By Linda Lye, Staff Attorney, ACLU of Northern California at 4:00pm
Shocking revelations about creepy government surveillance came in waves over the summer, from the Snowden leaks to the Hemisphere Project, through which the government has paid AT&T for access to a mind-bogglingly vast database of our telephone calls. In many cases of new surveillance technologies like Hemisphere, there are serious constitutional concerns that courts have not yet reviewed. That's where we come in.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 11:47am
Sometimes when I hear public officials speaking out in defense of NSA spying, I can’t help thinking, even if just for a moment, “what if the NSA has something on that person and that’s why he or she is saying this?”
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 11:00am
Today we’re releasing our policy recommendations on police “body cameras” (also called “on-officer recording systems” or “cop cams”), small cameras that clip on to an officer’s uniform and record audio and video of the officer’s interactions…
From 2010 until last spring, the Virginia State Police (VSP) maintained a massive database of license plates that allowed them to pinpoint the locations of millions of cars on particular dates and times. Even more disturbing, the agency used automatic…
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 11:13am
I recently came across the following quote from Albert Einstein which, if you just sub out “Communism” and replace it with “terrorism,” pretty much nails our current situation:
America is incomparably less endangered by its own Communists…
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 11:54am
Actress Mia Farrow made gossip-news headlines this week when, asked by Vanity Fair whether her former husband Frank Sinatra was the father of her son Ronan, rather than Woody Allen as broadly understood, she replied, “possibly.” She said that no…
By Joe Silver, Washington Legislative Office, ACLU at 10:32am
Last month, a web-based service called “Ghetto Tracker” was unveiled. The site’s creator touted it as a travel advice service where users could pin digital maps with safety ratings to enable those new to town to avoid dodgy neighborhoods. While…
By Patrick C. Toomey, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project at 12:36pm
The drumbeat of “non-denial denials” is getting louder as the NSA continues to refuse to directly state whether it is using cell phone information to track Americans’ whereabouts. When NSA Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander was asked again about…
