Blog

This week marks the 27th celebration of Banned Books Week, a national event promoted by the American Library Association (ALA) celebrating the freedom to read.To Kill a Mockingbird, The Color Purple, and Heather Has Two Mommies are just a few examples of material that some have tried to keep off library shelves. According to the ALA, more than 400 books were challenged this year. Among the top ten... Read More

We have blogged about the invasive new border search policies that allow copying of books, documents and data, as well as intrusive questioning, all without probable cause and in conflict with decades of legal precedents.The Travelers' Privacy Protection Act restores privacy protections, while still enabling federal border agents to retain foreign intelligence information by obtaining a warrant.Se... Read More

In case you missed it on our National ACLU blog, here is an entry written by the ACLU's Matt Bors about federal policies that allow DHS to search international travelers without consent or any suspicion of wrongdoing:Previously we've discussed the push to search under travellers' clothes with the naked machine and the million nameson the terrorist watch list. The latest Civil Discourse comic exami... Read More

Would you allow a stranger to sift through your purse or wallet and take your driver's license? Would you want your children or grandchildren to tell passers-by on the street what school they attend or their student ID numbers?Of course not. You know it is important to protect your and your family's personal information.But any time that tiny computer chips called Radio Frequency Identification (R... Read More

In an important victory for privacy rights, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday reinstated a portion of California's landmark financial privacy law that allows consumers to prevent banks from sharing information with affiliated companies about a customer's savings account or buying habits.The California Financial Information Privacy Act, which the ACLU worked to pass for many years, has b... Read More

On blogs, personal and political websites, and through user-generated content sites, ordinary citizens in extraordinary numbers are recreating a public sphere and reinvigorating the democratic debate at the core of our political system. 46% of Americans have already used the Internet in connection with the political campaign- more than during all of 2004. User-generated content is playing a partic... Read More

The Federal Communications Commission chastised Comcast for throttling peer-to-peer applications today, calling the practice unreasonable and ordering Comcast to change its network management policies.Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, responded, "We applaud the FCC for taking enforcement action against Comcast. The nation's second largest Internet service pr... Read More

Dutch and British transit cards, California Senate ID cards, HID building access cards, some new generation credit cards, and now FasTrak.What do they have in common?They all use RFID technology and security researchers have shown that they all have glaring privacy and security risks.Researcher Nate Lawson has discovered that FasTrak transponders are vulnerable to sniffing, cloning, and surreptiti... Read More

Dutch Chipmaker NXP, formerly Philips Semiconductors, is taking Dutch Radboud University to court to try to prevent researchers from publishing their scientific paper showing how the RFID chips used in Dutch travel cards can be copied and cloned.The Bay Area recently released its own RFID-enabled transit card system,Translink. It is important to ensure that security research about these systems is... Read More

President Bush signed into law the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, at 1:15 p.m. this afternoon in the Rose Garden.Immediately after he signed, the ACLU sued.Our clients are reporters, organizations like Amnesty International, Global Fund for Women, and Human Rights Watch, and defense attorneys, whose activities will be greatly curtailed by this new law.Our argument is simple: This bill is a clear vio... Read More

According to Google, the "time was right" for the company to post a link to a privacy policy on its homepage.It certainly was.The California Online Privacy Protection Act states that a company is in violation of the Act if they fail to post its policy within 30 days of being notified of noncompliance.Google released its modified homepage including the privacy link 30 days after receiving a letter ... Read More

Chief Judge Vaughn Walker of the Northern District of California issued a ruling blasting key arguments made by supporters of telecom immunity last week.The lengthy opinion cuts through many common misconceptions and makes clear that the Senate is set to vote on telecom immunity based on misinformed arguments.The FISA bill is scheduled for a vote tomorrow, Tuesday, July 8. Contact your Senators to... Read More