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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

The American Civil Liberties Union of California and the law firm Morrison & Foerster LLP today announced they would dismiss a class action lawsuit filed against the state of California on behalf of public school students who had been charged fees as a condition of taking academic courses. The announcement follows Gov. Jerry Brown’s Saturday signing of Assembly Bill 1575 (AB 1575), a bill authore... Read More

The American Civil Liberties Union of California today called Gov. Jerry Brown’s decision to veto AB1081, known as the TRUST ACT, a missed opportunity to protect Californians from unnecessary and unjustified detentions and deportations, but vowed to continue the fight to see it become law 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

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

Download the Fall 2012 ACLU of Northern California Newsletter and read about our latest events and initiatives. 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

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

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

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