State Secret: Thousands Secretly Sterilized. Beneath the surface of this Southern town, with its lush evergreens and winding riverbanks, is a largely forgotten legacy of pain, secrecy and human indignity. "My heart still bleeds, and it will forever bleed, because of what had happened to me," local resident Elaine Riddick said. Riddick was one of thousands of people secretly sterilized by the state between 1929 and 1974. From the early 1900s to the 1970s, some 65,000 men and women were sterilized in this country, many without their knowledge, as part of a government eugenics program to keep so-called undesirables from reproducing. "The procedures that were done here were done to poor folks," said Steven Selden, professor at the University of Maryland. "They were thought to be poor because they had bad genes or bad inheritance, if you will. And so they would be the focus of the sterilization. " Sterilized Without Her Knowledge Riddick was raped and became pregnant at the age of 13.
"They took so much away from me," Riddick said. U.S. Congress passes Espionage Act — History.com This Day in History — 6/15/1917. Studies show 'dark chapter' of medical research. The Public Health Service took photographs during the Tuskegee syphilis study, but no captions remain. This is one of them. The Tuskegee study, which began in the early 1930s, consisted of 399 African-American menThe Guatemala-based research involved 696 subjects Both studies were sponsored by U.S. government health agencies (CNN) -- The Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the 20th century is often cited as the most famous example of unethical medical research.
Now, evidence has emerged that it overlapped with a shorter study, also sponsored by U.S. government health agencies, in which human subjects were unknowingly being harmed by participating in an experiment. Research from Wellesley College professor Susan Reverby has uncovered evidence of an experiment in Guatemala that infected people with sexually transmitted diseases in an effort to explore treatments. The U.S. government apologized for the research project on Friday, more than 60 years after the experiments ended. 11 disturbing things Snowden has taught us (so far) (Spencer Platt/Getty Images) 1) Can you hear me now? The Guardian reported on June 6 that, according to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the Obama administration enabled the National Security Agency to collect caller information from Verizon through a “business records” provision of the Patriot Act, established under President George W. Bush. The government ordered Verizon to hand over call information on a daily basis, including the time, location and duration of calls.
The Bush administration began collecting such information in October 2001 from AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, which USA Today reported in 2006. The consequence: While US officials sought to reassure the public that such surveillance was legal and part of an ongoing program vital to national security, many Americans called the domestic spying an unnecessary invasion of privacy and lamented that it was even legal in the first place. (Mario Tama/Getty Images) 2) Yes we scan Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Edward Snowden: 'The US government will say I aided our enemies' – video interview | World news. NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst | PBS NewsHour | Aug. 1, 2013.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And we pick up on the continuing fallout from the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Last night, we debated the role of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence court, which approves the government’s requests to gather intelligence information on Americans. Tonight, we have a conversation with three former NSA officials, a former inspector general and two NSA veterans who blew the whistle on what they say were abuses and mismanagement at the secret government intelligence agency.
William Binney worked at the NSA for over three decades as a mathematician, where he designed systems for collecting and analyzing large amounts of data. He retired in 2001. And Russell Tice had a two-decade career with the NSA where he focused on collection and analysis. He says he was fired in 2005 after calling on Congress to provide greater protection to whistle-blowers. He claims the NSA tapped the phone of high-level government officials and the news media 10 years ago. Mr. Julian Assange lawyer calls on US to make formal decision on prosecution | Media. The lawyer acting for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange over the US criminal investigation into his publication of hundreds of thousands of state secrets has called on the Department of Justice to make a formal statement that it will not prosecute him, in the wake of off-the-record reports that the department is minded not to press charges.
Barry Pollack responded sharply to anonymous officials who told the Washington Post that the US government was unlikely to prosecute Assange because to do so would raise the issue of prosecuting news organisations and journalists involved in the WikiLeaks disclosures. Pollack said that the Justice Department had failed to respond to WikiLeaks’ inquiries about the status of the investigation, which has been led by the eastern district of Virginia, where a grand jury has been impaneled. “Mr Assange would welcome a formal unequivocal statement from the Department of Justice that it has not brought charges against him and will not do so in the future. 'Going to be one hell of a decade’ – Manning to Wikileaks in private online chat in 2010.
Published time: December 06, 2013 13:06 Edited time: December 06, 2013 18:18 Private Manning arrives alongside military officials at a US military court facility to hear his sentence in his trial at Fort Meade, Maryland on August 21, 2013. (AFP Photo / Saul Loeb) Buried deep inside a bulging US Army dossier relating to Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning’s court martial are 13 pages of online chat between Manning and a Wikileaks contact believed to be Julian Assange.
The communications, first published on the US Army’s FOIA reading room in late November but since removed, provide some interesting insight as to what may have motivated former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to release the biggest haul of classified documents in US history. Naturally, many of the conversations involve Manning’s release of top secret US Army documents to WikiLeaks. On March 6, Assange tells Manning that “full transcript for video is now complete.” Manning replied with a “wow, dead on. NSA Whistleblower Thomas Drake Prevails Against Charges in Unprecedented Obama Admin Crackdown. This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to whistleblowers and the unprecedented attack they’ve come under during the Obama administration. Evoking the Espionage Act of 1917, the administration has pressed criminal charges against no fewer than six government employees, more than all previous presidential administrations combined.
Their crime? Last month, Jake Tapper, the White House correspondent for ABC News, questioned the Obama administration for applauding truth seekers abroad while simultaneously prosecuting them at home. JAKE TAPPER: How does that square with the fact that this administration has been so aggressively trying to stop aggressive journalism in the United States by using the Espionage Act to take whistleblowers to court? PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY: Well, I would hesitate to speak to any particular case, for obvious reasons, and I would refer you to the Department of Justice for more on that. AMY GOODMAN: What did you find? Government Case Against Whistleblower Thomas Drake Collapses. Faced with the prospect of trying to convict a man for leaking unclassified information, the DoJ put together a misdemeanor plea deal. The Obama Administration’s aggressive war on whistleblowers suffered a humiliating setback on June 9 when former NSA official Thomas Drake accepted a misdemeanor plea agreement for exceeding his authorized use of a government computer.
About the Author Marcy Wheeler Marcy Wheeler blogs about civil liberties and national security at Emptywheel. Also by the Author For proof that the current surveillance programs are ripe for abuse, Americans need only look at what preceded them. When The New York Times first revealed the NSA was wiretapping Americans without a warrant in 2005, it was a scandal. The Department of Justice had been pursuing Drake for alleged violations of the Espionage Act that might have sent him to prison for up to 35 years. The collapse of the case against Drake may have repercussions beyond just this one case. And now there’s the Drake case. Pentagon Papers — History.com Articles, Video, Pictures and Facts. Pentagon Papers Leaker Daniel Ellsberg Praises Snowden, Manning : The Two-Way.
Hide captionDaniel Ellsberg was a military analyst in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret study of U.S. government decision-making in Vietnam. Paul J. RIchards/AFP/Getty Images Daniel Ellsberg was a military analyst in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret study of U.S. government decision-making in Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who in 1971 leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers detailing the history of U.S. policy in Vietnam, tells NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday that unlike Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, he "did it the wrong way" by trying first to go through proper channels — a delay that he says cost thousands of lives.
"I really regarded [it] as anathema ... leaking as opposed to working within the system," Ellsberg says, speaking to NPR's Linda Wertheimer. "During that time, more than 10,000 Americans died and probably more than a million Vietnamese," Ellsberg says. "I decided it was worth a life in prison to do that," he says. The truth in `Dark Alliance' TEN YEARS AGO today, one of the most controversial news articles of the 1990s quietly appeared on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News. Titled "Dark Alliance," the headline ran beneath the provocative image of a man smoking crack -- superimposed on the official seal of the CIA. The three-part series by reporter Gary Webb linked the CIA and Nicaragua's Contras to the crack cocaine epidemic that ripped through South Los Angeles in the 1980s.
Most of the nation's elite newspapers at first ignored the story. A public uproar, especially among urban African Americans, forced them to respond. Many reporters besides Webb had sought to uncover the rumored connection between the CIA's anti-communism efforts in Central America and drug trafficking. Two years before Webb's series, the Los Angeles Times estimated that at its peak, Ross' "coast-to-coast conglomerate" was selling half a million crack rocks per day.
Secret government experiment exposed - USATODAY.com Video. 10 People Who Exposed US Government Secrets And Lies. Politics It seems like another skeleton falls out of the United States’ closet every day. Whistleblowers are coming out of the woodwork, and the government is struggling to keep the scandals contained. Still, tattling on the powers that be is nothing new. Love ’em or hate ’em, here are ten of the most famous US government whistleblowers. 10 Gary Webb: The Dark Alliance In 1996, Gary Webb, a writer for the San Jose Mercury News, published a series of articles known as “Dark Alliance.”
According to Webb, the CIA allowed the traffickers to ship large amounts of drugs into the country because the profits were being used to fund the Reagan-supported Contras (a rebel group opposing the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua). Naturally, insinuating the crack cocaine epidemic of the ’80s was partially caused by the government was a controversial stance—especially when the Reagan administration was already tainted by the Iran-Contra affair. 9 Mark Felt: Watergate 7 Thomas Drake: Trailblazer.