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Dissent NewsWire
November 28, 2022
Reprinted with permission from Chip Gibbons’ Substack Newsletter. Chip Gibbons retains all copyright. It was twelve years ago today that five international newspapers—The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País—began working with WikiLeaks to publish the first stories based
November 28, 2022
Defending Rights and Dissent has joined with 90 other organizations – all of us fighting to protect youth privacy, safety, and access to information – to voice our concern about the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). While it sounds benign,
November 23, 2022
When voters went to the polls across the country for the midterms, it wasn’t just their member of Congress they were selecting. Voters also had the chance to weigh-on policy directly through ballot initiatives and referendums. Across the country, progressive,
November 23, 2022
On May 11, 2022, an Israeli sniper murdered Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. The Al-Jazeera reporter was wearing a blue press vest while covering an Israeli raid on a Palestinian refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. Abu Akleh’s family
November 23, 2022
On October 2, 2018, Washington Post columnist and journalist Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered inside the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, Turkey. His body was reportedly dismembered. Khashoggi was a critic of the Saudi government. US intelligence concluded that Crown Prince
November 18, 2022
Sherry Chen, a scientist at the National Weather Service was arrested in October 2014 after an illegal and discriminatory internal investigation (read more here). She was wrongly charged with espionage and faced 25 years in prison and a fine of
November 4, 2022
In 2010, as an Army private serving in Iraq, Chelsea Manning released hundreds of thousands of classified records shining light on the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These files included the “Collateral Murder” video (which showed American soldiers gunning
November 2, 2022
For someone heading up the Judiciary Committee, it appears Senator Dick Durbin missed out on a few key days of Constitutional Law. In his tweet, “Free speech does not include spreading misinformation to downplay political violence,” Senator Durbin strays far
October 31, 2022
Yet again, intelligence agencies have stepped outside of the law to conduct politically-motivated surveillance of protesters. This time, DHS was the culprit. According to an internal DHS report, agents assigned to Portland during 2020 Black Lives Matter protests drew up
October 14, 2022
If extradited, Julian Assange faces up to 175 years in prison under the Espionage Act – a draconian sentence intended to deter other journalists and truthtellers from revealing the long shadow of the American empire. On Saturday, October 8, DRAD
October 11, 2022
37 years ago today, Alex Odeh was assassinated at the offices of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) as part of a coordinated bombing campaign to silence activists. For decades, Defending Rights & Dissent has stood in solidarity with ADC in
October 7, 2022
On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we remember how the FBI surveilled and repressed AIM and other indigenous liberation movements. In 1969, American Indian Movement (AIM) activists occupied Alcatraz Island, invoking the Sioux Treaty of 1868, which grants unused federal lands to
September 30, 2022
Did the CIA use a Spanish security firm known as UC Global to spy on WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange while toying with plans to assassinate or kidnap the Australian national? In spying on Assange, did the CIA and UC Global
September 30, 2022
Two decades of the War on Terror make it clear that incremental reforms are insufficient to ameliorate the harms of a global system predicated upon Islamophobia and violence. Tendrils of the War on Terror encircle the globe and extend deep
September 19, 2022
The proposed resolution intends to adopt the working definition of antisemitism used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) along with its 11 contemporary examples. Anti-Semitism is a reprehensible form of bigotry, however, several of the examples attached to the IHRA definition incorrectly equate constitutionally-protected criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, effectively chilling free speech.