American Civil Liberties Union

State legislatures around the country are gearing up to take action on domestic surveillance drones. Maine has a bill introduced, as do Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas. In Virginia a hearing has already been held on a bill, while Montana has three bills, and hearings have already been held there as well.

On January 11, 2013, facing decades in prison on trumped up charges, my partner, Aaron Swartz, made the tragic choice to take his own life. He was only 26.

Aaron's supposed crime? He was accused of checking out too many articles (4.8 million), too fast, from an online academic library called JSTOR, to which he had authorized access. He never used or distributed the articles and later returned them. For that, he faced 35 years behind bars and endured two years of relentless persecution.

The U.S. government’s targeted killing policy and its use of drones for killing will be the subject of an investigation by the United Nations, it was announced today. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, Ben Emmerson, announced today that he will carry out an inquiry into the civilian impact and human rights implications of targeted killing.

Google released its latest transparency report today. They’ve made some interesting additions and the overall number of government requests is on the rise. But before we get to that, there is one major overriding point: good for Google and where is everybody else? The only other major company to release these types of numbers is Twitter. Where are Verizon and Facebook and Microsoft? How about AT&T, Amazon or Comcast? I could make this list endless but the major salient fact is that Google has paved the way (this is their 7^th report) and there hasn’t exactly been a stampede to follow suit.