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Revealing News For a Better World

Intelligence Agency Corruption News Stories
Excerpts of Key Intelligence Agency Corruption News Stories in Major Media


Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on intelligence agency 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.

For further exploration, delve into our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.


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.


Snowden Docs Show UK Spies Attacked Anonymous, Hackers
2014-02-04, NBC News
Posted: 2019-10-06 17:31:52
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/war-anonymous-british-spies-attac...

A secret British spy unit created to mount cyber attacks on Britain’s enemies has waged war on the hacktivists of Anonymous and LulzSec, according to documents taken from the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden and obtained by NBC News. The blunt instrument the spy unit used to target hackers, however, also interrupted the web communications of political dissidents who did not engage in any illegal hacking. It may also have shut down websites with no connection to Anonymous. A division of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British counterpart of the NSA, shut down communications among Anonymous hacktivists by launching a “denial of service” (DDOS) attack – the same technique hackers use to take down bank, retail and government websites – making the British government the first Western government known to have conducted such an attack. The documents ... show that the unit known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG, boasted of using the DDOS attack – which it dubbed Rolling Thunder - and other techniques to scare away 80 percent of the users of Anonymous internet chat rooms. Among the methods listed in the document were jamming phones, computers and email accounts and masquerading as an enemy in a "false flag" operation. A British hacktivist known as T-Flow, who was prosecuted for hacking, [said] no evidence of how his identity was discovered ever appeared in court documents.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.


Intelligence chief won't turn over whistleblower complaint to House committee
2019-09-17, NBC News
Posted: 2019-09-29 16:16:25
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/intelligence-chief-won-t-turn-over-whistlebl...

The acting director of national intelligence is withholding a secret whistleblower complaint from the House intelligence committee because it involves conduct by someone outside the spy agencies and doesn’t meet the legal requirement for disclosure to Congress, according to letters obtained by NBC News. But in doing so, acting DNI Joseph Maguire acknowledges he is overruling the intelligence community’s independent watchdog, which thinks the complaint should be turned over. The letters, written by Jason Klitenic, the DNI’s general counsel, provide Maguire’s side of the story in what has quickly become an acrimonious dispute with Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House intelligence committee. On Friday night, Schiff went public about the matter in dramatic fashion, announcing that he had issued a subpoena for a classified whistleblower complaint that he charged was being illegally withheld to shield President Donald Trump. On Tuesday, Schiff said Maguire has refused to comply with the subpoena. Current and former intelligence officials told NBC News they were taken aback by Schiff’s public escalation and his suggestion that they acting in bad faith at Trump’s behest. Schiff has declined to say whether he is aware of the nature of the complaint. A committee staffer who declined to be named said that Schiff went public because he wanted to send a message that “under no circumstances can there be any reprisals against this whistleblower.”

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.


Is 'The Five Eyes Alliance' Conspiring to Spy on You?
2013-06-25, The Atlantic
Posted: 2019-09-23 15:41:04
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/is-the-five-eyes-allianc...

Did you know that the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand participate together in an electronic eavesdropping cooperative called "The Five Eyes Alliance"? Or that Britain "has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency"? One key innovation has been GCHQ's ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects. This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user's access to websites - all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets. Say you're the NSA. By law, there are certain sorts of spying you're not lawfully allowed to do on Americans. (And agency rules constraining you too.) But wait. Allied countries have different laws and surveillance rules. Put bluntly, intelligence agencies have an incentive to make themselves complicit in foreign governments spying on their own citizens.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.


Brain trauma suffered by U.S. diplomats abroad could be work of hostile foreign government
2019-09-01, CBS News
Posted: 2019-09-16 17:55:52
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brain-trauma-suffered-by-u-s-diplomats-abroad-co...

In 2016 and 2017, 25 Americans, including CIA agents, who worked in the U.S. Embassy in Cuba suffered serious brain injuries causing impaired vision and memory loss among other persistent problems. At least 15 American officials in China suffered unexplained brain trauma soon after. As we first reported in March, the FBI is now investigating whether these Americans were attacked by a mysterious weapon that leaves no trace. Mark Lenzi is a State Department security officer who worked in the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, China. He says that he and his wife began to suffer after hearing strange sounds in their apartment. Mark Lenzi believes he was targeted because of his work. He uses top secret equipment to analyze electronic threats to diplomatic missions. "It was a weapon," [said Lenzi]. "I believe it's RF, radio frequency energy, in the microwave range." A clue that supports that theory was revealed by the National Security Agency in 2014. This NSA statement describes such a weapon as a "high-powered microwave system weapon that may have the ability to weaken, intimidate, or kill an enemy over time without leaving evidence." The statement goes on to say "... this weapon is designed to bathe a target's living quarters in microwaves." The NSA disclosed this in a worker's compensation case filed by former NSA employee Mike Beck. In the 1990's Beck and an NSA co-worker were on assignment overseas. Years later, he says they developed Parkinson's Disease at the same time.

Note: Read more on the mysterious "sonic attacks" in Cuba. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on non-lethal weapons from reliable major media sources.


Is an invisible weapon targeting U.S. diplomats?
2019-09-01, CBS News
Posted: 2019-09-16 17:54:09
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/is-an-invisible-weapon-targeting-u-s-diplomats-6...

Commerce Department trade officer Catherine Werner used to promote American business from the U.S. consulate in Guangzhou, China. Today she says she suffers from bouts of nausea, dizziness, and headaches. Robyn Garfield, also a trade officer with the Commerce Department, was posted in Shanghai. Along with nausea, dizziness, and headaches, he says he has trouble remembering words. State Department security officer Mark Lenzi used to work in the consulate in Guangzhou. When he did, he said the splitting pain in his head was debilitating. The three are among at least 15 American officials in China who say they suffered unexplained brain trauma after being attacked by a mysterious weapon. Previously, 25 Americans who worked in the U.S. embassy in Cuba said they also experienced an attack and have similar symptoms. The government employees weren't the only ones targeted. Their spouses, children, and family pets also exhibited neurological symptoms after hearing strange sounds in their homes. In July, a University of Pennsylvania medical team published a study on the brains of U.S. government personnel who developed neurological symptoms in Cuba. The study used advanced brain imaging and found "significant differences in brain tissue and connectivity" in the diplomats' brains. It is the first scientific evidence showing the diplomats had physical damage to the structure of their brains.

Note: Read more on the mysterious "sonic attacks" in Cuba. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on non-lethal weapons from reliable major media sources.


From mind control to murder? How a deadly fall revealed the CIAs darkest secrets
2019-09-06, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
Posted: 2019-09-16 17:45:51
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/06/from-mind-control-to-murder-h...

On 12 June 1975, the Washington Post ran a story about an army scientist who had been drugged with LSD by the CIA, reacted badly and jumped out of the window of a New York hotel. This story, with its lurid mix of drugs, death and the CIA, proved irresistible. For the next several days, reporters barraged the CIA with demands to know more. The Olson family called a press conference in the familys back yard. Alice read a statement saying that the family had decided to file a lawsuit against the CIA, perhaps within two weeks, asking several million dollars in damages. Since 1953, we have struggled to understand Frank Olsons death as an inexplicable suicide, she said. The true nature of his death was concealed for 22 years. White House lawyers offered the Olson family $750,000 in exchange for dropping its legal claims. After some hesitation, the family accepted. On 8 August 2002, [Eric Olson] announced that he had reached a new conclusion about what had happened to his father. The death of Frank Olson on 28 November 1953 was a murder, not a suicide, he declared. This is not an LSD drug-experiment story, as it was represented in 1975. This is a biological warfare story. Frank Olson did not die because he was an experimental guinea pig who experienced a bad trip. He died because of concern that he would divulge information concerning a highly classified CIA interrogation program in the early 1950s, and concerning the use of biological weapons by the United States in the Korean War.

Note: Read more about the CIA's MK-ULTRA program which Frank Olson was a part of. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on mind control from reliable major media sources.


‘Official Secrets’ sheds light on the story of U.K. whistleblower Katharine Gun
2019-09-05, Washington Post
Posted: 2019-09-16 17:43:47
https://beta.washingtonpost.com/express/2019/09/05/official-secrets-sheds-lig...

Katharine Gun and Martin Bright could be forgiven for fielding Hollywood’s overtures with a degree of skepticism. Ever since their story was documented in Marcia and Thomas Mitchell’s 2008 book “The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War,” Gun, the British whistleblower who attempted to prevent the Iraq War, and Bright, an investigative journalist who broke the leak, had sat down with many a filmmaker interested in translating their tale. So when veteran South African director Gavin Hood expressed interest, Gun and Bright took the development with a grain of salt. When Gun met with Hood, however, she was struck by his engagement. The end result, “Official Secrets,” opens locally Friday with Keira Knightley playing Gun and Matt Smith as Bright. The movie depicts the decision Gun made in 2003, while working for British intelligence agency GCHQ, to leak a secret memo exposing plans by the American government to potentially blackmail members of the U.N. Security Council into supporting the Iraq War. “Official Secrets” probes myriad issues that remain resonant a decade and a half later, including government overreach and accountability, the toxicity of anti-Muslim sentiment, and the merits of an intrepid free press. By positioning Gun as an everywoman, “Official Secrets” asks its audience to ponder the moral dilemma at its core. “I didn’t set out to be a whistleblower,” Gun says. “Hopefully people will see it and come away with the thought, ‘What would I do if I was in a similar situation?’”

Note: Explore more on this courageous whistleblower in this revealing article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.


The Coldest
2001-12-16, Washington Post
Posted: 2019-09-08 23:31:28
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/2001/12/16/the-cold...

From the headlines, [Sidney] Gottlieb had emerged as a kind of Dr. Strangelove. He had overseen a vast network of psychological and medical experiments conducted in hospitals, universities, research labs, prisons and safe houses, many of them carried out on unsuspecting subjects – mental patients, prostitutes and their johns, drug addicts, and anyone else who stumbled into the CIA's web. Some had been subjected to electroshock therapy in an effort to alter their behavior. Some endured prolonged sensory deprivation. Some were doped and made to sleep for weeks in an attempt to induce an amnesia-like state. Others suffered a relentless loop of audiotape playing the same message hundreds of thousands of times. As the CIA's sorcerer, Gottlieb had also attempted to raise assassination to an art form. Out of his labs had come a poisoned handkerchief designed to do in a Libyan colonel, a bacteriological agent for a Congolese leader and debilitating potions intended for Cuba's Fidel Castro. The name Sidney Gottlieb is but an obscure footnote. Yet for a generation of Americans who came of age in the Cold War, his experiments came to define the CIA as a rogue agency. The most notorious project was MK-ULTRA, created in 1953. It was, in Gottlieb's words, intended to explore 'various techniques of behavior control in intelligence operations.' It funded an array of research, including electric-shock treatments, hypnosis and experiments designed to program or deprogram a subject's memory.

Note: Read more about the CIA's MK-ULTRA program. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on mind control from reliable major media sources.


The Trump Administration Is Using the Full Power of the U.S. Surveillance State Against Whistleblowers
2019-08-04, The Intercept
Posted: 2019-08-26 15:52:35
https://theintercept.com/2019/08/04/whistleblowers-surveillance-fbi-trump/

While we all live under extensive surveillance, for government employees and contractors - especially those with a security clearance - privacy is virtually nonexistent. Everything they do on their work computers is monitored. Even when they try to outsmart their work computer by taking photos directly of their screen, video cameras in their workplace might be recording their every move. Government workers with security clearance promise “never [to] divulge classified information to anyone” who is not authorized to receive it. But for many whistleblowers, the decision to go public results from troubling insights into government activity, coupled with the belief that as long as that activity remains secret, the system will not change. The growing use of the Espionage Act, a 1917 law that criminalizes the release of “national defense” information by anyone “with intent or reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation,” shows how the system is rigged against whistleblowers. Government insiders charged under the law are not allowed to defend themselves by arguing that their decision to share what they know was prompted by an impulse to help Americans confront and end government abuses. “The act is blind to the possibility that the public’s interest ... might outweigh the government’s interest,” Jameel Jaffer, head of the Knight First Amendment Institute, wrote recently. “It is blind to the difference between whistle-blowers and spies.”

Note: The above article includes the stories of four whistleblowers charged under the Espionage act. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.


Secretive government agency linked to AFP raid on ABC, documents show
2019-06-08, MSN News
Posted: 2019-08-26 15:48:47
https://www.msn.com/en-au/kids/other/secretive-government-agency-linked-to-af...

Newly released documents show that another government agency, as well as the Australian Federal Police, was involved in the investigation that led to the raid on the ABC in June. The documents, obtained under Freedom of Information, reveal that the AFP refused to release certain documents relating to the June 6 raid because it said they related to an agency of the Federal Government which is exempt from FOI. Under the section cited by the AFP to justify not releasing the material - subsection 7(1) of the FOI Act - agencies which have complete exemption include the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS). The raid on the ABC's Ultimo headquarters was related to the Afghan Files, a series of stories, published in 2017, which detailed incidents where Australian soldiers in Afghanistan killed unarmed men and children. [South Australian senator Rex] Patrick said ... he believed that the other agency was either ASIO or the Australian Signals Directorate. The primary role of the Australian Signals Directorate is to eavesdrop on conversations and monitor the communications of people of interest outside Australia. The story which prompted one of the raids - on News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst - was about the push by some within the Federal Government to give ASD power to monitor the communications of Australians in Australia, which is currently prohibited by law.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and media manipulation from reliable major media sources.


U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid
2019-06-15, New York Times
Posted: 2019-06-23 00:18:44
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/us/politics/trump-cyber-russia-grid.html

The United States is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin and a demonstration of how the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively, current and former government officials said. In interviews over the past three months, the officials described the previously unreported deployment of American computer code inside Russia’s grid and other targets as a classified companion to more publicly discussed action directed at Moscow’s disinformation and hacking units around the 2018 midterm elections. In August of 2018, President Trump signed [an] executive order ... called National Security Presidential Memorandum 13. Its contents are still classified, but essentially it allows the Cyber Command to go ahead and conduct all kinds of operations inside foreign networks without going back to the president for prior approval. The first thing it did was go after those units in Russia that were responsible for a lot of the election-hacking. They went after the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence unit that had been responsible for breaking into the D.N.C.. A lot of that ... was made public. What wasn’t made public was a parallel effort to go inside the Russian power grid, to put some code in places where the Russians ... wouldn’t see it, in case the U.S. ever needed to act against Russia’s utilities as the Russians were putting malware in our systems.

Note: A 2007 New York Times article describes the formation of the Air Force Cyberspace Command to arm the US military in anticipation of widespread computer-based warfare. A more recent Guardian article says, "we might already be living through the first world cyberwar." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.


C.I.A. Sought to Spray Drug on Partygoers
1977-09-21, New York Times
Posted: 2019-06-23 00:10:28
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/09/21/archives/cia-sought-to-spray-drug-on-party...

A former Central Intelligence Agency employee told a Senate subcommittee today that he and another C.I.A. employee were sent to San Francisco in 1959 to lure unsuspecting people to a party at which the two agents were to spray the air with LSD 25 as part of the agency's secret drug testing program. The test [was] part of a much larger drug testing program known by the cryptonym MK ULTRA,” David Rhodes told the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research. Mr. Rhodes, two former C.I.A. employees, two former Bureau of Narcotics agents and Dr. Charles Geschickter, head of a foundation that channeled C.I.A. medical research funds to universities for nine or 10 years, were questioned this morning in the first of two days of hearings into C.I.A. testing of drugs on human beings. Today's testimony by Mr. Rhodes provided the first look the public has had at an LSD test inside a C.I.A. safehouse. The agency carried out other drug tests in both California and New York City from 1953 to 1966 in such safehouses, mainly apartments and motel rooms. These were secretly rented for the agency by George H. White, an official of the old Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which has since been supplanted by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Mr. Rhodes, a psychologist employed by the C.I.A. from 1957 to 1961, said he went to California in 1959 with Walter P. Pasternak. Mr. Pasternak, a former employee of the agency, was also an official with the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.

Note: Read more about the CIA's MK ULTRA program. Shortly before his death, George White summed up his CIA career by saying, 'It was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all highest," as reported in this ABC documentary on MK ULTRA. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on mind control from reliable major media sources.


Psychic Spying?
1977-08-07, Washington Post
Posted: 2019-06-01 23:05:09
https://www.WantToKnow.info/remoteviewing/770807-psychic-spying-post

Four years ago ago, officers of the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency participated in a series of unusual experiments run by Stanford Research Institute (SRI) to verify claims that certain people have psychic abilities. The results ... were astonishing. The SRI investigators, physicists Harold E. Puthoff (a former NSA research engineer) and Russell Targ, set out to demonstrate to their CIA sponsor that their subjects, a noted psychic named Ingo Swann and ... Pat Price, could describe distant locations merely by knowing which geographic coordinates to "look at." Puthoff and Targ [call this] "remote viewing." In one case, Swann described and sketched with reasonable accuracy a target island in the South Indian Ocean. In another instance, Pat Price gave an incredibly detailed description of a supposedly secret, underground military installation in Virginia. "Hell, there's no security left," a government security officer exclaimed upon hearing of Price's alleged success at psychic spying. One of Ingo Swann's remote viewing demonstrations at SRI was to pinpoint the location of Soviet submarines around the world. The CIA scientist monitoring the tests ... believed he had a potential class A espionage agent who could roam psychically anywhere in the world – in effect, the perfect spy. For the past 25 years, various branches of the military and intelligence communities have actively investigated this highly controversial field of parapsychology. There is particular concern ... that the Russians are able telepathically to influence the behavior of others, alter their emotions or health, knock them out or even kill. CIA psychologists are swamped with proposals for psychic studies.

Note: This article strangely is not to be found anywhere in the online archives of the Washington Post. It is still available for a fee in the archives of smaller newspapers which published the article. The amazing entire article can be found free at the link above. For lots more along these lines, see a wealth of reliable videos and information on remote viewing. And a great documentary "Third Eye Spies" on remote viewing can be found here. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Mind Control Information Center.


The CIA Drug Connection Is as Old as the Agency
1993-12-03, New York Times
Posted: 2019-05-26 03:13:57
https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/03/opinion/IHT-the-cia-drug-connectionis-as-o...

The Justice Department is investigating allegations that officers of a special Venezuelan anti-drug unit funded by the CIA smuggled more than 2,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States with the knowledge of CIA officials - despite protests by the Drug Enforcement Administration. That is a huge amount of cocaine. But it was hardly a first. The agency has never been above using individuals or organizations with known links to drug trafficking. Until recently, no DEA country attach overseas was allowed to initiate an investigation into a suspected drug trafficker ... without clearance from the local CIA station chief. CIA ties to international drug trafficking date to the Korean War. Nowhere, however, was the CIA more closely tied to drug traffic than it was in Pakistan during the Afghan War. As its principal conduit for arms and money to the Afghan guerrillas, the agency chose the Pakistan military's Inter-Services Intelligence Bureau. The ISI in turn steered the CIA's support toward [an Islamic fundamentalist who] received almost half of the agency's financial support during the war. But many of his commanders were also major heroin traffickers. Soon the trucks that delivered arms to the guerrillas in Afghanistan were coming back ... full of heroin. The heroin traffic blossomed in the shadows of a CIA-sustained guerrilla war. The conflict and its aftermath have given the world another Golden Triangle: the Golden Crescent, sweeping through Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of the former Soviet Union. Many of those involved in the drug traffic are men who were once armed, trained and financed by the CIA.

Note: The entire article at the link above is highy revealing. Read more about the CIA's ongoing involvement with Afghan heroin trafficking. The Taliban banned opium production in 2000 reducing the yield by 90%. Yet shortly after the U.S. defeated the Taliban, Afghanistan quickly returned to supplying 75% of the world's heroin. Do you think the U.S. is serious about stopping the drug trade? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing intelligence agency corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.


U.S. Revokes Visa of I.C.C. Prosecutor Pursuing Afghan War Crimes
2019-04-05, New York Times
Posted: 2019-04-29 16:21:15
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/world/europe/us-icc-prosecutor-afghanistan...

The United States has revoked the visa of the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor because of her attempts to investigate allegations of war crimes in Afghanistan, including any that may have been committed by American forces. Ms. Bensouda, a Gambian lawyer for the court, which is based in The Hague, formally requested an investigation more than a year ago into war crimes in Afghanistan. The inquiry would mostly focus on large-scale crimes against civilians attributed to the Taliban and Afghan government forces. But it would also examine alleged C.I.A. and American military abuse in detention centers in Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, and at sites in Poland, Lithuania and Romania, putting the court directly at odds with the United States. The United States is not a member state of the I.C.C. and does not recognize the court’s authority to prosecute Americans. In the past, though, the United States has cooperated with the court on other investigations, and Washington played a central role in establishing international criminal law at the Nuremberg trials. [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo, in a March news briefing in Washington, said investigators “should not assume that you will still have or will get a visa, or that you will be permitted to enter the United States” if they are part of a I.C.C. investigation. “These visa restrictions will not be the end of our efforts,” Mr. Pompeo said at the time. “We are prepared to take additional steps, including economic sanctions if the I.C.C. does not change its course.”

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the intelligence community.


Five myths about whistleblowers
2019-04-05, Washington Post
Posted: 2019-04-15 20:08:04
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths-about-whistleblo...

Despite the essential role whistleblowers play in illuminating the truth and protecting the public interest, several myths persist about them. The overwhelming majority of employees who see problems want to blow the whistle internally first. Understanding this can - and should - encourage employers to respond appropriately when workers report problems. Similarly, employees who understand that they are in fact whistleblowers when they raise concerns inside the workplace will be better prepared to navigate their rights, risks and options. While many employees who witness wrongdoing in the workplace stay silent, fearing reprisal or futility, those who do raise concerns ... demonstrate faith that their employers are committed to compliance and that they can make a difference. Whistleblowers who report externally typically do so because the problem is significant and their employers have failed to address it or engaged in reprisal (or both). Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s unconstitutional mass collection of telephone metadata, and Reality Winner’s disclosures about Russian efforts to hack state elections as the Trump campaign was denying Russian involvement, clearly meet this standard of significance. While reporters may use the term “leak” to describe information received from anonymous insiders, the failure to distinguish between leaking and anonymous whistleblowing risks undermining the legitimacy and importance of disclosures that clearly advance the public’s interest.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the intelligence community.


U.S. hackers helped UAE spy on Al Jazeera chairman, BBC host
2019-04-01, Reuters
Posted: 2019-04-15 19:56:16
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-raven-media-specialreport/special-repo...

A group of American hackers who once worked for U.S. intelligence agencies helped the United Arab Emirates spy on a BBC host, the chairman of Al Jazeera and other prominent Arab media figures during a tense 2017 confrontation pitting the UAE and its allies against the Gulf state of Qatar. The American operatives worked for Project Raven, a secret Emirati intelligence program that spied on dissidents, militants and political opponents of the UAE monarchy. A Reuters investigation in January revealed Project Raven’s existence and inner workings, including the fact that it surveilled a British activist and several unnamed U.S. journalists. At first, the goal was to crack down on terrorism by helping the UAE monitor militants around the region. But Raven’s mission quickly expanded to include monitoring and suppressing a range of UAE political opponents. Among its targets was Qatar, which the UAE and Saudi Arabia had long accused of fueling political opposition across the region, in part through the Qatari government’s funding of Al Jazeera. The Emiratis also tapped Raven in the effort to contain dissent at home. After the Arab Spring, the operatives were increasingly tasked with targeting human rights activists and journalists who questioned the government. The Raven effort went beyond the Middle East. Operatives [targeted] the mobile phones of other media figures the UAE believed were being supported by Qatar, including journalists for London-based Arabic media outlets.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the manipulation of public perception.


The timeless intrigue of redactions
2019-04-11, Washington Post
Posted: 2019-04-15 19:53:21
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/style/wp/2019/04/11/mad-libs-but-for-demo...

Redactions ... symbolize the ongoing tug-of-war between discretion and truth, between a government that knows what we don’t need to know and a citizenry that desires the whole story. That desire is inflamed after two years of theorizing about the Mueller report. “I think it’s going to be more disappointing than not, and frustrating to many,” says D.C. attorney Mark S. Zaid, who handles cases involving national security and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Zaid once sued the government for records related to the death of Princess Diana and the FBI surrendered reams of material. Zaid was thrilled, until he opened the boxes. Two thousand pages of redactions. Every page, blacked out. In 2003 the Department of Justice released a 186-page report on its hiring practices, and half of it was blacked out. American leaders brag about transparency but their agencies historically have cultivated a “culture of caution.” By the turn of last century at least 1.5 billion documents over 25 years old were kept from the public because of national security concerns. Classification cost the federal government $18.49 billion in fiscal year 2017 alone. Redactions can be cosmetic, or historic [like] the 14 blank pages of a 2002 Pentagon assessment of Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program. [Yet] when 19,045 documents related to the John F. Kennedy assassination were released last year, Nate Jones of the National Security Archive was struck by the banality of the information the government had insisted on keeping secret for years.

Note: Why was so much material around the death of Princess Diana redacted? Explore some of the strangeness around the killing of Princess Diana in this news article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on secrecy from reliable major media sources.


9/11 questions
2007-02-14, BBC News
Posted: 2019-04-06 23:00:19
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2007/02/911_questions.html

Lots of questions have been raised about 9/11: Why does it look like there is no plane at the crash site in Pennsylvania where flight United 93 came down? Why did a building called World Trade Centre Building 7 collapse even though it was never hit by an aircraft? And why was America so unprepared when terror attack warnings had been received? Through the internet and the media generally, allegations of complicity by the US government in the 9/11 attacks are intensifying. We found that simple requests, such as asking to see the plane wreckage of flight United 93 at Shanksville, or flight American Airlines 77 at the Pentagon, were refused after months of delay by the authorities. Yet if we had been able to film the wreckage from flight AA77 we would have had extremely strong evidence that a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon. Trying to prove or disprove these alternative theories is not easy. Officials are loathe to engage, thinking that any response will only fan the flames of popular conspiracy theories, and yet no response seems to be worse still. Senator Bob Graham ... co-chaired the Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 which detailed the failure of the CIA and FBI to use intelligence it had received about Al Qaeda before the attacks. Senator Graham told us there was a “collaboration of efforts among agencies and the administration to keep information out of the public’s hands.”

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing 9/11 news articles from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our 9/11 Information Center.


The Strange Tale of the FBI’s Fictional “Black Identity Extremism” Movement
2019-03-23, The Intercept
Posted: 2019-04-01 19:30:03
https://theintercept.com/2019/03/23/black-identity-extremist-fbi-domestic-ter...

Hours after police Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown on a quiet suburban street in Ferguson, Missouri, Olajuwon Ali Davis stood with a few dozen people on that same street. Davis, who was 22 at the time, kept showing up as the protests grew larger. Three months later, Davis and another young man named Brandon Orlando Baldwin were arrested in an FBI sting and accused of planning to ... blow up St. Louis’s iconic Gateway Arch. Three years later, the FBI listed Davis’s case in a secret memo warning of the rise of a “black identity extremist” movement whose members’ “perceptions of police brutality against African Americans” spurred what the FBI claimed was “an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement.” The “black identity extremism” report was prepared by the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit ... and was distributed to scores of local and federal law enforcement partners. Davis and Baldwin ... appear to be the first individuals retroactively labeled by the FBI as “black identity extremists.” According to The Intercept’s analysis, Davis and Olajuwon’s case was the only federal prosecution of individuals the FBI considers to be “black identity extremists” that resulted in a conviction. By comparison, the analysis found that 268 right-wing extremists were prosecuted in federal courts since 9/11 for crimes that appear to meet the legal definition of domestic terrorism.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the erosion of civil liberties.


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