SAN FRANCISCO – Twitter has been on a recruitment drive of late, hiring a host of former feds and spies. Studying a number of employment and recruitment websites, MintPress has ascertained that the social media giant has, in recent years, recruited dozens of individuals from the national security state to work in the fields of security, trust, safety and content.
[Source: nypost.com]Former Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance has now cleared Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam who were wrongfully convicted of Malcolm’s 1965 murder.
Vance and other government authorities, however, refused to investigate the FBI, NYPD, CIA, and other government agencies for their role in his killing.
[This article is part of CAM’s political assassination series and follows from our updated investigations into the life and death of civil rights icon Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.—Editors]
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Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, center, announces the creation of a controversial Justice Department effort called the “China Initiative”during a press conference at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 1, 2018. [Source: theintercept.com]The Justice Department’s China Initiative Was Established by the Trump Administration to Crackdown on Chinese Economic and Scientific Espionage.
However, its primary targets have been academics prosecuted for failing to properly disclose their connection to Chinese universities on grant forms and it has led to numerous miscarriages of justice.
An internal FBI report reveals how WhatsApp and iMessage happily hand over users’ data to the Feds, sometimes providing the source and destination of messages every 15 minutes.
The sensitive Federal Bureau of Investigation paper, unearthed by the transparency group Property of the People, spells out in concise yet shocking detail the Bureau’s ability to secure messaging app content and associated metadata via warrants and subpoenas — and shows that WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage turn over the most information to authorities.
It’s a rare insight into the systematic manner in which U.S. authorities can access private information, and can only cast significant doubt on the publicly avowed positions of Apple and Facebook/Meta in respect of user privacy.
BY KEVIN GOSZTOLA
Source: FBI.gov
[Editor’s Note: To mark the 20th anniversary of the rise of the American security state after the September 11th attacks, The Dissenter presents aretrospective on this transformation in law enforcement and government. Each entry in the series, “Twenty Years In A Security State,” will connect with whistleblower stories where possible.]
1 July 2021 — — Origin: Media Lens
As we have pointed out since Media Lens began in 2001, a fundamental feature of corporate media is propaganda by omission. Over the past week, a stunning example has highlighted this core property once again.
29 June 2021 — Craig Murray
On the final day of the Assange extradition hearing, magistrate Vanessa Baraitser refused to accept an affidavit from Assange’s solicitor Gareth Peirce, on the grounds it was out of time. The affidavit explained that the defence had been unable to respond to the new accusations in the United States government’s second superseding indictment, because these wholly new matters had been sprung on them just six weeks before the hearing resumed on 8 September 2020.
27 June 2021 — Caitlin Johnson
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The Icelandic newspaper Stundin reports that a key witness in the US prosecution of Julian Assange has admitted in an interview with the outlet that he fabricated critical accusations in the indictment against the WikiLeaks founder.
8 March 2021 — FAIR
20 November 2020 — Grayzone
6 July 2020 — Mint Press
From the Twitter account of her communications firm, Asymmetrica, Vanessa Neumann accused four journalists of a “criminal conspiracy” to support Venezuelan vice-president Delcy Rodriguez. “There is a price on your head,” she threatened.
30 January 2020 — Craig Murray
A persistent American lawyer has uncovered the undeniable fact that the FBI has been continuously lying, including giving false testimony in court, in response to Freedom of Information requests for its records on Seth Rich. The FBI has previously given affidavits that it has no records regarding Seth Rich.
7 August 2019 — Mint Press
William Barr’s warning that a “major incident” could occur “at any time” and “galvanize public opinion” around the unpopular encryption back-door policy he has been seeking seems to have come true in the weeks since the attorney general made those statements.
by Whitney Webb
3 May 2019 — National Security Archive
Washington D.C., May 3, 2019 – The National Security Archive, along with 15 other media organizations, filed a “friend of the court” brief on April 29 challenging the FBI’s authority to issue national security letters (NSLs) without any judicial oversight and under indefinite gag orders. The letters demand business records from a wide array of organizations for national security investigations, and their accompanying gag orders prohibit the recipient from speaking with anyone about the NSL, often permanently.
21 January 2019 — Global Research
Distinguished Press TV journalist/anchor’s unlawful arrest, detention and mistreatment by the FBI, on the pretext of being a material witness regarding a case her family knows nothing about, gave the US another international black eye.
18 January 2018– WSWS
Behind the backs of the US and world populations, social media companies have built up a massive censorship apparatus staffed by an army of “content reviewers” capable of seamlessly monitoring, tracking, and blocking millions of pieces of content.
The character of this apparatus was detailed in testimony Wednesday from representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, chaired by South Dakota Republican John Thune.
24 October 2017 — FAIR
Janine Jackson interviewed Nusrat Choudhury about the FBI’s “black identity extremist” designation for the October 20, 2017, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
20 October 2017 — FAIR
Foreign Policy (10/6/17)
This week on CounterSpin: Public protest against racist police brutality has been a beacon for all kinds of activists looking for ways to stand up to oppression—a model for those who want to go down on the right side of history with principled, persistent and peaceful action in resistance to increasingly frightening reactionary exertions of state power. Into this context we now introduce, by way of documents leaked to the magazine Foreign Policy, the FBI’s designation of “black identity extremists” as a movement constituting a violent threat to public safety, and warranting the surveillance and scrutiny of the country’s “counterterrorism” forces. What do we know about the definition of this term and, more importantly, the FBI’s application of it? The ACLU’s Racial Justice Program is on the case; we’ll hear from lead attorney Nusrat Choudhury.
12 October 2017 — Black Agenda Report
The FBI has apparently chosen a new heading under which to lump Black Americans targeted for political persecution: “Black Identity Extremists.” There’s a simple explanation for the new categorization. The FBI is a bureaucracy whose day-to-day work involves drawing up lists of people and organizations to be surveilled, disrupted and prosecuted. The dramatic increase in Black “movement” activity since the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, has presented the FBI with a much larger field of targets, including youthful elements loosely grouped under the Black Lives Matter banner. When bureaucracies compile new lists, they typically file them under new names.
10 October 2017 — TRNN
The FBI terrorism unit’s report warning that ‘black identity extremists’ are a violent threat is only the latest in a long tradition of targeting black activists, says the Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford (inc. transcript)
The New Dark Age 