The ACLU and dozens of other organizations – including Free Press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation – have teamed up to create the Declaration of Internet Freedom, which sets for a set of principles providing a positive vision to preserve the Internet as a platform for speech, innovation and creativity.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 10:05am
One of the technology-related civil liberties battles that ACLU affiliates around the country have been fighting in recent years involves defending students’ rights to privacy and free expression in the new electronic media that are becoming such a large part of their lives. For some reason many school officials seem to believe that when it comes to online communications, students have no such rights
Earlier this week, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed into law a bill that prohibits employers from requiring or requesting that employees or applicants reveal the username sand passwords for personal accounts on websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Governor Quinn, in signing the bill, said it was necessary to “protect workers and their right to personal privacy.” Illinois in is now the second state to enact this type legislation, following the lead of Maryland, which enacted a similar law in May.
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:53pm
While our electronic privacy laws have remained stagnant, online advertising has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry. The browsing and communications habits of online users are routinely and secretly tracked as they surf the internet. Yesterday, Senator Rockefeller (D-WV), chairman of the powerful Senate Commerce Committee, introduced a bill to establish a Do Not Track mechanism –similar to a Do Not Call Registry– that would allow users to restrict what companies collect about them and regain control of their privacy and online identity.
By Naomi Gilens, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:28pm
This morning, faced with the threat of criminal and civil contempt, Twitter turned over information about Occupy Wall Street protester Malcolm Harris to a New York criminal court judge. This development follows Twitter’s months-long effort to challenge the Manhattan District Attorney Office’s subpoena for Harris’s information, which was issued as part of the D.A.’s disorderly conduct prosecution of Harris stemming from his participation at an Occupy event last fall.
By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:02pm
Senator Charles Grassley got it right: officials at the Food and Drug Administration “have absolutely no business reading the private e-mails of their employees.”
On Sunday, the New York Times ran a lengthy story detailing how the FDA monitored the communications of its own scientists, including communications with members of Congress, lawyers and journalists. Those scientists had blown the whistle on what they believed were flawed internal procedures that led to the approval of unsafe medical imaging devices. The FDA engaged in a massive email monitoring campaign to read their communications—including their private, personal emails. The emails that the FDA collected included those of a former member of Senator Grassley’s staff, presumably because he had exchanged messages with one or more of the targeted FDA officials.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 10:00am
Everywhere I go, I hear some variation of the claim that “young people today just don’t care about privacy.” This is something that people widely seem to believe is “just true.” The latest claim to this effect comes in the form of a new poll, the release of which was trumpeted with unfortunate headlines like “Millennials don’t worry about online privacy.”
In fact, the poll, which was conducted by the University of Southern California’s corporate-partnered Center for the Digital Future, showed no such thing. Although there were some differences between younger and older respondents,
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:08pm
A video touting software created by Raytheon to mine data from social networks has been attracting an increasing amount of attention in the past few days, since it was uncovered by Ryan Gallagher at the Guardian.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 10:10am
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.
By Aden Fine, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:07pm
A New York criminal court judge has issued a decision denying Twitter’s motion to quash a court order requiring it to produce information about one of its users pursuant to a subpoena that the District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan issued in connection with the prosecution of an Occupy Wall Street protester.
