By Noa Yachot, Communications Strategist, ACLU at 10:13am
Alex Gibney, the Oscar-winning director of the new documentary “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks,” joined the ACLU’s Ben Wizner to talk whistleblowers, accountability, and government efforts to plug leaks.
The start of the Bradley Manning trial this week comes against the backdrop of a broader crackdown on journalists and their sources, who play a critical role in exposing the government’s growing arsenal of secrets. Gibney and Wizner discuss the charges against Manning, and whether recent investigations—including both those against Fox News reporter James Rosen and WikiLeaks—indicate a creeping criminalization of the journalistic activity that is critical for a healthy democracy.
The result, as “We Steal Secrets” demonstrates—as does “Taxi to the Dark Side,” Gibney’s Oscar-winning documentary exploring the Bush administration’s torture regime—is an erosion of the mechanisms designed to make government both transparent and accountable for its mistakes and even crimes. Gibney asks, “Within the context of a government that’s making everything secret, there comes a point where, if there aren’t leaks, then how are we to hold the government ever to account?”
(WikiLeaks, for its part, took issue with its portrayal in “We Steal Secrets”—read some of the organization’s objections here.)
By Noa Yachot, Communications Strategist, ACLU at 2:38pm
The FBI doesn't think it needs a warrant to read emails and other electronic communications – despite the fact that a federal court has ruled that doing so violates the Fourth Amendment. Ben Wizner appeared today on Democracy Now! to discuss this and other ACLU revelations regarding government surveillances practices.
The ACLU this week released documents that paint a disturbing picture of the authority the government claims to access a wide range of our communications – from emails to Facebook messages and much more. These latest developments reinforce what has long been clear: it is well past time to modernize ECPA, the egregiously outdated law that governs our electronic privacy but hasn't been updated since 1986, before the World Wide Web was even invented. As Wizner said:
By Noa Yachot, Communications Strategist, ACLU at 2:31pm
A detailed and harrowing first-person narrative of a prisoner's experiences in Guantánamo is available to the public for the first time: Slate today published a three-part series of excerpts from The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi. The excerpts were culled from a manuscript hundreds of pages in length, which Slahi provided his attorneys, a pro bono team of ACLU and other lawyers. After being classified for years, Slahi's memoirs – of arrest, rendition, torture, and imprisonment without charge or trial – are finally seeing the light of day, albeit with some redactions.
By Noa Yachot, Communications Strategist, ACLU at 4:16pm
In the Guantánamo Bay military commissions, the ACLU is persisting in its fight against the government's legally and morally untenable claim that it can censor from the public the 9/11 defendants' personal experiences and memories of torture, rendition, and detention by the CIA. This week, we filed a reply brief responding to the government's arguments in support of censorship.
By Noa Yachot, Communications Strategist, ACLU at 1:47pm
In a sign of the growing international concern over the U.S. targeted killing program, three European parliamentarians today expressed grave concern over the program, its human rights implications, and its destabilizing effects on international law.
In Brussels yesterday, several members of the European Parliament (EP) hosted a first-ever briefing on the topic with the ACLU’s Hina Shamsi and Jamil Dakwar, and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, Ben Emmerson. It was announced today that two EP subcommittees will hold a hearing next month to further investigate the U.S. program.
By Josh Bell, Media Strategist, ACLU & Noa Yachot, Communications Strategist, ACLU at 5:04pm
You shouldn’t have to trade your privacy rights for the ability to use digital technology. But with technological advances coming so quickly, privacy protections are having trouble keeping up. That’s why the ACLU created the dotRights campaign – to let Americans know about what’s really going on with digital privacy, and to press corporations and the government to respect our rights.
You might switch off the GPS function on your cell phone – but that doesn’t mean that your wireless carrier can’t still track your location, store it for long periods, and hand it over to the government on request (it can and does). You might think that you control who can see what you do on the internet – but tightening your Facebook privacy settings or deleting your browser’s tracking cookies won’t change the fact that your online activities are being recorded and sold for profit to the highest bidder.
