COCA-COLA ACCUSED OF FUNDING COLOMBIAN DEATH SQUAD

Coca-Cola was accused of hiring hitmen from a prominent paramilitary group between 1990 and 2002 to kill at least 10 trade union leaders.

U.S.-based Coca-Cola company along with more than 50 other companies were accused by Colombian courts of financing terrorism for their ties to the now-disbanded paramilitary organization, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a fact trade union leaders have been denouncing for decades.

The cases against the companies will be heard in a transitional justice tribunal after the peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the government is signed.

Coca-Cola was accused of hiring hitmen from the AUC between 1990 and 2002 to kill at least 10 labor union leaders who were trying to organize Coca-Cola’s plants. U.K. oil company BP has also be taken to court for its funding of AUC, along with kidnapping and human rights abuses.

Other companies suspected of financing terrorism, commonly referred to as the “para-economy,” include Colombia’s largest beverage company Postobon, cement company Cementos Argos, state oil company Ecopetrol and banana distributor Chiquita Brands International.

In June, families of victims killed by paramilitary groups opened a federal lawsuit against Chiquitain the U.S. for supporting the AUC. The company was estimated to have made at least 100 payments to the group worth US$1.7 million between 1997 and 2004.

The right-wing AUC coalition, deemed a terrorist organization by the Colombian government, disbanded in 2006. The paramilitary group was responsible for a number of massacres, human rights abuses, kidnappings and extortions that resulted in the displacement of thousands of Colombians.

Some politicians and authorities have been sentenced in relation to links with the AUC, the majority of businesses involved have not been punished for their illegal financial activities.

Investigations and punishment of businesses involved with paramilitary groups have commonly stuttered over whether payments were voluntary or not and if companies received any benefits in return.

https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/76436/cocacola-accused-of-funding-colombian-death.html

U.S. TO BEGIN TAKING DNA SAMPLES FROM MIGRANTS CROSSING BORDER OR IN DETENTION FOR FEDERAL CRIMINAL DATABASE

U.S. border agents will soon begin a widespread program to gather DNA samples from immigrants who enter the country illegally and are in federal custody, according to two administration officials.

The officials said the collection effort will fully enforce the DNA Fingerprint Act, a law Congress passed in 2005 that requires taking DNA samples from anyone arrested, facing charges or convicted — and from any non-U.S. citizens "who are detained under the authority of the United States."

Civil liberties groups have criticized the plan since it was first discussed last fall.

https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/76439/us-to-begin-taking-dna-samples-from-migrants-crossing-border-or-in-detention-for-federal-criminal.html

DuckDuckGo Made a Giant List of Jerks Tracking You Online

DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar is a best-in-class data set about trackers that is automatically generated and maintained through continuous crawling and analysis.

This data set is now publicly available to use for research and for generating tracker block lists. And, the code behind it is now open source.

We use it ourselves to power the tracker protection in the DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser mobile apps and DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials desktop browser extensions.

Using the Internet these days feels like being haunted by the ghosts of browsing past. The shoes or headphones you shopped for yesterday are following you around relentlessly today. These creepy ads are powered by hidden trackers, lurking behind most websites. And unfortunately, your shopping habits are just the tip of the iceberg of what they know and can exploit.

In addition to shopping history, trackers can pick up your location history, search history, browsing history and more, and from those infer your age, ethnicity, gender, interests, and habits. Companies collate this personal data into a detailed profile, continually auctioning you off to the highest bidders.

One of the best things you can do to protect yourself is to use a quality tracker blocker. While privacy protection is now important to a vast majority of people, our research on privacy behaviors finds only about 19% of people using tracker protection, and not necessarily of the highest quality. We are changing that!

That’s why we built seamless tracker protection into our DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser mobile apps (for iOS/Android) and into our DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials desktop browser extensions (for Chrome/Firefox/Safari). They allow you to to seamlessly search and browse privately across all of your devices. They contain what we call the “privacy essentials” — tracker blocking, private search, and upgraded website encryption — all in one package.

When we set out to add tracker protection, we found that existing lists of trackers were mostly manually curated, which meant they were often stale and never comprehensive. And, even worse, those lists sometimes break websites, which hinders mainstream adoption. So, over the last couple of years we built our own data set of trackers based on a crawling process that doesn’t have these drawbacks. We call it DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar. It is automatically generated, constantly updated, and continually tested.

Today we’re proud to release DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar to the world, and are also open sourcing the code that generates it. This follows our recent release of our Smarter Encryption data and crawling code (that powers the upgraded website encryption component in our apps and extensions).

https://governmentslaves.news/2020/03/06/duckduckgo-made-a-giant-list-of-jerks-tracking-you-online/