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.
If there’s one thing harder to put down than a good book, it’s a good book that’s been banned by those who would tell others what they should and shouldn’t read.
By Doug Bonney, Chief Counsel & Legal Director, ACLU of Kansas & Western Missouri at 2:05pm
Seventeen years ago this week, cooperating lawyers recruited by the ACLU of Kansas & Western Missouri were doing battle for the First Amendment in a major trial over the Olathe, Kansas School District’s removal of Nancy Garden’s award-winning young adult novel Annie on My Mind from all of the District’s school libraries.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of “Banned Books Week,” the American Library Association’s rousing celebration of free speech, and its condemnation of government shackling of library bookshelves across the nation. Free speech is a core mission of the ACLU: books are speech. They enrich us; they teach us; they entertain us; they confound us; and they challenge us. And sometimes, they make us uncomfortable. But there is no room on library shelves for censorship.
By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 2:07pm
At a time when the anger abroad over the Innocence of Muslims video shows no signs of abating, President Obama gave an impassioned speech Tuesday at the United Nations that was a full-throated, unqualified defense of the American tradition of free expression.
By Kade Crockford, Director, ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project at 2:29pm
This summer ACLU affiliates all around the country filed open-records requests seeking information about how government agencies are using automated license plate readers. One set of records, released this week to the ACLU of Massachusetts by the police department here in Boston, provides a snapshot of the data-collection practices that are taking place around the nation.
By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 11:59am
Back in the waning years of the Clinton administration, Congress quietly enacted an important internet privacy bill (the passage of which was overshadowed by other, more salacious developments). The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (“COPPA”) requires any website “target[ing]” children under the age of 13 to notify a child’s parent and receive verifiable consent before collecting personal information from that child. A lot of COPPA is about controlling online marketing activities involving young children, who may not appreciate the dangers in disclosing sensitive personal information to commercial entities.
By Sandra S. Park, ACLU Women's Rights Project at 1:14pm
Today, we asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review an appellate court’s 2-1 ruling upholding patents on two human genes associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. The case challenges patents that pose a serious barrier to using new discoveries in genetic testing and how genes influence the way cancers develop and can be treated.
BRCA1 and BRCA2 are two of the 23,000 genes in the human genome, 20 percent of which have been patented. We all have these genes, but women with certain genetic mutations are estimated to have up to an 85 percent risk for breast cancer and 50 percent risk for ovarian cancer. Myriad Genetics obtained patents on the “isolated” forms of the two genes, which simply means it obtained a patent on the human gene once it has been removed from the cell. It does not matter whether the genes come from you, me or any of the other 285 million people in the U.S., or whether you have a mutation or not – the patents claim them all. Even though laboratories around the country are fully capable of providing genetic testing for BRCA1 and BRCA2 (and were already testing patients before the patents forced them to stop), the patents in essence give a monopoly over these genes.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:26pm
Salon has a nice piece on how research shows the difficulty of detecting lies—the impossibility, really—and how people consistently overestimate their ability to do so. And, how people consistently misidentify signs of stress (from a variety of causes) as proof of lying. Of course, an entire TSA program has been built on the premise that people can be trained to detect lies with a reasonable level of certainty.
