Archive

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

On July 8, 2009, ACLU Foundation of Northern California, Lambda Legal, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights — representing LGBT community organizations Our Family Coalition, Lavender Seniors of the East Bay, and PFLAG — filed a motion to intervene in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of California's Proposition 8, which eliminated the right of ... Read More

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian filed a lawsuit on Aug. 24 against the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to speed the release of FBI records on the investigation and surveillance of Muslim communities in the Bay Area. Read More

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian filed a lawsuit against the FBI to speed the release of records on the investigation and surveillance of Muslim communities in the Bay Area. Over the past several months, community members from Berkeley, Fresno, Visalia and San Jose, among other cities, have contacted the ACLU to share their experiences abo... 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