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As sheriffs have readily admitted, county jails are not full of individuals who have been convicted of crimes, or even individuals thought to present a high public safety risk to the community. Most people in county jails have not been convicted of a crime. More than 71 percent of the 71,000 Californians held in county jails on any given day are awaiting their day in court. Most of them do not pos... Read More

One year ago today, police fired tear gas, flash bang grenades and lead-filled bags into a massive crowd of Occupy Oakland demonstrators. The ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild sued the Oakland Police Department for its egregious constitutional violations against demonstrators during the October 25, 2011 and November 2, 2011 demonstrations. That lawsuit is ongoing.Demonstrators are planning to ga... Read More

You don't lose your First Amendment rights because you have been arrested at a previous demonstration. Censorship in anticipation of possible illegal conduct in the future isn't just creepy, it's also unconstitutional and just plain wrong.That's why the ACLU of Northern California filed petitions for habeas corpus today on behalf of four Occupy Oakland demonstrators. The demonstrators are challeng... Read More

The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation have filed an amicus brief in what will be the first case in the country to address the constitutional implications of a so-called "stingray," a little known device that can be used to track a suspect's location and engage in other types of surveillance. We argue that if the government wants to use invasive surveillance technology like this, it must expl... Read More

If the First Amendment means anything, it's that students should be able to demonstrate on their own campus without being afraid of police violence. The pepper spraying incident at UC Davis on November 18, 2011 was among the worst examples of police violence against student demonstrators that we've seen in a generation.Fatima Sbeih was a senior majoring in International Studies, riding her bike ho... Read More

Shortly before next week's one-year anniversary of the Oakland Police Department's brutal crackdown on Occupy Oakland, Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern announced that he was seeking funds to purchase a drone to engage in unspecified unmanned aerial surveillance. One of the many unfortunate lessons of OPD's Occupy crackdown is that when law enforcement has powerful and dangerous tools in its arsen... Read More

Late last week, Gawker's Adrian Chen "unmasked" Violentacrez, a notorious "troll" on the content aggregator Reddit. Violentacrez is a remarkably unsympathetic figure; as the article put it, his "specialty is distributing images of scantily-clad underage girls," and he "also issued an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore, misogyny, incest, and exotic abominations yet unnamed." Yet while the stor... Read More

When Apple expanded the availability of its FaceTime videochat app to cell networks, AT&T responded by announcing that only iPhone and iPad users with a high-priced "Mobile Share" data plan would get to use the app on its network. In other words, ordinary AT&T customers—many of whom pay the carrier both for their mobile device and for the data they use—have been cut off from an easy way to... Read More

It should come as no surprise to Californians that our public schools are in crisis. Headlines regularly decry California's fiscal crisis and its devastating impact on our schools. One issue recently receiving a lot of attention is the shockingly high rates of suspension and expulsion, particularly for students of color, across the state. Read More

We did it. After years of work from the ACLU of California and our allies, dangerous shackles and restraints can no longer be used on pregnant women in our state's prisons and jails. Last week Governor Brown signed AB 2530, authored by Assemblymember Atkins, after it passed the legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support.In 2005 California became one of the first states to prohibit the shackl... Read More

The Location Privacy Act of 2012 was intended to ensure the privacy of Californians by requiring law enforcement and other government entities to get a search warrant before obtaining information about the location of an electronic device. As a result, it garnered broad bipartisan support in its passage through the California legislature. Unfortunately, Governor Brown ignored this support and chos... Read More

One year after the implementation of California's historic prison realignment plan, the state has failed to adopt the kinds of reforms necessary to ensure its success and a lasting reduction both in the number of people behind bars and recidivism rates. Read More