Blog

Last week wasn’t just a big one for NSA reform – it also found one of California’s largest cities rolling back warrantless surveillance by local law enforcement. With a unanimous vote, the Oakland City Council adopted a privacy policy for its port-centered surveillance project known as the Domain Awareness Center (DAC) and created a new committee to address citywide surveillance reform, including ... Read More

The California Senate on June 3, 2015 took a powerful stand for privacy, voting overwhelmingly to approve the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA). Read More

A growing chorus of elected officials, law enforcement, and community leaders settled on an answer to the senseless deaths of unarmed people of color at the hands of law enforcement: body cameras. And one in four police agencies have already started using them. Read More

We just learned that Santa Clara County will not be moving forward to purchase an invasive Stingray mobile tracking system. Read More

We live in a world where everyday devices collect and transmit data, but consumer privacy awareness is only beginning to come into focus for the Internet of Things. Read More

Today the California Senate’s Committee on Public Safety approved the CA Electronic Privacy Act. CalECPA would require police to get a warrant before searching devices or digital data. Read More

The ACLU filed lawsuits against two CA law enforcement agencies. The people deserve to know if these agencies are using StingRays without appropriate judicial authorization. Read More

Federal agencies served with a Freedom of Information Act request are refusing to release documents related to their purchase, use and disclosure of zero-day exploits, keeping the American public in the dark about a practice that leaves the Internet and its users less secure.Zero-day exploits are special software programs that take advantage of security vulnerabilities in software that are un... Read More

The people have spoken. And, today, the Federal Communications Commission listened. A majority of FCC commissioners voted in favor of historically strong open Internet rules.It appears they have done what the ACLU and other free speech groups have been suggesting for years: put net neutrality rules on firm legal footing to prevent large internet companies from using their market pow... Read More

Despite criticism from the ACLU and Supervisor Joe Simitian, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved a sheriff’s department request to use more than $500,000 of federal grant money to purchase a Stingray cell phone tracking system.Simitian perhaps put it best when he told Sheriff Lori Smith during Tuesday’s meeting of the supervisors that, “Just to be clear, we're being ask... Read More

The debate over cell phone surveillance comes to the heart of Silicon Valley on Feb. 24, when the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors will consider a proposal to purchase a Stingray. Unfortunately, the public wasn't told about it. Read More

Public participation in decisions about whether to equip police with surveillance technology is often the exception rather than the rule in California and across the country. Oakland knows this all too well. Read More