Reuters Has $6M Sole Source ICE Contract With US Homeland Security, Tracking "Aliens"

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, March 18 –  The US Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has a sole source contract with Thomson Reuters Special Services in order "to identify and locate illegal aliens that pose a threat to public safety and/or national security." 

Since Thomson Reuters holds itself out as independent media, heading the White House Correspondents Association and, at the UN, with a seemingly permanent seat on the board of the dubious UN Correspondents Association (which most recently partnered with Kazakhstan, for example, here), Inner City Press after viewing the Federal Business notice checked to make sure the recipient of this more than $6 millioin ICE contract is, in fact, part of the media company. 

Sure enough, this pitch online: "Analyze risk indicators found in public records and open source to help detect, prevent, and respond to insider incidents with the Thomson Reuters Special Services (TRSS) Insider Threat Service. With customized alerts and data delivery unique to your mission, TRSS Insider Threat Service complements your internal evaluation and control programs and provides case analysis with in-depth analytic reports by trained experts." 

This is the same Thomson Reuters which for example at the UN has used its insiderstatus to lobby to get smaller investigative Press thrown out. Here was a message with Reuters signature block to the UN's Stephane Dujarric, which Inner City Press not only saw but published, only to have Google grant a frivolous Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint(that an anti-Press email could be copyrighted) and banned from Search. The complainant - now lobbying for Human Rights Watch -Louis Charbonneau's successor has continued the campaign, followingup with a false complaint to UN Security, which subsequently ousted Inner City Press, audio here. Throughout, Reuters to the level of Stephen J. Adler to TR "corporate responsibility and social impact" Rachel Moseley never answered Press questions. What is the impact, then, of this Thomson Reuters contract? We'll have more on this.

Iran Deal Pitch at Thomson Reuters Pitched to (Some) UNSC Ambassadors, BHL Echo, Burundi Not Shows, Reuters Censorship

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, August 10 -- The Iran Deal UN Security Council resolution was adopted by the UNSC 15-0 on July 20. 

 On August 10 when the Security Council held closed door meeting on the crackdown in Burundi that resulted in very little, the pitch to ambassadors as they went in was not about Burundi but rather to attend a Reuters event about the Iran Deal on August 11, "moderated by Thomson Reuters Editor-at-Large Sir Harold Evans."

 Not even all Security Council Ambassadors were invited,Periscope here for now; longer here here is video of Sir Harry's "interview" of Bernard Henri Levi earlier this year, in which Harry asserted that the failure to oust Assad led to ISIS. That is certainly the Administration's line: but what does it portend for this event?

  From the UN we note Reuters as an outright censor, not only seeking to get the investigative Press thrown out, but that making a false claim to Google that its "for the record" complaint to the UN was somehow copyrighted, here. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (Chilling Effects) opined that this is problematic. But Reuters' Sir Harry rides on.

 Back on July 24, Kerry came to New York to field questions at the Council on Foreign Relations on Park Avenues, then to meet the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the American Jewish Committee.

 At CFR, Kerry argued that a nuclear arms race in the Middle East is less likely with the Deal than without it. He mentioned Yemen, bragging that he stopped Iran from landing a ship there (no mention was made of the new U.S. APCs in Aden). He said that Saudi Arabia spends $80 billion a year on defense, "fancy toys." Look at the impact of those toys on Yemen.

  Kerry said that France's Fabius is going to Iran, and that Germany will be going (actually, it's already gone). Moderator Richard Haass apologized for how few questions were taken from the floor, saying Kerry had other meetings to go to. But would he be protested there?

  Back on July 20 in the Security Council in speeches after the unanimous vote, Russia's Vitaly Churkin shouted out Kazakhstan as well as Austria and Switzerland, which hosted the talks. US Samantha Power vowed to pursue Iran on others issues. Iranian ambassador Gholamali Khoshroo was to speak inside the Security Council, then Israel's Ron Prosor outside at the stakeout.

  The day after the Iran Deal was announced in Vienna by the EU's Federica Mogherini then Iran's Javad Zarif, on July 15 a draft resolution was circulated in the UN Security Council, with paragraphs on sanctions snap-back and other provisions. Inner City Press put the draft, obtained from multiple sources, online here.

  As detailed below, the vote is set for July 20, 9 am in New York.

 On the US Sunday morning political talk shows, not only Republican Senator from Wyoming John Barrasso but also Democrat Ben Cardin of Maryland said the Obama administration shouldn't take the deal to the UN until Congress considers it. Republican Tom Cotton of Arkansas, speaking from London, said the same, citing Cardin and Steny Hoyer.

 On July 19, the US State Department in Washington said:

"Pursuant to the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, today the State Department transmitted to Congress the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, its annexes, and related materials. These documents include the Unclassified Verification Assessment Report on the JCPOA and the Intelligence Community's Classified Annex to the Verification Assessment Report, as required under the law. Therefore, Day One of the 60-day review period begins tomorrow, Monday, July 20."

  Then at 5 pm on July 16, Inner City Press reported that the UNSC vote on the draft would occur on Monday, July 20 at 9 am.

  Hours later, the UN confirmed this, and a US Mission spokesperson tweeted the timing. Reuters, typically, then published a story quoting an UNnamed "U.S. official" on the timing; the CBS former head of the UN Censorship Alliance echoed the timing targeting the P3 with nothing but photos. (The current head of the Censorship Alliancewas invisible, checked out.)

  This is how the UN works, or doesn't. At the underlying UNSC experts' meeting there were only two journalists. But Western missions served up information later to non-present correspondents, who by quoting unnamed sources seemed knowledgeable. This is today's UN.

  On July 16, the Security Council's 15 members at the Expert level met about the draft. Inner City Press and one other journalist staked-out the meeting (Periscope video for now here), held in basement Conference Room 8 and afterward asked attendees what the next step would be. 

  While several said "No comment" -- since it will presumably help them, including the US Legal Expert and a former French mission spokesman -- from others Inner City Press was told of a 9 am Monday July 20 vote on the resolution.

  It was said that France was pushing for a weekend vote, on Sunday, related to Foreign Minister Fabius desire to travel to Tehran with the vote already done. This was resisted - now, 9 am Monday, before a Security Council Arria formula meeting about Gaza, sponsored by Malaysia and Jordan. Watch this site.

  Here embeddd is the draft. Operative Paragraphs 11, 12and 15 bear particular interest, with their purported automaticity. See also, InnerCityPro.com.

Iran Deal Draft UNSC Resolution as Uploaded by Inner City Press byMatthew Russell Lee

   On July 14 the US White House held a background press call, "embargoed until conclusion." This meant, no tweets. But on the call, after Reuters asked a softball about Obama's involvement, several Senior Administration Officials gushed about Obama's calls to Vienna, updates from Susan Rice, concern for Israel's security.

  It was said Obama would not only call Netanyahu but also of course the King of Saudi Arabia. (He did both, adding Russia's Putin as well.)

   Earlier on July 14, Ban Ki-moon chimed in nearly immediately to welcome the deal. This stood in contrast to his 60 hour silence after his own faux Yemen Deal failed amid airstrikes. Success has many wannabe parents; UNsuccessful many fewer.

 Obama from Washington at 7 am said he will veto any legislation slowing this down; The Elders chaired by Kofi Annan spoke quickly against any “ideological preconceptions [or] narrow political interests.”

  Journalists camped out under the Evita-like balcony of the Coburg Hotel for more than two weeks gushed about UN Security Council action "in days," as France's Fabius put it. Now we know why. Watch this site 

  Previously as the Iran P5+1 talks continued on the eve of the then-deadline, who was bragging about having predicted their failure? Western wire service Reuters, crowing that "Other media now coming around to @reuters consistent reporting on how final Iran atomic deal unlikely."

 While false exclusives have proliferated at Reuters under Stephen J. Adler, there a second, separate trend at work here.

  On another UN sanctions regime, Somalia and Eritrea, even when former Reuters reporter turned sanctions monitor Dinesh Mahtani was forced to resign for havingchampioned a new leader for the country he was supposed to monitor, Reuters entirely omitted his removal from its claimed exclusives on the sanctions report.

  Some of this goes beyond a desire, compensated by editor Adler, to claim exclusives even where not merited (including by adopted a policy of not crediting others' exclusives).  At the UN, Reuters has gone so far as to try to censor and remove from Google's Search as "copyrighted" copies of Reuters complaints against other media filed with the UN, click here for that. 

 At what point does this become more (or less) that journalism? What about "other media now coming around to @reuters consistent" refusal to credit smaller media, attempts to get them kicked out, then censoring the Internet? We'll have more on this.

  Back on October 27, 2014 when the UN's special rapporteur on human rights in Iran Ahmed Shaheed held a press conference at the UN, Inner City Press asked him for an update on what he had said about the effect of sanctions and banning of Iran from the SWIFT payments system which Inner City Press asked him about one year and three days earlier, 2013 here from Minute 12:29.

  On October 24, 2013, Shaheed had acknowledged that the banning of Iran from the SWIFT payments system had had an impact. On October 27, 2014, Shaheed said he believes Iran is still banned from SWIFT, but he had no update. Instead he said that humanitarian exemptions to sanctions are having successes. 2014 video here.

 But banning from SWIFT or "de-SWIFT-ing" is not a targeted sanction at all, and he did not mention any exemptions to it.

   Overall, Inner City Press asked Shaheed what impact he thought "the nuclear issue" and the P5 + 1 talks have on human rights in Iran.  Shaheed said he doesn't like linkage, but added that when there's focus on the nuclear issue, it takes away from the focus on human rights.  Now what?

Footnote: on October 27, 2014, the UN Correspondents Association which so often demands the first question be set-aside for it didn't even send anyone to Shaheed's press conference. One attendee said, it's defUNCA-ed, as in defunct, or de-UNCA-ed, like de-SWIFT-ed. The new Free UN Coalition for Access, present, did not try to brand the press conference, because there was no need. Watch this site.

   

Reuters Misuses DMCA "Copyright" Act To Cover Up Its Attacks on Press, Charbonneau E-mail to UN Removed from Google

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, December 27 -- Can Reuters use the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act to get Google to remove a telling document from its search engine? 

  Based on a sworn statement under the DMCA by Reuters' bureau chief at the United Nations Louis Charbonneau, Google has blocked search access to a leaked copy of a written request by Charbonneau of Reuters to get an investigative journalist from Inner City Press thrown out of the UN. Click here to view the DMCA notice.

  The DMCA was enacted after massive industry lobbying 15 years ago. It has been used to take copyrighted movies and video games off free Internet sites; it has been subject to abuse in these fields. 

  But to misuse the DMCA to cover-up a Reuters complaint to the UN against a smaller competitor? This is a new low, for Reuters, the DMCA, the UN and Google (which have a previous and perhaps related history together.)

  Reuters, like Inner City Press and other media, seeks to obtain and publish documents without the consent of their authors. These are called leaks, and Reuters brags when it gets them, calls them exclusives.

   But it has emerged that on August 14, 2013, Reuters' Charbonneau made a sworn statement to Google under the DMCA seeking and obtaining the exclusion from Search and thus censoring of a complain he had filed with the UN's top two Media Accreditation officials in 2012.

  Ironically, Charbonneau later in 2012 leaked an internal anti Inner City Press document of the United Nations Correspondents Association, of which he was first vice president, to the UN. So the user of leaks tries to misuse the DMCA law to censor others' leaks.

Here is what Charbonneau told Google, under oath:

The copyrighted material is a private email I wrote in April 2012 and for which I never gave permission to be published. It has been published on a blog and appears in on the first page of search results for my name and the firm I work for, Reuters. It can be seen here: http://www.innercitypress.com/reutersLC3unmalu.pdf

Original work URL(s): http://www.innercitypress.com/reutersLC3unmalu.pdf

Allegedly infringing URLs: http://www.innercitypress.com/reutersLC3unmalu.pdf

SWORN STATEMENTS

I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. [checked]

The information in this notification is accurate, and I swear, under penalty of perjury, that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

  Here is the text of Charbonneau's communication to the UN's top Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit official Stephane Dujarric and MALU's manager, to which he claimed "copyright" and sought to censor from Search:

Hi Isabelle and Stephane,

I just wanted to pass on for the record that I was just confronted by Matt Lee in the DHL auditorium in very hostile fashion a short while ago (there were several witnesses, including Giampaolo). He's obviously gotten wind that there's a movement afoot to expel him from the UNCA executive committee, though he doesn't know the details yet. But he was going out of his way to be as intimidating and aggressive as possible towards me, told me I "disgust" him, etc.

In all my 20+ years of reporting I've never been approached like that by a follow journalist in any press corps, no matter how stressful things got. He's become someone who's making it very hard for me and others in the UN press to do our jobs. His harassment of fellow reporters is reaching a new fever pitch.

I just thought you should know this.

Cheers,

Lou
Louis Charbonneau
Bureau Chief. United Nations
Reuters News Thomson Reuters reuters. com

This email was sent to you by Thomson Reuters, the global news and information company.

  It is a spurious use of copyright. The e-mail was complaint to UN officials to try to get another journalist thrown out of the UN. 

  It came after Inner City Press published a story reporting that then UNCA president Giampaolo Pioli (referred to as a witness in Charbonneau's "copyrighted" email) had a previous financial relationship with Sri Lanka's ambassador and then agreed to screen inside the UN;s Dag Hammarskjold Library (DHL) auditorium a Sri Lanka government film denying war crimes. Click here and here for more on that.

  This, then, is a cover-up. Previous misuses of the DMCA, cataloged in March 2013 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, include for example Apple threatening Blu Wiki "for hosting a discussion about reverse engineering iPods to inter-operate with software other than Apple's own iTunes."

  "Censorware" vendor N2H2 claimed that the DMCA should block researchers like Seth Finkelstein from examining its software, and blocked a variety of legitimate websites, evidence that assisted the ACLU in challenging a law requiring the use web filtering software by federally-funded public libraries. See, e.g., Mainstream Loudoun v. Bd. of Trs., 24 F.Supp.2d 552 (E.D. Va. 1998), available (for now) at http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=13796536557265673818.

  Sony threatened the Norwegian website Gitorious, "a platform for open-source programmers to collaborate on new projects."

  But to misuse the DMCA to cover-up a Reuters complaint to the UN against a smaller competitor? This is something new.

  The new Free UN Coalition for Access has been formed to oppose censorship attempts by and at the United Nations, including by UNCA now headed without reforms by Pamela Falk of CBS. How will Google and the UN, and Reuters now that it has been exposed, act on the false statement under and misuse of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?

  Reuters has been on notice. Inner City Press asked Reuters editor Stephen J. Adler and three "ethics" colleagues about ThomsonReuters' policies, including how its UN bureau chief's attempts to oust Inner City Press from the UN complied with the wire services' claimed commitment to freedom of the press. Now the DCMA has been misused to try to cover up just one such Reuters attempt. This is a new low. Watch this site.

   

As Reuters Brags of Teaching in Jordan, At UN It Trolls Press With False Sri Lanka Terror Funding Charges: World Press Falsity Day

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, May 4 -- While World Press Freedom Day 2013 was marked or marred by some corporate hypocrisy on each continent, the split between Reuters bragging about investigative journalism in Jordan while its anonymous trolls attack just that at the UN must be noted.

  On May 1 -- when Reuters at the UN entirely ignored a protest march at the UN against Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's "forced relocations," click here for Inner City Press coverage -- the Thomson Reuters Foundation via its Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe covered its own "launch of a one-year project that aims to significantly improve investigative reporting in Jordan."

  Partnering as it does the UN with the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Reuters bragged that under Jo Weir, "the workshops will be taught by senior Thomson Reuters Foundation consultants."

  But what will they consult in? At the UN, Reuters bureau chief Louis Charbonneau has filed multiple stealth complaints trying to get Inner City Press thrown out of the UN. And emails here and here, audio here and here.

  The reporter Charbonneau supervises or "teaches," Michelle Nichols, is associated with an anonymous social media account which even on this Saturday, albeit at 1:13 am, falsely alleged that Inner City Press is funded by the defunct Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka.

  When Charbonneau led a United Nations Correspondents Association drive to expel Inner City Press in 2012 and was shown that this false funding allegation led to death threats, he cynically said "call NYPD," the New York Police Department, and continued the campaign.

  Reuters big wigs including editor Stephen J. Adler were contacted, but did nothing. This year they have been shown that the troll social media account stopped for exactly the ten days Reuters correspondent Michelle Nichols went home to Australia, then re-started the day she returned. 

  Reuters has been informed that Charbonneau tried to encourage the UN to throw Inner City Press out by saying he they didn't, he might leave the UN. Given the role he plays, as pass through, this carried some weight. 

  But Stephen J. Adler, surely a World Press Freedom Day proponent himself, did nothing; nor did his designated social media editor, nor now his recently acquired mascot columnist. This is Reuters. There's more, but that's it for now. Watch this site.