Blog

The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation have filed an amicus brief in what will be the first case in the country to address the constitutional implications of a so-called "stingray," a little known device that can be used to track a suspect's location and engage in other types of surveillance. We argue that if the government wants to use invasive surveillance technology like this, it must expl... 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One year after the implementation of California's historic prison realignment plan, the state has failed to adopt the kinds of reforms necessary to ensure its success and a lasting reduction both in the number of people behind bars and recidivism rates. Read More

Last week, LA Weekly ran a story indicating that the Los Angeles Police Department is using a device called a "Stingray" to track cell phones. Law enforcement seems to think that because these devices can track cell phones without going to the trouble of even interacting with mobile carriers, they don't need a search warrant. Please tell Governor Brown to sign the Location Privacy Act of 2012 into... Read More

This morning the ACLU of Northern California's important DNA privacy case, Haskell v. Harris, was reheard by an 11-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit. I argued that the current California law – which says that DNA has to be collected from anyone arrested on suspicion of a felony, whether or not they are ever charged or convicted – is unconstitutional and wrong. Collecting DNA at the point of arre... Read More

Just shy of the one-year anniversary of the inaugural Occupy Wall Street protests, the ACLU of Northern California and the San Francisco Bay Guardian obtained initial documents from the FBI about surveillance of Occupy demonstrations in the region.The documents came after an ACLU-NC lawsuit filed after the FBI refused to release any documents in a Freedom of Information Act req... Read More