By Robyn Greene, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:32pm
Over the last few months, more than 50,000 ACLU supporters signed our petition to the president urging him to veto CISPA if it made it to his desk. Not only did the president hear your calls – yesterday, he answered them with a resounding win for your privacy and civil liberties and threatened to veto CISPA, the dangerous privacy-busting cybersecurity bill.
By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 11:46am
Earlier this week, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, chaired by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), held a hearing on campaign finance law enforcement. We submitted comments highlighting a few areas of common ground between the ACLU and proponents of campaign finance reform.
By Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:20pm
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Wednesday marked up CISPA, the controversial cybersecurity bill that allows companies to share their customers' sensitive internet information with each other and the government. The bill's sponsors and corporations are not only declaring victory, but aggressively arguing that all privacy and civil liberties problems have been solved.
This couldn't be further from the truth.
We have flagged four general categories of problems in CISPA that have to be fixed before it is passed, and the markup only substantially fixed one of them:
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 3:22pm
As we have seen in the failed attempts of SOPA/PIPA, and the floundering Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, intellectual property (“IP”) laws are often poorly constructed, hastily proposed and ultimately both ineffective and potentially abusive.
By Allie Bohm, Advocacy & Policy Strategist, ACLU at 3:21pm
Remember that time when Congress passed a law that tried to create a national database of drivers' information and turn drivers' licenses into national identification cards? And remember how groups from across the political spectrum joined forces to tell Congress, the president, and their state lawmakers that they objected to this law, known as Real ID, calling it an unfunded mandate that trampled on states' rights, decrying its lack of sufficient protections and potential to increase racial discrimination, worrying about its negative impact on the Amish and other religious denominations, fretting that it would create an expansive and cumbersome new bureaucracy or facilitate the tracking of individuals? Opposition to Real ID united everyone from the National Governors Association to the ACLU to the American Conservative Union, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and National Organization for Women to Gun Owners of America, to name a few.
By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:52pm
Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), chair of the powerful Senate Commerce Committee, held a hearing today on online consumer privacy and "Do Not Track" standards. Do Not Track is a concept similar to the "Do Not Call" registry, and would allow individuals to signal that they don't wish to have their movements monitored by advertisers as they surf the web. The title of the hearing was "A Status Update on the Development of Voluntary Do-Not-Track Standards." We've got news for you, Congress—the status is not good.
By Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 11:12am
This week is “Cybersecurity Week” in the House of Representatives, and members will vote on a handful of bills intended to protect cybersecurity — the ability to prevent and respond to threats from foreign governments, terrorists and criminals over the Internet. Some of the bills are civil-liberties-neutral but, as usual when addressing a security issue, Congress is considering a bill that overreaches — this time by allowing companies to share private and sensitive information with the government without a warrant and without much oversight.
