American Civil Liberties Union

In April, ACLU of Colorado filed public records requests seeking to learn about their local law enforcement agencies’ policies, procedures, and practices for tracking cell phones, bringing the total count of ACLU-filed cell phone location tracking public records requests to over 400. (We’ve written about what we’ve learned nationwide here, here, here, here, and here, and our findings were featured in a front page story in the New York Times in April). What Colorado learned is particularly interesting because a remarkable number of law enforcement agencies in Colorado are getting probable cause warrants before tracking cell phone location information—Arvada, Boulder, Colorado Springs, Denver, and El Paso County always get warrants in investigative circumstances—and because Denver’s practices pretty much follow existing legislative proposals, proving these bills totally workable.

It's a race to see which state will be the first to pass legislation governing domestic drone use. Coming out of the gate first was Florida, which passed a bill through several committees in the Senate back in January. This is notable since the Florida legislature didn’t officially convene until March 5—they thought this issue was so important that they moved the bill during their committee organizing sessions. Then Montana pulled up from behind, passing two drones bills all the way through their Senate by mid-February. But, Virginia raced ahead, sending two bills to their governor’s desk by the beginning of March, where they currently await signature.

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.