American Civil Liberties Union

For the last four years, I've had the honor of representing 20 amazing organizations and individuals in our challenge to human gene patents. They include: leading organizations of pathologists and geneticists; scientists, physicians, and genetic counselors who work every day to improve our understanding of the connection between genes, disease, and treatment and the care they provide to patients; breast cancer and women's health groups, who spoke out against the effects of these patents on patients; and women who have family histories of breast and ovarian cancer, or who have already been diagnosed with cancer, and faced obstacles to their medical care because of these patents.

When Google published its first government transparency report in 2010, critics of the company showered praise upon the company, and rightly so. At a time when other internet companies were fearful of "stick[ing] their head up" by publishing surveillance statistics, Google boldly led the way. In recent years, Twitter, Microsoft, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Sonic.Net, SpiderOak and Silent Circle all followed, and received well deserved praise for doing so from public interest advocates.

Smartphones can be a cop's best friend. They are packed with private information like emails, text messages, photos, and calling history. Unsurprisingly, law enforcement agencies now routinely seize and search phones. This occurs at traffic stops, during raids of a target's home or office, and during interrogations and stops at the U.S. border. These searches are frequently conducted without any court order.

Several courts around the country have blessed such searches, and so as a practical matter, if the police seize your phone, there isn't much you can do after the fact to keep your data out of their hands.