Transparency

Privacy International has filed a federal lawsuit seeking to compel disclosure of records relating to a 1946 surveillance agreement between the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, known as the “Five Eyes alliance”.* We are represented by Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic (MFIA). The most recent publicly available version of the Five Eyes surveillance agreement dates from 1955. Our complaint was filed before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Jessi Baker, founder of blockchain technology platform Provenance, envisions a future where all physical products have digital histories, allowing people to trace and verify products’ origins, attributes and ownership. Is it time for a new dawn of transparency in retail?
The post Digital startup aims to lead a revolution in retail transparency appeared first on Positive News.

“We hope to find out the current scope and nature of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing agreement – and how much has changed since the 1955 version,” Privacy International legal officer Scarlet Kim tells WIRED. “We’d also like to know the US rules and regulations governing this exchange of information – what safeguards and oversight, if any, exist with respect to these activities?”

Capt. Robby Modad closes the gate at an ICBM launch control facility in the countryside outside Minot, N.D.
The Pentagon has thrown a cloak of secrecy over assessments of the safety and security of its nuclear weapons operations, a part of the military with a history of periodic inspection failures and bouts of low morale.

The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government.
Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

Tom Clancy

Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower responsible for releasing the Pentagon Papers, speaks during a rally in support of Army Pfc. Chelsea Manning, outside the gates of Fort Meade, Md, Aug. 21, 2013. (AP/Patrick Semansky)
In October 1969, a national security official named Daniel Ellsberg began secretly photocopying 7,000 classified Vietnam War documents. He had become increasingly frustrated with the systematic deception of top U.S. leaders who sought to publicly escalate a war that, privately, they knew was unwinnable.

Homestead Police Department (HPD), in South Florida, has myriad problems respecting the First Amendment. I went to HPD this week to serve some officers in a civil rights suit, the story was covered earlier. While entering I discovered that HPD still has not learned that photography is not a crime.

This photo shows a portion of a National Security Letter written in November 2007. (Photo: FBI via Wikimedia Commons)
The Justice Department refuses to turn over records on the FBI’s compliance with requirements that it periodically review and lift national security letter gag orders, the Electronic Frontier Foundation claims in a new lawsuit.

The City of Homestead has a torrid reputation and a pattern of willfully refusing to comply with the public records law. Homestead is a little town at the southern end of Miami-Dade County, rarely receiving the scrutiny it deserves as a cesspool of public corruption and maleficence.
I have used the records request process, as a pre-discovery method for investigating my civil rights claims. Homestead has failed to comply with the public records law on the majority of the nearly one hundred requests I have filed.

There is a lot of buzz about »fake news«. But there is very little discussion about what it is that is supposed to be fake.
Maybe, there isn’t that much real fake news. (Dissent doesn’t qualify as fake.) Maybe it’s about stuff we don’t really want to know about. Or are not supposed to.
»Fake news« seems to be a mirage that will vanish if you try to pin it down.
It might also be that we are already so entangled in lies that we can no longer recognize the truth, even in its presence.
/ HAX