By Abdi Soltani, Executive Director, ACLU of Northern California at 1:53pm
When I found out that AT&T and Verizon have been handing over information about millions of customers’ calls to the National Security Agency (NSA) I was outraged. Secret, unchecked surveillance is antithetical to democracy, and the government is going too far. As the nation’s primary defender of civil liberties, the ACLU has sued the government and is leading the charge to reform our surveillance laws.
By Lee Rowland, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 12:00am
We’ve written before about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1998 — a federal law that protects the robust diversity of free speech we’ve come to know and love (and hate) on the Internet. Last night, the ACLU and the ACLU of Kentucky…
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 11:14am
Some leading police officials around the nation seem to be realizing that high-technology surveillance systems need to be deployed with great care, lest they prompt a public backlash. As the Atlantic Cities pointed out in a piece Friday, the Seattle…
By Kade Crockford, Director, ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project at 2:42pm
Boston Police Department bosses want to install GPS monitoring devices in every patrol car, to enable dispatch to more efficiently process 911 calls. But police officers and their union are outraged, saying that the ubiquitous tracking is too invasive…
By Nathan Freed Wessler, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 8:36am
In criminal cases, defendants have a right to know what evidence the government plans to use against them and how the government gathered that evidence. This basic due process principle is essential: it allows defendants to test in court whether law…
By Joe Silver, Washington Legislative Office, ACLU at 3:32pm
Leaks of classified and highly secretive information from U.S. government databases by the likes of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning have naturally garnered massive press attention, exposing some deeply problematic U.S. military and national security…
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 11:34am
Recent reports have revealed that several companies are currently pushing “intelligent street lights” that are capable of being loaded with various kinds of sensors including, as Reuters reported late last month,
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 3:39pm
In 2003, California passed a landmark piece of legislation called the Shine the Light law, which gave Californians the right to learn how companies share their personal information for “direct marketing purposes.” Now that ten years have passed…
By Nathan Freed Wessler, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 12:04pm
The ACLU has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Justice to find out whether federal law enforcement agencies and prosecutors think they need a warrant to obtain people’s search queries from online search engine operators,…
By Allie Bohm, Advocacy & Policy Strategist, ACLU at 8:50am
2013 could easily be christened the year of the drone. It was the first full state legislative session after Congress passed a law requiring the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to open up domestic airspace much more widely to drones, and it brought…
