By Noa Yachot, Communications Strategist, ACLU at 4:16pm
In the Guantánamo Bay military commissions, the ACLU is persisting in its fight against the government's legally and morally untenable claim that it can censor from the public the 9/11 defendants' personal experiences and memories of torture, rendition, and detention by the CIA. This week, we filed a reply brief responding to the government's arguments in support of censorship.
By Michael German, Senior Policy Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:27pm
You would think that with an annual budget topping $70 billion, the intelligence community would employ the most rigorous scientific research methods and conduct exacting empirical studies to support its assumptions and evaluate the effectiveness of its programs. You would be wrong. Radically wrong.
In fact, our intelligence agencies do their best to avoid meaningful oversight or accountability, and setting empirically measurable benchmarks to evaluate the success or failure of particular programs would only invite the kind of scrutiny they eschew. Then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously complained way back in 2003 that "we lack metrics to know whether we are winning or losing the global war on terror," but ten years later the intelligence community continues to avoid setting such metrics.
By Robyn Greene, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:48pm
The Propellerheads may have been talking about fashion trends when they sang that "to me it seems quite clear that it's all just a little bit of history repeating." But that sentiment rings loud and true today when talking about the privacy-busting cybersecurity bill CISPA.
Leaders of the House Intel Committee reintroduced CISPA with the same privacy flaws as last year. While they suggested at its unveiling that they worked with the privacy community and addressed our concerns, they didn't. This is the same bill, with the same problems.
By Elayne Weiss, Washington Legislative Office at 4:49pm
Rebekah Havrilla, a former Army sergeant, received no justice after she was raped by a fellow soldier while serving in Afghanistan.
On Wednesday, Rebekah testified before the Senate Armed Services Personnel Subcommittee at a hearing on military sexual assault, recounting her traumatic and downright appalling time serving in a command culture that tolerated sexual assault and harassment. Her subsequent experience with the military justice system re-traumatized her after she decided to come forward and report her rapist.
By Robyn Greene, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:27pm
Privacy protection, and the debate about whether to house information-sharing programs in a civilian or military agency, dominated three congressional hearings on cybersecurity this week.
In separate hearings Tuesday in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Armed Services Committee, leaders of the intelligence community called cyberattacks the greatest threat to the U.S. at this time—but admitted that the kinds of catastrophic attacks imagined by reporters and cyber experts were only a "remote" possibility in the near future.
By Alexander Abdo, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project at 5:23pm
The government is increasingly relying on a national security pretext to bolster its secrecy claims, an Associated Press report released yesterday reveals. Analysis conducted by the news agency shows that the Obama administration cited legal exemptions to deflect requests for records under the Freedom of Information Act more often in 2012 than in any previous year.
Click here to read an original op-ed from the TED speaker who inspired this post and watch the TEDTalk below.
Trained in the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the military interrogators and guards who tortured and dehumanized prisoners in U.S. custody after 9/11 were hardly without ethical bearings. But as Alberto Mora, former chief counsel of the Navy, predicted when he discovered Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had authorized previously banned interrogation techniques,
