American Civil Liberties Union

Update: An earlier version of this post did not cite Heights High School's letter to Wesley and his parents, which was originally published on KWCH.com.

In Kansas, joking about sports can be hazardous to your high school graduation. Wesley Teague, the senior class president at Heights High School in Wichita, Kansas, found this out the hard way. In a gently mocking 48-character Twitter post, Wesley wrote:

For those who work each and every day to secure basic fairness and equality under the law for LGBT Americans, the pace of positive...

Watching President Obama take the Oath of Office four years ago was a historic moment I will never forget.  I remember meeting him when he was an Illinois state senator...

A disgruntled worker at a Texas auto dealership hacked into a vehicle-immobilization system and disabled more than 100 vehicles. Our automobiles are getting more and more computerized, so the threat of hacking vehicles is being taken increasingly seriously, according to this interesting article in CIO Magazine. And as computerization proceeds, with cars tied in to GPS, social networks, and who knows what else, the threat will increasingly be not just to security but also to privacy. Already today’s cars contain as many as 70 independent computers with up to 100 megabytes of code. And, vehicles—perhaps we should start calling them “transportation computers”—are increasingly being plugged into various networks, which greatly increases their vulnerability. Already, the job description “car thief” has come to take on some of the qualities of “hacker,” with today’s thieves plugging into vehicles’ data ports, replicating RFID key fobs, and otherwise manipulating data rather than hardware. It’s always seemed to me that one way to increase the security in cars and other publicly important software, is to require that their code be open source.