The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sued Facebook Thursday for engaging in housing discrimination by allowing advertisers to restrict who is able to see ads on the platform based on characteristics like race, religion and national origin. In addition to targeting Facebook's advertising practices, HUD claims in its lawsuit that the company uses its data-mining practices to determine which of its users are able to view housing-related ads. On both counts, the agency said, Facebook is in violation of the federal Fair Housing Act. How big of a problem is this?
The British government on Thursday released a scathing assessment of the security risks posed by the Chinese telecom company Huawei to Britain's telecom networks, as London weighs whether to heed US calls to bar the firm from the next-generation 5G network over fears it will enable spying by the Chinese government and potential cyberattacks. How much of this concern is justified, and how much of this, if any, is hype?
CODEPINK has released their ranking of the 2020 presidential candidates on war, peace and military spending. According to their summary, "Forty-five years after Congress passed the War Powers Act in the wake of the Vietnam War, it has finally used it for the first time, to try to end the US-Saudi war on the people of Yemen and to recover its constitutional authority over questions of war and peace. This hasn't stopped the war yet, and President Trump has threatened to veto the bill. But its passage in Congress, and the debate it has spawned, could be an important first step on a tortuous path to a less militarized US foreign policy in Yemen and beyond." How do candidates stack up, and what lies ahead?
Two former top CIA officials, former acting directors Michael Morell and John McLaughlin, have compiled an unclassified report on the major national security challenges facing the United States, which they are distributing to every candidate running for president. The report is modeled on the classified oral briefing that the intelligence community provides to the nominees of each major political party running for president, usually after the nominating conventions. Should we be concerned about who is preparing this and what's in it?
GUEST:
Chris Garaffa — Web developer and technologist.
William Binney — Former highly placed intelligence official with the United States National Security Agency turned whistle-blower, who resigned on October 31, 2001, after more than 30 years with the agency.
Medea Benjamin — Co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK and co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange. She has been an advocate for social justice for more than 40 years.
John Kiriakou — Co-host of Loud and Clear on Radio Sputnik.
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