By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:34pm
So, Wednesday, I’ll be participating in an “Ask Me Anything,” or AMA, discussion on Reddit. It amazes me that folks are even interested, but the topic will be the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (“TPP”).
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:08pm
UPDATE: The State Department's response to the ACLU is posted here.
The ACLU sent a letter yesterday to the State Department thanking Secretary Clinton for the department’s unwavering defense of basic free speech principles in the backlash over the controversial “Innocence of Muslims” video. While the video was blamed for riots, violence, and unrest in many countries, the Obama administration stayed strong against calls at home and abroad to take down the video (though it did, rightly, receive some criticism for “asking” Google to take another look at whether the video violated the company’s terms of service).
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:56pm
I blogged recently about video analytics, the attempt to build intelligence into video surveillance so that cameras can not only record our every move in public, but also in some respects understand what they are seeing. Now comes word of the latest twist in this effort: “product recognition.” As Technology Review reports, a startup called Graymatics
By Kara Dansky, Senior Counsel, ACLU Center for Justice at 2:35pm
Last week, the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Investigations issued a report criticizing the Department of Homeland Security for its failure to ensure proper oversight over state and local “fusion centers.” Shortly thereafter, the committee issued a statement denouncing the report and lauding fusion centers as playing a “significant role in many recent terrorism cases.”
In Our Mothers’ House, by Patricia Polacco, is a children’s book about three adopted children and their two mothers. In response to complaints from a subset of parents that the book “normalizes a lifestyle we don’t agree with,” Davis School District in Utah has instructed its elementary school librarians to remove all copies of the book from the library shelves and place the book behind a counter where students must have written parental permission to read it.
By Mitra Ebadolahi, Legal Fellow, ACLU National Security Project at 10:24am
The ACLU is appearing today before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to argue on behalf of our client, Nick George.
In August 2009, Nick went to the Philadelphia International Airport to catch a flight to California and begin his senior year at Pomona College. At the airport, he was detained, abusively interrogated, handcuffed, and jailed for several hours in a holding cell – solely because he was carrying a set of Arabic-English flashcards for his language studies, and a book critical of U.S. foreign policy.
By Diane Balogh, ACLU of Eastern Missouri at 4:44pm
Book banning still makes headlines, but today the practice seems pretty old school. The 21st century form of censorship has now become Internet filtering.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 11:56am
The ACLU of Michigan recently put out an interesting report on surveillance cameras. Like other ACLU reports on cameras (such as those by our affiliates in Illinois and Northern California, and the materials on our national site) it summarizes the policy arguments against cameras. But it also focuses on a uniquely disturbing application of surveillance cameras: their deployment in residential neighborhoods.
Today is Banned Websites Awareness Day – a designated day within Banned Books Week – which is sponsored by our friends at the American Association of School Librarians and designed to raise awareness of the overly restrictive blocking of legitimate, educational websites and academically useful social networking tools in schools and school libraries. At the ACLU LGBT Project, this is a subject near and dear to our hearts, and today we’re releasing a new report about our work to fight back against banned websites.
