Protecting Civil Liberties In The Digital Age
Since law is way behind technology when it comes to protecting your privacy, it’s crucial that you understand the ways in which your activity is being monitored, recorded, and used.
A constant stream of revolutionary new technologies erode existing protections, and greatly expanded powers for our security agencies allow the government to peer into our lives without due process or meaningful oversight. Our rights and liberties have undergone constant erosion since 9/11.
More than a decade later, the websites we browse are tracked, our cell phones log our movements, our tweets are monitored by the FBI, our Internet communications are being read and stored, and the NSA secretly wiretaps our calls. Things we once thought could only happen in far-away enemy states or distant dystopias are suddenly happening here in America. Sadly, it is no longer so hard to imagine a world straight out of the mind of Philip K. Dick, with personally-tailored advertisements that follow us online, or maybe even pre-crime predictors that turn us all into suspects when we haven’t done anything wrong.
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Visit www.dotRights.org to find out more about how what you do online is (and isn’t) protected >> |
The fact is, privacy laws have failed to keep up with emerging technologies. The goal of the Protecting Civil Liberties in the Digital Age initiative is to ensure that expressive, associational, and privacy rights are strengthened rather than compromised by new technology, and to protect these core democratic rights against intrusive corporate and government practices that rely on new technology to invade these rights.
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Additional Resources
Civil Liberties in the Digital Ages: Weekly Highlights (2011 blog) : Each week, we feature some of the most interesting news related to technology and civil liberties that we’ve spotted from the previous week.
Cell Phone Location Tracking Public Records Request (2011 feature): In a massive coordinated information-seeking campaign, 34 ACLU affiliates are filing over 375 requests in 31 states across the country with local law enforcement agencies large and small that seek to uncover when, why and how they are using cell phone location data to track Americans.
Is Your Local Law Enforcement Tracking Your Cell Phone's Location? (2011 map)
