By Aden Fine, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:52pm
We filed a friend-of-the-court brief today in New York state court in support of Twitter’s efforts to protect the constitutional rights of one of its users. As we posted earlier this month, Twitter took a great step to defend its users’ rights by filing a motion to quash a subpoena that the District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan issued in connection with the prosecution of an Occupy Wall Street protester.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:18pm
Privacy researcher Chris Soghoian gave a very nice talk at TEDx recently on “Why Google Won’t Protect You From Big Brother.” He provides a cogent overview and some useful perspective on the relationship between companies and the government, which is something we at the ACLU have been concerned about since our 2004 report on the Surveillance Industrial Complex, and before.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:54pm
The American Library Association has created an excellent public education resource on the privacy issues facing our society – a web site called privacyrevolution.org.
The ALA has long been a staunch defender of privacy and free speech, and a frequent ally of the ACLU on those issues. In fact, libraries have been the scene of many free speech battles in recent years. If you think about it, librarians are our natural allies since libraries exemplify the democratic ideal of citizens’ access to information, while protecting those citizens’ right to keep their inquiries and interests private. As the site explains:
CISPA is a dangerously overbroad bill that would allow companies to share our private and sensitive information with the government without a warrant and without proper oversight.
By Matthew Harwood, Media Relations Associate, ACLU at 10:00am
Yes, law enforcement drones are coming, but if Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, has his way they won’t leave the ground without a judge okaying it first.
Yesterday, Poe introduced the Preserving American Privacy Act to ensure government, particularly law enforcement, use of drones will not violate the Constitution. Before police can launch a drone to search a non-public area, they will have to get a warrant based upon probable cause--the constitutional standard. For public spaces the standard will be reasonable suspicion of criminal activity as well as a reasonable probability that the drone will capture evidence of that criminal activity. Once the order is executed, the police will have 10 days to serve a copy of the warrant to the suspects under surveillance, although the bill allows judges to delay notification if it will jeopardize an ongoing criminal or national security investigation. If government entities violate the public trust and fly drones outside the law, the attorney general can order the Secretary of Transportation to revoke their license.
By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 1:33pm
Yesterday we asked the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to consider our argument that law enforcement agents should have to obtain a warrant based on probable cause to attach a GPS tracker to a car and track its movements (you can read our amicus brief here).
In the case, the government suspected that Harry, Mark and Michael Katzin had robbed a number of Rite-Aid pharmacies. To confirm their hunch they attached a GPS tracker—without first going to a judge and getting a warrant—to Harry Katzin’s car. They used the GPS tracker to follow the Katzins when they traveled to another Rite-Aid, and arrested them shortly afterwards.
By Brian Hauss, Legal Fellow, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 9:30am
(Updated below)
In another round of the legal battle over the records of Twitter users sought by the government in connection with its WikiLeaks investigation, the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are appearing before a federal appeals court in Richmond this morning, arguing that the public has a right to know about secret court orders and other documents related to government efforts to obtain Internet users’ private information without a warrant.
Today, we filed our brief with the Supreme Court in our lawsuit challenging the FISA Amendments Act, the 2008 law that ratified and expanded the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program. (You can read our brief here.)
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – FISA – is a post-Watergate statute that was meant to rein in and regulate domestic surveillance undertaken in the name of national security. In 2008, Congress amended the statute, giving the National Security Agency unprecedented power to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international communications. The ACLU immediately challenged the law, but the government has tried to keep our case out of court.
By Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:39pm
It’s back. On Wednesday the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on a five-year reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), the 2008 law that legalized the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program and more. It permits the government to get year-long orders from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international communications—including phone calls, emails, and internet records—for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence. The orders need not specify who is going to be spied on or even allege that the targets did anything wrong. The only guarantees that the FAA gives are that no specific American will be targeted for wiretapping and that some (classified) rules about the use of intercepted information will be followed.
