Mind Horizon

In 2013 , George Reby was traveling through Tennessee when he was stopped by law enforcement for speeding. The officer asked Reby for permission to search his vehicle, and upon receiving it, seized $22,000 in cash belonging to the driver. The officer suspected the money was being used to buy drugs, as he later confirmed in an affidavit, saying,“common people do not carry this much U.S. currency.” But Reby protested that he was intending to purchase a car in Nashville, and even pulled out his computer with the eBay listing, which the officer omitted from his report. All of the money was whisked away by the police, and no criminal charges or investigations were ever carried out against Reby. In the interviews that followed, he stated, “If somebody told me this happened to them, I absolutely would not believe this could happen in America…You live in the United States. You think you have rights, and apparently, you don’t.” This is not an isolated incident, however. Similar cases h...

In part one, we looked at the rise of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, and how the two have done tremendously important work to create transparency and hold powerful governments accountable for their lies and atrocities. But Assange has not only set his sights on criminal governments; he has also dragged massive corporations into the sunlight to expose them for their crimes against humanity. A 2009 Minton report examining the waste dumping practices of Trafigura, a multinational oil trading firm, was initially suppressed but then leaked to Assange. The report detailed how the firm was dumping its toxic waste on the Ivory Coast in violation of EU regulations. As a result, approximately 109,000 Africans were affected by the chemical constituents, the harms of which include nausea, breathing problems, diarrhea, vomiting, skin burns, eyesight damage, and sometimes death.             The firm did this because they knew...