Blog

ACLU of Northern California Challenge to The Abuse of Immigration Detainers Leads to Reforms by ICEA man named Carlos was waiting at a bus stop in San Bernardino County one recent evening when officers stopped and questioned him "because he looked suspicious." When Carlos was unable to show identification, the police arrested him. Carlos, who works as a janitor, has lived in the United States for ... Read More

The ACLU of Northern California (ACLU-NC) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are calling for answers to critical privacy and safety questions that loom over a controversial federal program to track preschoolers with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips at George Miller III Head Start program in Richmond, California.In an open letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Servi... Read More

On Tuesday, preschoolers in Richmond, California showed up for school and were handed jerseys embedded with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. RFID tags are tiny computer chips that are frequently used to track everything from cattle to commercial products moving through warehouses. Now the school district is apparently hoping to use these chips to replace manual attendance records, track... Read More

A few weeks ago, we wrote about United States v. Maynard, a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit requiring the government to obtain a warrant when it uses a GPS tracking device to monitor someone's movements.Last Friday, Judge James Orenstein in the Eastern District of New York recognized that Maynard's reasoning also applies when the government tries to ret... Read More

Every year tens of thousands of people in California are arrested for simply possessing small amounts of marijuana. These arrests overload our already stressed courts and jails. They also divert scarce public safety dollars that could be used to address violent crime. California's Proposition 19, on the November 2, 2010 ballot, offers a remedy that will move marijuana policy in a direction that ma... Read More

Is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) spying on Muslim communities in Berkeley, Fresno, Visalia, San Jose or other Northern California communities?We don't know. But we're determined to find out.Over the past several months, community members from cities across Northern California have contacted the ACLU and the Asian Law Caucus to share their personal experiences about visits by FBI agents... Read More

Imagine you're a soldier stationed overseas and discover you're pregnant. If you want to have an abortion but are living in a country where it's illegal, you might as well be living in pre-Roe v. Wade America. Why? Current federal law prohibits almost all abortion services at U.S. military hospitals, even if a woman pays for the procedure herself. So, like a woman in the 1950s, you can fly to anot... Read More

Hundreds of millions of sensitive records have been compromised by data breaches. If your personal records were compromised by a breach, wouldn't you want companies to be required to tell you important information about the breach and how to protect yourself?Then ask Governor Schwarzenegger to sign SB 1166, which standardizes the details that must be disclosed to security breach victims.California... Read More

While the ACLU of Northern California and Facebook both agree that location information is very sensitive, we disagree that Places gives users adequate control of how and when to share this information. (Next time I visit my hometown, I'd like to be able to hang out with some of the Facebook crew at the Nut House without being asked again and again and again if I want that shared with everyone nea... Read More

Following Facebook's announcement today about its new location-based product, Places, here's what the ACLU of Northern California has to say on the privacy front:Facebook made some changes to its regular privacy practices to protect sensitive location-based information, such as limiting the default visibility of check-ins on your feed to "Friends Only." But it has failed to build in some other imp... Read More

Last Friday, the district court in the Western District of Washington granted the motion to intervene that the ACLU filed on behalf of our clients in the lawsuit challenging the North Carolina Department of Revenue's (DOR) repeated requests for Amazon's customer records in the course of its tax audit of Amazon. These customer records reveal highly personal and intimate details of people's lives th... Read More

Got a cell phone? Use Facebook? What about Gmail? Read books on your shiny new iPad? Did you buy that new iPad online?Since you're reading this on some kind of electronic device, we're guessing that you can answer "yes" to at least a few of those questions.Which is why it's crucial that you drop everything you're doing right now and take our Privacy Quiz!It's fun, it's short, and unlike pop quizze... Read More