By Linda Lye, Staff Attorney, ACLU of Northern California at 4:51pm
Today, the ACLU of Northern California went to court in two separate cases with the same goal: shedding light on the government's use of controversial and arguably unconstitutional surveillance techniques.
By Andrew Crocker, ACLU Intern / Harvard Law School Class of 2013 at 11:09am
In 2010, the FBI attached a GPS device to the car of a man named Fred Robinson and continuously monitored his whereabouts for nearly two months—all without getting a warrant. Now Robinson is on trial, and on Friday, the ACLU and its affiliate, the ACLU of Eastern Missouri, filed an amicus brief in his case, United States v. Robinson, which raises important Fourth Amendment issues about police use of GPS trackers for surveillance.
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 Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 11:21am
Data from license plate readers in Minnesota was obtained by a St. Paul car dealer using open-records laws, and used to repossess at least one car, according to a recent article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The article included this amusing tidbit:
When the Star Tribune published data tracking Mayor R.T. Rybak's city-owned car over the past year, the mayor asked police Chief Tim Dolan to make a recommendation for a new policy about data retention.
By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:00pm
Is the FBI attaching GPS devices to cars, boats and planes and tracking them without a warrant? Even in the wake of the Supreme Court’s January decision in United States v. Jones, holding that attaching a GPS device to a car is covered by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures, we don’t know for certain. That’s why today we filed a Freedom of Information Act request for two memos the FBI has prepared setting out its guidance on the Jones decision.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:52pm
The ACLU today wrote to the CEOs of the nation's major cell phone providers asking that they stop routinely collecting and storing data on their customers' daily movements.
By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 9:48am
Yesterday the Supreme Court heard argument in an important case that confronts how to apply Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures to new technologies.
The theme this week was "without": combating the spread of AIDS without actual tools and information to combat the spread of AIDS, searches without warrants, protections for business without protections for everybody else, government bureaucracy without privacy or security, accessing medical marijuana without federal government interference, sentencing without (or at least with a lot less) unfairness. That last one is good, the rest not so much....
