This week, Kumars and returning guest host and policy analyst with Open the Government Freddy Martinez are joined by The Intercept’s Micah Lee, a journalist, activist, and prolific open-source software developer involved in the publication and analysis of recent leak, dubbed Blue Leaks, of about 270 gigabytes of police data from more than 200 police departments and fusion centers and some 700,000 cops. 

Freddy and Micah are both members of the advisory board of the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), which acquired and released the data before being banned from Twitter and raided by the German government. The gang runs through the different components and major takeaways from the vast trove, delving into Micah’s analysis for The Intercept and Freddy's report on fusion centers for Open the Government, including how fusion centers massively oversold the threat of left-wing protesters to local police departments while downplaying the threat of far-right violence and what the leaked police data can illuminate about the massive federal repression currently underway in US cities.

You can follow Micah on Twitter @micahflee and keep up with the work of DDoSecrets at ddosecrets.com.

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Roqayah is off this week, so Kumars is joined from the top of the hour by Albuquerque-based community organizer Selinda Guerrero, founder of the Albuquerque Mutual Aid Coalition and National Action Coordinator for Save the Kids, an all-volunteer organization working to end the school-to-prison pipeline. Selinda also organizes with Building Power for Black New Mexico, Forward Together, and the Industrial Workers of the World’s Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC), and heads the New Mexico chapter of the prison-industrial complex abolitionist group Millions for Prisoners. 

After sharing a bit about her background as an organizer and the genesis of the mutual aid project she helped kick-start earlier in the pandemic, Selinda fills listeners in on the plight of her husband and fellow Black Lives Matter activist Clifton White, who helped organize BLM protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and was arrested on June 1 by Albuquerque police under extremely dubious circumstances. Selinda and Kumars discuss the conditions Clifton and other incarcerated people are facing from California to Louisiana as coronavirus continues to ravage the US prison system. Selinda relays testimonials from those behind bars, highlights their organizing in the face of government depravity, and reflects on what it means to be a political prisoner. 

Please call Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham at (505) 476-2200 and Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller at (505) 768-2200 and demand the immediate release of Clifton White (DOC #60458). You can find a complete list of numbers to call and a sample script here. You can also follow the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee at @IWW_IWOC and IWOC New Mexico at @IwocNew.

If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts. We can't do this show without your support!!!

Roqayah is off this week, so Kumars is joined from the top of the hour by Vincent Bevins, an award winning journalist who has covered Southeast Asia and Latin America extensively for the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and the author of a must-read history of US regime change operations during the Cold War, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World.

Vincent begins by reacting to the breaking news that the far-right Brazilian government claims president Jair Bolsonaro has tested positive for coronavirus. As is customary, Vincent shares a bit about his political evolution and background as a journalist before sketching the basics of his argument in the book, which moves beyond its primary focus on the US-backed military coup in Indonesia to tell the story of the Cold War as colonialism by other means. Vincent outlines the peculiar ideological landscape of postwar Indonesia, including the blend of nationalist, communist and Islamist forces that rallied under the anti-imperialist banner of the country’s founding father Sukarno. Vincent charts the evolution of the CIA’s strategy from the early coups in Iran and Guatemala to the model, perfected in Indonesia and named after its capital, that would be exported around the world. 

You can follow Vincent on Twitter @Vinncent and find the latest on where you can buy the book at thejakartamethod.com.

If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon for as little as $5 a month. Also, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts. We can't do this show without your support!!!