Who in Govt is Whistleblowing on Immigration/Asylum Detention?

Posted on August 7, 2016August 7, 2016 by Denise Simon

This event was hosted by Jones Day Law firm in Washington DC. The policies currently being applied by DHS, ICE and Customs and Border Patrol have officially been challenged as noted in this video of the The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and Human Rights First hosted a discussion on removal and detention of refugees seeking asylum in the U.S.

See the video here. While the session was almost 4 hours, please take the time to listen to the first two panelists…that will explain their mission and the links below. Moving forward, you will be able to better understand Barack Obama’s presentation next month at the United Nations, Jeh Johnson’s position and that of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Note that at no time is there a discussion about creating conditions by which globally migrants, refugees, asylum seekers would not have to leave their home countries in the first place.

Note also that the real human rights violations are happening in home countries yet no country leadership be it Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Syria, Iraq or Sudan has been brought before any tribunal for violations or war crimes.

2015 Annual Report

Click here to view USCIRF’s 2015 Annual Report

Click here to view USCIRF’s 2015 Annual Report Transmission Letters

2015 Annual Report Introduction

2015 Annual Report Overview

2015 Annual Report Prisoner Lists

It is a division of the State Department called United States Commission on International Religious Freedom

The Office of International Religious Freedom has the mission of promoting religious freedom as a core objective of U.S. foreign policy. The office is headed by the Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, David N. Saperstein. We monitor religious persecution and discrimination worldwide, recommend and implement policies in respective regions or countries, and develop programs to promote religious freedom.

Given the U.S. commitment to religious freedom, and to the international covenants that guarantee it as the inalienable right of every human being, the United States seeks to:

Promote freedom of religion and conscience throughout the world as a fundamental human right and as a source of stability for all countries;

Assist emerging democracies in implementing freedom of religion and conscience;

Assist religious and human rights NGOs in promoting religious freedom;

Identify and denounce regimes that are severe persecutors on the basis of religious belief.

The office carries out its mission through:

The Annual Report on International Religious Freedom. The report contains an introduction, executive summary, and a chapter describing the status of religious freedom in each of 195 countries throughout the world. Mandated by, and presented to, the U.S. Congress, the report is a public document available online and in book form from the U.S. Government Printing Office.

The designation by the Secretary of State (under authority delegated by the President) of nations guilty of particularly severe violations of religious freedom as “Countries of Particular Concern” under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (H.R. 2431) and its amendment of 1999 (Public Law 106-55). Nations so designated are subject to further actions, including economic sanctions, by the United States.

Meetings with foreign government officials at all levels, as well as religious and human rights groups in the United States and abroad, to address problems of religious freedom.

Testimony before the United States Congress on issues of international religious freedom.

Close cooperation with the independent United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Sponsorship of reconciliation programs in disputes which divide groups along lines of religious identity. The office seeks to support NGOs that are promoting reconciliation in such disputes.

Programs of outreach to American religious communities.

The Mafia, Cosa Nostra was Just Arrested 46

Posted on August 6, 2016August 6, 2016 by Denise Simon

6FBI rounds up nearly 50 mob suspects accused of litany of mafia crimes

The 46 defendants include alleged Philadelphia mob boss Joseph ‘Skinny Joey’ Merlino and New York crime figure Pasquale “Patsy” Parrello

Related reading: United States vs. JOSEPH MERLINO, FRANK GAMBINO, : RALPH ABRUZZI, STEVEN FRANGIPANI, : and ANTHONY ACCARDO criminal complaint

Joseph ‘Skinny Joey’ Merlino pictured in 2014. The alleged head of the Philadelphia mob was named in a federal indictment on Thursday charged with a range of crimes including extortion and fraud. Photograph: Yong Kim/AP

Guardian: Nearly 50 alleged mobsters have been charged by US prosecutors with being part of an east coast crime syndicate.

The 46 suspects include an old-school mafioso in New York and a reputed mob chieftain in Philadelphia who has been pursued by the government for decades.

The indictment, unsealed in New York City, accuses the defendants of a litany of classic mafia crimes, including extortion, loansharking, casino-style gambling, sports gambling, credit card fraud and health care fraud. It said the syndicate operated in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Florida and New Jersey.

Among those charged was Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino, the flamboyant alleged head of the Philadelphia mob who has repeatedly beat murder charges in past cases, but served nearly 12 years in prison for racketeering.

Also named in the indictment was Pasquale “Patsy” Parrello, identified as a longtime member of the Genovese organized crime family and the owner of an Italian restaurant in New York City.

What you Need to Know About IDI and Why

Posted on August 5, 2016August 5, 2016 by Denise Simon

This Company Has Built a Profile on Every American Adult

Every move you make. Every click you take. Every game you play. Every place you stay. They’ll be watching you.

David Gauvey Herbert

Bloomberg: Forget telephoto lenses and fake mustaches: The most important tools for America’s 35,000 private investigators are database subscription services. For more than a decade, professional snoops have been able to search troves of public and nonpublic records—known addresses, DMV records, photographs of a person’s car—and condense them into comprehensive reports costing as little as $10. Now they can combine that information with the kinds of things marketers know about you, such as which politicians you donate to, what you spend on groceries, and whether it’s weird that you ate in last night, to create a portrait of your life and predict your behavior.

IDI, a year-old company in the so-called data-fusion business, is the first to centralize and weaponize all that information for its customers. The Boca Raton, Fla., company’s database service, idiCORE, combines public records with purchasing, demographic, and behavioral data. Chief Executive Officer Derek Dubner says the system isn’t waiting for requests from clients—it’s already built a profile on every American adult, including young people who wouldn’t be swept up in conventional databases, which only index transactions. “We have data on that 21-year-old who’s living at home with mom and dad,” he says.

Dubner declined to provide a demo of idiCORE or furnish the company’s report on me. But he says these personal profiles include all known addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses; every piece of property ever bought or sold, plus related mortgages; past and present vehicles owned; criminal citations, from speeding tickets on up; voter registration; hunting permits; and names and phone numbers of neighbors. The reports also include photos of cars taken by private companies using automated license plate readers—billions of snapshots tagged with GPS coordinates and time stamps to help PIs surveil people or bust alibis.

IDI also runs two coupon websites, allamericansavings.com and samplesandsavings.com, that collect purchasing and behavioral data. When I signed up for the latter, I was asked for my e-mail address, birthday, and home address, information that could easily link me with my idiCORE profile. The site also asked if I suffered from arthritis, asthma, diabetes, or depression, ostensibly to help tailor its discounts.

Users and industry analysts say the addition of purchasing and behavioral data to conventional data fusion outmatches rival systems in terms of capabilities—and creepiness. “The cloud never forgets, and imperfect pictures of you composed from your data profile are carefully filled in over time,” says Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a consulting firm. “We’re like bugs in amber, completely trapped in the web of our own data.”

When logging in to IDI and similar databases, a PI must select a permissible use for a search under U.S. privacy laws. The Federal Trade Commission oversees the industry, but PI companies are largely expected to police themselves, because a midsize outfit may run thousands of searches a month.

Dubner says most Americans have little to fear. As examples, he cites idiCORE uses such as locating a missing person and nabbing a fraud or terrorism suspect.

IDI, like much of the data-fusion industry, traces its lineage to Hank Asher, a former cocaine smuggler and self-taught programmer who began fusing sets of public data from state and federal governments in the early 1990s. After Sept. 11, law enforcement’s interest in commercial databases grew, and more money and data began raining down, says Julia Angwin, a reporter who wrote about the industry in her 2014 book, Dragnet Nation.

Asher died suddenly in 2013, leaving behind his company, the Last One (TLO), which credit bureau TransUnion bought in bankruptcy for $154 million. Asher’s disciples, including Dubner, left TLO and eventually teamed up with Michael Brauser, a former business partner of Asher’s, and billionaire health-care investor Phillip Frost. In May 2015, after a flurry of purchases and mergers, the group rebranded its database venture as IDI.

Besides pitching its databases to big-name PIs (Kroll, Control Risks), law firms, debt collectors, and government agencies, IDI says it’s also targeting consumer marketers. The 200-employee company had revenue of about $40 million in its most recent quarter and says 2,800 users signed up for idiCORE in the first month after its May release. It declined to provide more recent figures. The company’s data sets are growing, too. In December, Frost helped underwrite IDI’s $100 million acquisition of marketing profiler Fluent, which says it has 120 million profiles of U.S. consumers. In June, IDI bought ad platform Q Interactive for a reported $21 million in stock.

IDI may need Frost’s deep pockets for a while. The PI industry’s three favorite databases are owned by TransUnion and media giants Reed Elsevier and Thomson Reuters. “There’s no shortage,” says Chuck McLaughlin, chairman of the board of the World Association of Detectives, which has about 1,000 members. “The longer you’re in business, the more data you have, the better results.” He uses TLO and Tracers Information Specialists.

Steve Rambam, a PI who hosts Nowhere to Hide on the Investigation Discovery channel, says marketing data remains a niche monitoring tool compared with social media, but its power can be unparalleled. “You may not know what you do on a regular basis, but I know,” Rambam says. “I know it’s Thursday, you haven’t eaten Chinese food in two weeks, and I know you’re due.”

Wait…there is another problem you don’t know about.

Comcast Lobbies To Charge Customers More To Protect Their Online Privacy

Internet providers are still hashing out issues with the FCC. In particular, Comcast is currently defend its “pay-for-privacy” model to the FCC [PDF]. Comcast has even contended that “the FCC has no authority to prohibit or limit these types of programs.”

So what exactly is the “pay-for-privacy” system? Essentially, companies like Comcast offers discounts to customers in exchange for allowing ISP’s to use their data. Comcast then floods these customers with various behaviorally-targeted ads. Customers who prefer privacy over pricing are charged a premium.

image: http://hothardware.com/ContentImages/NewsItem/38236/content/small_comcast_office.jpg

Several weeks ago a number of lawmakers urged the FCC to ban the “pay-for-privacy” system. They argued that this pricing pyramid is particularly harmful to elderly customers who do not necessarily understand how ISP’s work and low-income customers who cannot afford to pay the privacy premium. Members of Congress noted that Comcast’s policies are “counter to our nation’s core principle that all Americans have a fundamental right to privacy.”

Comcast argued that the “pay-for-privacy” model actually benefits elderly and low-income customers. They insisted that its “prohibition would harm consumers by, among other things, depriving them of lower-priced offerings.” They noted that this system is commonly used throughout the United States economy.

image: http://hothardware.com/ContentImages/NewsItem/38236/content/small_fcc.jpg

Comcast also argued that its ensures “through contractual provisions that vendors who handle customer-related data have strong measures in place to protect that customer-related data, and that the vendors are prohibited from using that data for any purposes other than as directed by Comcast.”

The company concurs that opt-in agreements should be required when dealing with sensitive information. This kind of information would include financial, health, and children’s information, Social Security numbers, and precise geo-location information. All other information, however, would be subject to opt-out or, in most instances, “implied” consent. The FCC is currently considering privacy rules that would require broadband providers to obtain consumers’ opt-in consent regardless of whether the information was sensitive or not. Hat tip to HotHardware

IRS Targeting Case Advances, Court Reverses Lower Decision

Posted on August 5, 2016August 5, 2016 by Denise Simon

CONCLUSION

For the reasons set forth above, we affirm the district

court’s dismissal of appellants’ Bivens actions and statutory

claims, but reverse the district court’s dismissal of the actions

for injunctive and declaratory relief and remand for further

proceedings consistent with this opinion.

****

United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued April 14, 2016 Decided August 5, 2016

No. 14-5316

TRUE THE VOTE, INC.,

APPELLANT

INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE, ET AL.,

APPELLEES

Appeal from the United States District Court

*****

Appellants appeal from judgments of the district court

dismissing some of their claims under Rule 12(b)(6) for failure

to state a claim for relief, and others under Rule 12(b)(1) for

lack of jurisdiction, by reason of mootness. See True the Vote,

Inc. v. IRS, 71 F. Supp. 3d 219 (D.D.C. 2014); Linchpins of

Liberty v. United States, 71 F. Supp. 3d 236 (D.D.C. 2014).

Each of the above-named appellants together with numerous coplaintiffs

in the Linchpins of Liberty litigation, filed applications

with the Internal Revenue Service for recognition of tax

exemption as charitable or educational organizations pursuant to

26 U.S.C. § 501(c)(3), (4). As to what happened thereafter, we

construe the complaints in the light most favorable to the

plaintiffs, see Missel v. DHSS, 760 F.3d 1, 4 (D.C. Cir. 2014),

although there is very little factual dispute between the parties

as to the conduct committed by the IRS.

Instead of processing these applications in the normal

course of IRS business, as would have been the case with other

taxpayers, the IRS selected out these applicants for more

rigorous review on the basis of their names, which were in each

instance indicative of a conservative or anti-Administration

orientation, as we will set out in more detail below, and as was

admitted by the Department of Treasury in the 2013 report of

the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration

(TIGTA).

The appellants before us, plaintiffs below, are applicants

who were afforded this unequal treatment. They brought the

present actions against the IRS and several of its individual

employees, seeking money damages by way of relief under

Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Fed. Bureau of

Narcotics, 403 U.S. 388 (1971), and equitable relief by way of

injunction and declaratory judgment. Additionally, the

complaints alleged that the IRS invaded the plaintiffs’ statutory

rights by violating 26 U.S.C. § 6103, by conducting

unauthorized inspection and/or disclosure of tax return

information from their applications and the other information

improperly obtained from them. Read the full decision here.

Edward Snowden has Gone Hollywood

Posted on August 5, 2016August 5, 2016 by Denise Simon

The U.S. v. Edward Snowden criminal complaint is under seal but the cover is here.

New Snowden Movie Depicts Traitor as Hero; Profiting from His Treason May Violate Law

JudicialWatch: The upcoming Hollywood movie about traitor Edward Snowden—criminally charged by the U.S. government under the Espionage Act—portrays the National Security Agency (NSA) subcontractor who leaked top secret information as a courageous patriot. Nothing surprising there considering the film’s Academy award-winning director, Oliver Stone, referred to Snowden as a “hero”back in 2013 when he fled to Moscow to avoid prosecution after betraying his country. Snowden’s illegal disclosures have helped terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and led to the death of innocent people. Last year Snowden began openly engaging with ISIS and Al Qaeda members and supporters via social media.

Buzzfeed

“Snowden has done incalculable damage to the NSA and, in the process, to American national security,” according to University of Virginia Law School Professor Robert F. Turner, who specializes in national security issues and served as Counsel to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board at the White House. “Officials in position to know said good people have already lost their lives thanks to Snowden. Countless more are likely to lose theirs now that our enemies know our most closely guarded sources and methods of communications intelligence collection.” Turner adds that Snowden is hailed as a hero and “whistleblower” by those who are clueless to the devastation he’s done. “When all of the smoke clears, it may very well be proven that Snowden is the most injurious traitor in American history.”

This would make it illegal to profit from his crimes and the Department of Justice (DOJ) should confiscate all money made by the violators. Snowden is no whistleblower. In fact he violated his secrecy agreement, which means he and his conspirators can’t materially profit from his fugitive status, violation of law, aiding and abetting of a crime and providing material support to terrorism. It’s bad enough that people are profiting from Snowden’s treason, but adding salt to the wound, the Obama administration is doing nothing about it. Judicial Watch has launched an investigation and is using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain records. True whistleblowers and law-abiding intelligence officers such as Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer, FBI Special Agent Robert G. Wright and Valerie Plame got release authority in accordance with their secrecy agreement and did not seek money or flee to Russia. A federal appellate court has ruled that government employees, such as Snowden, who signed privacy agreements can’t profit from disclosing information without first obtaining agency approval. The case involved a CIA agent (Frank Snepp) who violated his agreement with the agency by publishing a book. A federal court denied Snepp royalties from his book and an appellate court upheld the ruling, reiterating that the disgraced agent breached the “constructive trust” between him and the government.

Furthermore, Snowden, Stone and the producers of a 2014 Oscar-winning Snowden film titled “Citizenfour” may be in violation of the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA), which forbids providing material support or resources for acts of international terrorism. Many deep-pocketed institutions have been sued under the law for providing terrorist organizations or affiliates resources that assisted in the commission of terrorist acts. Just last month the families of victims killed and injured by Hamas filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Facebook under ATA for providing the terrorist group with material support by letting it use its services to help carry out attacks. A number of banks have also been sued under the law for financing terrorist activities, albeit unknowingly.

Both Stone and “Citizenfour” director Laura Poitras had clandestine meetings abroad with Snowden. Stone told a Hollywood trade publication he met Snowden in Russia and that he moved production overseas because filming in the U.S. was too risky. “We didn’t know what the NSA might do, so we ended up in Munich, which was a beautiful experience,” Stone said. Poitras actually collaborated with Snowden’s defection to China then Russia and had email communication with him before he committed his crimes so she had foreknowledge. This is all included in her documentary. On May 20, 2013 Snowden flew to Hong Kong to meet with British journalists and Poitras. He gave them thousands of classified documents and Poitras became known as the woman who helped Snowden spill his secrets, or rather commit treason. When Citizenfour won the 2015 Academy Award, Poitras was joined by Snowden’s girlfriend during her acceptance speech at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, California. “The disclosures that Edward Snowden revealed don’t only expose a threat to our privacy but to our democracy itself,” Poitras said in her acceptance speech. “Thank you to Edward Snowden for his courage and for the many other whistleblowers.”

Snowden remains a fugitive from U.S. law protected by Russia. On June 14, 2013, federal prosecutors charged him with “theft of government Property,” “unauthorized communication of national defense information” and “willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person.” Al Qaeda keeps using information leaked by Snowden to help its fighters evade surveillance technology, according to a British newspaper report. “The terrorist group has issued new video guidance based on what they have learnt about Western spying methods from the Snowden disclosures which have been made public on the internet,” the article states. “The move confirms the worst fears of British and American intelligence chiefs who warned that Snowden’s betrayal would play into the hands of the terrorists. The video even uses footage of news reports of the Snowden leak, highlighting how ‘NSA is tracking millions of phones.’”