Archive

Today's news story that Comcast is blocking customer use of peer-to-peer program, BitTorrent, provides yet another glimpse into a future without net neutrality. According to several sources, Comcast disrupts communications between users of the peer to peer file sharing protocol. Comcast's block can be analogized to dropping a telephone call between two people and has been called "the ... Read More

Claiming “state secrets” are at stake, the U.S. government today requested the dismissal of a federal lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union against Boeing Company subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. for its participation in the CIA’s unlawful “extraordinary rendition” program. The ACLU filed the lawsuit on behalf of five rendition victims who were kidnapped by the CIA and secretly tra... Read More

On September 27, we blogged about Verizon’s attempt to discriminate based on content when it announced that it would block the text messages of NARAL. After a firestorm of bad press, Verizon quickly retreated and said that it had all been a misreading of their policy. But, whether or not companies will be able to function as a bottleneck on protected speech is at the heart of the debate over net n... Read More

In late September, US District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the PATRIOT Act's changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures. The sections of FISA struck down by Judge Aiken detail how and under what circumstances federal officials can get a warrant to wiretap. Prior to the passage of the... Read More

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State Senator Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) announced today that Governor Schwarzenegger signed his Senate Bill 362, which would prohibit employers and others from forcing anyone to have a radio frequency identification (RFID) device implanted under their skin. The bill will go into effect on January 1, 2008.RFID "tags" are tiny chips with miniature antennae that can be embedded in almost anything. U... Read More

Over the last week, Americans in places as far as upstate New York and as nearby as downtown San Francisco have noticed ads on billboards and taxi cabs for Google's new service, Google 411. Google 411allows users to call a 1-800 number to get local business information for no fee. Users can also connect to the requested number without a charge and can have the phone number sent as a t... Read More

Last November we learned that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been secretly compiling data on millions of innocent Americans. According to the Washington Post, the DHS has been using its Automated Targeting System (ATS) originally developed for cargo security to generate "terrorist" risk ratings on American travelers. This past August the DHS proposed a rule that would continue the c... Read More

The California Supreme Court has agreed today to review the case of two San Francisco 49er season ticket holders who are challenging the pat-down policy implemented by the 49ers. The couple say their right to privacy under the California Constitution was violated.

Legal documents in Sheehan v. San Francisco 49ers are available. 

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In case you missed it on our National ACLU blog, here is an entry written by the ACLU's Catherine Crump about the government's latest attempt to censor the Internet. As expected, the government is appealing the ACLU's March 2007 victory in the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) case. COPA is an Internet censorship law that makes it a crime to place content deemed "harmful to minors" o... Read More