By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:04pm
During the Palmer raids from 1919 to 1921, the U.S. government created 150,000 secret files on Americans it believed held radical views. And in the 1950s it once again trampled all over our civil liberties when the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee ruined the careers of many loyal Americans based purely on their associations. The ACLU fears we are coming dangerously close to reliving these events.
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 1:55pm
It's a big week for reforming the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a little-known law which safeguards internet communications but hasn't been touched in nearly 30 years.
Yesterday the ACLU joined Americans for Tax Reform to push for an update to the law, and today Sen. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced a bipartisan bill that would do just that. The bill would require police to get a warrant before accessing email and all other online communications, like Facebook posts or photos we store in the cloud with Google, Yahoo, or any other provider. In addition, the House Judiciary Committee began a series of hearings today on updating ECPA. (ACLU statement for the record is here).
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:23pm
In 1956, in retaliation for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Alabama moved to stop the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from conducting any further business in the state and issued a subpoena that would have forced them to disclose their membership. The NAACP refused to turn over their membership, and in 1958 the Supreme Court decided in the group's favor. In the ruling, Justice John Marshall Harlan declared that “privacy in group association may in many circumstances be indispensable to preservation of freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs.”
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:44pm
Most people don't realize that the American government is in the habit of locking up journalists. We are disgusted when governments like China and Cuba criminalize the press, but in 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court said the press did not have absolute protection from revealing confidential information in court and, in doing so, dealt a significant blow to our own media. As a result of that decision, American journalists are repeatedly subpoenaed and, in some cases, imprisoned for trying to maintain an effective press.
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 6:00am
Last June I wrote about a police officer whose driver's license record was repeatedly accessed by a state-run database without proper authorization. She is an attractive woman and her fellow officers were treating her record like a Facebook page. She was stalked, harassed and eventually forced to leave town.
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:16pm
Although the conflict between government classification rules and practices and the First Amendment rights necessary to promote a free and open society is nothing new, recent developments may indicate an alarming shift away from basic First Amendment principles.
A recent article by the Washington Post showed surveillance of federal employees has been stepped up government-wide. According to the article, last year the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began spying on its scientists, claiming to be looking for the unauthorized sharing of trade secrets. The scientists, however, claim they were being targeted for blowing the whistle on an unethical review process. According the story, such invasive surveillance in the name of national security is spreading. The spyware sold by one software company, SpectorSoft--which claims to have clients in dozens of federal agencies--can do far more than just spy on email. According to the Post, “It could be programmed to intercept a tweet or Facebook post. It could snap screen shots of their computers. It could even track an employee’s keystrokes, retrieve files from hard drives or search for keywords.”
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:19pm
Late last month a Montreal homicide detective was found guilty of accessing a police database to pass citizens’ information to an organized crime ring to help it ship stolen vehicles overseas. We always keep an eye on these kinds of stories because abuse is one of the risks that is created by governments’ collection of personal data on citizens at all levels. These include records containing sensitive medical and employment history, contact details like email addresses or phone numbers, and even bank and credit card information. But when proponents argue for new databases, the fact that at least some of these records are almost certain to be exposed by crooked insiders is rarely accounted for.
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 3:51pm
While the Internet community came out in force to protest the free speech and privacy threats posed by the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an international trade agreement with the same stated goals—and potentially greater threats—was being negotiated behind closed doors. While the First Amendment can be served by intellectual property protections that incentivize content creation, IP laws can easily be misused. Like PIPA and SOPA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (“ACTA”) is another misguided and overbroad attempt to crack down on counterfeiting and piracy over the Internet. There has been excellent analysis of the issue by sources including EFF, Tech Dirt and Ars Technica, but we have also been watching this issue and wanted to summarize what’s at stake.
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 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."
