Blog of Rights
Chris
Calabrese
Christopher Calabrese is the legislative counsel for privacy-related issues in the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington Legislative Office (WLO). Prior to joining the WLO, Calabrese served as project counsel to the ACLU Technology & Liberty Project (TLP).  As legislative counsel, Calabrese leads the office's advocacy efforts related to privacy and the responsible use of technology, developing proactive strategies on pending federal legislation and executive branch actions concerning data collection, surveillance, and identification systems.
10/18/2011
GPS Act

Location Privacy: Anyone Sensing a Theme Here?

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 2:00pm

The goal of the GPS Act is to protect privacy by preventing cell phones and other mobile devices from becoming portable tracking devices.

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10/11/2011
Do Not Track

Yes, They Really Know It's You

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 10:39am

Behavioral targeting tracks consumers around the web by monitoring every click and then selling and sharing that information to advertisers so they can target you specifically.

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09/14/2011
E-Verify

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs — Even the ACLU is Talking About Jobs

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 11:34am

Everyone in Washington is talking about jobs these days. It's not surprising — with the country trapped in a long economic downturn and the President making it his key priority. Job creation is not something in which we claim any expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't pay attention to our common sense.

This week the spin over creating jobs has gotten so broad it has even pulled in our issues. Specifically, House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith is pushing the committee to approve legislation to mandate the use of the E-Verify program by all employers. E-Verify is a series of connected databases, in essence a giant list, of everyone who is supposed to be allowed to work in the US. Before you start your job, your employer is supposed to check E-Verify. If you are on the list, you get a job. If not, you don't (or you have to go wait in line at a Social Security Administration (SSA) office to prove they made a mistake).

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06/14/2011

The Battle Over Immigration is About to Affect All of Us in a Big Way

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:51pm

Many of us have strong opinions about immigration, but few feel the direct impact from the injustices of immigration law. That’s about to change.

Despite a significant error rate, pleas from multiple sectors of American business, and the heightened risk of identity theft, Congressman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) is dead-set on pushing legislation that would make the flawed E-Verify system mandatory for every U.S. worker and today he introduced H.R. 2164, the Lawful Workforce Act, which would do just that. This initiative is one of the top Republican priorities for this Congress.

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05/26/2011

We Must Combat Child Pornography Without Abandoning Online Privacy

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:56pm

Sexual abuse of children is deeply evil, not to mention criminal. It harms children to an almost unfathomable degree. Child pornography commercially exploits that harm, exacerbating the initial crime. Unfortunately, terrible crimes can sometimes lead to law enforcement excesses in battling them.

Yesterday, Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-Fla.) introduced H.R. 1981 the "Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011." Section four of this legislation would impose sweeping requirements on internet companies, forcing them to keep records on their customers for 18 months — impacting millions of individuals who have no connection to the sexual exploitation of children whatsoever. It doesn't have to go down like this.

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05/17/2011

Equality for Email!

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:07pm

Today Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) took an important step toward giving all of us who live our lives online a measure of true digital privacy. He announced (via Twitter — not bad for one of the senior members of the Senate!) that he was filing the Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Act of 2011. It may not roll off the tongue, but it does do something even better — it protects all of your private digital communications with a search warrant backed by probable cause.

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05/09/2011

Yes, You're Being Tracked. It's Time to Do Something About It

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 11:53am

In light of the recent disclosures about iPhone and Android location tracking, Sen. Al Franken and the Senate Judiciary Committee are taking the very welcome step of shedding light on privacy and smart phones with a hearing tomorrow. The senators will undoubtedly quiz Apple and Android's parent company Google about their practices of storing a log of users’ movements on their phones. (We have some questions about Apple’s explanation as well.) We hope Sen. Franken will also press Apple and Google on whether and when the phones share that information with the companies. There is some indication that it’s a common practice.

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04/21/2011

Does the Government Want to Read Your Texts and Emails?

By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project & Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:45pm

Last week the Justice Department squandered an opportunity to reassure Americans that as technology advances our civil liberties will not be left behind. The Justice Department was called before Congress to say whether it should be permitted to read people's email, text messages and other electronic communications without a probable cause warrant — that is, without a judicial determination that it has a good reason to believe a search will turn up evidence of a crime. The clear answer to this question should have been "no." After all, a warrant has been required for postal mail since at least the 1870s and for telephone conversations since the 1960s. Why shouldn't our email receive the same protection?

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02/10/2011

Permission to Work: The Government Database That May Stand Between You and Your Next Job

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:13pm

The government database is called E-Verify. Its job is simply stated: make a list of everyone who is eligible to work. The theory is this will prevent undocumented workers from getting jobs and end our immigration problems.

There are only 150 million U.S. workers; how hard could it be to make an accurate list of every single one of them? As numerous government reports have found over the years, pretty hard (PDF). And the results have been devastating. U.S. workers excited to start a new job are instead thrust into bureaucratic limbo as they try to sort out government mistakes. Their new employers hire, then fire them and never tell them why; or worse, they might never be hired in the first place and not know why.

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01/28/2011

Spying On Surfing: Why We Need a "Do Not Track" List

By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 2:37pm

The new model of Internet advertising scares the heck out of us. It's called behavioral targeting. What that amounts to, in a nutshell, is following you around the web from site to site recording your movements and using that record to sell you personalized ads. All those ads that pop up on the side of articles on your favorite websites like ESPN.com or NYTimes.com are often not provided by those sites, they are from third parties that you've never heard of, with names like Lotame Solutions Inc. Using a variety of techniques, those companies are tracking where you go throughout the web.

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