Blog of Rights
Noa
Yachot
03/07/2013
Targeted Killings

European Parliament Members Speak Out Against U.S. Targeted Killing Program

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.

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02/06/2013
Targeted Killings

ACLU Court Filing Argues for Judicial Review of U.S. Targeted Killings of Americans

By Noa Yachot, Communications Strategist, ACLU at 11:54am

The courts have a crucial role to play in determining the lawfulness of U.S. drone killings of three American citizens in Yemen in 2011...

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05/21/2013
Human Trafficking

Prestigious Law Firms Join Fight for Guestworkers' Rights in Major Human Trafficking Case

By Noa Yachot, Communications Strategist, ACLU at 11:30am

Eighty-three Indian guestworkers who fell victim to a massive human trafficking scheme filed suit...

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05/10/2013
Online Privacy

VIDEO: Is Law Enforcement Reading Your Email Without a Warrant?

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 These latest developments reinforce what has long been clear: it is well past time to modernize ECPA, the egregiously outdated law that governs our electronic privacy but hasn't been updated since 1986, before the World Wide Web was even invented.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:

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04/30/2013
U.S. Torture

Guantánamo Prisoner's Memoirs Offer Rare First-Person Account of Torture

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.

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03/22/2013
Guantánamo

Censorship at Guántanamo: Thoughts and Memories Don't Belong to the Government

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.

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03/06/2013
Civil Liberties in the Digital Age

Visit the New and Improved dotRights.org, and Demand a Privacy Upgrade

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.

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