Government Corruption News Stories

Excerpts of Key Government Corruption News Stories in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

In 2020, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was condemned as a quack and considered a pariah by the medical field for co-authoring a public declaration questioning the efficacy of Covid lockdowns. In an October 2020 email to Dr. Anthony Fauci that was later leaked online, [former director of the National Institutes of Health Francis] Collins called Bhattacharya a "fringe epidemiologist," and urged a "quick and devastating published takedown" of his declaration. Bhattacharya is now the new director of the NIH. He [said] Collins has since apologized for his comments–but only in private. Bhattacharya said of Collins: "I've been praying for him ever since I found out that he'd written that email. Reconciliation is really possible. Even if people disagree with each other fundamentally, even hate each other–and I'd never hated him and never will." Bhattacharya "wants to extend [Fauci] the same grace that I want to extend to everybody. I think he was deeply wrong in his scientific ideas in 2020, but I believe ... he was trying to do what he viewed as the best for the American people." President Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci for his extreme Covid response measures. The first step to rebuilding trust, Bhattacharya argues, is transparency. A database on doctors' relationships with Big Pharma already exists, thanks to the 2010 Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which allows anyone to search for and view all pharmaceutical money doctors have received since 2013. Producing a similar website that shows where scientists get their research funding, and the results of their research, "would be a really productive way to reestablish trust ... "The work of the NIH in particular affects basically every single aspect of biomedical research. And of course, there are pecuniary interests involved. People make money off of the results of the research."

Note: Bhattacharya's tone of reconciliation after being smeared in the media sets a powerful example. He recently received the top intellectual freedom award from the prestigious American Academy of Sciences and Letters. Top leaders in the field of medicine and science have spoken out about the rampant corruption and conflicts of interest in those industries. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on science corruption.

In their peer-reviewed book, In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, [left-leaning political scientists] Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee argue that public health authorities, the mainstream media, and progressive elites often pushed pandemic measures without weighing their costs and benefits, and ostracized people who expressed good-faith disagreement. The book grew out of research Macedo was doing on the ways progressive discourse gets handicapped by a refusal to engage with conservative or outside arguments. "Covid is an amazing case study in groupthink and the effects of partisan bias," he said. At times, scientific and health authorities acted less like neutral experts and more like self-interested actors, engaging in PR efforts to downplay uncertainty, missteps or conflicts of interest. Reports by Johns Hopkins (2019), the World Health Organization (2019), the state of Illinois (2014) and the British government (2011) had all expressed ambivalence or caution about the kind of quarantine measures that were soon taken. The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a wargaming exercise in October 2019, shortly before the pandemic began, to simulate a deadly coronavirus pandemic; the findings explicitly urged that "[t]ravel and trade … be maintained even in the face of a pandemic." A WHO paper in 2019 said that some measures – such as border closures and contact tracing – were "not recommended in any circumstances". "In inflation-adjusted terms," Macedo and Lee write, "the United States spent more on pandemic aid in 2020 than it spent on the 2009 stimulus package and the New Deal combined." The economic strain on poor and minority Americans was particularly severe. Teachers' unions ... painted school re-openings as "rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny" ... despite the fact that minority and poor students were most disadvantaged by remote learning.

Note: Pandemic policies led to one of the greatest wealth transfers in history. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on COVID corruption and media manipulation.

Consultants assessing Covid vaccine damage claims on behalf of the NHS have been paid millions more than the victims, it has emerged. Freedom of Information requests made by The Telegraph show that US-based Crawford and Company has carried out nearly 13,000 medical assessments, but dismissed more than 98 per cent of cases. Just 203 claimants have been notified they are entitled to a one-off payment of Ł120,000 through the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS) amounting to Ł24,360,000. Yet Crawford and Company has received Ł27,264,896 for its services. Prof Richard Goldberg, chairman in law at Durham University, with a special interest in vaccine liability and compensation, said: "The idea that this would be farmed out to a private company to make a determination is very odd. It's taxpayers money and money is tight at the moment. "The lack of transparency is not helpful and there is a terrible sense of secrecy about all of this. One gets the sense that their main objective is for these cases not to succeed. "There are no stats available so we don't know the details about how these claims are being decided or whether previous judgments are being taken into account." The Hart (Health Advisory and Recovery Team) group, which was set up by medical professionals and scientists during the pandemic, has warned that Crawford and Company has a "troubling reputation with numerous reports of mismanagement and claims denials across various sectors".

Note: COVID vaccine manufacturers have total immunity from liability if people die or become injured as a result of the vaccine. Our Substack dives into the complex world of COVID vaccines with nuance and balanced investigation. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on COVID vaccine problems.

Feeding incarcerated people has become big business. The food behemoth Aramark (which also services colleges, hospitals, and sports stadiums), as well as smaller corporations like Summit Correctional Services and Trinity Services Group, have inked contracts in the last decade worth hundreds of millions of dollars in prisons and jails across the country. The industry was worth almost $3.2 billion in 2022. Cell phone images smuggled out of jails and prisons across the country reveal food that hardly looks edible, let alone nutritious. At a jail in Cleveland, staff warned administrators in 2023 that the meals served by Trinity were so disgusting, that they put staff in danger. A 2020 study by the criminal justice reform advocacy group Impact Justice found that 94% of incarcerated people surveyed said they did not receive enough food to feel full. More than 60% said they rarely or never had access to fresh vegetables. Meager portions have left desperate people eating toothpaste and toilet paper. Most states spend less than $3 per person per day on prison food – and some as little as $1.02. The Food and Drug Administration's "thrifty plan" estimates that feeding an adult man "a nutritious, practical, cost-effective diet" costs about $10 per day. The major private food providers also have a stake in the booming prison commissary business, where incarcerated people can buy staples like ramen, tuna and coffee. Poor food served in the chow hall drives hungry prisoners to the commissary.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in prisons and in the food system.

Of the 17 years that I've been incarcerated for killing an abusive boyfriend, I spent eight – from 2016 to last May – in what the state calls "restrictive housing," but I call "solitary confinement" or "the hole." In women's prisons, sexual intrusion, harassment, coercion and violence are daily realities. And in solitary confinement, this conduct is so routine that many women – particularly the younger ones – don't even think of it as abuse. They believe it's simply an inevitable part of their incarceration. In 2023, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TCDJ) reported over 700 allegations of staff-on-prisoner sexual abuse and harassment to the PREA Ombudsman, an independent office that tallies up and investigates complaints. Almost 90 of those cases involved sexual harassment, nearly 150 were categorized as voyeurism, and a little more than 500 were classified as sexual abuse. Of the 505 abuse claims, only 20% met the prison system's onerous criteria for sexual assault or "improper sexual activity with a person in custody." On the outside, fewer than half of sexual violence cases are reported to police. Given the power dynamics of prison, underreporting is likely more severe here. Guards use a variety of methods to retaliate against women who complain about their abuse. They can write bogus disciplinary infractions that can lead to ... a longer sentence. Officers can also turn off the electricity and running water in women's cells and refuse to serve them meals.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and sexual abuse scandals.

Between 2000 and 2020, the number of young people incarcerated in the United States declined by an astonishing 77 percent. The number of young people behind bars increased steadily in the 1970s and 1980s and then rose more sharply in the 1990s. In the last two years for which we have data, 2021 and 2022, the number of incarcerated juveniles rose 10 percent. But even factoring in that increase, the country locked up 75 percent fewer juveniles in 2022 than it did in 2000. With fewer juveniles behind bars, many states have shuttered youth facilities. Today America has 58 percent fewer of them than it did in 2000. Beginning in 2008, New York State closed 26 juvenile jails; over the next 12 years, juvenile crime in the state declined 86 percent. [Susan Burke, director of Utah's juvenile justice system from 2011 to 2018] sees it similarly: "When judges worried that crime would go up if we closed the assessment centers, I could show them data that it was already dropping. Then I could go back and show them data a year later that it was still declining. At that point, what could they say?" Exposé after exposé piled up to prove to the public what many insiders already knew: The biggest recidivists in the system were the institutions. In early 2004, a series of expert reports documented rampant violence and cruelty. Custom-built individual cages where youth deemed violent received their school lessons. Video footage from a facility in Stockton showed counselors kneeling on the backs and necks of prisoners, beating and kicking the motionless young people. Six months later, The San Jose Mercury News published a multipart exposé revealing that youth were regularly tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed and forced into solitary confinement.

Note: Read the research that proves juvenile incarceration does not reduce criminal behavior. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and inspiring stories on repairing our criminal justice system.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has a long and checkered history of letting confidential informants run wild. Joshua Caleb Sutter firmly fits into this framework. A longtime occultist and neo-Nazi, Sutter became an FBI informant roughly 20 years ago. Since then, he's earned at least $140,000 infiltrating a range of far-right organizations, most notoriously the Atomwaffen Division (AWD) starting in 2017. WIRED found evidence of Sutter's extensive influence on and promotion of an international child abuse network that goes alternatively by "com" or "764." 764, as WIRED reported in March along with The Washington Post ... is the target of an international law enforcement investigation, with more than a dozen members arrested in the United States, Europe, and Brazil. Participants in 764 and its affiliated splinter groups like CLVT, 7997, H3ll, and Harm Nation extort minors into sexually exploiting or harming themselves. They find minors via Instagram, Roblox, Minecraft, and other popular games and social media apps where children congregate online. "The informant market is run on this tacit, uncomfortable understanding that the cure sometimes might be worse than the disease," [Harvard Law School professor Alexandra] Natapoff tells WIRED. By utilizing people with criminal or extremist histories to infiltrate hard-to-penetrate milieus like gangs, organized crime, or terrorist groups ... the US government rewards such people for continuing to swim in the same waters. "Baked into that arrangement is the well-understood, avoidable phenomenon that these individuals are going to commit criminal acts," Natapoff says. According to a New York University Law School study, 41 percent of all federal terrorism cases after 9/11 involve the use of a confidential source.

Note: US agencies used at least 1,000 ex-Nazis as spies and informants during the Cold War. Nazi doctors were also used to teach mind control methods to the CIA. For more along these lines, a Human Rights Watch report found that the nearly all of the highest-profile domestic terrorism plots in the US since 9/11 featured the direct involvement of government agents or informants. The FBI has even targeted vulnerable minors, some of them with brain development issues.

Last Tuesday, former president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte was arrested in Manila and taken to the Hague, where he will be tried for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court. From 2016-2022, Duterte's government carried out a campaign of mass killings of suspected drug users. It's estimated that 27,000 people, most of them poor and indigent, were executed without trial by police officers and vigilantes at his behest. Children were also routinely killed during Duterte's drug raids- both as collateral victims and as targets. While this happened, the United States provided tens of millions of dollars annually to both the Philippine military and the Philippine National Police. Many of the killings examined by [Human Rights Watch] followed a pattern: a group of plainclothes gunmen would enter the home of a suspected drug user, kill them without ever issuing an arrest, and plant drugs or weapons next to the body. Sometimes the gunmen would self-identify as police officers, and other times they would not. Police would also detain suspected drug users without charges and torture them for bribes. Less than a month after Duterte took office, then- Secretary of State John Kerry announced a $32 million weapons and training package specifically to support the Philippine National Police. Obama's administration authorized $90 million in military aid to the Philippines in 2016 and roughly $1 billion during the 8 years he was in office.

Note: Read our Substack on the dark truth of the war on drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the war on drugs.

The countless victims of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's bloody war on drugs are celebrating his arrest on charges of crimes against humanity as a momentous first step toward justice. Many of those who financed, enforced, and even continued in his state-sponsored killing campaign have not been held accountable. That list includes U.S. presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and current Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The Philippines remains one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid in the Indo-Pacific region. In 2018 and 2024, two international people's tribunals in Brussels brought together families of victims of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines under both the Duterte and Marcos administrations. Both tribunals ... found the Trump and Biden administrations complicit in heavily funding state-sponsored killings in the Philippines. The killings targeted not only drug users, but also dissidents and activists as well. Duterte established, and Marcos beefed up and continued, the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, or NTF-ELCAC, which immediately weaponized the Philippines civilian bureaucracy to go after government critics and activists on the grounds that they were fronts for the Communist Party of the Philippines. With no due process, activists under Duterte and Marcos continued to be systematically killed, illegally arrested, and targeted by state forces, even going as far as to be subjected to abduction, torture, and forced to sign affidavits claiming to be captured guerrillas.

Note: Read our Substack on the dark truth of the war on drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the war on drugs.

Starting this week, I once again have the privilege of teaching law students about the First Amendment. I am in the United States on a green card, and recent events suggest that I should be careful in what I say–perhaps even about free speech. The Trump administration is working to deport immigrants, including green-card holders, for what appears to be nothing more than the expression of political views with which the government disagrees. These actions ... make it difficult to work out how to teach cases that boldly proclaim this country is committed to a vision of free speech that, right now, feels very far away. In recent weeks, the Trump administration has been–is there any other way to describe it?–rounding up dissidents. To more easily chase down people with ideas it dislikes, the government is asking universities for the names and nationalities of people who took part in largely peaceful protests and engaged in protected speech. Exactly what kind of expression gets you in trouble is not clear–no doubt that's partly the point. [Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Troy] Edgar repeatedly refused to answer [NPR journalist Michel] Martin's simple question: "Is any criticism of the United States government a deportable offense?" A 2010 Supreme Court decision upheld a law banning certain forms of speech that are classified as "material support" to foreign terrorist groups–in that case, the speech included training designated groups on how to pursue their aims peacefully. But even in that case, which upheld a stunningly broad speech restriction, the Court also insisted that ... advocacy of unlawful action is protected so long as it is not done in coordination with terrorist groups. This ... rests "at the heart of the First Amendment": "viewpoint discrimination is uniquely harmful to a free and democratic society."

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and immigration enforcement corruption.

The for-profit prison company GEO Group has surged in value under President Donald Trump. Its stock price doubled after Election Day. But despite its soaring fortunes, the $4 billion company continues to resist having to pay detainees more than $1 a day for cleaning facilities where the government has forced them to live. At the 1,575-bed detention center GEO runs for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Tacoma, Washington, detainees once prepared meals, washed laundry and scrubbed toilets, doing jobs that would otherwise require 85 full-time employees, the company estimated. The state's minimum wage at the time was $11 an hour. (It's now $16.66.) In 2017, Washington sued GEO to enforce it, and in October 2021 a federal jury ruled unanimously in the state's favor. This year, GEO and Washington are back in court – for a third time – as the company tries to reverse the earlier decision that sided with the state. Mike Faulk, a spokesperson for the Washington state attorney general's office, said testimony in the minimum-wage issue highlights the problem with housing detainees in private prisons: profit motive. Not only did GEO pay $1 a day for cleaning in Tacoma, it budgeted less than $1 per meal that each detainee ate, one kitchen worker testified. "So the grade of food is abysmal," Faulk said of the detainee's testimony. "He routinely picked out grasshoppers/insects from the food." Conditions in Tacoma are worsening as the number of detainees rises.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corporate corruption and immigration enforcement corruption.

Business is booming for Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) top deportation flight contractor. On February 28, ICE posted a previously unreported notice that it would award a no-bid contract to CSI Aviation to remove immigrants via flights. The contract is worth up to $128 million and will last for at least six months beginning on March 1, and possibly extend up to a year. ICE modified this contract last Friday to increase the number of ICE removal flights. The recent no-bid contract is the latest of numerous awards in the company's history with ICE, amounting to a combined total of at least $1.6 billion in federal funding since 2005, although business has especially surged in recent years. CSI has long worked with ICE to remove immigrants using planes, working with a network of subcontractors such as GlobalX. Last year, 74% of ICE's 1,564 removal flights were on GlobalX planes. In late 2017, 92 Somali immigrants on a CSI-contracted plane were forced to stay shackled for nearly two days. For about 23 hours, the plane simply sat on a tarmac, and the immigrants were not allowed off. "As the plane sat on the runway, the 92 detainees remained bound, their handcuffs secured to their waists, and their feet shackled together," according to a lawsuit. "The guards did not loosen the shackles, even when the deportees told them that the shackles were painful because they were too tight, that their arms and legs were swollen and were bruised. When the plane's toilets overfilled with human waste, some of the detainees were left to urinate into bottles or on themselves," the lawsuit states.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corporate corruption and immigration enforcement corruption.

In January, President Donald Trump announced plans to detain up to 30,000 immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally at Guantanamo Bay ahead of deportation as part of his hard-line crackdown. Trump said he was signing an executive order "to instruct the departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay." 41 migrants were at the Guantánamo Bay base awaiting deportation, nearly evenly divided between low and high threat levels. All have since been flown to Alexandria, Louisiana, on non-military aircraft on Tuesday and Wednesday, where they are being held at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) processing facility, according to a U.S. official who spoke to ABC News. California Democrat Rep. Sara Jacobs toured the facilities on Friday as part of a bipartisan delegation from the House Armed Services Committee. Jacobs told ABC News that officials at Guantanamo Bay said it cost $16 million to stand up the migrant camp, noting that each tent allegedly cost $3.1 million to construct, despite not being up to DHS standards. U.S. officials told ABC News the tents did not comply with ICE's requirements for migrant detention, including provisions for air-conditioning and other amenities. Some of the hundreds of U.S. troops sent to Guantánamo Bay to prepare the base for housing migrants may be reassigned to assist with the southern border mission in another capacity.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on immigration enforcement corruption.

President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order banning "federal censorship" of online speech. "Over the last four years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans' speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform or otherwise suppress speech that the federal government did not approve," the executive order read. The order bans federal officials from any conduct that would "unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen." It also prohibits taxpayer resources from being used to curtail free speech and instructs the Department of Justice and other agencies to investigate the actions the Biden administration took and to propose "remedial actions." Limiting communication and coordination between Big Tech companies and the federal government could jeopardize public safety in natural disasters and health emergencies, some observers warned. Multiple lawsuits have accused the Biden administration of leaning on social media platforms to take down lawful speech about the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently backed up those claims, alleging senior administration officials pressured his employees to inappropriately take down or throttle content during the pandemic. The Biden administration has said it was combating the spread of falsehoods to protect the public.

Note: Watch our latest 31-min documentary about moving beyond media polarization, which includes a deeper look into content that was being censored that turned out to be true or worthy of investigation. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship.

The Trump administration's unveiling Tuesday of more than 2,000 documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy set off a scramble for any scraps of revelatory information. The newly unredacted files reveal details about CIA agents and operations that the agency kept secret for decades. [A] 1964 document delves into the CIA's operations out of Mexico City at the time, revealing that the agency had no agents actively operating from Cuba. But the agency had "a number of sources with access to Cuba in third party nationals who are debriefed each time they return to Mexico City from Cuba," according to the ... file. Questions surrounding the CIA's activity in Mexico City arose after a previous document release revealed that Oswald had visited the Cuban Consulate and the Soviet Embassy there weeks before the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination. [Another] one-page document divulges that Manuel Machado Llosas – treasurer of the Mexican revolutionary movement and a friend of Cuban president and dictator Fidel Castro – was a CIA agent. Machado Llosas was slated to be stationed in Mexico City, where the document says the CIA planned to "use him to report on the activities of Cuban revolutionaries" and leverage his friendship with Castro and other Cuban leaders so he could act as a "‘political action' asset." [A] newly unredacted memo reveals that the CIA surveilled Washington Post reporter Michael Getler.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the JFK assassination.

When the final, declassified records from the John F. Kennedy assassination files were posted on the National Archives' website last week, the first document researchers and reporters searched for was White House adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s June 1961 memorandum to the president titled "CIA Reorganization." "How could I have been so stupid as to let them proceed?" President John Kennedy asked his advisers following the CIA's infamous fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. Beyond the fact that the U.S. invasion of Cuba was an egregious act of aggression – violating international law and Cuba's sovereignty – its failure was a catastrophic embarrassment for JFK, only weeks into his White House tenure. Kennedy held CIA director Allen Dulles, and his deputy for covert operations Richard Bissell, personally responsible for deceiving him on the prospects for success of the ill-planned paramilitary assault. Indeed, as he processed the implications of the failed invasion, Kennedy vented his desire to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds." That concept was more than angry rhetoric; the president actually set in motion a secret set of deliberations on breaking up the intelligence, espionage and covert action functions of the CIA and subordinating its operations to the State Department. The CIA's operational branches would be "reconstituted" under a new agency.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the JFK assassination.

A former policy adviser to Barack Obama's administration flew to Britain planning to rape a nine-year-old child. Rahamim "Rami" Shy, 47, an investment banker who helped co-ordinate the US government's counter-terror response, travelled from New York to Bedfordshire to meet an English schoolgirl. He spent more than a month planning the trip and had packed his suitcases with cuddly toys and condoms, Luton Crown Court heard. On an online forum and messaging apps, Shy described the "unspeakable acts" he was planning in graphic detail to someone he believed to be the girl's grandmother. But the grandmother, using the name Debbie, was in fact an online decoy created by an undercover officer from Bedfordshire Police. In his messages, Shy described the girl as a "tad late" in starting sexual activity at the age of nine, and said that it was an "honour" to be considered "her first", the court heard. He flew to Gatwick on Feb 23 last year then drove to Bedford to meet the undercover officer, and was promptly arrested. During the trial, the court heard Shy, after arriving in Britain, tried to delete the "depraved messages" he had sent. Other messages retrieved from his phone revealed he had discussed his sexual interest in children with others. A cache of indecent images of children were discovered on his phone by police. Shy was previously employed at banking group Citi, and had worked in a senior role at the US treasury department.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on sexual abuse scandals.

A secret list of more than 300 people who belonged to a network that called publicly for the legalisation of sex with children has been handed to the BBC. A small number of those named on the list may still have contact with children. They were all members of a group called the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). The Metropolitan Police had the list for about 20 years from the late 1970s. Most PIE members were based in the UK - but there are also details of people in other parts of western Europe, Australia and the US. The BBC has established that a small number of the men are still alive and may currently be in contact with, or have care of, children through paid work or volunteering. PIE was formed in 1974. Its leaders sought to further their cause by attempting to align themselves with feminist, anti-racist and gay rights movements. It was not an illegal organisation and cost Ł4 a year to join, and to receive its members' magazine. Over a decade, PIE spokesmen gave interviews to the media arguing that adults and children had a human right to have sex with each other. Four years old, they argued, was an age at which most children could give consent. Records ... for 45% of the people on the list [showed] that half of them had been convicted or cautioned (or had been charged and died before trial) for sexual offences against children. Charges included distributing abuse images, kidnap and rape.

Note: Margaret Thatcher herself protected top diplomat Sir Peter Hayman from an investigation into his involvement with child sex abuse material. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on sexual abuse scandals.

One day last spring, the investigative journalist Alex Renton received an unusual email. It contained a scan of a typewritten document marked with the dates 1983/1984, which appeared to be an authentic list of members of an organisation known as the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). PIE operated legally in the UK for a decade from 1974 until the mid-1980s, lobbying publicly for a change in the age of consent – proposing in 1977 that there shouldn't be one at all. PIE members received a magazine, Magpie, which included news, non-nude photographs of children and a "contact page". PIE was disbanded in 1984 after several prosecutions relating to child pornography and conspiracy to promote indecent acts via the contact page. There were more than 300 names on the member list that Renton now had in his possession, a number of which he already knew. The police had the list from the late 1970s, Renton says. He and his team were able to find further information for around 45 per cent of the names on the list and discovered that half of these had convictions or cautions, or had been charged and died before trial, for sexual offences against children. And 65 members, Renton notes, "worked in what we now call regulated professions, which are child facing. "We've got about 30 teachers, as well as social workers, clergy, doctors. There's a number of eminent psychologists and quite a large sector of people in youth work."

Note: Margaret Thatcher herself protected top diplomat Sir Peter Hayman from an investigation into his involvement with child sex abuse material. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on sexual abuse scandals.

Former US congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard's ascendance to director of national intelligence last month signaled a major shift in views toward government surveillance at the highest rung of the US intelligence community. Major privacy groups this week urged Gabbard to declassify information concerning Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)–the nation's cornerstone wiretap authority ... known to vacuum up large quantities of calls, texts, and emails belonging to Americans. The groups privately urged Gabbard this week to declassify information regarding the types of US businesses that can now be secretly compelled to install wiretaps on the US National Security Agency's (NSA) behalf. While it's no secret that the government routinely compels phone and email service providers like AT&T and Google into conducting wiretaps, Congress passed a new provision last year expanding the range of businesses that can receive such orders. Legal experts had warned in advance that the provision was far too ambiguous and likely to vastly increase the number of Americans whose communications are wiretapped. But their warnings were not heeded. In response to questions from the US Senate ... Gabbard backed the idea of requiring the Federal Bureau of Investigation to obtain warrants before accessing the communications of Americans swept up by the 702 program.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.