TV News LIES

American Civil Liberties Union officials say Republican Gov. Rick Scott and the GOP-led Florida Legislature have mounted an unprecedented attack on civil liberties over the past two years.

The ACLU of Florida issued a report Thursday on actions by the group and others in the courts of law and public opinion and at the ballot box to protect voting, free speech and other rights.

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Just before Christmas, Truthout's Jason Leopold and the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund separately published a collection of about 100 pages of Federal Bureau of Investigation documents on Occupy Wall Street. The release shed some new light on how the FBI collaborated with other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and Naval Investigative Criminal Services, to keep tabs on the movement, which it considered a potential criminal and domestic terrorism threat.

Yet the documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, are also heavily redacted—including a curious report about a plot to identify and assassinate Occupy leaders with a sniper rifle—and leave much to the imagination.

The Treasury Department watchdog ordered JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) to work with U.S. regulators seeking documents in connection with a probe into the bank's relationship with convicted Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, in a warning letter dated December 21.

The letter from Treasury Inspector General Eric Thorson to JPMorgan's general counsel, Stephen Cutler, which was reviewed by Reuters on Friday, revealed that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has been unable to get documents it requested.

The three European men with Somali roots were arrested on a murky pretext in August as they passed through the small African country of Djibouti. But the reason soon became clear when they were visited in their jail cells by a succession of American interrogators.

U.S. agents accused the men — two of them Swedes, the other a longtime resident of Britain — of supporting al-Shabab, an Islamist militia in Somalia that Washington considers a terrorist group. Two months after their arrest, the prisoners were secretly indicted by a federal grand jury in New York, then clandestinely taken into custody by the FBI and flown to the United States to face trial.

The secret arrests and detentions came to light Dec. 21 when the suspects made a brief appearance in a Brooklyn courtroom.

The Times on Tuesday released about 1,200 previously unpublished files kept by the Boy Scouts of America on volunteers and employees expelled for suspected sexual abuse.

The files, which have been redacted of victims' names and other identifying information, were opened from 1985 through 1991. They can be found in a database along with two decades of files released by order of the Oregon Supreme Court in October. The database also contains summary information on about 3,200 additional files opened from 1947 to 2005 that have not been released publicly.

Ever hear of Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) 20? Bet not. The more you’ve never heard of something, the more worried you should be.
In mid-November , The Washington Post, the first media outlet to report on the directive, noted that it “enables the military to act more aggressively to thwart cyberattacks on the nation’s web of government and private computer networks.”

The Post’s revelation came at the same time that other stories broke pointing to deepening problems with electronic privacy rights in America.  The most sensational story involved the FBI’s snooping the private e-mails of two of the nation’s leading security officers, CIA Director David Petraeus and Gen. John Allen, head of the U.S. Afghanistan war effort.