected Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner prepares a number of changes to reduce costs for employers.
Posted on May 7, 2015
By Steve Rhodes
Better than the Beatles. Plus: The Return of Good Times and United’s off-key Rhapsody.
Posted on May 5, 2015
By Richard Tofel/ProPublica
The news that BuzzFeed had deleted posts critical of advertisers got some of us at ProPublica wondering about instances when news organizations stood up to advertiser pressure. As it turns out, ProPublica president Richard Tofel wrote a whole chapter of a book about one of those cases: In 1954, the Wall Street Journal and its publisher, Barney Kilgore, confronted General Motors. The little-remembered incident helped establish the notion that news organizations could and should preserve their independence from advertisers.
Here is an adaptation from the book, Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal, and the Invention of Modern Journalism.
Posted on May 5, 2015
By Roger Wallenstein
I live across the street from the North Shore Baptist Church, a venerable community institution that’s been around for more than a century. I’m pals with the pastor. I like having the church in the neighborhood – it’s called Lakewood-Balmoral – because it’s a stately, tasteful building that houses many social programs in addition to its religious mission.
Aside from Sunday morning, it also frees up a lot of on-street parking for the residents. North Shore Baptist is in the midst of some major renovations and improvements to its facility. And this is where the NFL draft, complete with the conditions it has imposed on our city, intersects with my neighborhood. Let me explain.
Posted on May 1, 2015
By The Illinois Public Interest Research Group
Thicker wallets gave big donors an outsized voice in this year’s mayoral election, according to new analysis of campaign finance data by Illinois PIRG Education Fund.
Contributions greater than $1,000 accounted for 92% of the money contributed to the Emanuel and Garcia campaigns, while under 2% of the money contributed came from contributions of less than $150. A clear majority – 58% – of money contributed, came from donors living outside Chicago.
Posted on May 1, 2015
By The National Center for Public Policy Research
Boeing Chairman and CEO W. James McNerney, Jr. was asked Monday to make any e-mails between Chicago-based Boeing and the U.S. State Department during the time State helped Boeing secure a Russian contract and Boeing made a contribution to the Clinton Foundation available for inspection.
The request came from a representative of the National Center for Public Policy Research, Boeing shareholder and National Center Executive Director David Almasi.
Between the shareholder meeting Monday and last year’s meeting, Boeing went to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to fight a shareholder proposal submitted by the National Center for Public Policy Research on Almasi’s behalf asking the company for more transparency in reporting its methodology for making charitable donations. Boeing was successful in getting the SEC to agree, in January 2015, that it would not require Boeing to place the proposal before shareholders for a vote.
Posted on April 29, 2015
By Steve Rhodes
Manslaughter or murder, a black woman is dead and the cop who killed her walked. Plus: The Chicago FBI, The NSA & Mumbai; Illinois Villainry; Cold Fuzz; The Cub Factor: Shawshanked; and Chicago Town Deep Dish Microwaveable Pizza.
Posted on April 27, 2015
By Sebastian Rotella/ProPublica
This story was co-published with Frontline.
When Edward Snowden revealed the government’s vast surveillance programs in 2013, the Obama administration responded with a defense that sounded compelling: the high-tech spying apparatus had stopped terrorist attacks.
In a rush to provide success stories, senior officials cited the capture of an American terrorist whose case I knew well. I had spent several years reporting about David Coleman Headley, whose reconnaissance for Pakistani spymasters and terrorist chiefs was crucial to the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai that killed 166 people, including six Americans.
Now the intelligence community was claiming the National Security Agency had played a key role in preventing Headley’s follow-up plot against a Danish newspaper in 2009.
That surprised me. In a series of stories and in the 2011 PBS Frontline documentary, A Perfect Terrorist, ProPublica had detailed multiple breakdowns in the U.S. counterterror system that allowed Headley to elude detection for years despite tips that could have prevented the attacks.
I consulted with intelligence and law enforcement sources involved in the case, and they were mystified, too.
“When I first heard that statement, I was scratching my head,” a counterterror official told me. “I was trying to figure out how NSA played a role. My recollection is that it wasn’t that much at all.”
The mystery soon deepened when ProPublica gained access to a trove of Snowden’s classified materials. Suddenly a new, previously hidden layer in the story emerged, one that largely contradicted the government’s claims and revealed Mumbai as a tragic case study in the strengths and limitations of high-tech surveillance 2013 a rare look at how counterterrorism really works.
Posted on April 27, 2015
