Archive

On Wednesday, July 18th the ACLU and community members gathered to support Juana Reyes, who is facing deportation after an arrest for selling tamales outside of the Florin Rd. Walmart in Sacramento and to urge the passage of the TRUST Act.Juana Reyes is your neighbor, your friend, or your family member. The food vendor and mother of two was recently arrested, chained and held in immigration detent... Read More

Why is the FBI spying on Occupy protesters? The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California is determined to find out. Read More

Download the Summer 2012 ACLU of Northern California Newsletter and read about our latest events and initiatives. Read More

Mayor Ed Lee shocked the city when he suggested bringing New York's failed stop-and-frisk policy to San Francisco. The ACLU of Northern California sent a letter to Mayor Lee yesterday explaining why it's such a bad policy.We're not sure what Mayor Lee was thinking, but stop-and-frisk is a bad idea all around. Not only is it a civil liberties nightmare and toxic for police-community relations, it r... Read More

This morning's New York Times features a front-page story about an "uptick" in demands for information from cell carriers by law enforcement. As the ACLU's Chris Calabrese writes, the numbers are staggering: 1.3 million requests for information, possibly many times that many users affected, hundreds of full-time employees whose sole job is to process incoming demands, and reports that these demand... Read More

Yesterday afternoon, the California State Senate approved the TRUST Act (AB 1081-Ammiano) with a vote of 21-13. Assemblymember Tom Ammiano is the bill's author; Sen. Kevin de León served as floor manager for the vote and presented the bill to the Senate. Read More

California’s budget negotiations are an exercise in high stakes tradeoffs. And as legislators accept deep cuts to education and the safety net, the ACLU is challenging Californians to acquire a real-time sense of how the state’s bottom line would fare if prisons and jails were placed at the center of the chopping block. Read More

This month, California quietly shed an unwanted title, going from the largest prison system in the country to the second-largest after the state of Texas.The change comes amid a significant drop in the number of prisoners held in state facilities nine months into California's realignment plan, which aims to transfer low-level inmates to county jails and rehabilitation programs. The state's prison ... Read More

In early June, the popular location based service foursquare overhauled its mobile app. As a result of these changes, users can now see all of their friends' check-ins from the last two weeks. Many users may not understand how much of their location history is visible to their friends, and even those users aware of the details have no practical way to opt out. And while forcing users to share that... Read More

Citing badly deteriorated conditions at the West Contra Costa school district's Community Day School Program, the ACLU of Northern California and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights today filed suit on behalf of two concerned taxpayers against the school district. The lawsuit seeks to compel the district to relocate its Community Day School Program (CDSP) and to provide adequate staffing, inst... Read More