Archive

The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision upholding Maryland's arrestee DNA testing law is a serious blow to genetic privacy. The ruling allows the police to seize the DNA of innocent Americans who have never been convicted of any sort of crime, without a search warrant. And as Justice Scalia makes clear in his scathing dissent, the majority opinion goes against decades of precedent that makes it clear tha... Read More

Yesterday afternoon the California Court of Appeal held that our prison system has, once again, completely failed to comply with state law when it adopted a problematic procedure for carrying out lethal injection executions.Given that there is now no legal protocol for lethal injection executions, no known legal source for the drugs, and that manufacturers worldwide are increasingly reluctant to m... Read More

Today the California Assembly passed AB 154 – the Early Access to Abortion bill – by a vote of 48-24. The bill moves on to the state Senate. Authored by Assembly Majority Leader Toni Atkins, AB 154 would improve abortion access by authorizing nurse practitioners, certified nurse midwives, and physician assistants to perform early abortions safely within the terms of their licenses. Read More

San Francisco – Today the ACLU sued the FBI in a freedom of the press lawsuit on behalf of two editors at a libertarian online magazine. After learning that their Bay Area-based site, Antiwar.com, was the subject of FBI surveillance, Eric Garris and Justin Raimondo sought the documents the government had compiled on both them and the site. After a year, the FBI has failed to produce any ... Read More

In light of recent revelations that the Department of Justice secretly requested the telephone records of Associated Press (AP) journalists, we started thinking about newer calling services, like Google Voice. We know that some journalists also use these services. Are these records vulnerable too?Google Voice can be handy, allowing people on the move like journalists to send and receive calls or t... Read More

The branches of the armed forces are expected to submit plans to the Department of Defense today describing how they will integrate women into combat positions following the repeal of the ban on women serving in combat units. The ACLU filed a lawsuit against the department last year challenging the combat ban on behalf of the Service Women's Action Network and four women who served in Iraq or Afgh... Read More

In a move that leads the nation in reducing barriers and expanding opportunities for voter registration, California’s Secretary of State, Debra Bowen, is designating the state’s new Health Benefit Exchange, Covered California, as a voter registration agency under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). In doing so, Covered California will reach millions of Californians who might not otherwise ... Read More

Today, a federal district judge in Arizona issued a very disappointing decision concerning the government's obligations to be candid with courts about new technologies they are seeking a warrant to use. The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus brief arguing that when the government wants to use invasive surveillance technology, it has an obligation to explain to the court ba... Read More

A bill that would uphold the constitutional right to vote for people sentenced under realignment was approved today by the California Assembly’s Elections and Redistricting Committee. The bill, A.B. 938, would make clear that all people in county custody retain their right to vote. Read More

Assemblymember Bonnie Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) announced this morning that the California Right to Know Act (AB 1291) will not be voted on this year but she will keep working to pass it next year.It's no secret that tech industry groups have been trying to use their political muscle to trample the Right to Know Act. The fact that companies are lobbying so hard to keep us in the dark about what's r... Read More