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With Trump Out Of Office, It’s Open Game On Those Who Fight For Freedom | “Brazil Charges Journalist Glenn Greenwald With Cyber Crimes” by New York Mag
| Journalist Glenn Greenwald, best known for publishing Edward Snowden’s leaked government documents, has been charged with cyber crimes by Brazilian authorities for his “role in the spreading of cellphone messages that have embarrassed prosecutors and tarnished the image of an anti-corruption task force,” the New York Times reported.
The Brazil-based American journalist, whose reporting exposed corruption in the upper ranks of the Brazilian government, is accused of being a part of a “criminal organization” that hacked private devices belonging to the officials. The Intercept Brazil, which Greenwald co-founded, published stories based on leaks under the heading of the “Secret Brazil Archive.” | ~ New York Mag
Greenwald Discusses Freedom Of The Press and How It Was Obama and The Democrats That Jailed Reporters and Threatened Sources, NOT President Donald Trump
“If you look at the last 8 years, there has been a very concerted war on not just sources and whistleblowers, also journalists, implemented not by Donald Trump but by the Obama Administration. More sources prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act than in all previous administrations combined.” ~ Glenn Greenwald
“Trump Wages War on the Press, but Was Obama Much Better to Reporters? (Guest Column)” in Variety | Trump Ended Up Using Speech |
As it turned out, the ‘war’ was actually a ‘war of words’. In one sense, Trump turned out to be the greatest proponent of Article 19, then our own American Press.
| Obama, who campaigned on a promise to protect government whistle-blowers, made greater use of the Espionage Act to prosecute leakers and menace journalists than all other presidents combined.
Obama’s Justice Department accessed the personal email of a Fox News reporter and surveilled the reporter’s parents and colleagues. They seized the home, work and mobile phone records of journalists at the Associated Press.
Risen, who fought the administration to protect his sources, got so deep in his own legal battle with Obama that he selected a reading list for prison before the government finally backed off.
White House officials subverted the press in a number of ways while touting themselves as the most transparent in history.
Obama routinely banned news photographers from official events. He went months between press conferences and used social media to circumvent reporters.
First lady Michelle Obama took policy trips overseas with no press on her airplane. The White House scrubbed public visitor logs of names it didn’t want in the news.
The Obama administration posted the worst record in history for fulfilling requests for public records under the Freedom of Information Act.
In a bleak episode of unintended irony, an open-government group gave Obama an award for transparency in an Oval Office ceremony closed to the press.
Trump may well end up being worse on press issues than Obama, and today’s White House reporters could be picking out their prison reading lists eventually.
But for now, those on duty there are guardedly hopeful. | ~ Paragraph 8 on, Variety
In 2020, It Was Reported That A “Record Number Of Journalists Jailed Worldwide” | Committee To Protect Journalists | But Not By President Trump
Again, while attacking President Trump’s own use of free speech, our friends on the ‘left’ again have to admit that President Trump never jailed any journalists.
| Within the United States, no journalists were jailed at the time of CPJ’s prison census, but an unprecedented 110 journalists were arrested or criminally chargedin 2020 and around 300 were assaulted, the majority by law enforcement, according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. At least 12 still face criminal charges, some of which carry jail terms. Observers told CPJ that the polarized political climate, militarized law enforcement, and vitriol toward the media combined during a wave of protests to eradicate norms that once afforded journalists police protection. | ~ Paragraph 4, Committee To Protect Journalists
Even In Articles When The “Left” Tried To Convince Us That Trump Was An Enemy To Freedom, They Admit He Never Jailed One Journalist | Reuters
| While no journalists were in prison in the United States as of Dec. 1, 110 were arrested or charged in 2020, many while covering demonstrations against police violence, the CPJ said. | Paragraph 8 ~ Reuters
Obama’s War On Freedom Of The Press | Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
In 2014, Kevin Lamarque for Reuters reported:
| President Barack Obama came into office in 2009 promising a new era of unprecedented transparency in his administration. But when he leaves office, reporters may remember him for an effort that has largely turned out to be the opposite — and for being what one affected reporter has called the “greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.”
At a time when journalists’ roles in covering different, critical conflict zones have been under the microscope, renewed attention has come to the case involving James Risen. He is the New York Times journalist who has been fighting efforts by two different Departments of Justice — under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush — to compel him to identify sources from a 2006 book that reveals a secret CIA plan to sabotage Iran’s budding nuclear program.
For the past five years, he has battled the Obama administration’s Justice Department, which in 2009 took a rather unprecedented step of renewing a subpoena scheduled to expire that year. From his case and others the Obama administration has pursued, Risen told The Times’ Maureen Dowd recently that Obama represented a fundamental obstacle for press freedom.
“It’s hypocritical,” Risen said. “A lot of people still think this is some kind of game or signal or spin. They don’t want to believe that Obama wants to crack down on the press and whistleblowers. But he does. He’s the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.” |
For the full text -> Why The Obama Administration Wants This Journalist In Jail
Can independent journalism fight back in Turkey?
“Accusing journalists of aiding terrorists because they do not toe the regime’s line is the first step to a totalitarian state,” journalist Sue Turton told me a few years ago.
Turton – the force behind the #FreeAJStaff campaign which helped release three Al Jazeera journalists jailed in Egypt in 2013 – was offering thoughts on how to secure the release of more than 100 journalists unjustly detained in Turkey.
The country is among the world’s biggest jailers of journalists for the fifth year in a row, and was ranked 153 out of 180 countries in the newly published World Press Freedom Index, between Belarus and Rwanda.
Since the failed coup attempt in July 2016, at least 180 media outlets have been shut down in Turkey and scores of journalists have been jailed on baseless ‘terrorism offences’ -many charged as a result of posts they have shared on Twitter, cartoons they have drawn or opinions they expressed.
COVID-19 has brought additional fears for journalists behind bars. Last week, Turkey entered its second lockdown but overcrowding and unsanitary facilities has been a concern long before the pandemic that already posed a serious health threat to Turkey’s prison population.
So how can we help get them out of jail?
“My advice is to build international solidarity,” Sue Turton tells me. “When my colleagues were convicted in Egypt, we knew our best weapon was the solidarity of the media all over the world”.
So we did just that. On World Press Freedom Day 2017, Amnesty International together with several other prominent human rights organizations launched the Free Turkey Media campaign. Four years on, more than 250,000 people have signed an online petition calling for the immediate release of Turkey’s journalists. Thousands of others have posted ‘solidarity selfies’ on Twitter, and leading journalists, politicians and celebrities have joined the call too.
And yet, the situation for journalists in Turkey remains dire.
SAGE admits risk of catching Covid in a pub or restaurant is ‘relatively low’
SAGE admits risk of catching Covid in a pub or restaurant is ‘relatively low’ with just 226 outbreaks in them since pandemic began – despite England’s hospitality sector being shut for another three weeks.
- Analysis by SAGE found risk of Covid in hospitality, retail or leisure sector ‘small’
- Admission came in a review of studies and data from UK and around the world
- SAGE found there’d been just 226 outbreaks in pubs and restaurants in England
Reuters exclusively reports why a U.S. hospital and oil company turned to facial recognition
Reuters exclusively reported how deployments of facial recognition from Israeli start-up Any Vision show how the surveillance software has gained adoption across the United States even as regulatory and ethical debates about it rage. The technology finds certain faces in photos or videos, with banks representing one sector that has taken interest in systems from Any Vision or its many competitors to improve security and service. Organizations in other industries are chasing similar goals. The Los Angeles hospital Cedars-Sinai and oil giant BP Plc are among several previously unreported users of Any Vision.
Feds’ cover-up of UFOs puts US at risk, ex-Pentagon official warns
The federal government has long been covering up the existence of UFOs because of religious objections, concerns over tarnishing its own reputation and fears of inciting public panic, according to the former Pentagon official who says he ran the program investigating “unidentified aerial phenomena” or UAP.
This longtime suppression of research data has resulted in a serious threat to US national security, controversial whistleblower Luis “Lue” Elizondo told The Post.
With a bombshell government report on UFOs set to be released any time between now and the end of June, Elizondo has revealed the shocking things he alleges to have learned — and the chilling reason why some in the Pentagon don’t want this information made public.
As part of his job, Elizondo says he had access to the Pentagon’s UFO data and interviewed military eyewitnesses who encountered UAP on an almost “daily basis.” Meanwhile, Navy pilots have testified about engaging 50-foot Tic-Tac shaped vessels only to see them disappear in the blink of an eye. Other pilots said their fighter jets had a “near collision” with a strange “sphere encasing a cube.” Elizondo scrutinized all this evidence, including radar and electro-optical data, that showed unknown aircraft zipping 60 miles in five seconds and descending at speeds of 14 miles per second.
“Do the math,” Elizondo, also a former intelligence officer for the US Department of Defense, told The Post. “You’ll see that it’s very fast.” (BTW: We did the math — and 60 miles in five seconds is 216,000 miles-per-hour.)
Despite those mind-blowing discoveries, Elizondo — who says he came into the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program in 2008, and headed it up from 2010 until 2017 — was always swimming upstream. He tried to share frightening evidence with close-minded non-believers who shunned his research, which he has now compared to an “intelligence failure on the level of 9/11.”