By Hina Shamsi, Director, ACLU National Security Project & Patrick C. Toomey, Fellow, ACLU National Security Project at 10:14am
The ACLU, together with the NYCLU and CUNY's CLEAR Project, filed a lawsuit today challenging the New York Police Department's unconstitutional policy and practice of targeting entire Muslim communities for discriminatory and suspicionless surveillance. The NYPD's vast religious profiling program has cast an unjustified badge of suspicion and stigma on hundreds of thousands of innocent New Yorkers, based on nothing more than their religious faith and practice. We represent civic and religious leaders, two mosques, and a charitable organization, all of whom were swept up in the police department's dragnet surveillance because they are Muslim.
By Laura W. Murphy, Director, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 3:16pm
The following remarks were given by Laura Murphy, director of the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office, at Sen. Rand Paul's press conference yesterday announcing his intention to sue the government to stop NSA surveillance of Americans' communications.
Last week, the Guardian reported something extraordinary. The National Security Agency is routinely collecting all of your phone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. They know who calls whom, when, for how long and from where. There's no more debate about whether the government is spying on Americans; the only question is how we can stop it.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:28pm
The Washington Post has an excellent, in-depth article today on the growing use of driver’s license photo databases combined with face recognition analytics by police.
There are two ways to think about this. First, it is yet another long stride toward a surveillance society:
By Laura W. Murphy, Director, ACLU Washington Legislative Office & Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 2:13pm
Because of the extraordinary revelations last week by the Guardian, Congress and the American people now know that the Patriot Act is being used by the National Security Agency to collect the phone records of all Americans, every day. There's no more debate about whether the government, and the military at that, is spying on us: only whether Congress is going to stop them.
Section 215 of the Patriot Act allows the government to obtain ‘any tangible thing' relevant to an investigation. According to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, this authority has been used to collect all phone records in the U.S., even those of law-abiding citizens who have no connection to crime or terrorism whatsoever. The administration and a few members of Congress have confirmed and defended this practice as necessary to protect national security.
But there's no reason to believe that the government's collection efforts stop there.
By Greger Calhan, Legal Fellow, ACLU, Racial Justice Program at 12:16pm
The month of June represents a double anniversary for Mildred and Richard Loving. Two weeks ago, the Virginia couple would have celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary. And earlier this week on June 12th, Americans celebrated the 46th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision which bears their name, Loving v. Virginia, and which recognized an equal right to marriage for all people, regardless of race.
The ACLU filed a lawsuit this week challenging which agency's surveillance program that the government uses to spy on millions of ordinary Americans?
Which federal court invalidated patents on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 cancer genes?
The ACLU is suing the governor of which state for denying drivers licenses to young people who have been authorized to remain lawfully in the country??
How much does it cost per year to hold a detainee at Gitmo?
By Laura W. Murphy, Director, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:14pm
When Google published its first government transparency report in 2010, critics of the company showered praise upon the company, and rightly so. At a time when other internet companies were fearful of "stick[ing] their head up" by publishing surveillance statistics, Google boldly led the way. In recent years, Twitter, Microsoft, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Sonic.Net, SpiderOak and Silent Circle all followed, and received well deserved praise for doing so from public interest advocates.
By Michael Tan, Staff Attorney, Immigrants' Rights Project, ACLU at 9:37am
One year ago, the immigrant youth movement won the most important immigrants' rights victory in recent memory: the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which grants young immigrants who came to the U.S. as children—or Dreamers—the ability to live and work in the country legally. As of this May, about 365,000 young immigrants have been granted DACA, and are working hard, going to school, and giving back to their communities—a preview of the benefits all of us stand to gain should Congress pass immigration reform this year.
