Wikileaks

See the following -

Don't Trade Away Our Health

Joseph E. Stiglitz | The New York Times | January 30, 2015

A secretive group met behind closed doors in New York this week. What they decided may lead to higher drug prices for you and hundreds of millions around the world...

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EFF Helps Freedom Of The Press Foundation

Cindy Cohn | Electronic Frontier Foundation | December 17, 2012

Today, a group of free expression advocates and journalists are launching the Freedom of the Press Foundation to promote aggressive, public interest journalism that takes aim at excessive government secrecy. Its goal is to crowd-fund donations for a variety of organizations that work to expose government mismanagement, corruption, and law breaking. [...] Read More »

Health Care in a Post-Privacy World

Someone knows you are reading this. They know what device you are using.  They know if you make it all the way to the end (which I hope you do!).  They may be watching you read it, and listening to you.  They know exactly where you are right now, and where you've been. As FBI Director James Comey recently proclaimed, "there is no thing as absolute privacy in America." Director Comey was speaking about legal snooping, authorized by the courts and carried out by law enforcement agencies, but, in many ways, that may be the least of our privacy concerns...

Holder's Disappointing Tech Legacy

Tim Wu | The New Yorker | September 26, 2014

As he leaves office, Attorney General Eric Holder is being celebrated for many accomplishments, particularly in areas like civil rights and racial justice, which he saw as his legacy...But, when it came to another frontier of civil rights—the digital world, in which most of us now spend much of our time—Holder fell far short...

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Latest TPP Leak Raises Burning Questions About Implications for U.S. Health Care System

Press Release | Public Citizen | June 10, 2015

The latest secret document from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations – published today by WikiLeaks – shows that the pact could expose Medicare to pharmaceutical company attacks and constrain future policy reforms, including the ability of the U.S. government to curb rising and unsustainable drug prices, according to Public Citizen. The concerns about the U.S. health care system arising from this latest leak add to the litany of reasons that nearly all Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives and a substantial bloc of House GOP oppose Fast Track trade authority for the TPP.

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Leaked TPP Chapter: 5 Scary Provisions In WikiLeaks' Trans-Pacific Partnership Release

Connor Adams Sheets | International Business Times | November 13, 2013

WikiLeaks broke the seal on key parts of the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership on Wednesday, when it released the agreement's intellectual property chapter online. Read More »

Open Source Spotlight: How DocumentCloud Adds Depth To Digital Journalism

Rohan Pearce | Computerworld | November 6, 2012

The corporate media is facing a deep-going, digital-driven crisis: Dropping print advertising revenue, a growth in online ad spend that hasn't plugged the revenue hole, and the unwillingness, in general, of readers to pay for online news. But while the internet has played a big role in the financial haemorrhaging of the media [....] it has also made possible new ways of doing journalism. Read More »

Schools Aren't Teaching Kids To Code; Here's Who Is Filling The Gap

Selena Larson | Say Media Inc. | October 18, 2013

Learning to code is all the rage these days, but not in one place that matters a lot: U.S. schools. U.S. students already significantly lag their global counterparts where math and science skills are concerned. But computer science is in even worse shape: Of 12 technical subjects examined in a recent study by the National Center for Education Statistics, computer science was the only one that declined in student popularity from 1990 to 2009 (p. 49)...

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The Final Leaked TPP Text is All That We Feared

Today's release by Wikileaks of what is believed to be the current and essentially final version of the intellectual property (IP) chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) confirms our worst fears about the agreement, and dashes the few hopes that we held out that its most onerous provisions wouldn't survive to the end of the negotiations. Since we now have the agreed text, we'll be including some paragraph references that you can cross-reference for yourself—but be aware that some of them contain placeholders like “x” that may change in the cleaned-up text. Also, our analysis here is limited to the copyright and Internet-related provisions of the chapter, but analyses of the impacts of other parts of the chapter have been published by Wikileaks and others.

The Secret Sharer

Jane Mayer | The New Yorker | May 23, 2013

On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen. A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state... Read More »

The White House Big Data Report: The Good, The Bad, And The Missing

Jeremy Gillula and Kurt Opsahl and Rainey Reitman | Electronic Frontier Foundation | May 4, 2014

Last week, the White House released its report on big data and its privacy implications, the result of a 90-day study commissioned by President Obama during his January 17 speech on NSA surveillance reforms. Now that we’ve had a chance to read the report we’d like to share our thoughts on what we liked, what we didn’t, and what we thought was missing...

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TPP Is Right Where We Want It: Going Nowhere

Maira Sutton | Electronic Frontier Foundation | April 25, 2014

President Obama is on a diplomatic tour of Asia this week and one of his top priorities is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement that includes restrictive copyright enforcement measures that pose a huge threat to users’ rights and a free and open Internet...Despite some reports of movement on some of the most controversial topics during meetings between Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Abe, it seems that the TPP is still effectively at a standstill...

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TPP Treaty Could be a Serious Threat to US Public Health System

While trade agreements may seem to be another, albeit international species of wonkery, these agreements could have major effects on patients' and the public's health.  Since these concerns have been essentially ignored by the US medical and health care literature, (although they have appeared in UK journals, Australian, and New Zealand journals in English), they I will discuss them below. Worthy of further discussion is the possibility that these potential threats to health care and public health may arise not just from ideological disagreements, but also from health care corporations' increasing capture of government, facilitated by the conflicts of interest generated by the revolving door. Read More »

Unlocking The Secretive Trans Pacific Trade Deal

Staff Writer | Aljazeera America | February 13, 2014

The Trans Pacific Partnership is the largest proposed trade deal in history impacting everything from how we use the internet to prescription drug prices. Public interest groups don’t have access to the negotiations, which involve 11 countries plus the U.S., but corporate lobbyists do. Given the potential for change, should the public have a say? Read More »

When It's At The Border, Your Data Is Fair Game — Even On Your Laptop

Philip Bump | The Atlantic Wire | September 10, 2013

Americans are protected from warrantless search in America — but not at the nation's borders. The imaginary line separating the United States from the rest of the world has become a critical demarcation for the privacy of the country's citizens, as new documents from the ACLU and the ongoing Snowden leaks make clear. Read More »