By David Ingram/Reuters

A new crop of ads on New York City subway cars reads “Justice now, but justice how?” The words evoke the tone of street protests over police killings of black men across the United States during the past three years.
But the ads are not a plea from civil rights activists; they are a recruiting pitch from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. One of them reads, “If the system is ever going to change, this is the place where change will begin.”
John Jay is one of a number of schools that are making academic changes in the wake of the high-profile killings of black men and boys by police in recent years in places such as Cleveland, Chicago, Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Ferguson, Missouri, that have fueled a debate about racial bias in the U.S. criminal justice system.

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Posted on December 4, 2016

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Internet Archive published a formerly secret national security letter (NSL) Thursday that includes misinformation about how to contest the accompanying gag order that demanded total secrecy about the request. As a result of the Archive’s challenge to the letter, the FBI has agreed to send clarifications about the law to potentially thousands of communications providers who have received NSLs in the last year-and-a-half.
The NSL issued to the Archive said the library had the right to “make an annual challenge to the nondisclosure requirement.” But in 2015, Congress updated the law to allow for more than one request a year, so that communications providers could speak out about their experience without unneeded delay. Represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Archive informed the FBI that it did not have the information the agency was seeking and pointed out the legal error. The FBI agreed to drop the gag order in this case and allow the publication of the NSL.

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Posted on December 3, 2016

By Ronnie Cohen/Reuters

Mexico’s soda tax is on course to prevent diabetes, heart attacks and strokes in more than 200,000 adults and to save nearly $1 billion in healthcare costs over a decade, a new study suggests.
The research bolstered arguments in favor of soda taxes approved this month in three Northern California cities as well as in Boulder, Colorado and Cook County, Illinois. The taxes were designed to wean consumers off sugar-sweetened beverages, to curb a worldwide surge in obesity and diabetes, an epidemic fueled by soda, public health experts say.

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Posted on December 2, 2016

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

CREDO Mobile representatives confirmed Wednesday that their company was at the center of the long-running legal battle over the constitutionality of national security letters (NSLs), and published the letters the government sent three years ago.
Until now, CREDO was under a gag order preventing company officials from acknowledging or discussing he case. In March, a district court found that the FBI had failed to demonstrate the need for this gag, and struck it down pending an appeal by the government. But in November, the government decided to drop its appeal of that order, leaving CREDO free to talk about why the legal challenge is important to the company and its customers.
“A founding principle of CREDO is to fight for progressive causes we believe in, and we believe that NSLs are unconstitutional,” CREDO CEO Ray Morris said.

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Posted on December 1, 2016