Tag: secrecy

More Secret Gender Transition Closets Discovered in Public Schools

They started in colleges, but trans closets—rooms stocked with transgender clothes and accessories for students to change into after arriving to school and back out of before going home—are being discovered in public schools with some indication they are being kept a secret from parents.

In a recent TikTok video, a California teacher implies that the trans closet he started at the high school where he works is meant to be kept from parents.

“The goal of the transition closet is for our students to wear the clothes that their parents approve of, come to school and then swap out into the clothes that fit who they truly are,” the teacher said.

The California Family Council and others eventually confirmed the identity of the teacher as Oakland Unified School District Spanish teacher Thomas Martin-Edwards, who is also the founder of “Queer Teacher Fellowship.”

Martin-Edwards, the teacher who runs the trans closet, is also transgender. He has posted videos of himself in the classroom showing off the stilettos he wears to school.

Neither Martin-Edwards, a former assistant principal in another school district, nor the school responded to inquiries by The Epoch Times about the trans closet.

Keep reading

School Nurse Suspended For Revealing Connecticut Public School Was Secretly Giving Children Puberty Blockers Behind Their Parents’ Backs

A school nurse was suspended after revealing the school worked at was secretly giving children puberty blockers behind their parents’ backs.

77-year-old Kathleen Cataford was suspended by Hartford Public Schools this week after she revealed the school secretly put an 11-year-old student on puberty blockers in a public comment on Facebook.

“Investigate the school system curriculum…CT is a very socially liberal, gender confused state,” the Facebook post read. “As a public school nurse, I have an 11yo female student on puberty blockers and a dozen identifying as non-binary, all but two keeping this as a secret from their parents with the help of teachers, SSW [social workers] and school administration.”

She continued, “Teachers and SSW are spending 37.5 hours a week influencing our children, not necessarily teaching our children what YOU think is being taught.”

Keep reading

Why the FBI Won’t Release Quarterly Crime Stats for 2021

Every year, the FBI releases its annual year-end crime report, which is based on data provided voluntarily by police departments across the country. This report typically comes out near the end of the following year. (The 2020 report, for example, came out in September of 2021.) Quarterly reports were actually a relatively new innovation, having been introduced in 2020.

To track the numbers that police departments report, the FBI for decades used a system called the Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) to collect data. But in 2021, the Bureau switched to a different system, called the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which provides more details on crimes that are reported. Though the change is meant to improve tracking, this week’s announcement from the FBI highlights what experts say are serious concerns about its impact on crime statistics for years to come.

The problem is that a large portion of police departments do not have the NIBRS system, which is expensive and can be difficult to implement into a department. According to the Bureau of Statistics, it could cost up to $377,000 for a department to switch over to NIBRS and over $53,000 for annual maintenance. According to the FBI, 63% of all police agencies in the country are using the NIBRS system; however, many of the big cities, like New York and Los Angeles, don’t use NIBRS, which means their crime trends will be completely left out of the FBI’s data analysis for 2021, including the annual reports.

“The absence of the two largest cities in the country begs the question as to what kind of confidence the public should have in the numbers produced by the FBI,” Rick Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, says. “This is a time period in which we really want to know what’s happening with respect to the most serious crimes. The uncertainties around the data are going to make definitive conclusions very difficult to draw.”

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment on the criticism of their collecting process and releasing the information.

Keep reading

CDC, Other Health Agencies Won’t Provide Employee Vaccination Data From 2022

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and three other top federal health agencies are refusing to provide employee COVID-19 vaccination data for 2022.

The CDC and the other agencies, including the one that is forcing virtually all health care workers to get a vaccine, say their most current employee vaccination data is from Dec. 3, 2021.

The Epoch Times asked the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), through media requests and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, to provide vaccination data current through March 2022, including the number of unvaccinated workers and the number of workers who received an exemption to President Joe Biden’s federal worker mandate, which is blocked by courts as of January.

The CDC recommends COVID-19 vaccination for virtually all Americans 5 and older. Its guidance has been used to justify mandates across the country, including on the federal level.

An official at the agency, which has 12,045 employees, pointed to the December 2021 figures. At that time, 96.4 percent of the CDC’s employees had gotten vaccinated and another 3.2 percent were in compliance with the mandate, or had pending or approved exemption requests.

Keep reading

Dick Durbin blocks documents showing Ketanji Brown Jackson’s judicial record

The Senate hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination are not going well.

Senate Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin is blocking the release of documents showing Brown Jackson’s actual record as a judge, taking a page from the tactics of impeachment-obsessed Rep. Adam Schiff. That’s how Democrats do hearings these days.

 According to John Solomon’s Just The News:

The Biden administration is keeping more than 48,000 pages of records about Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson from senators reviewing her nomination, including documents about her time at the U.S. Sentencing Commission that she has made a central part of her professional story.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) is “hiding” records from Jackson’s time as vice chair of the Sentencing Commission, where she championed leniency for child predators, says Michael Davis, former chief counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Monday that 16,000 pages of substantive content has been released on Jackson, compared to the 48,000 pages withheld by the White House under the Presidential Records Act and FOIA exemptions.

…and…

“Durbin has refused a request by Republican senators to look at her records on the sentencing commission,” Davis told “Just the News – Not Noise” on Monday, hours after Jackson’s first day of testimony in front of the committee weighing her nomination to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.

Which signals that there is something they are trying to hide.

According to the Article3Project, Brown Jackson sentenced perverts, predators, and child molesters to less-than-recommended jail and prison time on a consistent basis.

Keep reading

Pelosi Congress Claims Sovereign Immunity in Federal Court to Keep Secret January 6 Videos and Emails

“The Pelosi Congress (and its police department) is telling a federal court it is immune from all transparency under law and is trying to hide every second of its January 6 videos and countless emails,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The hypocrisy is rich, as this is the same Congress that is trying to jail witnesses who, citing privileges, object to providing documents to the Pelosi rump January 6 committee.”

In November 2021, Judicial Watch revealed multiple audio, visual and photo records from the DC Metropolitan Police Department about the shooting death of Ashli Babbitt on January 6, 2021, in the U.S. Capitol Building.  The records include a cell phone video of the shooting and an audio of a brief police interview of the shooter, Lt. Michael Byrd. In October, Judicial Watch released records, showing that multiple officers claimed they didn’t see a weapon in Babbitt’s hand before Byrd shot her, and that Byrd was visibly distraught afterward. One officer attested that he didn’t hear any verbal commands before Byrd shot Babbitt.

Also in November, Judicial Watch filed a response in opposition to the Department of Justice’s effort to block Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit asking for records of communication between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and several financial institutions about the reported transfer of financial transaction records of people in DC, Maryland and Virginia on January 5 and January 6, 2021. Judicial Watch argues that Justice Department should not be allowed to shield “improper activity.”

Keep reading

The Foilies 2022

Each year during Sunshine Week (March 13-19), The Foilies serve up tongue-in-cheek “awards” for government agencies and assorted institutions that stand in the way of access to information. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and MuckRock combine forces to collect horror stories about Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and state-level public records requests from journalists and transparency advocates across the United States and beyond. Our goal is to identify the most surreal document redactions, the most aggravating copy fees, the most outrageous retaliation attempts, and all the other ridicule-worthy attacks on the public’s right to know.

And every year since 2015, as we’re about to crown these dubious winners, something new comes to light that makes us consider stopping the presses.

As we were writing up this year’s faux awards, news broke that officials from the National Archives and Records Administration had to lug away boxes upon boxes of Trump administration records from Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s private resort. At best, it was an inappropriate move; at worst, a potential violation of laws governing the retention of presidential records and the handling of classified materials. And while Politico had reported that when Trump was still in the White House, he liked to tear up documents, we also just learned from journalist Maggie Haberman’s new book that staff claimed to find toilets clogged up with paper scraps, which were potentially torn-up government records. Trump has dismissed the allegations, of course. 

This was all too deliciously ironic considering how much Trump had raged about his opponent (and 2016 Foilies winner) Hillary Clinton’s practice of storing State Department communications on a private server. Is storing potentially classified correspondence on a personal email system any worse than hoarding top secret documents at a golf club? Is “acid washing” records, as Trump accused Clinton, any less farcical than flushing them down the john? 

Ultimately, we decided not to give Trump his seventh Foilie. Technically, he isn’t eligible: his presidential records won’t be subject to FOIA until he’s been out of office for five years (releasing classified records could take years, or decades, if ever).

Instead, we’re sticking with our original 16 winners, from federal agencies to small-town police departments to a couple of corporations, who are all shameworthy in their own rights and, at least metaphorically, have no problem tossing government transparency in the crapper.

Keep reading

How government over-classification may hide UFO videos and harm our security

Remember those videos taken by U.S. military pilots showing unidentified objects flying at incredible speeds and executing impossible maneuvers? They’ve appeared widely in various media since 2017, but soon — if DOD gets its way — you may not be able to watch them, thanks to a move to classify all such videos and other materials relating to UFOs, officially known as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs). 

Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines recently acknowledged that excessive government classification undermines U.S. national security. As she wrote in January in a letter to U.S. senators, “It is my view that deficiencies in the current classification system undermine our national security, as well as critical democratic objectives, by impeding our ability to share information in a timely manner.”

She also acknowledged that excessive classification damages the public’s faith in government and “reduces the Intelligence Community’s capacity to effectively support senior policymaker decision-making.”

The DNI’s testimony followed that of senior military officers who have complained to Congress regarding excessive classification.

This is, in fact, a problem familiar to anyone who has worked extensively with classified U.S. government information. 

The DNI’s concerns are particularly timely and important. As I used to remind my security and counterintelligence colleagues in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, we did not win the Cold War because we were better at protecting information; we won the Cold War because we were much better at moving and sharing information, especially in the private marketplace, where the resulting efficiencies and innovation enabled us to consistently outpace and outperform the Soviet Union.

Keep reading