Archive

The California Supreme Court ruled today that the state can no longer exclude same-sex couples from civil marriage. In a 4-3 decision, drafted by Chief Justice Ronald George, the court ruled: “In light of the fundamental nature of the substantive rights embodied in the right to marry — and their central importance to an individual’s opportunity to live a happy, meaningful, and satisfying life as a... Read More

When the ACLU of Northern California learned in October of 2006 that the City of Fresno was violating the constitutional rights of its homeless residents by seizing and immediately destroying their possessions, we, along with the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and the law firm of HellerEhrman LLP, filed a class-action lawsuit in federal district court.The following are excerpts from declarati... Read More

A U.S. District Judge for the Eastern District of California has ruled that the City of Fresno’s practice of immediately seizing and destroying the personal possessions of homeless residents violates the constitutional right of every person to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. Read More

Does a school district have the authority to expel students based on an incident involving a school resource officer that occurred off campus and after school? A Contra Costa County Superior Court ruled in May 2008 that the Antioch Unified School District violated the rights of two students when it expelled them from school following an off-campus incident in which police officers pepper-sprayed ... Read More

The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation can today reveal their participation in a long fight with the FBI over free speech and government-imposed secrecy.In November 2007, the FBI delivered a National Security Letter to the Internet Archive, which ordered them to hand over detailed usage logs on several users.Both the ACLU and EFF fought the legal request, which we argued was unconstitutional.... Read More

The FBI has withdrawn an unconstitutional national security letter issued to the Internet Archive after a legal challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As the result of a settlement agreement, the FBI withdrew the NSL and agreed to the unsealing of the case, finally allowing the Archive's founder to speak out for the first time about his battle aga... Read More

The Internet Archive is a digital library, founded in 1996 with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Internet Archive's collections includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages. To fulfill its mission, the Archive works with national libraries, muse... Read More

The government uses National Security Letters (NSLs) to demand access to sensitive records in the custody of Internet service providers, financial institutions, credit reporting agencies, and many other kinds of organizations. In almost all cases, recipients of the NSLs are served with gag orders that prohibit them from disclosing that they have received the letters. The NSL statute v... Read More

On November 26, 2007, the FBI served a National Security Letter (NSL) on the Internet Archive, a digital library. The letter sought personal information about one of the Archive's users, including the individual's name, address, and any electronic communication transactional records pertaining to the user. The NSL also included a gag order, prohibiting the Archive and its counsel from revealing th... Read More

In response to a letter from the ACLU of Northern California, the Linden Unified School District will not read private text messages stored on students' cell phones unless there is good reason to believe that the search will show that a law or school rule was violated. The District's new policy also limits the scope of the search to the alleged infraction leading to the seizure of a cell phone. Read More