October, 03 2012, 02:34pm EDT
ACLU Calls for Hearings on Fusion Centers Following Senate Report
WASHINGTON
The American Civil Liberties Union today called on Congress to hold hearings to investigate rampant civil liberties violations in the fusion centers funded by the Department of Homeland Security. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs permanent subcommittee on investigations released a report today on the centers, which were originally created to improve the sharing of counterterrorism information among different state, local and federal law enforcement agencies.
"We hope that continuing oversight and stronger regulation will prohibit law enforcement intelligence collection without reasonable suspicion of criminal activity," said Michael German, senior policy counsel in the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office. "The ACLU warned back in 2007 that fusion centers posed grave threats to Americans' privacy and civil liberties, and that they needed clear guidelines and independent oversight. This report is a good first step, and we call upon Congress to hold public hearings to investigate fusion centers and their ongoing abuses."
Starting in 2007, the ACLU issued reports warning that the lack of public oversight regarding the centers and their work put Americans' privacy at risk.
"Law enforcement has long abused its perceived intelligence authorities to spy on people because of their beliefs and political activities rather than evidence of wrongdoing, and the subcommittee report confirms that this problem continues today," said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU's national security project. "History has shown that police powers exercised in secret are often abused, and the ACLU previously identified excessive secrecy surrounding the development of fusion centers as one of the primary threats to civil liberties. These centers need to be accountable to federal, state and local governments, and, most importantly, to the public they serve."
The ACLU is currently litigating a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking documents about a federal program to share information with the fusion centers called eGuardian, which is the FBI's nationwide system of collecting and sharing so-called "Suspicious Activity Reports" from local, state and federal law enforcement agencies.
More information on fusion centers at:
www.aclu.org/spy-files/more-about-fusion-centers
The complaint in the ACLU's eGuardian FOIA lawsuit is at:
www.aclu.org/files/assets/11-cv-5963-pgg_complaint.pdf
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
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'Landmark Victory': US Proposes Endangered Species Protections for Monarch Butterfly
"We're hoping that this is a call to everybody to say this species is in decline, and now is our opportunity to help reverse that decline," said one federal scientist.
Dec 10, 2024
Biodiversity defenders on Tuesday welcomed a "long overdue" move by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service toward protecting the monarch butterfly under the Endangered Species Act—the result, the Center for Biological Diversity said, of a lawsuit filed by several groups to safeguard the pollinators and their fragile habitat.
The FWS proposed designating the butterfly as threatened with extinction, four years after monarchs were placed on a waiting list for protection.
"For too long, the monarch butterfly has been waiting in line, hoping for new protections while its population has plummeted. This announcement by the Fish and Wildlife Service gets this iconic flier closer to the protections it needs, and given its staggering drop in numbers, that can't happen soon enough," said Steve Blackledge, senior director of conservation campaigns for Environment America.
Monarch butterflies journey from Mexico each spring to points across the United States east of the Rocky Mountains to pollinate and reproduce. When cooler weather arrives they migrate back to the south for the winter.
But their populations have declined by more than 95% from over 4.5 million in the 1980s, leaving the western monarch with a 99% chance of becoming extinct over the next six decades, according to federal scientists.
The decline has been driven by the widespread use of herbicides like Roundup on milkweed, the monarch's sole food source, as well as the use of neonicotinoid insecticides. Millions of monarchs are also killed by vehicles annually during their migration, and in their winter habitats they face the loss of forests due to logging.
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Western monarchs are down to an estimated 233,394 butterflies, while experts say there are several million eastern monarchs in existence.
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This is a breaking story… Please check back for possible updates...
A day after Luigi Mangione was arrested and charged as the alleged killer of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, independent journalist Ken Klippenstien on Tuesday published what he said was the 26-year-old's highly reported on manifesto.
The existence of the handwritten document found on Mangione when he was taken into custody in Pennsylvania on Monday was confirmed by the New York Police Department, and major media outlets have quoted from it, but none had released it in full.
"My queries to The New York Times, CNN, and ABC to explain their rationale for withholding the manifesto, while gladly quoting from it selectively, have not been answered," Klippenstein explained on his Substack.
According to Klippenstein—who previously published dossiers on Vice President-elect JD Vance and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the nominee for U.S. secretary of state—Mangione's manifesto reads:
To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.
Common Dreams has not independently verified its authenticity.
Klippenstein
said on social media that the manifesto he published is "the real one, not the fake one circulating online."
NBC News deputy technology editor Ben Goggin noted that language shared by Klippenstein "matches what NBC has reported here as real."
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A report released Tuesday from the environmental group Friends of the Earth finds that the U.S. food retail sector's use of pesticides on just four crops—almonds, apples, soy, and corn—could result in over $200 billion worth of financial, climate, and biodiversity risks for the industry between 2024 and 2050. Pollinators, including bees, form a crucial link between pesticide use and these risks.
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