By Allie Bohm, Advocacy & Policy Strategist, ACLU at 6:44pm
June: best known for school ending, kids’ going to camp, longer days, and increasing temperatures. Also known for being Torture Awareness Month. And, tomorrow, June 26, is International Day in Support of Victims of Torture (as declared by the U.N. in 1997).
By Allie Bohm, Advocacy & Policy Strategist, ACLU at 2:29pm
Rhode Island’s state legislature adjourned on Tuesday – or, according to their floor calendars, sometime after 2 am on Wednesday morning. (Ouch!) As in most state legislatures, the last day of session saw a flurry of activity, a rush to pass important bills that legislators could not allow to die with the session. Among those must-pass bills in the Rhode Island House of Representatives? A resolution calling on Congress to repeal Sections 1021 and 1022 of the Fiscal Year 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Those are the dangerous detention provisions authorizing the president — and all future presidents — to order the military to pick up and indefinitely imprison people captured anywhere in the world, far from any battlefield. The members of the Rhode Island House, like so many of you, found those provisions so abhorrent that they could not go home for the summer/campaign season until they had officially expressed their disapproval to Congress.
By Allie Bohm, Advocacy & Policy Strategist, ACLU at 10:46am
This week, the House Armed Services Committee has turned its attention back to the National Defense Authorization Act and began working on this year's bill. You remember last year's perversion that, for the first time in American history, codified indefinite military detention without charge or trial far from any battlefield? State legislators and activists and concerned citizens on the right and the left — and everyone in between — haven't forgotten.
By Allie Bohm, Advocacy & Policy Strategist, ACLU at 1:38pm
The ACLU has released the results of our public records requests to hundreds of police departments asking about their cell phone tracking policies. What we have learned is disturbing.
By Allie Bohm, Advocacy & Policy Strategist, ACLU at 3:21pm
Remember that time when Congress passed a law that tried to create a national database of drivers' information and turn drivers' licenses into national identification cards? And remember how groups from across the political spectrum joined forces to tell Congress, the president, and their state lawmakers that they objected to this law, known as Real ID, calling it an unfunded mandate that trampled on states' rights, decrying its lack of sufficient protections and potential to increase racial discrimination, worrying about its negative impact on the Amish and other religious denominations, fretting that it would create an expansive and cumbersome new bureaucracy or facilitate the tracking of individuals? Opposition to Real ID united everyone from the National Governors Association to the ACLU to the American Conservative Union, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and National Organization for Women to Gun Owners of America, to name a few.
