News

Facing intense pressure from an ACLU-led coalition of nearly three dozen community organizations, Mayor London Breed has pulled her proposed ballot measure that would have gutted key provisions of San Francisco’s landmark surveillance oversight ordinance. Read More

Nearly three dozen community partners sent a letter expressing our grave concerns about Mayor Breed's proposal to give virtually unchecked surveillance power to the police. Read More

The ACLU of Northern California released findings from a year-long investigation into California Highway Patrol’s aerial surveillance of the 2020 protests following the murder of George Floyd. Read More

Community activists in Northern California today sued Marin County Sheriff Robert Doyle for illegally sharing millions of local drivers’ license plates and location data with hundreds of federal and out-of-state agencies. Read More

Proposition 24 appears to have passed, despite its deep flaws, and sends a clear message from California voters to the California legislature that they expect and demand action to protect their privacy and safeguard their fundamental privacy rights. Read More

Local activists sued San Francisco today over the city police department’s illegal use of a network of more than 400 non-city surveillance cameras to spy on them and thousands of others who protested as part of the Black-led movement against police violence. Read More

ACLU Foundation of Northern California and ACLU Minnesota along with Color of Change and MediaJustice have sent a letter to Twitter this morning demanding that they take immediate action to prevent its developers from facilitating government surveillance of its users. Dataminr, a Twitter developer, has provided law enforcement with tweets by activists organizing and participating in ongoing demons... Read More

In January 2019, the ACLU led a coalition of over 80 civil rights groups calling on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to stop selling face recognition technology to law enforcement. Google heeded these calls early on. Microsoft instead responded with a legislative effort in multiple states to legitimize law enforcement use of the technology. The ACLU, together with a coalition of groups, earlier this ... Read More

Amazon today announced a one-year moratorium on its sale of face recognition technology to law enforcement. The American Civil Liberties Union two years ago revealed that the company is secretly selling this technology to police, and has since led a coalition effort calling on the company to stop fueling police abuses and civil rights violations with the sale of this technology to law enforcement. Read More

Santa Cruz Mayor Cummings and Police Chief Mills are hosting an online community meeting to discuss police policies in the wake of national protests over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others at the hands of the police. Read More

On Wednesday, the Santa Cruz Public Safety Committee voted to approve an ordinance that would bring oversight to government use of surveillance technology, prohibit government use of facial recognition, and ban government use of predictive policing technology. Read More

SACRAMENTO — A partial company list published today in an expose by Buzzfeed confirms that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and at least one California law enforcement agency have teamed up with Clearview AI to run people’s faces against the company’s shadily-assembled database of billions of photos. In fact, according to Buzzfeed, ICE agents have run more than 8,000 searches from about 60 acco... Read More