Government Corruption News Articles

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Nashville officials reportedly concealed the low number of COVID-19 cases deriving from bars and restaurants in the city, according to emails between the Metro Health Department and Mayor John Cooper's office. On June 30, contact tracing found that construction and nursing homes were the cause of most Nashville coronavirus cases with thousands traced back to those specific categories. Only 22 cases were traced back to bars and restaurants. In the series of emails obtained by FOX 17 News, a discussion between the two offices about how to conceal the number associated with restaurants and bars from the public was shown. "This isn't going to be publicly released, right? Just info for Mayor's Office?" wrote Leslie Waller from the health department. Senior Advisor Benjamin Eagles responded: "Correct, not for public consumption." A month later ... reporter Nate Rau asked the health department about rumors circulating that only 80 cases resulted from the city's bars and restaurants. Rau asked: "The figure you gave of 'more than 80' does lead to a natural question: If there have been over 20,000 positive cases of COVID-19 in Davidson and only 80 or so are traced to restaurants and bars, doesn't that mean restaurants and bars aren't a very big problem?" "We raised taxes 34 percent and put ... literally thousands of people out of work that are now worried about losing their homes, their apartments ... and we did it on bogus data. That should be illegal," [Nashville Councilman Steve] Glover told FOX 17 News.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus and government corruption from reliable major media sources.

The drug that buoyed expectations for a coronavirus treatment and drew international attention for Gilead Sciences, remdesivir, started as a reject. To make progress, Gilead needed help from U.S. taxpayers. Lots of help. Three federal health agencies were deeply involved in remdesivir’s development every step of the way, providing tens of millions of dollars of government research support. Federal agencies have not asserted patent rights to Gilead’s drug. That means Gilead will have few constraints other than political pressure when it sets a price. “Without direct public investment and tax subsidies, this drug would apparently have remained in the scrapheap of unsuccessful drugs,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Tex.) ... said earlier this month. Doggett and Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.) have asked Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar for a detailed financial accounting of federal support for remdesivir’s discovery and development. Watchdog groups ... have documented the large taxpayer-funded contributions toward the drug. Public Citizen estimates public investment at a minimum of $70 million. An independent organization that measures the cost-effectiveness of drugs said Gilead could be justified in charging up to $4,500 for a 10-day course of treatment for a single coronavirus patient. But advocates, citing a study by academic researchers on what it costs to make the drug, have said Gilead could break even by charging $1 per dose.

Note: According to this CNBC article Gilead is charging from $2,000 to $3,120 per patient despite huge subsidies. Gilead is the same company which developed Tamiflu and licensed it to Roche. Aggressive sales of Tamiflu to governments around the world brought profits of over $1 billion yet almost none of the doses sold were ever used, as described in this Reuters article. The study that is being used to tout Remdesivir was conducted by none other than Gilead. Could there be conflict of interest here? For more, see summaries of revealing news articles on big Pharma corruption.

Year after year, the bombs fell — on wedding tents, funeral halls, fishing boats and a school bus, killing thousands of civilians and helping turn Yemen into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Weapons supplied by American companies, approved by American officials, allowed Saudi Arabia to pursue the reckless campaign. But in June 2017, an influential Republican senator decided to cut them off, by withholding approval for new sales. It was a moment that might have stopped the slaughter. Not under President Trump. Trade adviser Peter Navarro ... wrote a memo to Jared Kushner and other top White House officials calling for an intervention. He titled it “Trump Mideast arms sales deal in extreme jeopardy, job losses imminent.” Within weeks, the Saudis were once again free to buy American weapons. The intervention, which has not been previously reported, underscores a fundamental change in American foreign policy under Mr. Trump. Where foreign arms sales in the past were mostly offered and withheld to achieve diplomatic goals, the Trump administration pursues them mainly for the profits they generate and the jobs they create, with little regard for how the weapons are used. Mr. Trump has tapped Mr. Navarro ... to be a conduit between the Oval Office and defense firms. His administration has also rewritten the rules for arms exports, speeding weapon sales to foreign militaries. The State Department, responsible for licensing arms deals, now is charged with more aggressively promoting them.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and war from reliable major media sources.

The FBI inadvertently revealed one of the U.S. government’s most sensitive secrets about the Sept. 11 terror attacks: the identity of a mysterious Saudi Embassy official in Washington who agents suspected had directed crucial support to two of the al-Qaida hijackers. The disclosure came in a new declaration filed in federal court by a senior FBI official in response to a lawsuit brought by families of 9/11 victims that accuses the Saudi government of complicity in the terrorist attacks. The declaration ... represents a major breakthrough in the long-running case, providing for the first time an apparent confirmation that FBI agents investigating the attacks believed they had uncovered a link between the hijackers and the Saudi Embassy in Washington. The disclosure, which a senior U.S. government official confirmed was made in error ... shines a light on the extraordinary efforts by top Trump administration officials in recent months to prevent internal documents about the issue from ever becoming public. “This shows there is a complete government cover-up of the Saudi involvement,” said Brett Eagleson, a spokesman for the 9/11 families whose father was killed in the attacks. “It demonstrates there was a hierarchy of command that’s coming from the Saudi Embassy to the Ministry of Islamic Affairs [in Los Angeles] to the hijackers.” Ironically, the declaration identifying the Saudi official in question was intended to support recent filings ... barring the public release of the Saudi official’s name and all related documents.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on 9/11 from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our 9/11 Information Center.

Publicly traded companies have received more than $1 billion in funds meant for small businesses from the federal government’s economic stimulus package, according to data from securities filings compiled by The Washington Post. Nearly 300 public companies have reported receiving money from the fund, called the Paycheck Protection Program, according to the data compiled by The Post. Recipients include 43 companies with more than 500 workers, the maximum typically allowed by the program. Several other recipients were prosperous enough to pay executives $2 million or more. After the first pool of $349 billion ran dry, leaving more than 80 percent of applicants without funding, outrage over the millions of dollars that went to larger firms prompted some companies to return the money. As of Thursday, public companies had reported returning more than $125 million. Other companies have said they plan to keep the funds. While much of the program’s criticism has focused on the relatively large companies that received the money intended for small businesses, there is some evidence that the program missed its target in other ways, too. The areas where small businesses have been most affected – New York and New Jersey, for example – were less likely to see loans from the program. Only about 15 percent of businesses in the congressional districts most affected by business losses were able to obtain PPP help; by contrast, in the least affected congressional districts, 30 percent were able to obtain them.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the coronavirus pandemic from reliable major media sources.

The number of new coronavirus cases reported in China over the past week suggested that the outbreak might be slowing — that containment efforts were working. But on Thursday, officials added more than 14,840 new cases to the tally of the infected in Hubei Province alone, bringing the total number to 48,206, the largest one-day increase so far recorded. The death toll in the province rose to 1,310, including 242 new deaths. The sharp rise in reported cases illustrates how hard it has been for scientists to grasp the extent and severity of the coronavirus outbreak in China. Confronted by so many people with symptoms and no easy way to test them, authorities appear to have changed the way the illness is identified. Hospitals in Wuhan, China — the largest city in Hubei Province and the center of the epidemic — have struggled to diagnose infections with scarce and complicated tests that detect the virus’s genetic signature directly. Other countries, too, have had such issues. Instead, officials in Hubei now seem to be including infections diagnosed by using lung scans of symptomatic patients. The change ... raises the question whether the province, already struggling, is equipped to deal with the new patients. The few experts to learn of the new numbers ... were startled. Lung scans are an imperfect means to diagnose patients. Even patients with ordinary seasonal flu may develop pneumonia visible on a lung scan.

Note: So now anyone who has regular pneumonia will likely be diagnosed as having Coronavirus. This intriguing article suggests that many of the Coronavirus deaths are pneumonia not associated with the virus. For more showing how the fear around this is being blown way out of proportion, see this well researched essay. Then explore concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health from reliable major media sources.

Immigration-related crimes now make up the majority of all federal criminal prosecutions. While laws criminalizing entry have existed since 1929, they “were largely ignored for a century,” the lawyer and scholar César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández reminds us in a new book, “Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants.” In 1975, he noted “a mere 575 people” were charged with an immigration crime; in 1993, only 2,487. Contrast that with fiscal year 2018, when prosecutors brought 105,692 federal immigration charges. The criminalization of immigration, especially the scale at which it happens now, is a relatively recent trend, Hernández argues. And it ought to be reversed. In the 1980s and ’90s, legislation introduced new levels of criminality for immigrants, which in turn expanded the population of imprisoned people. As Hernández writes, “Congress denied immigration judges the discretion to release anyone convicted of an aggravated felony,” which includes serious offenses like murder but also shoplifting and tax fraud. Detention and deportation, once decided with considerable discretion, became mandatory for all sorts of offenses. The link between mass incarceration and immigrant incarceration is clear in the legislative history: The same 1986 law that created mandatory minimum sentences for crack cocaine created “detainers,” requests to local police to hold someone in jail until they can be picked up by immigration.

Note: Detaining immigrants has become a huge industry bringing major profits to those involved. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the court system from reliable major media sources.

A plot of Wall Street interests to overthrow President Roosevelt and establish a Fascist dictatorship, backed by a private army of 500,000 ex-soldiers and others, was charged by Major Gen. Smedley D. Butler, retired Marine Corps officer, who appeared yesterday before the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities, which began hearings on the charges. [The committee] heard testimony from General Butler and Gerald P. Maguire, a bond salesman in the Stock Exchange firm of Grayson M.P. Murphy & Co., 52 Broadway, named by General Butler as having urged him to head the proposed Fascist army. There were immediate emphatic denials by the purported plotters. From Philadelephia came word that General Butler had told friends there that General Hugh S. Johnson, former NRA administrator, was scheduled for the role of dictator, and that J. P. Morgan & Co. as well as Murphy & Co. were behind the plot.

Note: General Butler, who was greatly loved by his troops, only discovered how he and his troops had been used by Wall Street bankers after retiring from the military. As a result, he wrote a seminal book titled "War is a Racket" for which you can find an excellent summary on this webpage. Explore a suppressed book on this titled "The Plot to Seize the White House." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our War Information Center.

When incarcerated people face abuse and mistreatment, they can typically file a formal complaint with jail or prison administrators. In federal prisons, the system for resolving these complaints is known as the "Administrative Remedy Program," but it's more commonly referred to as a "grievance system" in state prisons and local jails. Grievance systems are supposed to provide incarcerated people with a way to challenge issues they face behind bars – such as inadequate medical care, harassment by corrections officers, or unsanitary living conditions – and (hopefully) receive some kind of relief. In practice, however, incarcerated people who turn to grievance systems are forced to run a gauntlet of rules and regulations just to be heard, and very rarely succeed. This is especially true when it comes to medical complaints: our analysis of a decade of data from the Data Liberation Project finds that, between 2014 and 2024, a startling 98% of medical grievances were rejected for reasons ranging from the bureaucratic (such as using the wrong size sheet of paper) to the substantive (actually being denied on the merits of the complaint). Less than 1% of medical cases ended in a grant of relief. Conditions are so bad on the inside that since 2000, roughly half of all state prison systems have been court-ordered to improve mental and medical healthcare. In practice ... the grievance system is a black hole, a time-waster, and a deterrent to complaining at all.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and inspiring articles on prison system reform.

The pandemic's most contentious question: Did SARS-CoV-2 emerge through natural spillover from animals to humans, or through a laboratory incident tied to research intended to anticipate the next outbreak? A flashpoint in that debate has been DEFUSE – a 2018 grant proposal submitted to DARPA, the Defense Department's advanced research agency. DEFUSE outlined plans to test spike-protein swaps and cleavage-site insertions in bat coronaviruses. Newly obtained NIH records suggest that the experimental concepts later spotlighted in DEFUSE – tuning bat coronavirus infectivity through spike swaps, receptor-binding changes, and cleavage-site insertions– were already embedded in multiple U.S.-funded coronavirus research projects years before the pandemic. NIH ... reviewers saw potential risk. In an internal "biohazard comment," a grants manager warned that recombinant coronaviruses engineered to enhance spike cleavage or strengthen ACE2 binding "may have novel and unexpected virulence phenotypes" – or, new and unpredictable traits that could make the virus more dangerous. NIH reviewed – and frequently approved – experiments designed to alter receptor-binding domains, swap spike proteins between viruses, or modify cleavage sites that influence how coronaviruses infect cells. American and Chinese researchers shared sequences, experimental ideas and preliminary findings in real time.

Note: Read how the NIH bypassed the oversight process, allowing controversial gain-of-function experiments to proceed unchecked. Watch our Mindful News Brief on the strong evidence that bioweapons research created COVID-19. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on COVID corruption.

New York City's public hospital system is paying millions to Palantir, the controversial ICE and military contractor. Since 2023, the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation has paid Palantir nearly $4 million to improve its ability to track down payment for the services provided at its hospitals and medical clinics. Palantir, a data analysis firm that's now a Wall Street giant thanks to its lucrative work with the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community, deploys its software to make more efficient the billing of Medicaid and other public benefits. That includes automated scanning of patient health notes to "increase charges captured from missed opportunities," contract materials reviewed by The Intercept show. It's Palantir's work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that is drawing the most protest today. The company provides a variety of services to help the federal government find and deport immigrants. ICE's Palantir-furnished case management software, for example, "plays a critical role in supporting the daily operations of ICE, ensuring critical mission success," according to federal contracting documents. Palantir's contract with New York's public health care system allows the company to work with patients' protected health information, or PHI. With permission from New York City Health and Hospitals, Palantir can "de-identify PHI and utilize de-identified PHI for purposes other than research," the contract states.

Note: Listen to an audio clip of Jeffrey Epstein promoting Palantir to Ehud Barak. Read how Palantir helped the NSA spy on the entire planet. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.

A federal statement announcing Jeffrey Epstein's death has surfaced in newly released Justice Department files but it carries a date that appears to precede the moment he was officially found dead inside his New York prison cell. The document, issued by the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and dated Friday, August 9, 2019, states that Epstein had already been found unresponsive and pronounced dead. But prison records and official accounts show Epstein was not discovered unresponsive until the morning of August 10, 2019. According to official accounts, Epstein was discovered unresponsive in his cell shortly after 6.30am on August 10 by a corrections officer. Medical personnel attempted to revive him, but he was pronounced dead soon afterward. Epstein's death came amid a cascade of failures inside one of the federal government's most secure detention facilities. Prison records show that guards assigned to monitor Epstein did not conduct required checks during the overnight hours before his body was discovered. Scheduled rounds at 3am and 5am were missed, according to official findings. Furthermore, cameras positioned outside Epstein's cell were not functioning properly that night. Investigators later confirmed that at least two surveillance cameras had malfunctioned, leaving critical gaps in visual monitoring. Because of those failures, officials were unable to establish a definitive timeline of Epstein's final moments.

Note: Mark Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein's brother, believes that his death involved an official cover-up. An email thread between high-level federal investigators discusses what appears to be an unnamed individual attempting to extort Mark Epstein. The sender claims: "with the coordination of the director of prison regulations, the cameras were tampered with and some the videos of the prison cameras were cut. At that time, prison guards [redacted] were paid $6,500 so that they would not visit prisoners at this time. Within 15 minutes, a man named [redacted] entered your brother's prison cell and strangled him." For more, internal US Bureau of Prison (BOP) documents suggest a possible cover-up, while a 60 Minutes 2020 investigation uncovered compelling evidence that challenges the official suicide ruling in Epstein's death–including suspicious neck fractures, missing surveillance footage, and a series of unexplained security failures.

Thousands of surveillance reports compiled by undercover police officers who spied on political campaigners were routinely passed to MI5, documents obtained by the spycops inquiry have revealed. Police sent undercover officers on long-term deployments to infiltrate mainly leftwing protest groups and gather enormous quantities of information about their political and personal activities. It can now be revealed that most of those clandestine reports were sent to MI5, helping the Security Service to build up large files on peaceful protesters who were engaged in democratic protests for an array of causes. MI5 still retains these surveillance reports in its files today. Officers have been criticised for spying on thousands of political organisations such as campaigns against racism and nuclear weapons, the Socialist Workers party, justice campaigns and trade unions. Their reports logged personal information about protesters, including their marriages, sexuality, holiday plans and bank accounts, as well as their plans for political action such as demonstrations. Stamped on the surveillance reports are a tell-tale sign – Box 500, a nickname for MI5 ... which confirms that they were sent to the Security Service by the police spies. Working in tandem, senior police officers running the undercover spies and MI5 met regularly to discuss the political groups they wanted to infiltrate. On several occasions, MI5 warned that particular police spies were in danger of being rumbled by activists.

Note: Read more about the spycops scandal and the dozens of activists tricked into having romantic relationships with undercover police. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on police corruption.

Every year millions of people cycle through America's prisons and jails. Many of them never make it home. Using information from a federal government database of more than 21,000 deaths, The Marshall Project is now able to show how people are dying in America's prisons and jails. For incarcerated people under the age of 55, just under half of the deaths we could identify were from largely preventable causes – like suicide or drug overdoses. Older incarcerated people tended to die from natural causes. In more than a third of cases, we simply could not determine a cause of death, because there was not enough information. Our analysis is based on data collected by the Justice Department under the Death In Custody Reporting Act, which Congress passed a quarter-century ago with the intention of creating a record of everyone who dies in law enforcement custody. The data contained information like names, dates and brief descriptions of the circumstances surrounding each person who died in prisons, jails and during the course of arrest between Oct. 1, 2019 and Sept. 30, 2023. The government's data is riddled with errors. Not only did we find hundreds of deaths missing from the dataset, but the majority of the descriptions detailing how each person died didn't meet the government's own minimum quality standards. Almost one-in-10 of the deaths in the dataset were suicides – making it the third most common way people of all ages died.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption.

On Thursday, lawmakers in the House approved a "pilot program" in the pending Pentagon budget bill that could eventually open the door to sending billions to big contractors, while providing what critics say would be little benefit to the military. The provision, which appeared in the budget bill after a closed-door session overseen by top lawmakers, would allow contractors to claim reimbursement for the interest they pay on debt they take on to build weapons and other gadgets for the armed services. One big defense contractor alone, Lockheed Martin, reported having more than $17.8 billion in outstanding interest payments last year, said Julia Gledhill, an analyst at the nonprofit Stimson Center. "The fact that we are even exploring this question is a little crazy in terms of financial risk for the government," Gledhill said. Gledhill said even some Capitol Hill staffers were "scandalized" to see the provision in the final bill, which will likely be approved by the Senate. The switch to covering financing costs seems to be in line with a larger push this year to shake up the defense industry. The Pentagon itself was dubious in a 2023 study conducted by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment. The Pentagon found that policy change might even supercharge the phenomenon of big defense contractors using taxpayer dollars for stock buybacks instead of research and development.

Note: Read our concise summaries of news articles on government corruption.

The idea of a "right to repair" – a requirement that companies facilitate consumers' repairs, maintenance, and modification of products – is extremely popular, even winning broad, bipartisan support in Congress. That could not, however, save it from the military–industrial complex. Lobbyists succeeded in killing part of the National Defense Authorization Act that would have given service members the right to fix their equipment in the field without having to worry about military suppliers' intellectual property. The decision to kill the popular proposal was made public Sunday after a closed-door conference of top congressional officials, including defense committee chairs. For the defense industry ... the proposal threatened a key profit stream. Once companies sell hardware and software to the Pentagon, they can keep making money by forcing the government to hire them for repairs. Defense lobbyists pushed back hard against the proposal when it arose in the military budgeting process. The CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association claimed that the legislation could "cripple the very innovation on which our warfighters rely." The contractors' argument was that inventors would not sell their products to the Pentagon if they knew they had to hand over their trade secrets as well. As a piece of legislation, the right to repair has likely died until next year's defense budget bill process. The notion could be imposed in the form of internal Pentagon policies.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.

The United States has long used drone strikes to take out people it alleges are terrorists or insurgents. President Donald Trump has taken this tactic to new extremes, boasting about lethal strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and declaring the U.S. is in a "non-international armed conflict" with narcotics traffickers. Trump appears to be merging the war on terror with the war on drugs. This comes as he's simultaneously ramping up the use of troops to police inside American cities. The modern drug war began during President Richard Nixon's administration. In 1994, the journalist Dan Baum tracked down Nixon aide John Ehrlichman and interviewed him. He said, "Look. The Nixon campaign in '68 and the Nixon White House had two enemies: Black people and the antiwar left. [V]ilify them night after night on the evening news, and we thought if we can associate heroin with Black people in the public mind and marijuana with the hippies this would be perfect." And [Ehrlichman] said, "Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." This line of thinking drove policies designed to "unleash" law enforcement. The Nixon administration tried to relax wiretapping laws, roll back Miranda rights, and erode Fourth Amendment protections against unconstitutional searches and seizures. And now we're seeing the Trump administration push even harder to roll back constitutional protections.

Note: Though President Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs by declaring drugs "public enemy No. 1," secretly he admitted in a 1973 Oval Office meeting that marijuana was "not particularly dangerous." The War on Drugs is a trillion dollar failure that has been made worse by every presidential administration since Nixon. Don't miss our in-depth investigation into the dark truths behind the War on Drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and the War on Drugs.

Senior officials in the Biden administration, including some White House officials, "conducted repeated and sustained outreach" and "pressed" Google- and YouTube parent-company Alphabet "regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate [Alphabet's] policies," the company revealed yesterday. While Alphabet "continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden Administration officials continued to press [Alphabet] to remove non-violative user-generated content," a lawyer for Alphabet wrote in a September 23 letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan. Administration officials including Biden "created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions" of private tech platforms regarding the moderation of misinformation. This is what has come to be known as "jawboning," and the fact that it doesn't involve direct censorship may make it even more insidious. Direct censorship can be challenged in court. This sort of wink-and-nod regulation of speech leaves companies and their users with little recourse. What's more, each time authorities stray from the spirit of the First Amendment, it makes it that much easier for future authorities to do so. And each time Democrats (or Republicans) use government power to try and suppress free speech, it gives them even less standing to say it's wrong when their opponents do that.

Note: Read more about the sprawling federal censorship enterprise that took shape during the Biden administration. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and government corruption.

Amid escalating anti-immigrant rhetoric ... private prison corporations are once again expanding their grip on U.S. detention policy. In fact, today roughly 90 percent of detained immigrants are held in privately operated facilities, the highest share in history. The industry is instead preparing for explosive growth. On recent earnings calls, CoreCivic executives announced plans to triple the number of beds in their facilities within a few months. That would mean an additional $1.5 billion in revenue for the corporation, more than doubling its annual earnings. Meanwhile, growing scrutiny of immigration detention practices has led to reports of abuse, medical neglect, and deaths in custody. Privatization, with the cost-cutting practices that define it, is the structural driver of human rights violations at these facilities. Private prisons corporations are just one piece of the sprawling prison industry. The U.S. carceral system is comprised of a vast and deeply entrenched network of public-private partnerships that make billions from incarceration and detention. Commissary corporations mark-up basic hygiene items like toothpaste or tampons by 300 percent or more. Private healthcare providers routinely deny or delay treatment, contributing to suffering and preventable deaths behind bars. Private food vendors serve meals that are frequently expired or nutritionally inadequate, all in the name of cutting costs and maximizing returns.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on immigration enforcement corruption.

Tor is mostly known as the Dark Web or Dark Net, seen as an online Wild West where crime runs rampant. Yet it's partly funded by the U.S. government, and the BBC and Facebook both have Tor-only versions to allow users in authoritarian countries to reach them. At its simplest, Tor is a distributed digital infrastructure that makes you anonymous online. It is a network of servers spread around the world, accessed using a browser called the Tor Browser, which you can download for free from the Tor Project website. When you use the Tor Browser, your signals are encrypted and bounced around the world before they reach the service you're trying to access. This makes it difficult for governments to trace your activity or block access, as the network just routes you through a country where that access isn't restricted. But, because you can't protect yourself from digital crime without also protecting yourself from mass surveillance by the state, these technologies are the site of constant battles between security and law enforcement interests. The state's claim to protect the vulnerable often masks efforts to exert control. In fact, robust, well-funded, value-driven and democratically accountable content moderation – by well-paid workers with good conditions – is a far better solution than magical tech fixes to social problems ... or surveillance tools. As more of our online lives are funneled into the centralized AI infrastructures ... tools like Tor are becoming ever more important.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.