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

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

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

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

Today the Location Privacy Act of 2012 passed through the California Assembly with overwhelming bipartisan support. This is a critical step in protecting the privacy of all Californians in our modern world where a cell phone is closer to a necessity than a luxury.We shouldn't have to choose between using our smartphone and protecting our privacy. Unfortunately, outdated laws like the Electronic Co... Read More

In a victory for free speech on the Internet, social network giant Facebook last week corrected a mistake that had the unfortunate consequence of blocking political speech and affirmed its commitment to serving as a neutral platform for political advocacy. The controversy erupted when the social network, which positions itself as a key platform for reaching "a huge potential voter pool," rejected ... Read More

Last week the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said it would rehear the ACLU of Northern California's lawsuit challenging a California law that mandates that DNA is collected from anyone arrested on suspicion of a felony. This suit is the only civil suit in the country challenging a disturbing trend toward invasive DNA collection of people who haven't been convicted of crime. The federal class-ac... Read More

Today, the ACLU of Northern California went to court in two separate cases with the same goal: shedding light on the government's use of controversial and arguably unconstitutional surveillance techniques. In the first, we filed a motion to unsealsecret court papers authorizing the government to use a device called a "stingray" to track an individual's location. In the second, we filed a... Read More

This morning's New York Times features a front-page story about an "uptick" in demands for information from cell carriers by law enforcement. As the ACLU's Chris Calabrese writes, the numbers are staggering: 1.3 million requests for information, possibly many times that many users affected, hundreds of full-time employees whose sole job is to process incoming demands, and reports that these demand... Read More

In early June, the popular location based service foursquare overhauled its mobile app. As a result of these changes, users can now see all of their friends' check-ins from the last two weeks. Many users may not understand how much of their location history is visible to their friends, and even those users aware of the details have no practical way to opt out. And while forcing users to share that... Read More