Archive

Christopher CalabreseACLU Washington Legislative OfficeThe new model of Internet advertising scares the heck out of us. It's called behavioral targeting. What that amounts to, in a nutshell, is following you around the web from site to site recording your movements and using that record to sell you personalized ads. All those ads that pop up on the side of articles on your favorite websites like E... Read More

In December, officials at a Sacramento-area high school suspended a student for posting to Facebook a message describing one of his teachers as a “fat ass who should stop eating fast food, and is a douche bag.” But this week, officials at the school moved quickly to expunge the suspension after a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California put forth this civics lesson: th... Read More

Documents Received August 18, 2011View DocumentsDocuments Received May 27, 2011View DocumentsBeaty v. FDA On February 2, 2011 death row prisoners from California, Arizona, and Tennessee filed suit against the FDA seeking to prohibit the FDA from allowing the importation or use of unapproved sodium thiopental.  Below are some of the court papers related to this case.Beaty v. FDA, court pa... Read More

In a case with chilling privacy implications, the California Supreme Court recently held that police officers can search the entire contents of a cell phone whenever they arrest someone, no matter how small the suspected crime or how relevant the cell phone contents might be. Why? Because it's just like a backpack, according to the Court, and previous cases have stated that backpacks can be search... Read More

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) released 192 pages of records to the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC) in compliance with a Dec. 14, 2010 California Superior Court order. The documents, delivered on Jan. 4, reveal more damaging details about the Department's "secret mission" to acquire sodium thiopental, a controlled substance used a... Read More

ACLU And Others Publish Open Letter To Public Officials Addressing Proposed Legislation And CensorshipNEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union and a coalition of free speech organizations today sent an open letter to public officials cautioning against the prosecution of third party publishers for publishing leaked government documents and efforts to limit the rights of individuals to view th... Read More

The California affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union announced a settlement today with the State of California that will establish a comprehensive monitoring and enforcement system to ensure school districts do not unlawfully charge fees to students for educational activities. Read More

Your online activities say a lot about you: what you like, where you go, and even who you know. And companies are often eager to collect this kind of detailed information about you. So we're pleased that the FTC has joined the chorus calling for companies and lawmakers to give us all greater control over our own personal information.One of the key elements of the FTC's proposal is a "do not track"... Read More

A California state court ordered the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) Tuesday to produce records relating to its acquisition of sodium thiopental, a controlled substance used as part of California's lethal injection protocol for executing death row inmates. Read More

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC) is alerting travelers to their rights amid the uproar about new Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screening procedures. Some travelers are unaware that full-body virtual strip-search machines are already in place in several major California airports including San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Oakland. In this environment,... Read More