Tag: secrecy

The Truth About Non-Disclosure Agreements In Non-Profits

MORE NON-PROFITS START DEMANDING VOLUNTEER NDAS

We were recently asked a question about NDAs for non-profit organizations by someone who had been asked to sign one. In light of that discussion, THE EASTON GAZETTE did some research on NDAs.

Non-disclosure agreements seem to be more prevalent than ever. Most of the time, we hear about non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) as they apply to high powered CEO’s leaving their positions or individuals involved in settlements of lawsuits. But now we are hearing about them in the context of local, small non-profit groups. What is an NDA?

A non-disclosure agreement (NDA) is a binding contract that obligates one or both parties to keep specified information confidential and to refrain from disclosing or misusing it. An NDA protects trade secrets, client lists, financial data, product designs, and other proprietary information. Parties sign NDAs before sharing sensitive material during deals, employment, or negotiations. Are NDAs Legally Enforceable?

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The practice of getting people to sign non-disclosure agreements applies in many different situations. For example, an employee either is hired for or leaves their job, and they may get slapped with signing an NDA by their employer. Some employees may sign an NDA upon retirement. That NDA must specify a particular time period for which that NDA is in effect. It also cannot use retirement benefits as leverage for signing an NDA. In other words, an employee cannot be coerced to sign with a threat of losing or reducing retirement benefits or health care.

are non-disclosure agreements enforceable?

Mostly, yes. However, there are clear stipulations to when NDAs are enforceable and when they are not.

NDAs are enforceable when they identify clearly defined confidential information. In other words, the NDA must specify a reasonable scope of information that is protected. It cannot just be a general statement that makes everything protected.

The parties, disclosing and receiving, involved in the NDA must also be clearly defined and both parties must receive something for signing, employment, access to information, or a business relationship. Neither party may be coerced to sign the agreement.

NDA’s cannot cover illegal activity.

When NDA’s fail it is generally because of an unreasonable duration for the NDA, a vague designation of what is and isn’t covered, an application to an existing employee without giving them anything new for signing, or an attempt to hide fraud, safety violations or illegal activity.

So, for example, if a corporation attempts to get an employee to sign an NDA so that employee will not disclose fraud of any kind, the NDA is invalid.

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Declassified Docs Show Deep State Letting Chinese Espionage Slide If It Helps Democrats

his week the FBI released newly declassified files on former Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., and Chinese national Christine Fang (Fang Fang). There are two heavily redacted packets: one from the San Francisco Division’s 2014 “Freshman Fifteen” public-corruption probe and the other covering counterintelligence and recruitment efforts. These documents fill in details that earlier reporting left incomplete and underscore how institutional choices allowed a suspected Chinese intelligence operative to operate with relative impunity.

Here is a brief summary of the case: Fang, a Chinese national who lived in the U.S. until 2015, was the daughter of officers in China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS). The FBI suspected her of being an MSS-linked operative and unsuccessfully attempted to recruit her as a source in 2013 and 2014.

Fang facilitated conduit contributions to Swalwell’s campaigns, contradicting the 2020 Axios report that claimed there was no evidence of illegal donations. She also placed interns in Swalwell’s office and maintained a sexual relationship with him. FBI agents built a case against both Fang and Swalwell and provided regular updates to the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section (PIN), then led by Jack Smith, who later oversaw the special counsel investigations into Donald Trump. Declassified files now indicate the case was more serious than previously understood. It remains unclear why the DOJ did not arrest or charge Fang.

Swalwell cut ties with Fang after agents gave him a defensive briefing in early 2015. Fang fled to China in May that same year. She remains in China and is barred from re-entering the United States. The DOJ closed the Fang/Swalwell case without action against either party.

The declassified documents reveal a broader reluctance among institutions to address Chinese influence operations targeting Democratic officials. Field agents reported Fang’s illegal fundraising and other suspicious activities to Jack Smith’s Public Integrity Section. Yet, no decisive steps were taken before the suspected operative left the country. Once Fang was safely in China, the chance to prosecute or further disrupt her network disappeared. Closing the case without charges left the underlying security risk unresolved.

Democratic leaders further complicated the situation. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi publicly supported Swalwell and kept him on the House Intelligence Committee for years, suggesting that party considerations took precedence over the counterintelligence warning the FBI had already delivered.

The Swalwell/Fang case is not an isolated incident. The same FBI San Francisco Division had earlier identified former Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s longtime driver and California staffer as a Chinese intelligence recruit. He reported on local politics to handlers linked to the San Francisco Chinese consulate for years before the bureau notified Feinstein in 2013. Sen. Feinstein dismissed him, yet no charges were filed. The breach occurred while she chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of the most sensitive oversight positions in government. Yet, her career proceeded without interruption or lasting professional consequence.

More recently, Linda Sun, a senior aide to Govs. Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul, was charged with acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government. The case ended in a mistrial.

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Hidden In Safes: Pentagon Uncovers Classified Documents On 5th Anniversary Of Abbey Gate Massacre

Five years ago today, 13 American service members were killed at Abbey Gate in Kabul, Afghanistan. Now, the investigation into what really happened — and who tried to bury the truth — may finally be blowing open.

Sean Parnell, Chairman of the Afghanistan Withdrawal Special Review Panel and Senior Advisor to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, dropped a bombshell on the fifth anniversary of the August 26, 2021 attack. His team has uncovered classified documents that had been deliberately hidden — “stashed and hidden away in safes where they would not be found.” After reviewing them, Parnell said it “became clear why someone tried to hide them” — but he declined to release the contents publicly until the investigation is complete.

The 13 Americans killed at Abbey Gate gave everything. Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo. Sgt. Nicole L. Gee. Staff Sgt. Darin T. Hoover. Cpl. Hunter Lopez. Cpl. Daegan W. Page. Lance Cpl. Humberto A. Sanchez. Lance Cpl. David L. Espinoza. Lance Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz. Lance Cpl. Rylee J. McCollum. Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola. Lance Cpl. Kareem M. Nikoui. Hospital Corpsman Maxton Soviak. Staff Sgt. Ryan C. Knauss. Their families have waited five years for answers.

Parnell made clear his panel is not interested in giving Americans a “convenient version of the truth.” The panel has already reviewed more than nine million documents — compared to roughly 3,000 documents examined under the Biden-era review. This administration is not looking the other way.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth participated in a Pentagon ceremony today to upgrade valor awards for service members who defended Abbey Gate, correcting what Parnell described as the “inappropriate downgrading” of those honors under the previous administration. These were Americans who ran toward the bomb and saved lives. They deserved better recognition then, and they are getting it now.

One of the most consequential and least-scrutinized decisions of the entire debacle was the U.S. military’s reliance on the Taliban — including the Haqqani Network — to provide perimeter security at the airport during the evacuation. The previous investigation concluded the attack “could not have been prevented at the tactical level.” The new panel is not accepting that answer on faith.

Washington made the decisions in Afghanistan. Americans carried the consequences. What is in those safes may finally tell the families — and the country — what their government chose to hide.

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Feds keep 860 million pages of historical records inaccessible to Canadians

Nearly 860 million pages of historical records held by Library and Archives Canada remain inaccessible to the public, according to internal federal documents obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter.

An April 21 briefing note, Comprehensive Expenditure Review, revealed an estimated 78% of the federal archives remain closed, leaving only 22% to 25% of records accessible to Canadians either online or in person.

“Seventy-eight percent of records, 860 million pages, are still inaccessible, underscoring the need for continued effort and reform,” said the note, according to Blacklock’s.

Officials blamed the enormous backlog partly on the labour-intensive process of retrieving and digitizing paper records.

“Boxes must be physically retrieved from storage and transported from one building to another,” managers wrote.

Staff must then inspect pages, remove paper clips and staples, determine which scanning equipment to use and review digitized files for legibility. Fragile or mould-damaged documents can require conservation work, while classified records create additional complications.

The problem isn’t new.

A 2021 internal evaluation found Library and Archives Canada’s backlog of private archival material stretched an estimated eight kilometres of cartons, with staff acknowledging the material was unavailable to researchers.

The Auditor General raised similar concerns more than a decade ago.

A 2014 audit found Library and Archives Canada was warehousing boxes without even processing them to determine exactly what they contained or whether the records were historically significant.

“Until the boxes are processed Library and Archives Canada will not know what is in them,” auditors wrote.

Among the warehoused material were 24,000 Department of National Defence records, some dating as far back as the Boer War, along with another 5,200 cartons from the Department of Justice.

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The rape gang trial the UK establishment doesn’t want you to know about

The trial of six members of a Pakistani ‘grooming gang’ has quietly restarted in Manchester. The retrial hasn’t made the headlines, and looking at the sordid details of the case, it’s clear the British establishment wants to keep it that way.

The six suspects were alleged members of the Rochdale grooming gang – a group of Muslim men, predominantly Pakistani, who trafficked, sexually abused, and raped underage white British girls in the northern English town between the 1980s and 2010s. More than 75 men have been charged and 53 convicted since Greater Manchester Police began investigating the gang in 2010.

What are the men accused of?

The suspects have been charged with 46 counts of rape, sexual assault, and ‘assault by penetration’, with two of the men facing more than a dozen charges each.

  • Tahrir Rashid, 53, 12 counts of rape, 3 counts of indecent assault, 1 count of assault by penetration
  • Mohammed Saleem, 46, 8 counts of rape
  • Sucklane Shah, 46, 2 counts of rape
  • Itfaq Hussain, 45, 3 counts of rape
  • Arshad Mohammed, 55, 5 counts of rape
  • Amjad Mahmood, 53, 12 counts of rape, 2 counts of indecency with a child, 1 count of indecent assault, 2 counts of assault by penetration

All of the suspects’ alleged offenses took place between 2003 and 2008, and involved two girls who were as young as 13 when they were “passed around” between the gang, according to prosecutors. Rashid, the alleged ringleader, is also accused of raping a 12-year-old girl in the 1980s.

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Court Backs DMCA Takedown of Public Meeting Videos

The US copyright system is often used as a tool of censorship, and a recent court ruling shows that there is little to stop this from happening.

The way the system is set up, it provides a powerful tool for anyone to unceremoniously remove content from the internet, with no questions asked. At least not initially.

That tool is the DMCA takedown notice, and the law that underpins it, and the whole system, is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). One of its sections, 512(f), is meant to deter abuse of this process, but as the court decision shows, it is toothless.

The case concerns a local news outlet in Massachusetts that had its YouTube channel taken down because of videos it posted about local government meetings.

The city of Waltham had outsourced the recording of its meetings to a contractor, Waltham Community Access Corporation (WCAC), and it was this entity that sent the DMCA notices to YouTube, targeting 15 videos on the Channel 781 News outlet.

This resulted in YouTube temporarily deactivating the channel.

But the court found that WCAC had done nothing wrong, and that its consideration of the fair use doctrine was sufficient, even though it was minimal.

The court’s decision was to grant summary judgment to WCAC and dismiss the claim that the takedowns were a misrepresentation under Section 512(f) of the DMCA.

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

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The Backstory on Bill Gates’ Secret ‘Q’ Clearance Is Revealed — And It Is Chilling

The mystery surrounding Bill Gates’ extraordinary access to some of the federal government’s most sensitive information is a bone-chilling look at how America’s elites are corrupting our government.

And the latest trail leads through nuclear research, the Pentagon, DARPA — and, strangely enough, Jeffrey Epstein.

It all began when Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) dropped a massive batch of government records last month, revealing, among other things, that Gates possessed a Department of Energy “Q” security clearance for more than seven years.

DOE describes Q access authorization as comparable to a Department of Defense Top Secret clearance. Depending on an individual’s need to know, it can permit access to highly sensitive Restricted Data involving nuclear programs.

Gates’ authorization was “reciprocally granted” on June 11, 2014, and terminated on December 6, 2021, according to the DOE letter released by Paul. In other words, DOE recognized an existing clearance granted through another federal agency rather than starting from scratch.

Which agency? DOE didn’t publicly say.

But investigator Sayer Ji, who is the Senior Adviser to MAHA Action, has assembled a timeline that provides a potentially important piece of the puzzle — and Paul himself is drawing attention to it.

“Fantastic explainer here,” Paul wrote. “Gates, a private citizen, had ‘Q’ level clearance, which is equal to a Department of Defense Top Secret clearance and is required to handle sensitive nuclear weapons data and Restricted Data. Was this for DARPA? And why? This was long before COVID-19.”

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Science by press release: Moderna cashes in on mRNA cancer vaccine without publishing trial results

hen the Food and Drug Administration approved Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine, the first ever, two weeks ago, the pharmaceutical company that reaped billions from federal taxpayers with its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine didn’t wait for the agency to even publicly post the approval. Moderna rushed out the news at 10 p.m., with a 4% increase in its share price the next morning.

It was a promising market signal for a drugmaker whose revenue cratered following the collapse in demand for COVID vaccines, which also led Pfizer to cancel a trial this spring for its own updated mRNA COVID jab. 

What Moderna left out of the release Wednesday, and the media ignored: the mRNA flu jab’s disproportionately high rate of serious adverse events compared to a normal flu shot – the same problem with its Omicron-specific COVID vaccine three years ago – and the number of jabs required to prevent a single hospitalization, 5,000.

Yet the market and the media went crazy for Moderna this week when it announced “positive topline results” from a late-stage trial of its cancer vaccine with Merck, with a 177% spike in its share price on top of a 357% increase this year before the cancer vaccine news, despite no published trial data or FDA approval. 

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They Built Cities Beneath Your Feet: The 170 Bunkers They Don’t Want You to Know About

This article is based on declassified U.S. government documents, testimonies from former federal employees with top-level security clearances, and investigative journalism spanning over two years. The information presented here draws from Congressional reports, files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and sworn statements by officials such as Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under the Bush administration. The figures regarding secret expenditures of $21 trillion originate from her analysis of federal financial records. The event that first exposed the existence of the Mount Weather bunker—the crash of TWA Flight 514 on December 1, 1974—is documented in official FAA and NTSB reports. The facilities described are real locations, accessible to the public up to their security perimeters, though most operations conducted inside remain classified at “Top Secret” level or higher.

The December 1st Cover-Up

The mountain swallowed the plane whole. On December 1st, 1974, TWA Flight 514 fell from the sky above Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, its fuselage tearing through ancient oak and hickory before slamming into a granite face that shouldn’t have been there. Ninety-two people died in the impact, their bodies scattered across a mountainside that official maps marked as empty federal wilderness. But when rescue crews finally hacked their way through the smoldering debris, they didn’t find only death. They found a revelation that would haunt the survivors until their own graves.

Carved directly into the living rock, sealed behind blast doors weighing more than some buildings, a tunnel yawned open where no tunnel should exist. Armed men emerged from the earth itself—men who spoke in the flat, affectless tones of people trained to deny everything, to explain nothing, to make witnesses doubt their own sanity. They took names. They confiscated cameras. They made it abundantly clear, without ever explicitly threatening, that what had been seen could not be spoken of.

Those rescue workers had stumbled upon Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, one node in a subterranean empire that stretches across the continental United States like a second, hidden nation. While you read these words, while your neighbors sleep peacefully in their beds, an entirely separate America exists beneath the topsoil—hardened against nuclear fire, stocked with decades of provisions, connected by tunnels that shuttle the chosen few between major cities without ever seeing sunlight. These are not crude backyard fallout shelters from 1950s paranoia. These are underground cities in their own right, complete with hospitals, crematoriums, television studios, and enough supplies to sustain thousands of people for years after the surface becomes uninhabitable.

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Democrat Gov. Andy Beshear Demands Mitch McConnell Tell Voters the Truth About His Health

Kentucky’s far-left Democrat Governor Andy Beshear took to national television this Sunday and once again demanded that longtime Republican Senator Mitch McConnell provide a public health update.

Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, Beshear claimed he has “heard absolutely nothing back from Mitch McConnell” despite formal requests for information following the senator’s June 14 hospitalization after a fall.

“I’ve heard absolutely nothing back from Mitch McConnell,” Beshear said.

“And while I do hope that he is getting better, I’ve known him my entire life. I wish him no harm. I actually wish him good health. His boss are the people of Kentucky, and this is why the Senate – the Republican-controlled Senate – feels so broken. They feel like they’re not accountable to anyone.”

Beshear then escalated: “All he needs to do is call into this show for two minutes, or Fox News for two minutes, or do a video for two minutes to the people he’s supposed to serve. But you know what? He absolutely refuses to do it.”

The Democrat governor also took a shot at Senate Majority Leader John Thune, claiming the South Dakota Republican has a “duty to make sure all of your senators have the capacity to serve” and accusing him of saying “Not my job.”

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