CyberLaw and Business Report

Sandy Rosenthal is an American civic activist and founder of Levees.Org, an organization created in October 2005 to educate the American public about the cause of the levee failures and catastrophic flooding in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.  In the aftermath of one of the worst disasters in U.S. history, Words Whispered in Water tells the story of one woman’s fight―against all odds―to expose a mammoth federal agency―and win. It’s a horror story, a mystery, and David and Goliath story all in one. In 2005, the entire world watched as a major U.S. city was nearly wiped off the map. The levees ruptured and New Orleans drowned. But while newscasters attributed the New Orleans flood to “natural catastrophes” and other types of disasters, citizen investigator Sandy Rosenthal set out to expose the true culprit and compel the media and government to tell the truth. This is her story. When the protective steel flood-walls broke, the Army Corps of Engineers―with cooperation from big media―turned the blame on natural types of disasters. In the chaotic aftermath, Rosenthal uncovers the U.S. corruption, and big media at the root. Follow this New Orleans hero as she exposes the federal agency’s egregious design errors and eventually changes the narrative surrounding the New Orleans flood. In this engaging and revealing tale of man versus nature and man versus man, Words Whispered in Water proves that the power of a single individual is alive and well. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

An intriguing and accessible nonfiction graphic novel about the role that wealth and influence play in American democracy.Despite our immense political divisions, Americans are nearly united in our belief that something is wrong with our government: It works for the wealthy and powerful, but not for anyone else. Unrig exposes the twisted roots of our broken democracy and highlights the heroic efforts of those "Unrigging" the system to return power to We the People.This stirring nonfiction graphic novel by democracy reform leader Daniel G. Newman and artist George O’Connor takes readers behind the scenes—from the sweaty cubicles where senators dial corporate CEOs for dollars, to lavish retreats where billionaires boost their favored candidates, to the map rooms where lawmakers scheme to handpick their voters. Unrig also highlights surprising solutions that limit the influence of big money and redraw the lines of political power.If you're overwhelmed by negative news and despairing about the direction of our country, Unrig is a tonic that will restore your faith and reveal the path forward to fix our broken democracy.Daniel G. Newman is a national expert on government accountability and money in politics. He is president and co-founder of MapLight, a nonpartisan nonprofit that promotes transparency and political reform. Newman has appeared in hundreds of media outlets, including CNN, CBS, MSNBC, FOX Business News, and NPR. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

As with past years, we conclude 2019 with our annual Heroes and Zeros show with our good friends Brenda Christensen and Dan Tynan.Except this year, we are covering Heroes and Zeros both for 2019 and the decade as a whole. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Josh Levin is the national editor at Slate and the host of the sports podcast Hang Up and Listen. He previously worked at the Washington City Paper and has written for Sports Illustrated, the Atlantic, GQ, and Play: The New York Times Sports Magazine. He is a graduate of Brown University. The Daily Beast calls his book, The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth (Little, Brown and Company), "one of the most outlandish true crime capers of the season. On the South Side of Chicago in 1974, Linda Taylor reported a phony burglary, concocting a lie about stolen furs and jewelry. The detective who checked it out soon discovered she was a welfare cheat who drove a Cadillac to collect ill-gotten government checks. And that was just the beginning: Taylor, it turned out, was also a kidnapper, and possibly a murderer. A desperately ill teacher, a combat-traumatized Marine, an elderly woman hungry for companionship— after Taylor came into their lives, all three ended up dead under suspicious circumstances. But nobody- not the journalists who touted her story, not the police, and not presidential candidate Ronald Reagan- seemed to care about anything but her welfare thievery. Part social history, part true-crime investigation, Josh Levin's mesmerizing book, the product of six years of reporting and research, is a fascinating account of American racism, and an exposé of the "welfare queen" myth, one that fueled political debates that reverberate to this day. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Philip Mudd, the ex-deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and FBI's National Security Branch, appears regularly on Fox News, CNN, and NPR. He is the current director of enterprise risk at SouthernSun asset management in Memphis, Tennessee.Black Site: The CIA in the Post-9/11 World is a bold account of one of the most controversial and haunting initiatives in American history, Black Site tells the full story of the post-9/11 counterterrorism world at the CIA.When the towers fell on September 11, 2001, nowhere were the reverberations more powerfully felt than at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Almost overnight, the intelligence organization evolved into a warfighting intelligence service, constructing what was known internally as “the Program”: a web of top-secret detention facilities intended to help prevent future attacks on American soil and around the world. With Black Site, former deputy director of the CIA Counterterrorist Center Philip Mudd presents a full, never-before-told story of this now-controversial program, directly addressing how far America went to pursue al-Qa’ida and prevent another catastrophe.Heated debates about torture were later ignited in 2014 after the US Senate published a report of the Program, detailing the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” to draw information from detainees. The report, Mudd posits, did not fully address key questions: How did the officials actually come to their decisions? What happened at the detention facilities―known as “Black Sites”―on a day-to-day basis? What did they look like? How were prisoners transported there? And how did the officers feel about what they were doing?Black Site seeks answers to these questions and more, first by examining pre-9/11 Langley, when the CIA was tasked with collecting, disseminating, and analyzing information related to overseas events. Mudd argues that September 12, 2001, marked an operational revolution, as officials suddenly felt the weight of protecting a nation from a second wave of attacks inside the United States. Re-creating the incredibly tense atmosphere of the time, Mudd reveals that many officials felt an unshakable personal responsibility to thwart another attack.Based on interviews from dozens of officials―many of whom have never spoken out before― Black Site illuminates how the Agency quickly stepped into the process of organizing a full-blown interrogation program. Mudd offers a deeper understanding of how the enhanced interrogation techniques were developed and how intelligence professionals prepared to talk to the world’s most hardened terrorists. With careful detail, he takes us through the process of each legally approved technique, including waterboarding.As compelling as it is revelatory, Black Site shows us the tragedy and triumph of the CIA during its most difficult days. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

A deeply textured and compelling biography of comedy giant Mel Brooks, covering his rags-to-riches life and triumphant career in television, films, and theater, from Patrick McGilligan, the acclaimed author of Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. Patrick McGilligan is the author of Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light; Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast; and George Cukor: A Double Life; and books on the lives of directors Nicholas Ray, Robert Altman, and Oscar Micheaux, and actors James Cagney, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood. He also edited the acclaimed five-volume Backstory series of interviews with Hollywood screenwriters and (with Paul Buhle), the definitive Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, not far from Kenosha, where Orson Welles was born. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Alissa Quart is the executive editor of the journalism non-profit Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She co-founded its current incarnation with Barbara Ehrenreich. She is also the author of four previous acclaimed books, Branded, Republic of Outsiders, Hothouse Kids and the poetry book Monetized. She writes the Outclassed column for The Guardian and has published features and reported commentary in many magazines and newspapers, most recently for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Nationand The New York Review of Books. She has won the Columbia Journalism School’s 2018 Alumni Award and the LA Press Club Award for Commentary, was a 2010 Nieman fellow at Harvard University, and has been nominated for an Emmy and a National Magazine Award. Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America (Ecco) is her most recent book. Alissa Quart, executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, examines the lives of many middle-class Americans who can now barely afford to raise children. Through gripping firsthand storytelling, Quart shows how our country has failed its families. Her subjects—from professors to lawyers to caregivers to nurses—have been wrung out by a system that doesn’t support them, and enriches only a tiny elite. Squeezed is an eye-opening page-turner. Powerfully argued, deeply reported, and ultimately hopeful, it casts a bright, clarifying light on families struggling to thrive in an economy that holds too few options. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Miriam Pawel is the author of In The Browns of California, journalist, and scholar. Miriam weaves a narrative history that spans four generations, from August Schuckman, the Prussian immigrant who crossed the Plains in 1852 and settled on a northern California ranch, to his great-grandson Jerry Brown, who reclaimed the family homestead one hundred forty years later. Through the prism of their lives, we gain an essential understanding of California and an appreciation of its importance. The magisterial story is enhanced by dozens of striking photos, many published for the first time. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

CLBR presents its annual year-end Heroes and Zeros episode as guests Brenda Christensen, Denise Howell and Dan Tynan highlight those doing wonderful things on the internet and those deserving a cyber lump of coal. Plus, Bennet announces sadly, it most likely will be our last live broadcast as I have decided its time to move on.  Officially, he is taking a break for a few months before finally deciding whether to continue with the show for a ninth season. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Beth Macy is the author of the widely acclaimed and bestselling books Truevine and Factory Man. Based in Roanoke, Virginia for three decades, her reporting has won more than a dozen national awards, including a Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard. Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America (Little, Brown and Company) is the only book to fully chart the devastating opioid crisis in America: "a harrowing, deeply compassionate dispatch from the heart of a national emergency" (New York Times) from a bestselling author and journalist who has lived through it. In this masterful work, Beth Macy takes us into the epicenter of America's twenty-plus year struggle with opioid addiction. From distressed small communities in Central Appalachia to wealthy suburbs; from disparate cities to once-idyllic farm towns; it's a heartbreaking trajectory that illustrates how this national crisis has persisted for so long and become so firmly entrenched. In these politically fragmented times, Beth Macy shows, astonishingly, that the only thing that unites Americans across geographic and class lines is opioid drug abuse. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Michael Beschloss is the author of nine books on presidential history, including, most recently, the New York Times bestsellers Presidential Courage and The Conquerors, as well as two volumes on Lyndon Johnson’s White House tapes.  He was also editor of the number-one global bestseller Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy. He is the NBC News Presidential Historian and a PBS NewsHour contributor and has received an Emmy and six honorary degrees. Presidents of War (Crown) is a groundbreaking and often surprising saga of America’s wartime chief executives. Ten years in the research and writing, Presidents of War is a fresh, magisterial, intimate look at a procession of American leaders as they took the nation into conflict and mobilized their country for victory. It brings us into the room as they make the most difficult decisions that face any President, at times sending hundreds of thousands of American men and women to their deaths.  Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

A former reporter for the Charlotte Observer, Pam Kelley has won honors from the National Press Club and the Society for Features Journalism. She contributed to a subprime mortgage exposé that was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. She is the author of Money Rock: A Family’s Story of Cocaine, Race, and Ambition in the New South (The New Press). Meet Money Rock. He’s young. He’s charismatic. He’s generous, often to a fault. He’s one of Charlotte’s most successful cocaine dealers, and that’s what first prompted veteran reporter Pam Kelley to craft this riveting social history—by turns action-packed, uplifting, and tragic—of a striving African American family, swept up and transformed by the 1980s cocaine epidemic. This gripping tale, populated with characters both big-hearted and flawed, shows how social forces and public policies—racism, segregation, the War on Drugs, mass incarceration—help shape individual destinies. Money Rock is a deeply American story, one that will leave readers reflecting on the near impossibility of making lasting change, in our lives and as a society, until we reckon with the sins of our past. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Gillespie explains that his book I have been writing about the impact of platforms and the digital transformation for fifteen years,” said Gillespie. “This book explains how content moderation works: how the platforms think of their responsibilities, the way they create and articulate the rules, the labor behind the scenes, and recent efforts to automate it all.” Based on interviews with content moderators, creators, and consumers, this book contributes to the current debates about the public responsibilities of platforms, be it about harassment, data privacy, or political propaganda. Gillespie argues that content moderation still receives too little public scrutiny. How and why platforms moderate can shape societal norms and alter the contours of public discourse, cultural production, and the fabric of society. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Gaurav is Free Press’ policy counsel and works alongside the policy team on topics ranging from internet freedom issues like Net Neutrality and media ownership to consumer privacy and government surveillance. Gaurav’s human rights and civil liberties work has taken him from Capitol Hill to Uganda, India and Liberia. Before joining Free Press, he worked at the Government Accountability Project protecting the rights of national security whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, and prior to that as a legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. He earned both his B.A. in international affairs and his J.D. from the George Washington University. Outside of work he can be found getting some fresh air riding his bike to and from one of D.C.’s many roof decks. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It's CyberLaw and Business Report's annual Cyber Thanksgiving Special and for the 7th year, we celebrate the Wednesday before Thanksgiving with a special show featuring a guest panel discussing websites/apps they are grateful for, recommendations for Giving Tuesday and maybe even share what they will be cooking for Thanksgiving. Open source evangelist and troubadour Pete Kronowitt and Benét Wilson, founder and sole proprietor of Aviation Queen LLC, return to join Bennet on what they are thankful for.   Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

We continue our 2018 Miami Book Fair series with Obama National Security Council Alum Rumana Ahmed who is one of eighteen former Obama administration contributors to “West Wingers: Stories from the Dream Chasers, Change Makers and Hope Creators Inside the Obama White House“. Rumana Ahmed interned in the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence before becoming a full-time staffer. She then was a liaison to Muslim American and other communities in the Office of Public Engagement, where she also worked on highlighting community-based efforts to address issues like gun violence. Later, as Senior Advisor in the Office for Global Engagement and Strategic Communications in the National Security Council, she worked on advancing relations with Cuba and Laos. A Bangladeshi-American and Muslim who wore a hijab since she was twelve, Rumana was the only (and possibly the first) hijab-wearing staffer in the West Wing.  She played a key role in President Obama’s visit and speech at a Baltimore mosque in response to anti-Muslim hate crimes. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

James Miller is a professor of politics and liberal studies at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche; The Passion of Michel Foucault; Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977; and Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. He is the author of Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Today, democracy is the world’s only broadly accepted political system, and yet it has become synonymous with disappointment and crisis. How did it come to this? In Can Democracy Work?James Miller offers a lively, surprising, and urgent history of the democratic idea from its first stirrings to the present. As he shows, democracy has always been rife with inner tensions. Ranging from the theaters of Athens to the tents of Occupy Wall Street, Can Democracy Work? is an entertaining and insightful guide to our most cherished―and vexed―ideal. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Sarah Kendzior is best known for her reporting on St. Louis, her coverage of the 2016 election, and her academic research on authoritarian states. She is currently an op-ed columnist for the Globe and Mail and she was named by Foreign Policy as one of the “100 people you should be following on Twitter to make sense of global events.” Her reporting has been featured in many publications, including Politico, Slate, The Atlantic, Fast Company, The Chicago Tribune, TeenVogue, and The New York Times. The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America (Flatiron Books) is her most recent book. Kirkus writes it is,"A collection of sharp-edged, humanistic pieces about the American heartland...Passionate pieces that repeatedly assail the inability of many to empathize and to humanize." A clear-eyed account of the realities of life in America’s overlooked heartland, The View from Flyover Country is a piercing critique of the labor exploitation, race relations, gentrification, media bias, and other aspects of the post-employment economy that gave rise to a president who rules like an autocrat. The View from Flyover Country is necessary reading for anyone who believes that the only way for America to fix its problems is to first discuss them with honesty and compassion. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

At CLBR, we are proud of our record promoting press freedom with guests such as Reporters Without Borders to discuss global press freedom. For the episode on Raif Badawi, we prepared a special backgrounder on human rights in Saudi Arabia. Because of this, CLBR strongly condemns the apparent abduction, torture and murder of  Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi embassy in Turkey. We also are proud of our record of promoting human rights around the world from China, to Mexico and Saudi Arabia.  This includes a 2016 interview with Human Rights Watch’s Kristine Beckerle on Social Media and Women’s Rights in Saudi Arabia and an interview earlier this year with Brandon Silver of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights on the campaign to free jailed Saudi blogger Raif Badawi. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

We continue our 2018 Miami Book Fair series with lawyer turned acclaimed author Ben Fountain and his new book, Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion and Revolution“.  Fountain argues that the United States is in the middle of an existential crisis akin to the Civil War or the Great Depression that will require a “burning” of the old order for a new America to emerge. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy