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.

When Jill Kelley sought help from the FBI in the fall after receiving harassing e-mails, she had no idea that her trust in law enforcement would ultimately end in a loss of faith.

In November, Kelley and her husband, Scott, woke up to find themselves at the heart of a scandal that would ultimately lead to the resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus because of an extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, and engulf another high-ranking military official, U.S. Marine Gen. John Allen, in allegations of “inappropriate communications” with Mrs. Kelley. (Last night, the Pentagon’s Inspector General cleared Gen. Allen of all wrongdoing).

My colleague Ben Wizner and I are in Brussels this week, partly to meet with European lawmakers and others about the new privacy regime that the EU is in the process of putting into place. Unlike the United States, Europe has a set of basic rules and institutions in place to protect individuals’ privacy, and is trying to update its existing rules and institutions for the digital age.

The United States needs similar protections—a basic, overarching privacy law, and institutions with the teeth to enforce it. We are an outlier in the world in lacking those things. However, some U.S. companies seem to be terrified at the prospect of basic, fair privacy rules being put into place in Europe. Not only are companies such as Facebook and Google furiously lobbying against those rules, but the U.S. government has “shocked” Europeans by also lobbying hard against many elements of this update.