Blog of Rights
05/13/2013
Transgender Rights

A Boy Named Issak

By Issak Wolfe at 5:11pm

I am a high school senior at Red Lion Area High School in Pennsylvania.  As a student who happens to be transgender, my life isn’t all that different from other students in my class, except that I came out the summer before my junior year and have been going by my male name ever since.  I try hard to make good grades, work at a part –time job, and have a wonderfully supportive family and an awesome girlfriend.  My high school, like any other, has a senior prom. Our prom always has a king and a queen, and every senior gets a spot on the ballot for royalty. This year was my turn to get a chance at king like every other boy in my class. 

Read More»
05/03/2013
School-to-Prison Pipeline

In Florida, High School Student Kiera Wilmot’s Curiosity Is a Crime?!

By Rebecca McCray, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project at 2:47pm

Fed up with the school-to-prison pipeline? Take action!

Earlier this week, the well-oiled school-to-prison pipeline once again moved swiftly and fiercely to criminalize kids. This time, the pipeline delivered 16-year-old Kiera Wilmot to the open arms of a Florida Assistant State Attorney (ASA).

Read More»
05/06/2013
U.S. Death Penalty

Tomorrow, Willie Manning Is Scheduled To Die. Shouldn't Mississippi Find Out If He's Innocent First?

By Cassandra Stubbs, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 10:33am

Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant alone has the power to save Willie Manning, who is scheduled to die tomorrow, May 7, 2013...

Read More»
05/20/2013
Voter Suppression

Happy 20th Anniversary to the National Voter Registration Act! May It Have Many More

By Dale Ho, Managing Attorney, ACLU at 11:50am

Twenty years ago today, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), in order to make voter registration free, fair, and accessible for all Americans. The statute has been a resounding success, helping to enfranchise millions of Americans across the country.

The NVRA is often referred to as the "Motor Voter" law, because it requires states to offer voter registration with applications for driver's licenses. But other provisions are equally important. The NVRA requires states to offer voter registration to applicants for public assistance programs such as Medicaid and the new health benefit exchange that is required under the Affordable Care Act. . It also protects the right of citizens and civic associations to conduct volunteer voter registration drives, and removes state-imposed barriers to registration, by creating a one-page standardized voter registration form for use in all states, on which voters affirm their eligibility as citizens by signing a sworn affidavit.

Read More»
10/21/2011

"We Don't Need a Warrant, We're ICE"

By Lindsay Kee, ACLU of Tennessee at 5:46pm

On the night of October 20, 2010, Angel Escobar and Jorge Sarmiento were in their beds in their small, two-bedroom apartment in the Clairmont complex in Nashville. Several roomates and friends were in other rooms. The doors and windows were all shut and locked. Suddenly there was a loud banging at the door and voices shouting "Police!" and "Policia!" When no one answered, the agents tried to force the door open. Scared, occupants hid. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents began hitting objects against the bedroom windows, trying to break in. Without a search warrant and without consent, the ICE agents eventually knocked in the front door and shattered a window, shouting racial slurs and storming into the bedrooms, holding guns to some people’s heads. When asked if they had a warrant, one agent reportedly said, "We don't need a warrant, we're ICE," and, gesturing to his genitals, "the warrant is coming out of my balls."

Read More»
07/03/2012
FOIA

Happy Birthday, FOIA: The Myths and an Unlikely Hero Behind the Origin of the Freedom of Information Act

By Sam Walker, University of Nebraska at Omaha at 12:52pm

Happy birthday, FOIA!

July 4 marks the 46th birthday of the Freedom of Information Act. President Lyndon Johnson signed the historic law on July 4, 1966, at his ranch in Texas. FOIA has become a cornerstone of American democracy, making it possible for Americans to find out what their government is doing and to hold it accountable for its actions.

Read More»
05/13/2013
Government Surveillance

The Asymmetry Between Past and Future, and Why it Means Mass Surveillance Won’t Work

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 11:39am

Former Senator Joseph Lieberman recently charged that mistakes by U.S. security agencies were responsible for failing to stop the Boston Marathon bombing. I recently wrote about how mass surveillance makes this kind of recrimination inevitable, because once a government agency spies on a person, they become in a sense responsible for any actions that that person takes. To paraphrase Colin Powell, we might sum it up as “You surveil him, you own him.”

I recently came across a good analogy for why it’s deceptively hard for security agencies to detect and stop out-of-nowhere terrorist attacks like the Boston bombing—and why mass surveillance isn’t likely to help. It comes from the book The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by the physicist and writer Leonard Mlodinow, in a discussion of Brownian motion.

Brownian motion, you may recall, is the random jiggling of molecules in a liquid or other substance. A dye molecule floating in a seemingly still glass of water will randomly move about, covering about an inch in three hours, buffeted by random collisions with the smaller water molecules that surround it.

What would it take to actually explain the motion of that molecule? This is where the parallel to anti-terrorism efforts comes in. Mlodinow points out, “In any complex string of events in which each event unfolds with some element of

Read More»
05/02/2013
Video Surveillance

Chertoff on Google Glass

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:56pm

We’ve been doing a fair amount of thinking about the implications of consumer wearable cameras like Google Glass, and I’m sure we’ll have more to say in this space on the subject. But meanwhile, we’re pleasantly surprised to report a very trenchant analysis of the technology’s implications for our privacy by none other than Michael Chertoff. Writing on CNN’s web page, the former DHS chief writes,

So, who owns and what happens to the user's [video] data? Can the entire database be mined and analyzed for commercial purposes? What rules will apply when law enforcement seeks access to the data for a criminal or national security investigation? For how long will the data be retained? ….

Even those who might be willing to forgo some degree of privacy to enhance national security should be concerned about a corporate America that will have an unrestricted continuous video record of millions.

What is to prevent a corporation from targeting a particular individual, using face recognition technology to assemble all uploaded videos in which he appears, and effectively constructing a surveillance record that can be used to analyze his life?

Chertoff says he’s inclined to think that government regulation may be needed. I haven’t seen Chertoff say anything about the threat of pervasive government surveillance, which would make him a kind of anti-libertarian on privacy—in favor of restricting corporations, but not the government. For the average, relatively powerless person trying to live their life, the threat comes from both directions.

Permalink
02/26/2013
Cell Phones & Smartphones

New Document Sheds Light on Government’s Ability to Search iPhones

By Chris Soghoian, Principal Technologist and Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project & Naomi Gilens, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 10:11am

Cell phone searches are a common law enforcement tool, but up until now, the public has largely been in the dark regarding how much sensitive information the government can get with this invasive surveillance technique. A document submitted to court in connection with a drug investigation, which we recently discovered, provides a rare inventory of the types of data that federal agents are able to obtain from a seized iPhone using advanced forensic analysis tools. The list, available here, starkly demonstrates just how invasive cell phone searches are—and why law enforcement should be required to obtain a warrant before conducting them.

Read More»
05/06/2013
Biometrics

The Privacy-Invading Potential of Eye Tracking Technology

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 9:42am

Eye tracking technology received new attention recently due to its inclusion in the Samsung Galaxy IV phone, where it can (with mixed results, according to reviewers) let users scroll the screen with their eyes or dim the screen when they look away. Clearly this is a technology that has the potential for a lot of clever applications. But what are the privacy implications?

Eye tracking for research was used for over a century before computers (see the quick history outlined in this article). The earliest research, in the 19th century, actually involved direct mechanical contact with the cornea. Already by 1898, researchers were discovering some really cool phenomena of the human brain. Motion pictures were applied to the problem as early as 1905, and the first head-mounted eye-tracker was developed in 1948, which freed study subjects from having to keep their heads still. In the mid-1970s the first remote trackers were developed that were truly unobtrusive to the subject. By then, research and writing based on eye tracking was booming, not only on the part of psychologists but also the military.

Read More»