By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:37pm
In a largely partisan vote, Senate Democrats defeated a resolution that would have overturned the FCC's open Internet rules that are set to go into effect this month.
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:53pm
Sadly, Congress is once again considering an amendment to the U. S. Constitution banning desecration of the American flag and, in doing so, testing our political leaders' willingness to defend what is arguably one of America's most sacred principles — protecting political speech.
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:15pm
Citing a variety of privacy concerns, a broad coalition of advocacy groups from across the political spectrum including libertarians, consumer groups and privacy advocates sent letters to both the House and Senate Monday opposing a mandatory E-Verify system. Problems with the system include increased identity theft and the danger of a national ID system. The letters include a full list of signatories and in-depth description of the privacy problems with the legislation.
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:38pm
Google released its new transparency report this week, revealing that U.S. government demands for the personal information of Google's users, like chat records or emails, continue to rise. The report serves to emphasize the heightened importance of increased transparency about how often the government is accessing sensitive information about who we are, where we go, what we do and why.
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 1:49pm
Last year Yasir Afifi, a 20-year-old U.S.-born citizen, found a strange device attached to his car. When he posted a photo of it online, the FBI showed up at his home two days later. They wanted their GPS tracking device back. The FBI had been tracking Afifi’s movement for months without his knowing about it. Moreover, the agency did so without a warrant and apparently based on the flimsy rationale that his friend wrote a blog they felt was questionable. This type of warrantless tracking seems to be an increasingly common government practice.
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 7:34pm
Schools collect a wealth of information on students. Some of this—such as grades, discipline problems, and household income—makes sense for educators to collect and can be vital to the protection of civil rights. Some—such as pregnancy, mental health, victimization, and criminal histories—is excessive. But under proposed rules from the Obama administration, all of it is about to be shared much more widely.
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:57pm
Last week, House Republicans called a hearing on the status of the employment verification system E-Verify. E-Verify is basically a series of giant, Internet-based government databases that contains a list of all American workers and whether they are eligible to work. The system is currently voluntary, but some in Congress would like to make it mandatory because they mistakenly believe it will curb undocumented immigrants working in America. While the evidence doesn't seem to support this theory — E-Verify only catches one in every two undocumented workers — what was interesting about this hearing was the variety of other problems that will likely occur, including concerns over the program's vulnerability to ID theft and its impact on lawful workers.
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 11:18am
It was a sad day on Capitol Hill as Rep.Peter King (R-NY) chaired a misinformed, counterproductive and discriminatory hearing in the House Homeland Security Committee to discuss the "radicalization" of American Muslims. Instead of focusing on the real threat of terrorism facing the U.S., King allowed his hearing room to be used to target and isolate the entire American Muslim community. We have seen similar behavior from those in power in the past and Rep. Laura Richardson put things in perspective when she announced that "the only difference between today's hearing and the McCarthy hearings she watched as a child is that today's are televised in color."
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:40pm
In 1994 the FBI decided it needed a surveillance system built into the telephone network to enable it to listen to any conversation with the flip of a switch. Congress obliged by passing the Communication Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), forcing the telecoms to rebuild their networks to be "wiretap ready." Seventeen years later, law enforcement is asking to expand CALEA to include the Internet, claiming that its investigative abilities are "going dark" because people are increasingly communicating online.
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 9:51am
Three years ago, while campaigning to be president, Barack Obama declared his support for net neutrality:
“What you've been seeing is some lobbying that says that the servers and the various portals through which you're getting information over the Internet should be able to be gatekeepers and to charge different rates to different Web sites...so you could get much better quality from the Fox News site and you'd be getting rotten service from the mom and pop sites… And that I think destroys one of the best things about the Internet—which is that there is this incredible equality there."
