The scramble to secure a controversial trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is leading to some serious ethical conflicts for the Obama Administration. While many initial objections to TPP were due to concerns about a lack of transparency from the White House as to the contents of the agreement and how it was negotiated, a recent decision by the State Department to change a country’s ranking in a human trafficking report has human rights groups crying foul and citing TPP as the real reason for the change.

Kevin Gosztola interviews Duncan Campbell, recently published in The Intercept, about his 4 decades as a journalist dedicated to uncovering the surveillance state and the international ECHELON program. Campbell says less has changed for today’s journalists than you might think.

The Wet’suwet’en, a band of about 140 indigenous members, maintain the Unist’ot’en Camp, a checkpoint blocking the only bridge entering their land. It’s a direct challenge to the Canadian status quo because the Wet’suwet’en say they won’t let pipeline crews, oil company developers, or even Canadian police onto their land.

Inmate deaths in local jails and state prisons are on the rise for the third year in a row, according to a new study by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. The report, released on August 4, found that the number of jailhouse deaths increased between 2012 and 2013 even though jail populations declined by 4% during that time.

On Monday, the ACLU asked an attorney general to “back off” and stop invading the privacy of Internet users to infringe on free speech or serve the agenda of big corporations and their lawyers. Google already sued Attorney General Jim Hood over the massive, invasive subpoena.

Executives of the “social media risk management” firm ZeroFOX have defended an assessment the company produced for Baltimore, which labeled Black Lives Matter activists as “threat actors.” After Baltimore police killed Freddie Gray, an uprising, which included rioting, occurred. ZeroFOX offered pro bono assistance to city officials and produced a “confidential” report identifying supposed threats to the city. It recommended steps city officials could take to protect security, including keeping a close eye on protest leaders.

Late last month, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) issued a blistering report detailing millions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse in the US and coalition reconstruction effort in Afghanistan. The report, issued to Congress on July 30th, presents the results of a series of investigations conducted by SIGAR that revealed $37.4 million in “questionable costs” in the last quarter of the year — those costs lead to a total of $279.5 million in questionable costs identified by SIGAR to date.

Prison mistreatment may have given Oberist Saunders a staph infection after surgery, but under the privatized healthcare of Corizon Health Services, things got even worse, according to a lawsuit. Florida prisons have been home to some of the most horrific stories of inmate abuse and medical neglect and this lawsuit shows the harm caused by putting profit over patient health.

Boston is also one of three cities, selected in February, for the launch of a pilot program with the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, and the National Counterterrorism Center to “counter violent extremism.” But local advocates for civil rights worry the program is really infringing on Muslims’ rights.

To launch Shadowproof but retain Firedoglake’s history, our tech team had to transfer approximately 4 million comments — ten years worth of conversations. The first Shadowproof Mailbag. Is your letter inside?