Amid recent revelations that the NSA has been secretly spying on phone records and the Internet activity of people in the United States, transparency reports filed by the California utilities companies and obtained by the ACLU of California show that a significant amount of data about the energy use of Californians could be ending up in the hands of the government too. In 2012, a single California utility company, San Diego Gas & Electric, disclosed the smart meter energy records of over 4,000 of its customers pursuant to legal demands – and it’s unclear whether this information was turned over in a private lawsuit, to local law enforcement, or even to the federal government.
By Hina Shamsi, Director, ACLU National Security Project & Patrick C. Toomey, Fellow, ACLU National Security Project at 10:14am
The ACLU, together with the NYCLU and CUNY's CLEAR Project, filed a lawsuit today challenging the New York Police Department's unconstitutional policy and practice of targeting entire Muslim communities for discriminatory and suspicionless surveillance. The NYPD's vast religious profiling program has cast an unjustified badge of suspicion and stigma on hundreds of thousands of innocent New Yorkers, based on nothing more than their religious faith and practice. We represent civic and religious leaders, two mosques, and a charitable organization, all of whom were swept up in the police department's dragnet surveillance because they are Muslim.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:28pm
The Washington Post has an excellent, in-depth article today on the growing use of driver’s license photo databases combined with face recognition analytics by police.
There are two ways to think about this. First, it is yet another long stride toward a surveillance society:
By Laura W. Murphy, Director, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 3:16pm
The following remarks were given by Laura Murphy, director of the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office, at Sen. Rand Paul's press conference yesterday announcing his intention to sue the government to stop NSA surveillance of Americans' communications.
Last week, the Guardian reported something extraordinary. The National Security Agency is routinely collecting all of your phone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. They know who calls whom, when, for how long and from where. There's no more debate about whether the government is spying on Americans; the only question is how we can stop it.
By Sandra S. Park, ACLU Women's Rights Project at 4:18pm
For the last four years, I've had the honor of representing 20 amazing organizations and individuals in our challenge to human gene patents. They include: leading organizations of pathologists and geneticists; scientists, physicians, and genetic counselors who work every day to improve our understanding of the connection between genes, disease, and treatment and the care they provide to patients; breast cancer and women's health groups, who spoke out against the effects of these patents on patients; and women who have family histories of breast and ovarian cancer, or who have already been diagnosed with cancer, and faced obstacles to their medical care because of these patents.
By Sandra S. Park, ACLU Women's Rights Project at 11:35am
Should companies be able to patent human genes? Today, the Supreme Court answered that profound question with a resounding NO.
Seems like common sense, right? But over the last 30 years, the U.S. Patent Office has issued patents on thousands of human genes, including genes associated with colon cancer, Alzheimer's disease, muscular dystrophy, and many other devastating diseases. The status quo meant that companies controlling gene patents had the right to stop all other scientists from examining, studying, testing, and researching our genes.
By Laura W. Murphy, Director, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:14pm
When Google published its first government transparency report in 2010, critics of the company showered praise upon the company, and rightly so. At a time when other internet companies were fearful of "stick[ing] their head up" by publishing surveillance statistics, Google boldly led the way. In recent years, Twitter, Microsoft, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Sonic.Net, SpiderOak and Silent Circle all followed, and received well deserved praise for doing so from public interest advocates.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 9:32am
I’d like to make one major point about the NSA surveillance scandal that many people have made indirectly, or implicitly, or seem to have assumed, but have not stated baldly and explicitly. That point is how this incident has laid bare the arrogance of our national security officials.
Because there are really two separate issues behind last week’s revelations. The first is, how much surveillance of the American people should the government conduct? The second is, who should decide how much surveillance of the American people the government should conduct?
And on that second question, the government has arrogated to itself the power to make that decision, unilaterally, in secret, on behalf of the American people.
In his only comments on this scandal, President Obama said,
By Brett Max Kaufman, Legal Fellow, ACLU National Security Project at 3:30pm
In the wake of the past week's revelations about the NSA's unprecedented mass surveillance of phone calls, today the ACLU filed a lawsuit charging that the program violates Americans' constitutional rights of free speech, association, and privacy.
This lawsuit comes a day after we submitted a motion to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) seeking the release of secret court opinions on the Patriot Act's Section 215, which has been interpreted to authorize this warrantless and suspicionless collection of phone records.
