Blog

What if once a week the police drove by your home and took a picture?That is what the San Jose City Council proposed last week with an effort to install automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) on garbage trucks.ALPRs are high-speed cameras that sit atop patrol cars or on roadsides and are capable of snapping photos of thousands of license plate numbers per hour, including their location. This tech... Read More

While students, parents, faculty and school staff gear up for the excitement of a new school year, a critically important process is unfolding largely out of public view. Read More

Today a Connecticut Supreme Court ruling saved 11 men from the death penalty. They were sentenced to death for crimes committed before Connecticut's death penalty repeal and must instead serve life imprisonment without release. Read More

A new poll shows that California voters overwhelmingly see a problem with biased policing in our state and support reforms to address the issue. Read More

Public-records laws are designed to ensure that constituents and journalists have access to information on public affairs. They protect a bedrock value of our democracy: transparency. Read More

For communities of color, surveillance isn't just an invasion of personal privacy, it’s a tool for high tech racial profiling that can have disastrous and fatal consequences. Read More

According to documents recently obtained by The Intercept in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the government is surveilling the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Read More

A federal district court held that the government must obtain a warrant to obtain historical cell phone location data. This important ruling makes it clear that we don’t have to give up privacy to participate in modern society. Read More

Sandra Bland had a constitutional right to give her arresting officer the middle finger. She could have even told him to f*** off. Nothing in the law prevented her from being rude. Read More

The ACLU of Northern California has joined the Federal Public Defender’s Office and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in supporting a warrant requirement for access to cell phone location information. Read More

Trans women’s lives are endangered when renting hotel rooms, driving cars, walking down the street. How much longer will we sit idly by while they are murdered for having the audacity to exist? This must stop. Read More

The ACLU of Southern California sued LAUSD, asking that the school district be required to invest the appropriate amount of money to develop new or improved services for the high need students targeted under LCFF. Read More