WikiLeaks Sues To Unseal DOJ Charges Against Julian Assange

WikiLeaks announced in a Wednesday statement that it's seeking to force the Trump administration to unseal any charges against founder Julian Assange, according to AP.

According to the statement, they have filed a legal challenge with the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights in Washington, while also asking Ecuador to prevent Assange's extradition to the United States.

The charges against Assange were accidentally revealed due to a copy-paste error in an unrelated federal case involving a 29-year-old who had been charged with enticing a 15-year-old girl into sex acts.

Assistant US Attorney Kellen S. Dwyer, urging a judge to keep the matter sealed, writing that "due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged." Later in the filing, Dwyer wrote that the charges would "need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested."

That Kokayi case involved previously classified information and prosecutors were planning to use information obtained under the FISA act. Kokayi was indicted last week and is set to be arraigned on Friday. His case has been sealed since September.

Since the revelation was made in error, no other details about the charges against Assange were revealed.

Dwyer is also assigned to the WikiLeaks case. People familiar with the matter said in November that what Dwyer was disclosing was true, but unintentional.

Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for EDVA, said "the court filing was made in error. That was not the intended name for this filing."

The DOJ has for years refused to reveal whether charges have been pending against Assange under seal, though it was widely believed that they were. But seeing as filings like Dwyer's are probably vetted by multiple readers, the fact that an error of such magnitude was allowed to be made is almost suspicious in and of itself.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-23/wikileaks-sues-unseal-doj-charges-against-julian-assange

Anti-Christ: What you've NEVER seen before - The Ascension of Isaiah (2019)

Exposes the "EVIL TALMUD"

Shutdown Woes Deepen As 800,000 Federal Workers To Miss Second Paycheck; IRS Employees Bail

With negotiations behind the partial government shutdown showing no signs of a breakthrough, an estimated 800,000 government employees are set to miss a second paycheck on Friday.

Roughly 420,000 federal employees are working without pay, while around 380,000 have been furloughed amid the longest shutdown in US history, according to CNBC.

While the actual economic impacts are thus far thought to be limited, specific companies and industries are feeling the effects.

Commercial airlines, for example, are facing slower demand as airports struggle with understaffed security checkpoints, are losing revenue. Last week, Delta said it had lost $25 million in revenue on account of the shutdown.

The hit to the overall gross domestic product in the first quarter is also difficult to quantify. Economists have come up with a range of numbers, but they agree that the longer the shutdown goes on, the wider the damage to economic growth. –CNBC

Hundreds of IRS employees, meanwhile, will probably skip work as part of a coordinated protest which takes advantage of a provision which allows them to stay home if they suffer a “hardship,” according to the Washington Post. With IRS offices headed into their busiest time of the year, the the shutdown may result in delayed refunds and frustrating wait times, despite President Trump’s promise not to delay payments.

“I have fielded no less than 30 to 40 calls, emails or text messages about hardship requests from employees daily since Thursday,” said Shannon Ellis, President of the National Treasury Employees Union.

The Trump administration last week ordered at least 30,000 IRS workers back to their offices, where they have been working to process refunds without pay. It was one of the biggest steps the government has taken to mitigate the shutdown’s impact on Americans’ lives.

But IRS employees across the country — some in coordinated protest, others out of financial necessity — won’t be clocking in, according to Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, and several local union officials. The work action is widespread and includes employees from a processing center in Ogden, Utah, to the Brookhaven campus on New York’s Long Island. –Washington Post

Prospects for reopening the government were grim on Tuesday after President Trump’s latest proposal to end the impasse (which outraged immigration hard-liners), was immediately rejected by Democrats. His plan, which includes funding for most public agencies, promises to DACA recipients, and of course – funding for his wall, is headed for a vote this week in the Senate where it is anticipated to fail.

Trump maintains that he won’t sign any bill that does not fund the long-promised border wall.

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/shutdown-woes-deepen-as-800000-federal-workers-to-miss-second-paycheck-irs-employees-bail_01232019

Microsoft Teams with Establishment ‘NewsGuard’ to Create News Blacklist

Without consulting with its users, Microsoft has installed an establishment media browser extension, purportedly designed to rate the accuracy of news websites, as a default extension on mobile versions of its Edge browser. In practice, it creates a news blacklist by warning users away from sites including Breitbart News, The Drudge Report, and the Daily Mail.

The browser extension, called “Newsguard,” presents users with a red warning label if they navigate to a website that it judges to be unreliable. A “green” rating is given to websites that NewsGuard considers trustworthy.

A number of pro-Trump websites, including Breitbart News, are given a “red” rating by the extension.

The website of the conservative-leaning British newspaper The Daily Mail, which has the third-highest circulation in the U.K., is also given a “red” rating. Newsguard says the site “fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.”

WikiLeaks, which has never had to retract a story due to false or misleading information, is also given a “red” rating.

Among the websites given a “green” rating is BuzzFeed, which was recently humiliated for publishing alleged details about the ongoing Mueller investigation that were contradicted by the speial prosecutor himself. BuzzFeed did not retract the story, and even led with it on its frontpage … after Mueller contradicted it.

But in Newsguard’s view, BuzzFeed “regularly corrects or clarifies errors.”

Many of the websites that recently fed the fake news feeding frenzy against students of Covington Catholic high school in Kentucky, who were falsely accused of taunting a left-wing Native American agitator, are also given a “green” rating. These include CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.

Also “green” — Media Matters, the Clintonite Democrat website that regularly publishes hit-jobs against conservative media publications and personalities.

Rolling Stone, the magazine infamous for publishing a hoax rape allegation against members of a University of Virginia fraternity in 2015 is also given a “green” rating. Newsguard says the outlet has “consistently published well-researched, factual information about contemporary American culture.”

Some left-wing sources are given “red” ratings by Newsguard. However, they tend to be on the anti-establishment side of Democratic politics: ShareBlue and the Daily Kos, for example, both have “red” ratings. Salon and the Huffington Post, however, do not.

It shouldn’t be surprising that Newsguard has a bias against independent and anti-establishment media though: the team behind the browser extension include top neocons and members of America’s foreign policy establishment, including Trump-hating former CIA director Michael Hayden, and former members of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations.

Breitbart News has reached out to Microsoft for comment.

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/01/23/microsoft-teams-with-establishment-newsguard-to-create-news-blacklist/

1984

How $137 Billion Strangely Disappears

In fiscal year 2018, $137 billion was paid “improperly” by the federal government, according to a recent report. That number sums all the improper payments by what the government calls high-priority programs. They are programs with improper-payments estimates exceeding $2 billion annually.

If it makes your head spin, it should.

Always the optimist, I have tried hard to find some good news in this year’s number. I have been tracking such improper payments for a while, and I am happy to report that, while they grew dramatically between their FY2013 level ($106 billion) and FY2015 ($137 billion), they haven’t gone up since.

Now that’s where the good news stops, I am afraid. In 2015, the $137 billion was spread over 15 programs. The $137 billion in improper payments in 2018 is spread over 12 programs. In other words, each program’s improper payments have grown.

Now, not all of these improper payments are the result of fraudulent activities. Some of them, which include overpayments as well as underpayments, might result from clerical error, from an innocent failure to confirm that a recipient is eligible to receive the amount of money that is disbursed, or from any violation of federal guidelines or rules.

While that may not sound as bad, these are still large-scale mistakes, errors that Uncle Sam continues making year after year in all impunity.

Interestingly, although not surprisingly, most of the government’s “high-error programs” are social welfare programs, which are fairly well-known for having low administrative costs in part because of poor oversight. The highest dollar amount of improper payments comes from Medicaid. The program registered $36.2 billion in improper payments, or almost 10 percent of the $370 billion paid out to beneficiaries in 2018 in total. Second-highest is Medicare’s fee-for-service program, with improper payments totaling $31.8 billion (or 8.12 percent of that program’s total payments). If you add the $15.6 billion in improper payments under Medicare Advantage (Part C)to the other two health care programs, you get 60 percent of all improper payments on the list.

Traditionally, the highest rate of improper payments comes from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) program. Not this time. In 2018, the distinction goes to the Veterans Health Administration VA Community Care Program, with an error rate of 105 percent! Basically, all of this program’s $8 billion in payments were improper. The tremendous level in this program’s improper payments (and the program wasn’t on the list of high-error programs before) isn’t the result of a sudden increase in payments going to the wrong parties, or paid in the wrong amounts, or paid twice or more for the same service. Instead, it seems to be the result of changes made in what the VHA is counting as improper payments — for instance, all the “transactions that did not follow acquisition regulations.” Nevertheless, such a stupendous error rate should make us wonder what’s going on.

The EITC is hardly off the hook, though. The $18.4 billion in improper EITC payments represents a substantial portion — 25.06 percent — of the EITC’s total 2018 spending of $73.6 billion. That’s right. A full quarter of the program’s payments were improper.

This high error rate is not new. In fact, the EITC is well-known for its high error rate. Ironically, the program is administered by the Internal Revenue Service, a government agency that isn’t known for its leniency toward taxpayers making reporting mistakes. Unfortunately, this fact has had no impact whatsoever on the unconditional support and praise the program receives from both the political left and right. In fact, not only has EITC funding expanded, from $65 billion in FY2015 to its current level, but this program is on everyone’s wish list for yet further expansion. Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute and I do not share this wish; indeed, we have written that the EITC should be terminated.

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/how-137-billion-strangely-disappears_01232019

IRS Becoming Big Brother With $99-Million Supercomputer

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is building a $99-million supercomputer that will give the agency the “unprecedented ability to track the lives and transactions of tens of millions of American citizens,” tax expert Daniel Pilla reports.

The IRS is already dangerous enough, notes Pilla. “The IRS lays claim to your data without court authority more so than any other government agency. And to make matters worse, they share the data with any other federal, state or local government agency claiming an interest, including foreign governments.”

The IRS already receives billions of tax documents annually, and the amount of information the agency receives continues to grow. According to the IRS’ 2018 – 2022 Strategic Plan, the agency’s data volume increased a hundredfold between 2007 and 2017, while the number of users with access to that data grew by a factor of 23.

But that’s not enough for the IRS, which states in its Strategic Plan that it wants “to increase its access to data, and use that data more effectively to drive its agency-wide decision making, as well as case evaluations and selections for enforcement purposes,” pens Pilla. Thus, the agency is investing $99 million in a contract with Palantir Technologies of Palo Alto, California, to provide hardware, software, and training to “capture, curate, store, search, share, transfer, perform deconfliction, analyze and visualize large amounts of disparate structured and unstructured data.”

Specifically, Palantir is tasked with building and training IRS employees to use a supercomputer to “search, analyze, visualize, and interact with a wide variety of disparate data sets so users will be able to leverage the platform to perform advanced analytics, such as link, pattern, statistical, behavioral, and geospatial analysis on an investigative platform that is scalable and interoperable with existing IRS equipment and systems.”

Under the terms of the contract, writes Pilla, the system has to meet the following criteria:

Allow for the rapid ingestion of massive amounts of data.

Users should be able to immediately use the imported data in the imported format to perform queries, analysis and identify links.

Allow users to drill down on massive amounts of disparate data to find connections.

Allow users to visualize connections from millions of records with thousands of links by grouping data visualization by the commonalities and roles.

The dangers of such a supercomputer in the hands of the IRS should be obvious, but in case they aren’t, Pilla spells them out:

This would allow the IRS to meaningfully link tens of millions of tax returns, billions of information returns, and trillions of bank and credit card transactions, phone records and even social media posts. For example, if a U.S. citizen moves money from a Swiss bank to some other offshore bank, then uses credit or debit cards to spend the money in the U.S., Palantir’s software can link those transactions. It could also flag a person whose tax return shows relatively low annual income but whose social-media posts indicate something entirely different.

https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/31263-irs-becoming-big-brother-with-99-million-supercomputer

Is Big Tech Merging With Big Brother? Kinda Looks Like It

A friend of mine, who runs a large television production company in the car-mad city of Los Angeles, recently noticed that his intern, an aspiring filmmaker from the People’s Republic of China, was walking to work.

When he offered to arrange a swifter mode of transportation, she declined. When he asked why, she explained that she “needed the steps” on her Fitbit to sign in to her social media accounts. If she fell below the right number of steps, it would lower her health and fitness rating, which is part of her social rating, which is monitored by the government. A low social rating could prevent her from working or traveling abroad.

China’s social rating system, which was announced by the ruling Communist Party in 2014, will soon be a fact of life for many more Chinese.

By 2020, if the Party’s plan holds, every footstep, keystroke, like, dislike, social media contact, and posting tracked by the state will affect one’s social rating.

Personal “creditworthiness” or “trustworthiness” points will be used to reward and punish individuals and companies by granting or denying them access to public services like health care, travel, and employment, according to a plan released last year by the municipal government of Beijing. High-scoring individuals will find themselves in a “green channel,” where they can more easily access social opportunities, while those who take actions that are disapproved of by the state will be “unable to move a step.”

Big Brother is an emerging reality in China. Yet in the West, at least, the threat of government surveillance systems being integrated with the existing corporate surveillance capacities of big-data companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon into one gigantic all-seeing eye appears to trouble very few people—even as countries like Venezuela have been quick to copy the Chinese model.

Still, it can’t happen here, right? We are iPhone owners and Amazon Prime members, not vassals of a one-party state. We are canny consumers who know that Facebook is tracking our interactions and Google is selling us stuff.

Yet it seems to me there is little reason to imagine that the people who run large technology companies have any vested interest in allowing pre-digital folkways to interfere with their 21st-century engineering and business models, any more than 19th-century robber barons showed any particular regard for laws or people that got in the way of their railroads and steel trusts.

Nor is there much reason to imagine that the technologists who run our giant consumer-data monopolies have any better idea of the future they’re building than the rest of us do.

Facebook, Google, and other big-data monopolists already hoover up behavioral markers and cues on a scale and with a frequency that few of us understand. They then analyze, package, and sell that data to their partners.

https://www.wired.com/story/is-big-tech-merging-with-big-brother-kinda-looks-like-it/

‘Huge Historic Win’: Los Angeles Teachers Return to Class With New Raises

On Tuesday, the six-day Los Angeles teachers’ strike ended after teachers and staff voiced their support for a new agreement negotiated with the school board.

The agreement, which received the votes of the majority of union members, establishes a 6 percent pay raise and promises a decrease in class sizes and the hiring of more librarians, nurses and counselors.

Cecily Myart-Cruz, a teacher in the LA Unified School District (LAUSD) for 23 years and the Vice President of United Teachers Los Angeles(UTLA), joined Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear Wednesday to discuss the new agreement.

"It's a historic day today in Los Angeles," UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl told reporters late Tuesday, according to multiple reports.

"Our members, after a strike that began on Monday, January 14, are going to be heading back to school [Wednesday] to the students that they love and the classrooms that they love and the schools that they love and are committed to," he added.

The new agreement, which includes a 6 percent pay raise for teachers, was struck Tuesday evening after a 21-hour negotiation session between the teachers' union and the school district.

"It is a historic agreement," LA Mayor Eric Garcetti said, according to multiple reports. "It gets to lower class sizes. It gets to proper support staff."

Myart-Cruz agreed, calling the new contract a "huge, historic win."

"Of course we didn't get everything we wanted, but the strike did exactly what it was supposed to do," Myart-Cruz told hosts John Kiriakou and Brian Becker.

"We took our power back and won a great contract. Having members [strike] for six days and one contract cannot solve 40 years of [issues] in our classroom. Over the last week, through the power of collective action and community support, we [teachers] have learned to raise our hopes and our expectations of what we can do. We won this strike for our students and for ourselves, but more importantly, the fight still continues. We're going to be resilient, because it's not over. We have to own this moment and this movement to save public education," she added.

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201901241071762138-los-angeles-teachers-return-to-class-new-raises/

Emiliano Sala’s ex-girlfriend reveals those behind plane’s disappearance

http://dailypost.ng/2019/01/23/emiliano-salas-ex-girlfriend-reveals-behind-planes-disappearance/

Emiliano Sala missing plane LIVE updates: Search for Cardiff City striker called off for the day

https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/emiliano-sala-missing-plane-live-13890265

>>4880647

they don't know hard times,

many anon's do!