American Civil Liberties Union

Yesterday, President Obama issued an executive order that institutionalizes the ongoing indefinite detention of detainees in U.S. custody at Guantánamo Bay. As ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero told the Washington Post, "It is virtually impossible to imagine how one closes Guantánamo in light of this executive order."

Furthermore, the Obama Administration reversed its January 2009 decision to stop bringing new military commission charges against Guantánamo detainees and announced that new trials will resume shortly. According to media reports, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is suspected of planning the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, is likely to be among the first detainees charged in new commission proceedings. The ACLU's Denny LeBoeuf blogged recently of al-Nashiri's treatment:

This afternoon, the Department of Justice announced that it would not defend the constitutionality of Section Three of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in court.

Late yesterday, a court unsealed three motions filed by the ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) last month on behalf of Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Icelandic parliamentarian whose Twitter account records were targeted by the government in connection with its investigation related to WikiLeaks.

We filed these motions in late January, but because they were initially placed under seal by the court, we couldn't tell anyone about them until the court unsealed them last night. One of the motions seeks to overturn a federal court order requiring Twitter to turn over the private records of some of its users on the grounds that the order is overbroad and violates our client's constitutional rights. The second motion seeks to unseal court records concerning government attempts to collect our client's private records from Twitter and other companies. The third motion asked the court to unseal the original two motions and the hearing.