American Civil Liberties Union

Yesterday, six inmates from death rows in California, Arizona and Tennessee sued the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Department of Health and Human Services for allowing those states to import non-FDA-approved sodium thiopental from foreign suppliers to carry out executions.

Sodium thiopental is a general anesthetic sometimes used by doctors for surgery patients. The drug is also part of the three-drug cocktail many death penalty states use to execute condemned inmates. The only FDA-approved manufacturer is Illinois-based Hospira, which announced last month that it will cease manufacturing the drug.

Today, the ACLU will be in a federal court in Seattle arguing that the North Carolina Department of Revenue's (NCDOR) demands for detailed purchase information made by Amazon.com customers is an unconstitutional violation of those customers' rights to free speech, anonymity and privacy.

The NCDOR asserted it needed this information for tax collection purposes, so Amazon responded by furnishing a list of the items its customers had purchased, but withheld information linking those purchases to specific customers. But that wasn't good enough—NDCOR demands to know who bought what.

Over the weekend, it was reported that renowned Columbian journalist Hollman Morris — one of 12 international journalists selected to participate in the prestigious Nieman fellowship program at Harvard University during the 2010–11 academic year — has been denied a visa by the State department. The U.S. embassy in Bogota informed him that he has been found permanently ineligible for a visa under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Yesterday, WNYC's On the Media (OTM) profiled our cell phone tracking case. In this case, the ACLU, Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked the court to require that the government at least show probable cause before it can ask a wireless provider to fork over information about your whereabouts using GPS or cell tower tracking via your cell phone. We won in the district court (PDF); the government appealed that decision to the 3rd Circuit.