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Information about where you go is valuableLocation data from your cell phone or portable device can make it easy to get directions or locate the closest coffee shop. But that location data also says a lot about you – where you go, what you do, and who you know. And outdated privacy laws, written before GPS and other location-aware technologies even existed, mean that all this personal information ... Read More

Wireless companies are opposing an important new mobile privacy bill in California (SB 1434) because they say they are too busy "working day and night to assist law enforcement," so it would be too much of a burden to tell their customers how often and why they are turning over location data to law enforcement.Every moment of every day, our mobile devices track our location, and our cell providers... Read More

Today, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC) and the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild demanded that the Oakland Police Department explain if it plans to abandon its Crowd Control Policy, in favor of vague standards that fail to provide specific guidance to officers in the field and that invite a repetition of last fall’s botched handling of... Read More

The good news is that SB 1434, the important California privacy law that would make sure that police get a warrant before getting access to sensitive location information, passing its first hurdle and is moving onto a full vote by the California Senate.The bad news is that several California legislators made the wrong call yesterday, selling out the privacy interests of Californians to the wireles... Read More

BART has a serious public relations problem. BART Police have been involved in three fatal shootings of passengers in the past three years, including the Oscar Grant incident in 2009, in which an unarmed African-American New Year's Eve reveler was shot in the back while lying face-down on a BART platform by a white police officer who later testified that he meant to use his taser, not his pistol. ... Read More

By Aden FineACLU National OfficeTwitter has filed a motion in state court in New York seeking to quash a court order requiring it to turn over information about one of its users and his communications on Twitter. This particular case involves a Twitter user, Malcolm Harris, who is being prosecuted by the District Attorney's Office in Manhattan for disorderly conduct in connection with the Occupy W... Read More

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed an amicus brief asking the Santa Cruz County Superior Court to dismiss felony conspiracy charges against two photojournalists who accompanied a group of activists into a vacant bank building. The journalists were arrested and charged with conspiracy, as well as trespass and vandalism, after they took and published photographs of the occupation. Read More

With students across California being suspended and expelled at alarming rates – and with no evidence that this severe discipline actually makes schools safer – Assemblymember Tom Ammiano has introduced AB 1729, a bill to encourage effective school discipline. The bill will be heard in Assembly Appropriations on Wednesday, May 16. Read More

The big news in the business world this week is Facebook's ongoing Initial Public Offering, where the company is selling shares to the public based on an estimated value of around one hundred billion dollars. [Or, as Dr. Evil would say: one hundred billion dollars.]Where does that kind of valuation come from?Certainly, some of it comes from Facebook's infrastructure and employees. But most of that... Read More

The DEA wants to capture the license plates of all vehicles traveling along Interstate 15 in Utah, and store that data for two years at their facility in Northern Virginia. And, as a DEA official told Utah legislators at a hearing this week (attended by ACLU of Utah staff and covered in local media), these scanners are already in place on “drug trafficking corridors” in California and Te... Read More