New Yorker – Ronan Farrow – “Missing Files Motivated the Leak of Michael Cohen’s Financial Records – A law-enforcement official released the documents after finding that additional suspicious transactions did not appear in a government database.” “Last week, several news outlets obtained financial records showing that Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal attorney, had used a shell… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Censorship
CFPB techies blast talk of taking down complaint portal
FCW.com: “…Created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is one of the first federal examples of bringing in outside tech talent to deliver government services. “If you’re going to build a government agency from scratch, you’re going to get the chance to do things differently,” one former CFPB senior official told… Continue Reading
Advocacy Groups Push Tech Companies To Be More Transparent and Accountable About Censoring User Content
“EFF, ACLU of Northern California, Center for Democracy & Technology, New America’s Open Technology Institute, and a group of academic experts and free expression advocates today released the Santa Clara Principles, a set of minimum standards for tech companies to augment and strengthen their content moderation policies. The plain language, detailed guidelines call for disclosing… Continue Reading
DOJ Deleted Language About Press Freedom And Racial Gerrymandering From Its Internal Manual
BuzzFeed: “Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein ordered a review of the US Attorneys’ Manual, which features high-level policy statements as well as practical guidance to prosecutors on how to do their jobs. Since the fall, the US Department of Justice has been overhauling its manual for federal prosecutors. In: Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ tough-on-crime policies.… Continue Reading
Update: After Congress complains, USDA restores animal welfare reports
Science: “Following Congress’s request for greater transparency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has apparently restored detail in its most recent animal welfare inspection reports. Reports published on the agency’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service website since last August have omitted inventories that list the number and species of animals housed at facilities within… Continue Reading
Editorial – Obfuscating with transparency
Obfuscating with transparency, Jeremy Berg. Science 13 Apr 2018: Vol. 360, Issue 6385, pp. 133. DOI: 10.1126/science.aat8121 “Transparency is critical when it comes to decision-making that broadly affects the public, particularly when it comes to policies purported to be grounded in scientific evidence. The scientific community has been increasingly focused on improving the transparency of… Continue Reading
NYT – The Case of Hong Kong’s Missing Booksellers
New York Times Magazine – As China’s Xi Jinping consolidates power, owners of Hong Kong bookstores trafficking in banned books find themselves playing a very dangerous game: “…The Chinese government has long sought to shape and control information, but the scope and intensity of this effort was something new — and its origins could be… Continue Reading
Removal of Breast Cancer Website, Related Webpages from within HHS’s Office on Women’s Health Website
[April 2, 2018] “the Sunlight Foundation’s Web Integrity Project released a new report, “Removal of Breast Cancer Website and Related Webpages from within HHS’s Office on Women’s Health Website.” We also released a blog post analyzing the wave of removals from the Office on Women’s Health (OWH) website, “Unexplained censorship of women’s health website renews… Continue Reading
Academic research is publicly funded why isn’t it publicly available?
Erica Stone: Academic research is publicly funded — why isn’t it publicly available? [TED] “In the US, your taxes fund academic research at public universities. Why then do you need to pay expensive, for-profit journals for the results of that research? Erica Stone advocates for a new, open-access relationship between the public and scholars, making… Continue Reading
WSJ staff allege censorship – graphic of uneven gains since financial crisis removed
Columbia Journalism Review: “Alleging “censorship,” Wall Street Journal staffers circulated a letter yesterday decrying the suppression of a story detailing uneven gains in the decade since the financial crisis. “This week a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal attempted to take a graphic offline because the facts it contained were not politically palatable,” the letter read. “When… Continue Reading
The Yemen War Online: Propagation of Censored Content on Twitter
As a devastating civil war rages on in Yemen, online political networks that coalesce around the war use Twitter to propagate censored content from the open web, making it available to users behind open-web filtering regimes. by Helmi Noman, Robert Faris, and John Kelly. 28 February 2018 Download PDF. “This study, conducted by the Internet… Continue Reading
Senator Wants to Revive Federal Research on Gun Violence, 22 Years After Congress Banned It
Mother Jones: “On Tuesday, as teenagers swarmed the Florida legislature to advocate for gun control, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) renewed a familiar call for Congress to repeal an amendment that blocks the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from funding research into the public health effects of gun violence. I am calling for the repeal of the Dickey Amendment,… Continue Reading
