The only problem is, despite what the agency would have us believe, the NSA is mainly a spy agency, not a cybersecurity agency. The agency's website says:

The NSA/CSS core missions are to protect U.S. national security systems and to produce foreign signals intelligence information.

The Information Assurance mission confronts the formidable challenge of preventing foreign adversaries from gaining access to sensitive or classified national security information. The Signals Intelligence mission collects, processes, and disseminates intelligence information from foreign signals for intelligence and counterintelligence purposes and to support military operations.

But if you look at the current language from Executive Order 12333 (as amended in 2008), which governs the powers and responsibilities of the intelligence agencies, it is quite a stretch to say, as the NSA does on its website, that one of its "core" missions is "information assurance."

It's probably no accident that NSA puts the "information assurance" mission first on the website, even though the executive order makes it pretty clear that's not the case. They have been aggressively promoting themselves as the primary expert in the cybersecurity arena, even though the Department of Homeland Security was originally given the mandate. NSA is an intelligence agency, plain and simple, and we should continue saying so. Take action today by sending a letter to Google, letting them know that you object to such a deal and value your privacy online.

In one case, student Justin Layshock used his grandmother's computer to post a mock profile of his principal on MySpace, using the principal's name and picture to pretend it was the principal. The profile said things like the principal was "too drunk to remember" his birthday and has been drunk many times; was a "big steroid freak" and belonged to "Steroids International," in the past month smoked a "big blunt" (I'm guessing most of you don't need me to explain what blunt means in a footnote, like the court did!), and took "pills"; does not have a "big dick," is a "big fag" and is "transgender."

Justin's principal was displeased (go figure!) so he suspended him for 10 days, kicked him out of all interscholastic activities, removed him from AP classes and stuck him in a class with low-performing students. The ACLU sued and got Justin back into classes pretty quickly.

In the other case, student J.S. used her parents' computer to post a mock profile of her principal on MySpace, not using his name but including his picture and suggesting he was a principal in Alabama. The profile said things like the principal was a "tight ass," "wonderful, hairy expressionless, sex addict, fagass put on this world with a small dick"; spent time with his child who "looks like a gorilla"; likes "fucking in [his] office" and "hitting on students and their parents"; and loves "sex of any kind," being a "dick head," and his "darling wife who looks like a man."

J.S.'s principal wasn't pleased either, so he suspended J.S. for 10 days.

So you've got two mock profiles of principals, both of which are sophomoric, crude and vulgar. Both were created from a home computer, without school resources, and were never physically brought into the school. Both schools claimed that the MySpace postings were "disruptive," but all four of the courts that reviewed the two fact patterns agreed there was minimal disruption, and certainly not enough to justify punishment by the school. Pretty similar facts so you'd expect the same result. But you'd be wrong.

In Layshock, the appeals court ruled that the school violated Justin's First Amendment free speech rights. The court observed that, "It would be an unseemly and dangerous precedent to allow the state in the guise of school authorities to reach into a child's home and control his/her actions there to the same extent that they can control that child when he/she participates in school sponsored activities," and allowing the school to punish Justin "would create just such a precedent." Clear enough.

But in the other case, the court upheld J.S.'s punishment. Two of the judges wrote (the third judge dissented) that just because the speech "originates from a computer located off campus," school officials should not be "left powerless to discipline the student." Ultimately, school officials have the same power, in and out of school, to regulate student speech "challenging" a school official's "fitness to hold his position by means of baseless, lewd, vulgar and offensive language."

So, you ask, how are the cases really different? Ok, here's what I can come up with. Justin was a high school senior and J.S. was in middle school. Justin lives in Western Pennsylvania, on the Ohio border; J.S. is in Northeastern Pennsylvania, near Scranton. Justin is a boy. J.S. is a girl. Justin didn't say "fuck" in his profile; J.S. did. Hmmm. It's hard to imagine any of these factors could explain the inconsistent result. One of our legal panel members may have summed it up best when he simply wrote, WTF!

Oh, one more difference: the judges. Six different judges on the two cases. Justin won his case 3-0. J.S. lost her case 2-1. So four appeals court judges thought that the schools violated the students' rights. Two judges, one of whom was district court judge specially assigned to hear the case, thought otherwise.

The issue of how much power school officials have over students' off-campus speech is growing in importance, as more kids have access to computers. The ACLU of Pennsylvania had hoped these cases would help clarify how to analyze these cases, but as you can see there was no such luck.

Over the past 40 years, courts have given school officials fairly broad latitude to regulate students' speech in school. All four of the Supreme Court's student-speech cases are based on the "special circumstances of the school environment," a factor that doesn't exist when the students aren't in school. And the Supreme Court has never ruled on this issue of how much power principals have over kids outside of school.

The ACLU's position is that school officials should not — and under the First Amendment do not — have the same authority to control what kids say when they are off campus as when they are in school. Out of school, kids' parents or guardians call the shots. School officials can talk to the parents if the kids post vulgar, disrespectful things on the Internet about teachers and principals, but we don't think they can use their official powers to punish the kids. At least one court got it right.

Needless to say, this didn't go over so well with several of his students who took the class to learn about health, not be indoctrinated with Professor Lopez's religious views. The ACLU's demand letter includes several examples where Professor Lopez presented his beliefs and opinions as fact, including:

• Presented a slide listing "homosexual facts," including on that described homosexuality as a "biological misapplication of human sexuality" and stated the "recommended treatment" is "psychological counseling" or "hormone supplements."
• Presented LGBT people as a burden on and/or threat to society, claiming, for example, that anything but a heterosexual union provides a "one-sided foundation for raising children."
• Presented Bible passages as "empirical" evidence that life begins at conception, in support of his assertion that abortion is murder and "the leading cause of death in this country" (because there are over 1 million abortions a year).
• Followed a slide on climate change in a presentation on "environmental health" with a slide containing a biblical quote about the world ending in fire, and said "that is the real global warming we should be worried about."
• Repeatedly referenced the Bible and used it as a teaching tool, for example assigning as homework a question about Jesus' genetic makeup.

Obviously, Professor Lopez is entitled to his beliefs and is more than welcome to express them outside the classroom. But as a state school funded by taxpayer dollars, Fresno City College has an obligation to protect its students from religious indoctrination and anti-gay bias presented as 'science' or 'fact.'

The letter sent by the ACLU charges that Professor Lopez's lectures violate federal and state constitutional protections guaranteeing the separation of church and state. To satisfy its legal obligation to combat anti-gay bias, the letter also urges the school to mandate accurate and unbiased health instruction. The letter gives the college until February 15 to explain how it intends to address the problem.

Such was the case for Harold Strickland, who witnessed two undercover police officers chase, then beat and kick another man after he was handcuffed and on the ground.

Strickland, 45, was walking in South Beach one evening in March 2009, talking to his sister on his cell phone, when he noticed two men, who were undercover Miami Beach officers, chase a young gay Hispanic man through the parking lot next to Flamingo Park on Michigan Avenue, drag him to the ground, and beat him. Strickland hung up with his sister and called 911, reporting to the emergency dispatch officer at the Miami Beach Police Department (MBPD) that someone was being beaten by the police officers in the parking lot, next to a parked car. The dispatcher asked for Strickland’s location and asked him to walk closer to the scene to read the license plate on the car.

But there was no license plate. And Strickland had caught the attention of the two men who were beating Doe. The men approached Strickland, took his cell phone and verbally assaulted him with anti-gay epithets. The officers spewed insults: “We’re sick of all the f---ing fags in this neighborhood,” pushed Strickland to the ground and tied his hands behind his back.

Strickland told them why he was walking up to them and calling 911, but the officers ignored his explanation . After one officer continued taunting Strickland with anti-gay remarks, Strickland said he would report them. In response, the police officers threatened Strickland by telling him that “guys like him disappear every day.”

Strickland and Doe were transported to MBPD headquarters where the verbal abuse continued. After first questioning what charges they could charge Strickland with, the two officers charged Strickland with loitering and prowling.

On February 3, the ACLU of Florida announced its intent to sue the City of Miami Beach and the two officers on behalf of Harold Strickland.

"Gay men have been reportedly targeted by Miami Beach police near Flamingo Park for decades. Often, police target gay men walking near Flamingo Park for nothing more than looking 'too gay,'" said the ACLU's Robert Rosenwald. Furthermore, “The issue here is not just the violation of Mr. Strickland's rights as a gay man." said Ray Taseff, cooperating attorney and co-counsel. "All people have a clear constitutional right and a civic duty to report police misconduct. When police arrest individuals for reporting police misconduct, the public's faith in law enforcement suffers."

Thanks to additional efforts by SAVE Dade, a local organization whose mission is to protect LGBT individuals from discrimination, the City Manager called a meeting with leadership that resulted in an order by City of Miami Beach Police Chief for an internal affairs investigation and a review of the reports filed by the two officers. According to a statement released by the Miami Beach Police Department “a decision was made to reassign both officers involved in the reported incident to administrative duties effective immediately and pending the conclusion of the investigation.” The officers are off the streets and behind desks now. On February 9, the Miami Beach LGBT Business Enhancement Committee will be meeting with the Chief of Police, Carlos Noriega, in an open forum to ensure that the proper measures are taken to prevent a recurrence of this behavior by Miami Beach police.

The incident has shed light on anti-gay sentiment within the Miami Beach Police Department, and the ACLU of Florida is equally concerned with the retaliation against those who report police misconduct. It's our hope that our lawsuit will bring justice to those who have been victimized by this kind of abuse.

Facebook does seem to have learned something from the many criticisms of its recent privacy transition. There are two notable improvements in the Applications and Games Dashboard as compared to that debacle: (1) Facebook has actually created a privacy setting at the bottom of the Applications and Websites that controls who can see your Application and Games activities, and (2) it has set this to “only friends” by default.

We’ve talked quite a bit about the importance of default privacy settings, and as those go, “only friends” is certainly an improvement from defaulting this setting to “everyone” (or, worse, making it PAI that cannot be restricted). But even this setting is more permissive than the previous situation, when no one could easily find out which applications you used—and apart from a paragraph at the bottom of a blog post that few readers may see, Facebook has done very little to advertise the consequences of this change or the availability of new settings (one of the few things we praised during the last Facebook overhaul).

To change your own settings, go to the Applications and Websites privacy page and use the bottom control for “Activity on Applications and Games Dashboard.” You can choose one of the basic options, or the “Custom” option that allows you to share this information with only selected friends, to block certain friends from seeing this information, or to let nobody else see it at all.

Real control over information means giving people the information they need to make choices about what information to share before they share, not making changes and then allowing those who realize the implications to opt out. We hope Facebook will continue to work towards giving users this kind of control over their personal information so they can connect and communication without paying with their privacy.

Please join us and the Demand Your dotRights campaign as we continue to push companies to give us more control over our own information! You can help by signing our petition demanding that Facebook give you better control over your own information. Demand a privacy upgrade—Demand Your dotRights!

Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that Google — the world’s largest Internet search company — is negotiating an information-sharing agreement with the National Security Agency (NSA) — the world’s largest network for routine, mass communications surveillance.

The partnership is supposed to help protect Google’s networks, but the ramifications of companies like Google working with the NSA are frightening.

The NSA — a component of the Department of Defense — is an intelligence collection agency with few effective checks against abuse, and no public oversight of its activities. The NSA sucks up the equivalent of the contents of the Library of Congress every six to eight hours, every single day. In the last decade, the NSA’s dragnet, suspicionless surveillance has targeted everyday Americans, in violation of the law and the Constitution. (To lean more about NSA spying, download our fact sheet on “America’s Surveillance Society”).

If companies like Google think they need the government’s help to secure their networks, then a civilian agency needs to step up to the task. Cybersecurity for the American people should not be handed over to a military spy agency, one that is insulated from public oversight and has a history of secretly exploiting vulnerabilities, rather than fixing them.

Concerned? You can take action today by sending a letter to Google, letting them know that you object to such a deal and value your privacy online.

The use by states and localities of criminal laws to go after undocumented immigrants simply for being undocumented is generally unlawful, because the federal government has sole power to regulate immigration. For example, in 2005, two New Hampshire sheriffs arrested and prosecuted several undocumented immigrants for "criminal trespass," accusing them of being in New Hampshire unlawfully solely because they were undocumented. The state court that heard the case concluded (PDF) that the state law could not be used in that way because only the federal government can regulate immigration.

More important, the federal government's decision to prosecute more immigration violations criminally has diverted resources from prosecution of serious violent and property crimes. As federal prosecutions for immigration law crimes such as illegal entry have increased dramatically, with prosecutors choosing to pursue 97 percent of all such crimes referred to them, federal prosecutors have had less time for prosecutions for gun trafficking, public corruption, organized crime, and white-collar crime. Prosecutors currently only pursue charges on about 50 percent of white collar crimes sent to them by law enforcement. Localities and states that attempt to expend criminal justice resources targeting undocumented immigrants may reduce public safety overall.

Adoption of state and local criminal laws against undocumented immigrants has often been driven by misleading rhetoric about "criminal aliens," as well as by reliance on inaccurate statistics suggesting that all undocumented immigrants are criminals or a dangerous threat to communities. Local and state officials also often misunderstand the nature of the criminal provisions in federal immigration law. In fact, mere unlawful presence in the United States has never been a crime. When considering immigration reform legislation in 2005, Congress specifically rejected a provision that would have made unlawful presence in the United States a federal crime.

In addition, immigrants are not more likely to commit crimes than other residents of the United States. Studies have shown that increased immigration does not lead to increased crime and that immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated for violating criminal laws than non-immigrants. And a study of those immigrants most likely to be undocumented has concluded that they are not only substantially less likely to be incarcerated than non-immigrants, but may even be less likely to be incarcerated than other immigrants to the United States.

Criminalization of undocumented immigrants is a misguided policy that may harm public safety and violate federal law. The entire Issue Brief — which contains more information on these issues, including links to the cited studies — can be found here.

This is a welcome change: Today, women make up 15 percent of the military. More than 356,000 women currently serve in the Armed Forces and more than 222,000 women have been deployed thus far to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. It should go without saying that these women should have access to basic contraceptive care — EC can prevent pregnancy if taken less than 72 hours after unprotected sex or a contraceptive accident (the earlier the better).

The DOD deserves more credit than it sought for reversing a nearly decade-long policy that undermined servicewomen's reproductive health. But given what happened the last time DOD tried to make EC available to its servicewomen, it's easy to see why they might have been a bit gun-shy about publicity.

After EC became available in 1999, the press reported that nearly two-thirds of military treatment facilities (MTF) carried it. In February 2002, the DOD Pharmaceutics and Therapeutics Executive Council considered whether to officially add EC to the basic core formulary — the list of drugs that must be stocked at all military treatment facilities. Ethics consultants from all three military branches — hardly a group of rabid reproductive rights activists — had already concluded "that there are no apparent reasons to preclude the use of Plan B at MTFs, since it is an FDA-approved contraceptive and not, as some argue, an abortifacient." The council thus saw no reason that EC should not be "uniformly and immediately available" to servicewomen and voted to add it to the formulary.

However, when news of the decision became public, the then-Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs immediately rescinded the decision to place EC on the military formulary so that he could have a chance to "review" it. (I confess that I do read the minutes from the quarterly committee meetings, and I've never seen any drug submitted for a similar "review"). And so this FDA-approved contraceptive remained under "review" at the highest levels of DOD for more than seven years — until yesterday.

Hopefully, the decision to guarantee that EC is available to women serving overseas is the beginning, not the end, of needed changes. To reflect the reality of women's participation in the military, we must fully meet servicewomen's reproductive health needs — from access to birth control and regular gynecological exams to abortion care. Servicewomen dedicated to serving our country deserve no less.

Pundits and advocates of many stripes have been weighing in. Some criticize CBS for its last minute game change — in prior years CBS's policy was supposedly not to air "issue ads" during the big game; that's apparently why, in 2004, they rejected a United Church of Christ ad promoting its open-door policy for gays and lesbians. Others give CBS credit for opening up the airways (if you have a few million dollars, that is) and making room for something other than over-produced beer and car commercials. How open this policy is, however, is up for discussion: the press also reports that while CBS accepted the Focus on the Family ad, it closed the door on a gay dating service spot.

Our colleagues at Planned Parenthood have taken a different approach. They decided to go head to head with Focus on the Family and put out their own issue ad featuring two athletes — Sean James and Al Joyner — celebrating sports and family. They speak respectfully of Mrs. Tebow and the decisions she's made for her family, and they honor the women in their lives who have taught them that "women can make the best decisions about their health and their future."

Now, that's meeting speech with some powerful speech. Unfortunately, Planned Parenthood's ad won't be broadcast during the Super Bowl, but with a little help, as many people could watch it as will watch Focus on the Family's. Share the link with your loved one's and Go Saints! Go Colts! Go Women!

The right to free speech is undeniably one of the most fundamental rights we have as Americans. It is the breath that sustains our democracy.

When that right is threatened by government players, we at the ACLU — as the premier defender of free speech in America — take it personally. And so did Wayne E. Weatherbee, owner of Bee’s Auto in downtown Clermont, Fla.

In October 2009, Weatherbee erected 12 signs on his business property in political protest against the City of Clermont, which he claims selectively enforced its laws against him and his business, and has falsely arrested him. One of the signs pleads:

“ACLU WHERE ARE YOU”

Well, here we are. On Tuesday, February 2, the City began imposing a $75/day fine on Bee’s Auto until the signs are removed or Weatherbee obtains a permit. This series of actions crossed the line and unacceptably infringed on Weatherbee’s right to free expression, so yesterday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida filed a federal lawsuit (PDF) against the City of Clermont on behalf of the local businessman, charging that city officials have unconstitutionally targeted Weatherbee, attempting to suppress his free speech. The lawsuit also charges that the city’s signage code is unconstitutional and should be overturned.

So what’s really at stake here? Aren’t these signs just a bunch of eyesores in historic downtown Clermont? 

Political speech doesn’t have to be pretty to be protected.  And when a city regulates political speech based on its content, it is a violation of the First Amendment.  Clermont’s code, for instance, would allow, without a permit, a sign that urges viewers to ‘Vote for Crist for Senate,’ but would require a permit for one that reads ‘Impeach Gov. Crist.’ That’s viewpoint discrimination, and it’s unconstitutional.

(Notably, holiday decorations are exempt from Clermont’s permitting process and restrictions on size or number. That means that in Clermont, there would be greater protection of a warren of giant inflatable Easter Bunnies than of Weatherbee’s political speech. Not that there’s anything wrong with giant inflatable Easter bunnies, but...)

This isn’t the first time the city has violated the First Amendment. In 2007, the ACLU sent a letter to the city on behalf of a resident who was cited under the code for posting a “Vote for Ron Paul” sign in his yard.  The city wanted to charge residents a permit fee for posting political signs; although they backed down in 2007, they have failed to embrace the principle that political speech is protected speech.

Derek B. Brett, ACLU cooperating attorney in Orlando and Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Central Florida, is leading the ACLU’s efforts in the lawsuit. Brett says: “The city’s actions are abusive.  Since at least 2007, the City of Clermont has been on notice that the code violates the First Amendment’s protection of political speech.”

So here we are again. This time, we are aiming not only to prevent the city from further levying fines or collecting past fines placed on Weatherbee and Bee’s Auto, but also to strike down the Clermont’s unconstitutional signage ordinance.

Media cameras and reporters descended upon this small central Florida town this week to see the Clermont Sign War play out, and residents poured out to support the ACLU’s efforts, saying “Thank God for the ACLU” and even taking up a collection of donations for the ACLU’s work.

So, we march on with their support and your help, battling bad government policies one small town at a time.