American Civil Liberties Union

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. 

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.

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.

I wrote recently about the U.S. government and companies lobbying against the EU’s attempt to strengthen their privacy laws, and our own efforts at the ACLU to advance high transnational privacy standards. Our efforts helped attract a round of press coverage of this unfolding drama (including stories in the New York Times and Washington Post). We’ve also written a letter along with other privacy groups to senior Obama Administration officials, asking for a meeting to discuss the issue.