Entries by emptywheel

One Small Victory for Oversight

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One lingering suspicion that they’re just moving this off the books:

After several requests from the Homeland Security Committee callingfor a moratorium on the controversial use of spy satellite imagery fordomestic purposes, the Department has heeded the call and delayed itsplanned October 1st launch of its new National Applications Office(NAO). The Department has cited the need to address unanswered privacyand civil liberties questions from Congress – as addressed in theCommittee’s September 6th

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What Secrets Is Wilkes Planning to Spring?

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Paul Kiel reported this morning that Brent Wilkes doesn’t want the government to mention the prostitutes that Wilkes engaged as part of his bribe scheme to influence Duke Cunningham (here’s the filing). And if the Court doesn’t exclude the testimony about prostitutes, Geragos threatens, he’s going to haul the prostitute whose calendar has been submitted as a business record into court so he can delve into her record-keeping practices.

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One Texas Oilman Pleads Guilty

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It may not be the Texas oilmen we’d like to plead guilty, but it is going to make others think twice before they bribe dictators to do their oil deals.

Texas oilman Oscar Wyatt Jr. pleaded guilty Monday to charges that hepaid millions of dollars to Iraqi officials to illegally win contractsconnected to the United Nations oil-for-food program.

[snip]

During the trial, prosecutors demonstrated that Wyatt had such a closerelationship with Iraq that he

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The Cost of Doing Business

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Walter Pincus analyzes one of the contracts that Henry Waxman is looking at to determine how much more Blackwater’s mercenaries are costing us than a law-abiding US soldier. Pincus notes that Petraeus makes roughly $493 a day. This doesn’t appear to include benefits; figuring benes make up 1/3 of someone’s compensation–which in the private sector is often about right, but in the military is probably too small–then Petraeus might cost us,

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AT&T’s Latest Censorship

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It’s a good think I chose Comcast’s oligopoly service for broadband internet service and not AT&T (my two easy choices for real broadband). That’s because I tend to point out that our government is becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T. And AT&T just changed its acceptable use policy to prevent you from using AT&T’s Toobz to tell others about the bad things AT&T is doing (via boing boing).

Failure to observe

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Counterproliferationinsurgency

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I’ve got two small points to make about Sy Hersh’s latest, which has been covered generally just about everywhere.

What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, thePresident and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign toconvince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threathas failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that

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Duke Conference: Judges Panel (Reggie Live)

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Gary Hengstler, Director Reynolds Center for the Courts and Media. Importance of having a judicial strategy for the media. Who makes editorial decisions now? previously, you’d give everyone access. BC of conglomeration, editorial decisions are not being made by journalists, they’re being made by commercial interests. Justice is in the entertainment and media field becoming a commodity.

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Duke Conference: Role of the Public

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This panel matches Communications scholar Kim Gross with Scott Bullock with the Institute of Justice and Steve Shapiro of ACLU. Gross talked a lot about framing, particularly the coverage of race and crime. Bullock is talking a lot about working with the media, particularly reaching out to opinion leaders.

Bullock is also talking about putting a client’s story up front in their narrative.

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Duke Conference Update

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On the comparative access panel, we got the European and Canadian perspective on media access, with a really interesting panel from Gavin Phillipson arguing that in the US the claims of the First Amendment are actually serving commercial interests. He argued that the British system, which made people responsible for leaks, was better.

Lucy Dalglish argued that we don’t have as much access as the others made out.

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Prosecutor Panel

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Thomas Metzloff poses a question: In re: Nifong: We had a case in Durham, we had a prosecutor who was saying lots of things on TV, everyone remembers the quotable quotes. What is the message that’s learned from Nifong?

Michael Cassidy
More lessons not learned than lessons learned. Brady and lying to court, he was going to be disbarred anyway.

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