Blog

Issues of free speech, censorship, and harassment took center stage last week at Twitter, the very popular online messaging and "micro blogging" site. Twitter has become an Internet craze. Users rely on the site to publish brief messages which typically describe what that person is doing or other things that don't warrant a separate blog post or email. The short version of the recent free sp... Read More

The blogosphere has been bubbling over the past few weeks over the subject of laptop searches and seizures at international borders. The source of the buzz? A couple of recent court cases. Read More

A federal grand jury on Thursday issued an indictment against a Missouri woman accused of creating a fake MySpace page to bully a 13-year old girl who later committed suicide. The high profile, and emotionally charged case, has drawn media attention from around the world.Unfortunately, the prosecutors have relied on a novel and troubling interpretation of the law in order to go after the MySpace b... Read More

Statement on In re Marriage Cases decisionToday is the day we’ve been working for—a watershed for basic fairness and human dignity. The California Supreme Court has recognized that equality means that everyone must be free to marry the person they love.Profound social change starts in California, and does not end here.  It influences the rest of the nation. Today’s decision means th... Read More

When the ACLU of Northern California learned in October of 2006 that the City of Fresno was violating the constitutional rights of its homeless residents by seizing and immediately destroying their possessions, we, along with the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and the law firm of HellerEhrman LLP, filed a class-action lawsuit in federal district court.The following are excerpts from declarati... Read More

The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation can today reveal their participation in a long fight with the FBI over free speech and government-imposed secrecy.In November 2007, the FBI delivered a National Security Letter to the Internet Archive, which ordered them to hand over detailed usage logs on several users.Both the ACLU and EFF fought the legal request, which we argued was unconstitutional.... Read More

The FBI has withdrawn an unconstitutional national security letter issued to the Internet Archive after a legal challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As the result of a settlement agreement, the FBI withdrew the NSL and agreed to the unsealing of the case, finally allowing the Archive's founder to speak out for the first time about his battle aga... Read More

The Internet Archive is a digital library, founded in 1996 with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Internet Archive's collections includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages. To fulfill its mission, the Archive works with national libraries, muse... Read More

The government uses National Security Letters (NSLs) to demand access to sensitive records in the custody of Internet service providers, financial institutions, credit reporting agencies, and many other kinds of organizations. In almost all cases, recipients of the NSLs are served with gag orders that prohibit them from disclosing that they have received the letters. The NSL statute v... Read More

In response to a letter from the ACLU of Northern California, the Linden Unified School District will not read private text messages stored on students' cell phones unless there is good reason to believe that the search will show that a law or school rule was violated. The District's new policy also limits the scope of the search to the alleged infraction leading to the seizure of a cell phone. Read More

The Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference is on May 20-23, 2008 at the Omni Hotel in New Haven, Connecticut. Early Bird Registration is open until this Friday, May 2.This year, the 18th annual Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference is focusing on those issues at the forefront of technology policy this election year. In the areas of privacy, intellectual property, cybersecurity, telecommun... Read More

Tomorrow, Thursday, April 24, the Sacramento Library Board will be debating its internet use policy, which directs library staff to ask Internet users to "end a search or change a screen" if the content they are viewing is deemed to interfere with the "a safe, welcoming and comfortable environment."The effect is like allowing one library patron to snatch a book out of another person's hands just b... Read More