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 Allie Bohm, Advocacy & Policy Strategist, ACLU at 12:21pm
Updated 5/23/13
We’re currently seeing an unprecedented surge of activity in state legislatures across the country aimed at regulating domestic surveillance drones. (My colleagues Jay Stanley and Catherine Crump have this recent piece detailing the trend.) Working closely with our lobbyists in state capitols around the country, we have been tracking this activity and working hard to make sure these privacy-protective bills become law. The chart below shows the current status of state legislation as we understand it. We will update this as we receive new information.
By Matthew Harwood, Media Relations Associate, ACLU at 10:00am
Yes, law enforcement drones are coming, but if Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, has his way they won’t leave the ground without a judge okaying it first.
Yesterday, Poe introduced the Preserving American Privacy Act to ensure government, particularly law enforcement, use of drones will not violate the Constitution. Before police can launch a drone to search a non-public area, they will have to get a warrant based upon probable cause--the constitutional standard. For public spaces the standard will be reasonable suspicion of criminal activity as well as a reasonable probability that the drone will capture evidence of that criminal activity. Once the order is executed, the police will have 10 days to serve a copy of the warrant to the suspects under surveillance, although the bill allows judges to delay notification if it will jeopardize an ongoing criminal or national security investigation. If government entities violate the public trust and fly drones outside the law, the attorney general can order the Secretary of Transportation to revoke their license.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:48pm
In 2004, the ACLU produced a satiric video called “Ordering Pizza in 2015” that has become the single most-downloaded piece of content we’ve ever produced (at least we believe in the absence of complete stats). I won’t describe it—you can watch it here if you haven’t seen it—but like many successful viral products, it combined humor with a biting commentary on an all-too-real set of trends.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:08pm
A video touting software created by Raytheon to mine data from social networks has been attracting an increasing amount of attention in the past few days, since it was uncovered by Ryan Gallagher at the Guardian.
By Katie Haas, ACLU Human Rights Program at 10:07am
Aiming to determine the impact of border searches on Americans’ civil liberties, the Department of Homeland Security has produced a report on its policy of combing through and sometimes confiscating travelers’ laptops, cell phones, and other electronic devices—even when there is no suspicion of wrongdoing. The report was completed sometime between October 2011 and September 2012, and last week DHS quietly posted only the executive summary on its website, without many people noticing.
By Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California at 3:22pm
Last year was jam-packed with stories of companies making costly mistakes on user privacy and free speech. To help companies get a fresh start in 2013, the ACLU of California has just released the new edition of Privacy and Free Speech: It's Good for Business.
This primer (and companion website) is a practical, how-to guide illustrating how businesses can build privacy and free speech protections into their products and services – and what can happen if they don't.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:32pm
In April 2011, the White House set forth a proposed "National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace," or NSTIC. The document was a proposal to create a mechanism by which people could identify themselves online to another party with certainty—a long-elusive goal that has been talked about and pursued by the private sector and "identity community" for many years, without success.
The Hill broke a fascinating story last week: many major email providers are already requiring a warrant for the content of the communications they hold. What you say, this doesn't sound fascinating at all? It really is—just bear with me.
