By Laura W. Murphy, Director, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:04pm
The immigration reform bill that has emerged from the Senate Judiciary Committee is good – not ideal, not awful, but good. It is a game changer for those who currently have no hope of realizing the Constitution's promise of equal protection. But it also creates real risks to privacy for all Americans regardless of status and expands the kind of database environment that many of us fear will give the government access to far too broad a swath of our lives. And the bill creates the kind of militarized environment along our southern border that is extremely costly, harmful to border communities' quality of life, and enormously inefficient. And we must not forget that some are wrongly excluded from even a chance at the fruits of immigration reform – beginning with those who happen to love someone of the same sex.
By Nathan Freed Wessler, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 10:31am
New documents from the FBI and U.S. Attorneys’ offices paint a troubling picture of the government’s email surveillance practices. Not only does the FBI claim it can read emails and other electronic communications without a warrant—even after a federal appeals court ruled that doing so violates the Fourth Amendment—but the documents strongly suggest that different U.S. Attorneys’ offices around the country are applying conflicting standards to access communications content (you can see the documents here).
Last month, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the ACLU received IRS documents indicating that the agency’s criminal investigative arm doesn’t always get a warrant to read Americans’ emails. Today we are releasing these additional documents from other federal law enforcement agencies, reinforcing the urgent need for Congress to protect our privacy by updating the laws that cover electronic communications.
The FBI and Electronic Communications: Where’s the Warrant?
The documents we received from the FBI don’t flat out tell us whether FBI agents always get warrants, but they strongly suggest that they don’t.
In 2010, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decided in United States v. Warshak that the government must obtain a probable cause warrant before compelling email providers to turn over messages to law enforcement. But that decision only applies in the four states covered by the Sixth Circuit, so we filed our FOIA request to find out whether the FBI
By Jesselyn McCurdy, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 11:20am
It's estimated that more than 80,000 prisoners are held in solitary confinement or restricted housing across the United States on any given day. According to a new report released last week by the U.S. General Accounting Office, it's about time the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) started evaluating its use of solitary and monitoring its effects on those prisoners.
The GAO finally released its long-awaited report on the use of solitary confinement in the federal prison system. The report, which was requested by several members of Congress, attempts to solve the mystery surrounding how many prisoners in federal prison are subjected to solitary confinement and how BOP monitors individuals while in solitary.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 9:06am
The PBS series NOVA, “Rise of the Drones,” recently aired a segment detailing the capabilities of a powerful aerial surveillance system known as ARGUS-IS, which is basically a super-high, 1.8 gigapixel resolution camera that can be mounted on a drone. As demonstrated in this clip, the system is capable of high-resolution monitoring and recording of an entire city. (The clip was written about in DefenseTech and in Slate.)
In the clip, the developer explains how the technology (which he also refers to with the apt name “Wide Area Persistent Stare”) is “equivalent to having up to a hundred Predators look at an area the size of a medium-sized city at once.”
By Alex Abdo, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project at 12:59pm
The government has just officially confirmed what we've long suspected: there are secret Justice Department opinions about the Patriot Act's Section 215, which allows the government to get secret orders from a special surveillance court (the FISA Court) requiring Internet service providers and other companies to turn over "any tangible things." Just exactly what the government thinks that phrase means remains to be seen, but there are indications that their take on it is very broad.
By Michael German, Senior Policy Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 2:05pm
What's worse than waterboarding and letting the government wiretap Americans without warrants? It's not a riddle; it is a question we need James Comey to answer, particularly if President Obama nominates him to lead the FBI for the next 10 years.
You see, while serving as acting attorney general in March 2004, Comey took a courageous and defiant stand against the Bush administration's secret [REDACTED] surveillance program, refusing to sign a certification saying the program was legal. When White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales authorized the program to go forward without a Justice Department certification, Comey threatened to resign, along with his staff and FBI Director Robert Mueller.
I recently learned about a group of young people who did something extremely brave. They were invited to lunch with Nebraska's Governor, Dave Heineman...
By Nathan Freed Wessler, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 11:00am
Everyone knows the IRS is our nation’s tax collector, but it is also a law enforcement organization tasked with investigating criminal violations of the tax laws. New documents released to the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the IRS Criminal Tax Division has long taken the position that the IRS can read your emails without a warrant—a practice that one appeals court has said violates the Fourth Amendment (and we think most Americans would agree).
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 9:57am
The New York Times ran an article yesterday about pressure that is mounting on Facebook to censor websites full of awful misogynistic material. The company said it was reviewing its processes for dealing with content under its hate speech policy.
