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Leaked Google Emails Reveal Internal Discussion On Burying Articles From Conservative Outlets

November 30, 2018

Leaked Google Emails Reveal Internal Discussion On Burying Articles From Conservative Outlets

Google – which was exposed trying to help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election, and who were beside themselves after she lost – discussed whether to bury conservative media outlets in the company’s search function after Donald Trump became president, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation‘s Peter Hasson.

Internal communications obtained by the Caller reveal that The Daily Caller and Breitbart were specifically singled out for potential censorship.

Communications obtained by TheDCNF show that internal Google discussions went beyond expressing remorse over Clinton’s loss to actually discussing ways Google could prevent Trump from winning again.

“This was an election of false equivalencies, and Google, sadly, had a hand in it,” Google engineer Scott Byer wrote in a Nov. 9, 2016, post reviewed by TheDCNF.

Byer falsely labeled The Daily Caller and Breitbart as “opinion blogs” and urged his coworkers to reduce their visibility in search results.

“How many times did you see the Election now card with items from opinion blogs (Breitbart, Daily Caller) elevated next to legitimate news organizations? That’s something that can and should be fixed,” Byer wrote.

“I think we have a responsibility to expose the quality and truthfulness of sources – because not doing so hides real information under loud noises,” he continued.

“Beyond that, let’s concentrate on teaching critical thinking. A little bit of that would go a long way. Let’s make sure that we reverse things in four years – demographics will be on our side.” –DCNF

Not all Google employees agreed with the notion of censoring conservative outlets; engineer Uri Dekel – a self-described Clinton supporter, argued that manipulating search results was the wrong approach.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Climate Scientist Michael Mann Releases Emails Ahead of University of Arizona Response to E&E Legal

November 30, 2018

Climate Scientist Michael Mann Releases Emails Ahead of University of Arizona Response to E&E Legal

Michael Mann

Nearly a decade ago, in late 2009, a server at the University of East Anglia was hacked and thousands of emails from the university’s Climatic Research Unit were subsequently released in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate talks. Within these thousands of emails, climate change deniers attempted to cherry-pick a few sentences to falsely suggest scientific malfeasance. This so-called “Climategate” incident managed to briefly cast doubt on the public’s acceptance of the scientific realities of climate change. But ultimately, numerous investigations found there was no wrongdoing, and the media storm was found to only have a fleeting public impact.

I have discussed the manufactured scandal in the context of the larger industry-funded, bad faith attack on climate science in my book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.

In increasingly desperate attempts to recreate this short-lived machination, there have since been repeated efforts to obtain my and other climate scientists’ emails via fishing expeditions through misuse of the legal system. Led by David Schnare, one coal-funded group masquerading as a think tank — which currently goes by the name of Energy & Environment Legal Institute(E&E Legal) — brought a lawsuit in Virginia seeking to obtain virtually every email I had ever sent or received during the six years I was a professor at the University of Virginia.

The case was struck down by the Virginia Supreme Court, but E&E Legal has continued to essentially relitigate the matter in friendlier forums. E&E Legal targeted two other prominent climate scientists at the University of Arizona, Jonathan Overpeck and Malcolm Hughes (the latter being one of my longtime co-authors), seeking a total of 13 years of emails from them, including correspondence with or about me or my research.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Governor Knew About Flint Water Poisoning for Nearly a Year, Tried to Shift Blame

January 22, 2016

What Snyder Knew: Flint Email Dump Shows Attempts to Shift the Blame

Emails: US Government Facilitated LNG Business Deals Before Terminals Got Required Federal Permits

January 5, 2016

Emails: US Government Facilitated LNG Business Deals Before Terminals Got Required Federal Permits

This release of the documents coincides with the imminent opening of the first ever LNG export terminal in the U.S. hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) era, owned by Cheniere.

The documents came via an open records request filed by DeSmog with the Port of Lake Charles. The request centered around the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) the Port signed with the Panama Canal Authority in January 2015.

Panama Canal, Lake Charles MOU

Image Credit: Port of Lake Charles

The records offer an inside glimpse of how — as the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) weigh environmental and energy policy concerns before handing out LNG export permits — other federal agencies have proceeded as if the permits are a fait accompli.

They also further raise the specter that, as some have highlighted, FERC and DOE merely serve as rubber-stamp regulatory agencies in service to powerful industrial interests. Further, they demonstrate how pivotal the proposed and nearly operationalPanama Canal expansion project is for the LNG shipping industry moving forward.

Missionary Work

While the LNG export company-heavy Port of Lake Charles signed an MOU with the Panama Canal Authority on January 6, 2015, the emails date back to February 13, 2014. The MOU mentions LNG a few times throughout the text.
Port of Lake Charles Panama Canal

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New Snowden Leak Exposes AT&T’s “Extreme Willingness To Help” NSA Spy On Americans

August 16, 2015

New Snowden Leak Exposes AT&T’s “Extreme Willingness To Help” NSA Spy On Americans

Newly disclosed NSA files expose the spy agency’s relationship through the years with American telecoms companies. As NYTimes reports, The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T. The documents, provided by the former agency contractor Edward Snowden, described the NSA-AT&T relationship as “highly collaborative,” while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.”

While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly disclosed N.S.A. documents show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. As The NY Times reports,

AT&T’s cooperation has involved a broad range of classified activities, according to the documents, which date from 2003 to 2013.

AT&T has given the N.S.A. access, through several methods covered under different legal rules, to billions of emails as they have flowed across its domestic networks. It provided technical assistance in carrying out a secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, a customer of AT&T.

The documents, provided by whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, as RT adds, explain that the telecom giant was able to deliver under various legal loopholes international and foreign-to-foreign internet communications even if they passed through networks located in the US.

To show the extent of AT&T’s involvement, the files revealed that the company installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its major US internet hubs, thought to be a lot more than Verizon installed. AT&T’s engineers were also the first ones to get their hands on this new surveillance technologies created by the NSA, the newspaper reported.

Further proving a unique relationship is the NSA’s top-secret budget from 2013, which doubled the funding of any other cooperation of similar size, according to the documents.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Emails: How State Department Secretly Approved Expanding Piece of Enbridge’s “Keystone XL Clone”

April 21, 2015

Emails: How State Department Secretly Approved Expanding Piece of Enbridge’s “Keystone XL Clone”

DeSmogBlog has obtained dozens of emails that lend an inside view of how the U.S. State Department secretly handed Enbridge a permit to expand the capacity of its U.S.-Canada border-crossing Alberta Clipper pipeline, which carries tar sands diluted bitumen (“dilbit”) from Alberta to midwest markets.

The State Department submitted the emails into the record in the ongoing case filed against the Department by the Sierra Club and other environmental groups in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota. Collectively, the emails show that upper-level State Department officials hastened the review process on behalf of Enbridge for its proposed Alberta Clipper expansion plan, now rebranded Line 67, and did not inform the public about it until it published its final approval decision in the Federal Register in August 2014.

According to a March 17, 2014 memo initially marked “confidential,” Enbridge’s legal counsel at Steptoe & Johnson, David Coburn, began regular communications with the State Department on what the environmental groups have dubbed an “illegal scheme” beginning in at least January 2014.

Enbridge State Department Emails
Image Credit: U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota

 

Environmental groups have coined the approval process an “illegal scheme” because the State Department allowed Enbridge to usurp the conventionalpresidential permit process for cross-border pipelines, as well as the standard National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process, which allows for public comments and public hearings of the sort seen for TransCanada’s KeystoneXL pipeline.

Further, the scheme is a complex one involving Enbridge’s choice to add pressure pump stations on both sides of the border to two pipelines, Enbridge Line 3 andEnbridge Line 67, to avoid fitting under the legal umbrella of a “cross-border” pipeline.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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