Whistleblower comes forward with details of a coverup in the results of a 2004 study by the CDC linking MMR vaccine and autism in African American boys.

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NaturalNews

CDC scientists held meeting to destroy autism-vaccine documents, reveals CDC whistleblower

Thursday, December 03, 2015 by: Julie Wilson staff writer

 

(NaturalNews) The results of a 2004 study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) discovered a significant link between the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps and rubella) and autism in African American boys vaccinated under or around the age 36 months; however, if it weren't for one whistleblower, you would not have been privy to any of this, because the evidence was deliberately covered up.

Dr. William Thompson, currently a senior scientist at the CDC, recently made a shocking admission that he and his colleagues specifically arranged a meeting to destroy important documents related to the study in an attempt to withhold information from the public regarding a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

As first reported by Sharyl Attkisson, a former CBS News journalist turned independent investigative reporter, Dr. Thompson and the study co-authors "scheduled a meeting to destroy documents related to the study.

"The remaining four co-authors all met and brought a big garbage can into the meeting room, and reviewed and went through all the hardcopy documents that we had thought we should discard, and put them into a huge garbage can."

"The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism." – CDC Senior Science Dr. William Thompson

However, aware that destroying documents in this manner was both illegal and unethical, Dr. Thompson kept hard copies of all the documents that had been disposed of, as well as maintained all associated computer files.

After securing a whistleblower attorney, Dr. Thompson came forward with his admission, providing relevant documents in August 2014 to the office of Rep. Bill Posey (R-Florida), who presented details of the cover-up on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Posey, who maintains that he is "pro-vaccine," read the following quote by Dr. Thompson on the House floor:

My primary job duties while working in the immunization safety branch from 2000 to 2006, were to later co-lead three major vaccine safety studies. The MADDSP, MMR autism cases control study was being carried out in response to the Wakefield-Lancet study that suggested an association between the MMR vaccine and an autism-like health outcome.
There were several major concerns among scientists and consumer advocates outside the CDC in the fall of 2000, regarding the execution of the Verstraeten Study. One of the important goals that was determined up front, in the spring of 2001, before any of these studies started, was to have all three protocols vetted outside the CDC prior to the start of the analyses so consumer advocates could not claim that we were presenting analyses that suited our own goals and biases.
We hypothesized that if we found statistically significant effects at either 18 or 36 month thresholds, we would conclude that vaccinating children early with MMR vaccine could lead to autism-like characteristics or features. We all met and finalized the study protocol and analysis plan. The goal was to not deviate from the analysis plan to avoid the debacle that occurred with the Verstraeten thimerosal study published in Pediatrics in 2003.
At the Sept 5th meeting we discussed in detail how to code race for both the sample and the birth certificate sample. At the bottom of table 7, it also shows that for the non-birth certificate sample, the adjusted race effect statistical significance was huge.
All the authors and I met and decided sometime between August and September 2002, not to report any race effects from the paper. Sometime soon after the meeting, we decided to exclude reporting any race effects.
The co-authors scheduled a meeting to destroy documents related to the study.
The remaining four co-authors all met and brought a big garbage can into the meeting room, and reviewed and went through all the hardcopy documents that we had thought we should discard, and put them into a huge garbage can.
However, because I assumed it was illegal and would violate both FOIA and DOJ requests, I kept hardcopies of all documents in my office, and I retain all associated computer files. I believe we intentionally withheld controversial findings from the final draft of the Pediatrics paper.

The CDC and Dr. Thompson's co-author Dr. Frank DeStefano, CDC Director of Immunization Safety, continue to defend the study as originally published.

A July 29 Tweet by Attkisson states:

So far, no hearings scheduled and no known inquiry of the alleged scientific misconduct.

Sources:


SharylAttkisson.com
SharylAttkisson.com
Twitter.com

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WikiLeaks has released the final text of the TPP’s intellectual property rights chapter and it is absolutely terrifying.

Frank Koch

June 26, 2014 ·

 

Trans-Pacific Partnership (NAFTA on Steroids) Threatens Sovereignty

The TPP is "NAFTA on steroids" and will do even greater damage to the economy and sovereignty of the United States. By Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.

thenewamerican.com

...

Fight for the Future

 

 

 

Last week, WikiLeaks released the final text of the TPP’s intellectual property rights chapter and it is absolutely terrifying.

These are just a few of its most dangerous pieces:

• Compel ISPs to take down websites without any sort of court order, just like SOPA. (Appendix Section I)
• Extend the US’s copyright regime to require copyrights stand for life plus 70 years, preventing anyone from using works that belong in the public domain. (Article QQ.G.6)
• Criminalize whistleblowing by extending trade secrets laws without any mandatory exemptions for whistleblowers or investigative journalists. (QQ.H.8)
• End anonymity online by forcing every domain name to be associated with a real name and address. (Article QQ.C.12)
• Make it illegal to unlock, modify, or generally tinker with a device you own. (Article QQ.G.10)
• Export the US’s broken copyright policies to the rest of the world without expanding any of the free speech protections, like fair use. (Article QQ.G.17)
  
  

The worst part is that this is just one of the TPP’s 30 chapters.

The final text confirms our worst fears — click here to take action demanding Congress vote NO on the TPP.

 

For years, governments have held critics of the massive Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement in a perfect catch 22. Officials brushed off public outcry and concern by claiming that the dissenters didn’t have all the facts.

This was by design—the 12 country trade deal was negotiated entirely behind closed doors by industry lobbyists and government appointees, and even now the text of the agreement is still classified.

But late last week, WikiLeaks released the final text of the Intellectual Property chapter, meaning those excuses won’t work anymore.

We’re planning to go all out against the TPP, but the first step is to make sure Congress knows just how many people oppose the TPP.

Click here to take action demanding Congress vote NO on the TPP.

 

Taking action today is just the beginning, because if all we do is send emails and make phone calls, Congress is not going to reject the TPP. Too many giant industries are seriously invested in making sure Congress ratifies the TPP.

If we’re going to win, we need to go big. Which is exactly what we’re going to do.

So take action right now. Contact your Congresspeople now and tell them to vote against the TPP. Then get ready to do more because we’re going to unleash some of our strongest campaigns ever.

Already we have plans to work with hundreds of different groups as a massive coalition to fight the TPP, coordinate gigantic on-the-ground protests in key cities across the country, and produce compelling content to spread the word to as many different audiences as possible just what is at stake in the TPP.

To do all that, we need your help — if you can, pledge to chip in $5 every month between now and when the TPP fight ends so that we can run our biggest, boldest, and best campaign yet.

Thanks for all you do,

Charlie

P.S. Want to read the text of the chapter for yourself? Check it out on WikiLeaks here, or read their overview of it here. It’s long and complicated, so maybe you'll see something that we didn't. If you do, send us an email.

David Noyes

January 15, 2014 ·

*KILL THE TPP!!!*
Excellent!:
— Noam Chomsky has joined the chorus decrying the TPP, which has very little to do with free trade and is really about limiting regulation, helping corporate interests and imposing fiercer standards of intellectual property (to, again, largely benefit corporate interests).
... See More

 

Noam Chomsky: Obama Trade Deal A 'Neoliberal Assault' To Further Corporate 'Domination'

The Obama administration's Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal is an "assault," on working people intended to further corporate "domination," according to author…

huffingtonpost.com

 

Elizabeth Mueller

January 11, 2014 ·

Let me give you an example of what TPP could allow:
You are an independent journalist or blogger. You need content. Suddenly, all the pictures, videos, memes and articles become "private property." You want to cite the video, where the now former NRC chairman turns whistleblower and says he's adamantly anti-nuclear, after witnessing the damage at Fukushima. You can't. A major news outlet owns the press conference video footage. You place a stupid cat meme on your page, withou...
See More

 

 

 

Frank Koch

January 18, 2014 ·

A chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership released by WikiLeaks reveals potential violations of applicable U.S. environmental standards.

 

Leaked TPP Environment Chapter Shows Obama Betrayal of Greens

A chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership released by WikiLeaks reveals potential violations of applicable U.S. environmental standards. By Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.

thenewamerican.com

 

Jennifer Hibberd

January 17, 2014 · Portland, OR ·

 

The story the news is finally talking about

Ed Schultz led the coverage over the dangers of TPP. Finally, Congress and the media begin to realize the importance of stopping this bill. Larry Cohen joins.

msnbc.com

 

Ian Kevin Draper

January 16, 2014 ·

‪#‎AceSecurityNews‬ says latest information and opinions from RT on the release of the “TTPP Uncovered: WikiLeaks releases draft of highly-secretive multi-national trade deal” documents together with download at this link PDF
Published time: November 13, 2013 17:36
Edited time: November 15, 2013 09:36
Get short URL

#TPP Uncovered: WikiLeaks Releases Draft of Highly-Secretive Multi-National Trade Deal

#AceSecurityNews says latest information from RT on the release of the "TTPP Uncovered: WikiLeaks releases draft of highly-secretive multi-national trade…

acenewsservices.com

 

 

Joseph McDaniel

January 10, 2014 ·

Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google have updated their policies to routinely notify customers when law enforcement has requested information about them.

Defiant Apple, Facebook, other firms to inform public of govt surveillance requests

Published time: May 02, 2014 01:07
Edited time: May 02, 2014 06:42

Reuters / Eric Thayer

The same technology companies that the US intelligence community has relied upon to disclose email records are now refusing to keep surveillance requests secret and informing customers when they are the subject of such requests.
In the nearly ten months since former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed extensive surveillance efforts on everyday Americans’ online activity, the companies that were forced to facilitate that surveillance have come under harsh public scrutiny.
The embarrassment ignited a series of comments from executives at Google and Facebook, among others, calling on the NSA and other agencies to either stop forcing them to provide the communications that customers trust them with, or allow them to be more transparent.
Now, according to a Thursday report in the Washington Post, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google have updated their policies to routinely notify customers when law enforcement has requested information about them.
Yahoo enacted such a change in July, with the Post reporting Thursday that companies “have found that investigators often drop data demands to avoid having suspects learn of inquiries.”

Read More Here

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• The Washington Post

Apple, Facebook, others defy authorities, notify users of secret data demands

By Craig Timberg, Published: May 1

Major U.S. technology companies have largely ended the practice of quietly complying with investigators’ demands for e-mail records and other online data, saying that users have a right to know in advance when their information is targeted for government seizure.This increasingly defiant industry stand is giving some of the tens of thousands of Americans whose Internet data gets swept into criminal investigations each year the opportunity to fight in court to prevent disclosures. Prosecutors, however, warn that tech companies may undermine cases by tipping off criminals, giving them time to destroy vital electronic evidence before it can be gathered.

Graphic

How the NSA is infiltrating private networks

Fueling the shift is the industry’s eagerness to distance itself from the government after last year’s disclosures about National Security Agency surveillance of online services. Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google all are updating their policies to expand routine notification of users about government data seizures, unless specifically gagged by a judge or other legal authority, officials at all four companies said. Yahoo announced similar changes in July.As this position becomes uniform across the industry, U.S. tech companies will ignore the instructions stamped on the fronts of subpoenas urging them not to alert subjects about data requests, industry lawyers say. Companies that already routinely notify users have found that investigators often drop data demands to avoid having suspects learn of inquiries.
“It serves to chill the unbridled, cost-free collection of data,” said Albert Gidari Jr., a partner at Perkins Coie who represents several technology companies. “And I think that’s a good thing.”
The Justice Department disagrees, saying in a statement that new industry policies threaten investigations and put potential crime victims in greater peril.
“These risks of endangering life, risking destruction of evidence, or allowing suspects to flee or intimidate witnesses are not merely hypothetical, but unfortunately routine,” department spokesman Peter Carr said, citing a case in which early disclosure put at risk a cooperative witness in a case. He declined to offer details because the case was under seal.
The changing tech company policies do not affect data requests approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which are automatically kept secret by law. National security letters, which are administrative subpoenas issued by the FBI for national security investigations, also carry binding gag orders.
The government traditionally has notified people directly affected by searches and seizures — though often not immediately — when investigators entered a home or tapped a phone line. But that practice has not survived the transition into the digital world. Cellular carriers such as AT&T and Verizon typically do not tell customers when investigators collect their call data.
Many tech companies once followed a similar model of quietly cooperating with law enforcement. Courts, meanwhile, ruled that it was sufficient for the government to notify the providers of Internet services of data requests, rather than the affected customers.
Twitter, founded in 2006, became perhaps the first major tech company to routinely notify users when investigators collected data, yet few others followed at first. When the Electronic Frontier Foundation began issuing its influential “Who Has Your Back?” report in 2011 — rating companies on their privacy and transparency policies — Twitter was the only company to get a star under the category “Tell users about data demands.” Google, the next mostly highly rated, got half a star from the civil liberties group.

Read More Here

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Optic Nerve: millions of Yahoo webcam images intercepted by GCHQ

• 1.8m users targeted by UK agency in six-month period alone
• Optic Nerve program collected Yahoo webcam images in bulk
• Yahoo: 'A whole new level of violation of our users' privacy'
• Material included large quantity of sexually explicit images

• Spencer Ackerman and James Ball
• 
  
• The Guardian, Thursday 27 February 2014

The GCHQ program saved one image every five minutes from the users' feeds. Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.
GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.
In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.
Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of "a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy".
GCHQ does not have the technical means to make sure no images of UK or US citizens are collected and stored by the system, and there are no restrictions under UK law to prevent Americans' images being accessed by British analysts without an individual warrant.
The documents also chronicle GCHQ's sustained struggle to keep the large store of sexually explicit imagery collected by Optic Nerve away from the eyes of its staff, though there is little discussion about the privacy implications of storing this material in the first place.

Optic Nerve, the documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show, began as a prototype in 2008 and was still active in 2012, according to an internal GCHQ wiki page accessed that year.
The system, eerily reminiscent of the telescreens evoked in George Orwell's 1984, was used for experiments in automated facial recognition, to monitor GCHQ's existing targets, and to discover new targets of interest. Such searches could be used to try to find terror suspects or criminals making use of multiple, anonymous user IDs.
Rather than collecting webcam chats in their entirety, the program saved one image every five minutes from the users' feeds, partly to comply with human rights legislation, and also to avoid overloading GCHQ's servers. The documents describe these users as "unselected" – intelligence agency parlance for bulk rather than targeted collection.
One document even likened the program's "bulk access to Yahoo webcam images/events" to a massive digital police mugbook of previously arrested individuals.
"Face detection has the potential to aid selection of useful images for 'mugshots' or even for face recognition by assessing the angle of the face," it reads. "The best images are ones where the person is facing the camera with their face upright."
The agency did make efforts to limit analysts' ability to see webcam images, restricting bulk searches to metadata only.
However, analysts were shown the faces of people with similar usernames to surveillance targets, potentially dragging in large numbers of innocent people. One document tells agency staff they were allowed to display "webcam images associated with similar Yahoo identifiers to your known target".
Optic Nerve was based on collecting information from GCHQ's huge network of internet cable taps, which was then processed and fed into systems provided by the NSA. Webcam information was fed into NSA's XKeyscore search tool, and NSA research was used to build the tool which identified Yahoo's webcam traffic.
Bulk surveillance on Yahoo users was begun, the documents said, because "Yahoo webcam is known to be used by GCHQ targets".

Programs like Optic Nerve, which collect information in bulk from largely anonymous user IDs, are unable to filter out information from UK or US citizens. Unlike the NSA, GCHQ is not required by UK law to "minimize", or remove, domestic citizens' information from its databases. However, additional legal authorisations are required before analysts can search for the data of individuals likely to be in the British Isles at the time of the search.

Read More Here

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Snowden elected leader of students at UK school

MSN

Getty Images: Barton Gellman

Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden poses for a photo during an interview in an undisclosed location in December 2013 in Moscow.

  By Associated Press

Students at the University of Glasgow elected former NSA contractor Edward Snowden as the official representative of the student body.

LONDON — Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden was elected Tuesday as the official representative of the student body at the University of Glasgow.
Students at the institution say that they nominated Snowden to make a statement about democratic rights.
"We showed Edward Snowden and other brave whistleblowers that we stand in solidarity with them, regardless of where they are," they said in a statement.
Read More Here
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Edward Snowden wins UK university role

Updated: 11:19, Wednesday February 19, 2014

Edward Snowden, the former US National Security Agency analyst who revealed US surveillance of phone and internet communications, has been elected rector of Glasgow University.
The analyst was nominated by a group of students at the Scottish institution who said they had received his approval through his lawyer.
The group said: 'We are incredibly delighted to see Edward Snowden elected as the new rector of Glasgow University.'
The statement said the institution had a 'virtuous tradition of making significant statements through our rectors'.
It added: 'Our opposition to pervasive and immoral state intrusion has gone down in the records.
.....

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Moby Breaks the Set on Piracy, Music Therapy, and Animal Cruelty

breakingtheset


   

Published on Nov 19, 2013

Abby Martin speaks with musical artist Moby, discussing his activism, the failures of the corporate music industry, and why he is a vegan.

LIKE Breaking the Set @ http://fb.me/BreakingTheSet
FOLLOW Abby Martin @ http://twitter.com/AbbyMartin

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• You Can Remix Moby's New Album Thanks to BitTorrent
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Margaret Heffernan: The dangers of "willful blindness"

TEDtalksDirector

Published on Aug 12, 2013

Gayla Benefield was just doing her job -- until she uncovered an awful secret about her hometown that meant its mortality rate was 80 times higher than anywhere else in the U.S. But when she tried to tell people about it, she learned an even more shocking truth: People didn't want to know. In a talk that's part history lesson, part call-to-action, Margaret Heffernan demonstrates the danger of "willful blindness" and praises ordinary people like Benefield who are willing to speak up. (Filmed at TEDxDanubia.)

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• TED: Margaret Heffernan: The dangers of "willful blindness" - Margaret Heffernan (2013)
• Margaret Heffernan: The dangers of "willful blindness"
• Cherish the employees who bring you bad news, says Margaret Heffernan
• Margaret Heffernan: Dare to disagree
• Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril