Blog of Rights
Amanda
Simon
09/19/2011
Indefinite Detention

Will the Senate Forget the Lessons from Japanese-American Internment?

By Amanda Simon at 1:02pm

The U.S. Senate is considering the unthinkable, changing detention laws to imprison people – including Americans – indefinitely and without charge. Before they proceed, they should review our own history by listening to the voices of the last people systematically targeted and detained by the U.S. government: Japanese-Americans.

Today the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) sent an important letter to the Senate regarding two damaging sections of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) - Sections 1031 and 1032. As we've talked to you about before, this would be the first time since 1950 that Congress authorized the American government to detain its citizens without charge or trial.

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06/13/2011

FBI Lowers the Surveillance Bar Yet Again

By Amanda Simon at 3:46pm

Looks like the FBI will be once again lowering its already rock bottom standards for surveillance soon. According to a report in the New York Times — quoting our own Michael German (a former FBI agent) — the bureau is revising its surveillance guidelines yet again, updating the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, which governs the activities of FBI agents.

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05/11/2011
AUMF

Unchecked Executive War Power Could Slip Through the House

By Amanda Simon at 4:08pm

Tucked inside the National Defense Authorization Act, being marked up by the House Armed Services Committee this week, is a hugely important provision that hasn't been getting a lot of attention — a brand new authorization for a worldwide war.

This stealth provision was added to the bill by the committee's chairman, Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), but has a bit of a history. It was first proposed by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey in 2008 after the Bush administration lost the Boumediene v. Bush case, in which the Supreme Court decided that federal courts would subject the administration's asserted law of war basis to hold Guantanamo detainees to searching review. An idea that may have originally been intended to bolster the Bush administration's basis for holding Guantanamo detainees is now being promoted as an authorization of a worldwide war — and could become the single biggest ceding of unchecked war authority to the executive branch in modern American history.

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04/14/2011
LGBT Discrimination in the Workplace

Putting an END(A) to Workplace Discrimination

By Amanda Simon at 11:06am

Congress is about to take up an incredibly important bill that will affect thousands of American workers. The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which was reintroduced in the House last week and in the Senate today, would prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in most American workplaces. Though the bill has been introduced countless times in several iterations, it has never been made law.

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04/08/2011
ECPA

A Straight Answer on Warrants for Email from the Government? Not So Easy.

By Amanda Simon at 6:15pm

The Senate Judiciary Committee met this week to hear testimony from Obama administration officials on upcoming plans to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). You remember ECPA? That bill passed in 1986 — before we had the World Wide Web — to protect your electronic records and which hasn't been updated since?

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01/18/2011

ACLU On Frontline Tonight

By Amanda Simon at 5:14pm

The ACLU Washington Legislative Office’s own Mike German will be appearing in tonight’s Frontline report Are We Safer? talking about the expansion of domestic surveillance since 9/11and its impact on your civil liberties.

Topics will include spying on protesters, suspicious activity reporting and those pesky fusion centers.

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07/09/2010
Indefinite Detention

Does Sen. Lindsey Graham Want Another Declaration of War?

By Amanda Simon at 12:58pm

Buried in a New York Times story on the Obama administration’s failure to close Guantanamo Bay a few weeks ago was a link to Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) much-discussed and much-anticipated draft legislation. For months and months, we’ve read story after story about Sen. Graham’s negotiations on habeas corpus and detention policy for “enemy combatants” with the White House, but this was the first time the draft policy was made public.

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06/29/2010

Spyfiles. Now With 100% More Spying!

By Amanda Simon at 5:18pm

The ACLU relaunched its Spyfiles site today with the release of report that found over 100 specific incidents of political surveillance and harassment by U.S. law enforcement agencies in 33 states and the District of Columbia since 9/11. For those of you that read this blog regularly, that's not a huge surprise.

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06/10/2010

Facts vs. Fiction on the Military’s Abortion Ban

By Amanda Simon at 5:43pm

The Washington Times published an article Tuesday on the Senate Armed Services Committee’s recent move to repeal a ban on private funding for abortions on military bases. The story contained several misleading and unfortunate claims from anti-abortion members of Congress. The paper then followed up that article with an editorial today in which the paper itself that takes many of those claims to a new level.

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04/27/2010

House Introduces Criminal Justice Commission Bill; ACLU Says "Pleased To Meet You"

By Amanda Simon at 4:18pm

A bill was introduced today in the House that replicates a criminal justice bill already making good headway in the Senate. The National Criminal Justice Commission Act would create a bipartisan commission to study the American justice system and offer recommendations to ease imbalance and, well, injustice.

ACLU Washington Legislative Office Director Laura Murphy watches as Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Fla.) speaks about the need for criminal justice system reform.
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