Democracy Now! Thursday, April 10, 2008

Today's Headlines

• Report: Top Admin Officials Approved Assault, Waterboarding of CIA Prisoners
• 4 Killed in US Attack on Sadr City
• Baghdad Under Curfew on 5th Anniversary of US Seizure
• Iraqi Judiciary Calls for Release of Bilal Hussein from US Military Jail
• Dems Seek Delay of Colombia Trade Pact
• Fighting Renews in Gaza
• Jimmy Carter to Meet Exiled Hamas Leader
• Haiti Food Protests Enter 2nd Week
• IMF: US Mortgage Crisis Worse Shock Since Great Depression
• Clinton, Wal-Mart Founder Trade Praise in 1991 Video
• Lawmakers Urge Probe of Alleged Cover-Up on Halloween Photos

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  Telecom Whistleblower Discovers Circuit that Allows Access to All Systems on Wireless Carrier -- Phone Calls, Text Messages, Emails and More

  Babak Pasdar is a computer security expert who was hired in 2003 to help restructure the tech infrastructure at a major wireless telecommunications company. What he found shocked him. The company had set up a system that gave a third party, presumably a governmental entity, access to every communication coming through that company’s infrastructure. This means every email, internet use, document transmission, video, text message, as well as the ability to listen to and record any phone call. [includes rush transcript]

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  China's Great Leap: Human Rights Watch on the Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges

  Thousands of protesters turned out in San Francisco to protest the Olympic torch relay and this year’s Beijing Games. Similar protests condemning China’s human rights abuses have attempted to disrupt the torch along its earlier stops in Athens, Istanbul, Paris and London. We speak with Human Rights Watch’s Minky Worden, who is editor of a new book, China’s Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges. [includes rush transcript]

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  Justice Department Increasingly Avoiding Corporate Prosecutions

  The Justice Department has put off prosecuting more than fifty companies suspected of wrongdoing over the last three years. The decline in prosecutions is seen as a deliberate and dramatic shift in policy. While the news reported in a front-page article in the New York Times surprised many, the Justice Department’s use of so called “deferred prosecution agreements” is nothing new. Back in 2005, a report released by the Corporate Crime Reporter profiled dozens of these cases and warned against their use. We speak with Russell Mokhiber, editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter. [includes rush transcript]

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  Report: 40 Years After King, Little Progress in Closing Economic Inequality Gap Between African Americans and Whites

  In the late 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King recognized that the next phase in the quest for civil rights and equality would focus on the economic divide. A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies titled “40 Years Later: The Unrealized American Dream” lays out key elements of the inequality that African Americans still experience in the United States around education, employment and wealth accumulation. We speak with the co-author of the report, Dedrick Muhammad. [includes rush transcript]