The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2017-2018
25 Sheriffs Using Iris Recognition Technology along US–Mexico Border ...
24 More Than 80,000 Stolen Guns Worsen Crime in Florida ...
23 New Restrictions on Prisoners’ First Amendment Rights ...
22 Big Pharma’s Biostitutes: Corporate Media Ignore Root Cause of Opioid Crisis ...
21 Parkland Shooter’s JROTC Connections Spotlight Militarization of Schools ...
20 Extravagant Hospital Waste of Unused Medical Supplies ...
19 People Bussed across US to Cut Cities’ Homeless Populations ...
18 Adoption Agencies a Gateway for Child Exploitation ...
17 “Model” Mississippi Curriculum Omits Civil Rights Movement from School Textbooks ...
16 $21 Trillion in Unaccounted-for Government Spending from 1998 to 2015
Two federal government agencies, the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), may have accumulated as much as $21 trillion in undocumented expenses between 1998 and 2015....
15 Digital Justice: Internet Co-ops Resist Net Neutrality Rollbacks
More than 300 electric cooperatives across the United States are building their own Internet with high-speed fiber networks. These locally-owned networks are poised to do what federal and state governments and the marketplace have not accomplished. First, they are protecting open Internet access from the Internet service providers (ISPs) that stand to pocket the profits from the rollbacks of net neutrality the Trump administration announced in November 2017. Second, they are making affordable and fast Internet accessible to anyone, narrowing the digital divide that otherwise deepens individual and regional socioeconomic inequalities....
14 FBI Paid Geek Squad Employees as “Confidential Human Source” Informants
New documents released to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) show that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Louisville field officers have been paying Best Buy Geek Squad employees as informants for more than a decade. A Geek Squad facility in Kentucky has been violating customers’ constitutional rights by secretly handing over data found on customer computers to the FBI whenever employees suspected customers of possessing illegal material, such as child pornography. Evidence indicates that the FBI treated Geek Squad employees as confidential human sources, or “CHS,” and that at least four Geek Squad CHS were paid for their “services” to the FBI....
13 The Limits of Negative News and Importance of Constructive Media ...
12 ICE Intends to Destroy Records of Inhumane Treatment of Immigrants ...
11 US Air Force Seeks to Control Seventy Percent of Nevada’s Desert National Wildlife Refuge ...
10 FBI Racially Profiling “Black Identity Extremists” ...
9 Indigenous Communities around World Helping to Win Legal Rights of Nature ...
8 Congress Passes Intrusive Data Sharing Law under Cover of Spending Bill
Hidden in the massive omnibus spending bill approved by Congress in February 2018 was the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act of 2018. The CLOUD Act enables the US government to acquire data across international borders regardless of other nations’ data privacy laws and without the need for warrants.
The CLOUD Act was subject to almost no deliberation as the Senate was working swiftly to avoid a prolonged government shutdown. Describing how congressional leaders decided, behind closed doors, to attach an “un-vetted, unrelated data bill” to the $1.3 trillion government spending bill, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s David Ruiz wrote that Congress had “a professional responsibility . . . to debate the merits and concerns of this proposal amongst themselves, and this week, they failed.” Due to this failure, Ruiz continued, “U.S. laws will be bypassed on U.S. soil.” The CLOUD Act gives US and foreign police new mechanisms for seizing data—including private emails, online chats, Facebook posts, and Snapchat videos—from around the world, with few restrictions on how that information is used or shared.
Specifically, the CLOUD Act adds provisions to two existing laws that protect constitutional rights in the digital age. As Robyn Greene reported for Just Security, the CLOUD Act creates an exception to the Stored Communications Act, enabling certified foreign governments to request personal data directly from US companies. Such contracts would partially negate the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, which mandates that foreign governments must obtain a warrant through the Department of Justice before requesting data.
While noting that the bill passed in the omnibus spending vote included some improvements on previous versions of the CLOUD Act, Greene wrote that “the new bill failed to incorporate any changes to improve privacy protections for Americans. It still requires only that foreign governments minimize data in a manner similar to what is required under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and it still permits foreign governments to share U.S. persons’ communications back to the U.S. government with few limitations on how the U.S. government may use that data.” ...
7 Regenerative Agriculture as “Next Stage” of Civilization
Regenerative agriculture represents not only an alternative food production strategy but a fundamental shift in our culture’s relationship to nature. As Ronnie Cummins, director of the Organic Consumers Association and a founding member of Regeneration International, wrote, regenerative agriculture offers a “world-changing paradigm” that can help solve many of today’s environmental and public health problems. Climate disruption, diminishing supplies of clean water, polluted air and soil, rising obesity, malnutrition and chronic disease, food insecurity, and food waste can all be traced back to modern food production, Cummins noted, and regenerative agriculture is designed to address these problems from the ground up.
The array of techniques that comprise regenerative agriculture rebuilds soils and sequesters carbon. Regenerative farming, Cummins wrote, could potentially draw a critical mass of 200–250 billion tons of carbon from the earth’s atmosphere over the next 25 years, mitigating or even reversing key aspects of global warming. Regenerative agricultural techniques allow carbon to be stored in soils and living plants, where it can increase food production and quality while reducing soil erosion and the damaging runoff of pesticides and fertilizers.
In 2012, nearly two dozen governments around the world (including the United States) spent an estimated $486 billion to subsidize 50 million industrial farmers who, Cummins wrote, “routinely over-till, over-graze (or under-graze), monocrop, and pollute the soil and the environment with chemicals and GMOs to produce cheap commodities… Meanwhile, 700 million small family farms and herders, comprising the 3 billion people who produce 70 percent of the world’s food on just 25 percent of the world’s acreage, struggle to make ends meet.” Similarly, Cummins reported, “corrupt, out-of-control governments continue to subsidize fossil fuels to the tune of $5.3 trillion a year, while spending more than $3 trillion annually on weapons, mainly to prop up our global fossil fuel system and overseas empires.”
Industrial farming systems effectively “mine” soils, decarbonizing them and, in the process, destroying forests and releasing 44–57 percent of all climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide).
“The basic menu for a Regeneration Revolution,” Cummins wrote, “is to unite the world’s 3 billion rural farmers, ranchers and herders with several billion health, environmental and justice-minded consumers to overturn ‘business as usual’ and embark on a global campaign of cooperation, solidarity and regeneration.” According to food activist Vandana Shiva, who is quoted in Cummins’s report, “Regenerative agriculture provides answers to the soil crisis, the food crisis, the health crisis, the climate crisis, and the crisis of democracy.” ...
6 Russiagate: Two-Headed Monster of Propaganda and Censorship
Russiagate, which began as a scandal over Russian efforts to sway the 2016 US election, has since proliferated into a drama of dossiers, investigative councils, Russian adoption cover-ups, and an ever-changing list of alleged scandals. As journalists from the Intercept, Truthdig, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, Rolling Stone, and other independent outlets documented, corporate media coverage of Russiagate has created a two-headed monster of propaganda and censorship. By saturating news coverage with a sensationalized narrative, Russiagate has superseded other important, newsworthy stories. Furthermore, corporate news coverage that has been reflexively hostile toward Russia also serves to link political protest in the United States with Russian operatives and interests in ways that discredit legitimate domestic activism....
5 Washington Post Bans Employees from Using Social Media to Criticize Sponsors ...
4 How Big Wireless Convinced Us Cell Phones and Wi-Fi are Safe
A Kaiser Permanente study (published December 2017 in Scientific Reports) conducted controlled research testing on hundreds of pregnant women in the San Francisco Bay area and found that those who had been exposed to magnetic field (MF) non-ionizing radiation associated with cell phones and wireless devices had 2.72 times more risk of miscarriage than those with lower MF exposure. Furthermore, the study reported that the association was “much stronger” when MF was measured “on a typical day of participants’ pregnancies.” According to lead investigator De-Kun Li, the possible effects of MF exposure have been controversial because, “from a public health point of view, everybody is exposed. If there is any health effect, the potential impact is huge.” [For previous Project Censored coverage of this topic, see Julian Klein and Casey Lewis, with Kenn Burrows and Peter Phillips, “Accumulating Evidence of Ongoing Wireless Technology Health Hazards,” in Censored 2015: Inspiring We the People.]
A March 2018 investigation for the Nation by Mark Hertsgaard and Mark Dowie showed how the scope of this public health issue has been inadequately reported by the press and underappreciated by the public. Hertsgaard and Dowie reported that the telecom industry has employed public relations tactics, first pioneered by Big Tobacco in the 1960s and developed by fossil-fuel companies in the 1980s, to influence both the public’s understanding of wireless technologies and regulatory debates....
3 World’s Richest One Percent Continue to Become Wealthier ...
2 “Open-Source” Intelligence Secrets Sold to Highest Bidders
In March 2017, WikiLeaks released Vault 7, which consisted of some 8,761 leaked confidential Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents and files from 2013 to 2016, detailing the agency’s vast arsenal of tools for electronic surveillance and cyber warfare. [According to WikiLeaks, the first series of released CIA documents, titled “Year Zero,” introduced “the scope and direction of the CIA’s global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of ‘zero day’ weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs…”] Vault 7, which WikiLeaks described as the “largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency,” drew considerable media attention, including stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post, for example. However, as George Eliason of OpEdNews reported, while Vault 7 documented the tools at the CIA’s disposal, the “most important part” of the disclosure—“the part that needs to frighten you,” he wrote—is that “it’s not the CIA that’s using them.” Instead, the malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero-day” exploits, and remote-controlled systems detailed in Vault 7 are “unclassified, open-source, and can be used by anyone.” Eliason’s OpEdNews series reported how the CIA and other agencies came to rely on private contractors and “open source intelligence,” and considered the manifold consequences of these revolutionary changes in intelligence gathering.
As Eliason explained in his first OpEdNews article, the CIA is limited by law in what it can do with these hacking tools—but subcontractors are not similarly restricted. (“If these tools were solely in the hands of a US agency,” he wrote, “you would be much safer.”) By using private contractors, the CIA and other government intelligence agencies gain access to intelligence gathered by methods that they are prohibited from using.
1 Global Decline in Rule of Law as Basic Human Rights Diminish
Those nuns do tend to keep their lips sealed about such things.....
