Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Common Dreams:
"Telecommunications giant AT&T is spying on Americans for profit and helped law enforcement agencies investigate everything from the so-called war on drugs to Medicaid fraud—all at taxpayers' expense, according to new reporting by The Daily Beast. The program, known as Project Hemisphere, allowed state and local agencies to conduct warrantless searches of trillions of call records and other cellular data ...

Evan Greer, campaign director at the digital rights group Fight for the Future, said Tuesday, 'The for-profit spying program that these documents detail is more terrifying than the illegal [National Security Agency] surveillance programs that Edward Snowden exposed. Far beyond the NSA and FBI, these tools are accessible to a wide range of law enforcement officers including local police, without a warrant, as long as they pay up.' ...

Greer added: 'Customers trusted AT&T with some of their most private information, and the company turned around and literally built a product to sell that information to as many government agencies and police departments as they could. Not only did they fail to have any safeguards to prevent unauthorized use of the data, they actually required law enforcement to keep the program secret and dig up or fabricate other evidence, to hide the fact that they'd received information from AT&T.' "

-->The mainstream media is not covering this story of a communications giant profiting from selling all our calling data to the government. No doubt the NYT is working on how to spin this latest insight into our scary national security state. 

UPDATE: The NYT did cover this story on Oct 26.

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The Guardian UK:
"As they go to the polls in a historic presidential election, more than six in 10 Americans say neither major political party represents their views any longer, a survey has found. Dissatisfaction with both Democrats and Republicans has risen sharply since 1990, when less than half held that neither reflected their opinions, according to research by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). ...

Both Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican standard bearer Trump continue to suffer historically low favourability ratings, with less than half of the public viewing each candidate positively (41% v 33%). ...

The discontent with parties and candidates extends to the electoral process itself, which Trump claims is rigged against him. Less than half the public (43%) say they have a great deal of confidence that their vote will be counted accurately, while 38% have some confidence and 17% have hardly any confidence."

-->Major media does not like to remind voters how little confidence the electorate has in the political system. That's because the media is part of the corrupted, corporate owned, two party fraud.  

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Common Dreams:
"A prominent Honduran leader of a rural land rights movement was killed on Monday night in what supporters claim was an assassination organized by wealthy landowners. Jose Angel Flores, president of the Unified Campesinos Movement of the Aguan Valley, or MUCA, had been under police protection since March, teleSUR reported, after the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights ordered the Honduran state to protect him from death threats in 2014. ...

About 150 other activists have been killed so far in the region, the local campesinos organizations told teleSUR. The battle between landowners and peasant farmers has led to so much bloodshed that people describe Bajo Aguan, where MUCA operates, as 'killing fields.' ...

And the U.S. continues to funnel millions of dollars in military funding to the Honduran government, despite the targeted assassinations and other human rights abuses."

-->The NYT did not cover this latest murder, and even the Associated Press story omitted the real reason behind the Honduran killing fields, the coup that overthrew the country's last democratically elected president. Of course, the coup was the work of a particularly warlike Secretary of State at the time, Hillary Clinton. What major media would touch that?