Archive

After decades of tough-on-crime policies and draconian sentencing practices, California's correctional system - a state with one of the highest incarceration rates in a country with one of the highest incarceration rates - finally buckled under its own weight. Faced with last year's historic Supreme Court order requiring a reduction in prison overcrowding, the state enacted AB 109 to realign the c... Read More

By Allie BohmACLU National OfficeThe state of Maryland just passed the first bill in the nation that bans employers from asking for the social media passwords of job applicants and employees. In a statement that the ACLU of Maryland issued about the bill's passage, Melissa Goemann, Legislative Director of ACLU of Maryland, said, "We are proud of Maryland for standing up for the online privacy of e... Read More

By Sarah RobertsACLU National OfficeIn January, the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in U.S. v. Jones, ruling unanimously that when the D.C. police and the FBI attached a GPS device to Antoine Jones's car and tracked him for 28 days, they violated the Fourth Amendment. But now the government — instead of fixing the way it conducts this kind of invasive surveillance — has simply set its sig... Read More

With the help of the ACLU of Northern California and the Asian Law Caucus, three high school seniors in San Francisco recently gave their principal a basic civics lesson: students have free speech rights, online and off.In March, after students at a San Francisco high school posted parodies and irreverent memes from their home computers about teachers and school administrators on a Tumblr blog ("T... Read More

By Chris CalabreseACLU Washington Legislative OfficeWhat the heck is a multistakeholder process (MSP)? The word multistakeholder is so obscure that my computer's spell check doesn't even recognize it, yet it's come to dominate the online privacy conversation in recent weeks. That discussion will begin in earnest today with a filing deadline for comments to the National Telecommunications and Infor... Read More

By Allie BohmACLU National Office Ten. That's the number of law enforcement agencies that responded to our coordinated public records requests on cell phone location tracking and reported that they, in fact, do not track cell phones. The number of agencies queried: 383. The number that responded (so far): some 200.We've just released the documents those law enforcement agencies turned ov... Read More

Technology and Civil Liberties Resources - Demand Your dotRights! Downloadable One-Page Information Sheets Demand Your dotRights: An Online Privacy Fact Sheet from the ACLU [also in Spanish] Search Engines: Who's Searching For You? Location Information: Do You Know Where Your Privacy Is? Social Networking: Do You Know Who Y... Read More

For several years, the FBI's San Francisco office conducted a "Mosque Outreach" program that collected and illegally stored intelligence about American Muslims' First Amendment-protected beliefs and religious practices, according to government documents released today by the American Civil Liberties Union from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Northern California, Asian L... Read More

By Ateqah KhakiACLU National OfficeToday Facebook weighed in on the recently reported problem of employers demanding job applicants to share their username and passwords during the application process. In a note on their Facebook and privacy page, Chief Privacy Officer (Policy) Erin Egan wrote:We don't think employers should be asking prospective employees to provide their private information and ... Read More

By Chris CalabreseACLU Washington Legislative OfficeThe FTC's newly released privacy report is a roadmap to success on consumer privacy — now it's up to Congress to follow the directionsThe Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a helpful new privacy report yesterday. While no one has a crystal ball, the FTC provides one of the best previews of where privacy regulation is going in the near future. ... Read More