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The ACLU Foundation of Northern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) successfully defended the First Amendment when they persuaded a federal district court judge in San Francisco to dissolve an order requiring a domain registrar to shut down the domain name Wikileaks.org in a dispute over documents allegedly posted on the site by a former employee of Swiss Bank Julius Baer. Read More

Attorneys for same-sex couples presented arguments to the California Supreme Court today in a historic lawsuit seeking to strike down a state law that bars lesbians and gay men from marriage. Read More

In September 2007, a U.S. District Court judge in Oregon struck down two provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act as unconstitutional. Brandon Mayfield, a Portland-based attorney, was arrested and detained in connection with the 2004 bombing of a train station in Madrid, but was released after two weeks when a fingerprint at the scene alleged to be his was matched to an Algerian terrorist. The court foun... Read More

Today was a really good day for the First Amendment. And it was also a good day for our court system. The judge made it clear in the Wikileaks case that he took the Constitutional issues seriously, at one point reminding the court that he had taken an oath to uphold the Constitution.From the very beginning of the argument over what should happen in the Wikileaks case, the judge made it clear that ... Read More

The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Northern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) last night filed a motion to intervene in a lawsuit that led a federal district judge to order the domain name Wikileaks.org shut down. The motion is on behalf of organizations and individuals that have accessed and used documents on the Wikileaks.org website in their work and want to c... Read More

Today was a really good day for the First Amendment. And it was also a good day for our court system.From the very beginning of the argument over what should happen in the Wikileaks case, the judge made it clear that he took the Constitutional issues seriously, at one point reminding the lawyers for the Bank that he had taken an oath to uphold the Constitution.In the end the Court not only dissolv... Read More

In a new YouTube video released Feb. 28, 2008, Aundre Herron talks about why California’s death penalty has to go.  As both a former prosecutor and murder victim survivor, Herron has a unique and incisive perspective on the death penalty, which she shared with the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice.Watch her testimonyHerron commented that she empathizes with the ... Read More

Order To Shut Down Wikileaks.org Violates First Amendment, Groups SayThe American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Northern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) last night filed a motion to intervene in a lawsuit that led a federal district judge to order the domain name Wikileaks.org shut down. The motion is on behalf of organizations and individuals that have accessed and us... Read More

We are deeply saddened by the apparent murder of 26-year-old Arthur Carmona on Feb. 17, 2008.Arthur was just 16-years-old when he was wrongfully convicted of a robbery as a result of mistaken eyewitness identification in 1998. Arthur spent two years in prison before his innocence was proven, largely as a result of the tireless efforts of his mother, Ronnie Carmona, and his pro-bono legal team... Read More

A recent policy conference on Internet issues held in Washington, D.C. included the panel, "Social Networking and Privacy: An Oxymoron?" It shouldn't be, but some of the major platforms for social networking seem to be treating the two concepts as if they were mutually exclusive.We have blogged about the controversy over Facebook's Beacon feature, a program launched during the holiday shopping sea... Read More