American Civil Liberties Union

Like many women, police officer Annie Balcastro of Wallingford, CT faced an uncertain future when she had to request a light-duty accommodation during her pregnancy. Many pregnant workers whose jobs entail physical activity are pushed out of the workforce when pregnant, even though their employers have provisions in place for other workers who are temporarily unable to do all aspects of their jobs, such as injured workers. Currently, fewer than ten states require employers to provide reasonable accommodations to pregnant employees who want to remain on the job but are unable to perform some aspect of their job during pregnancy.

Last week served as yet another reminder of the threats posed to Americans' privacy by the post-Patriot Act surveillance state...

Join us tomorrow in Washington, DC to protest the Corrections Corporation of America or follow the protest on Twitter @ACLULive.

At its annual shareholder meeting next week, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) will celebrate thirty years of incarcerating people in its for-profit prisons. This gives the company the dubious distinction of being the oldest for-profit prison company in modern America. And it's why the ACLU is working with civil rights organizations, labor, faith-based groups, and immigrant rights advocates to organize anti-CCA events around the country from now through their May 16 shareholder meeting in Nashville. Our message is clear: Thirty years of for-profit prisons is nothing to celebrate!

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 19^th 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.