News

Today, Senator Dick Durbin is holding a Senate Judiciary Sub-committee hearing on the civil rights violations endured by American Muslims. This timely hearing comes on the heels of a report by the New York Times revealing that the FBI is using its intelligence gathering powers, which were expanded significantly during the Bush years, to investigate thousands of people and groups without any factua... Read More

The ACLU today appealed a ruling that the government can collect the private records of three Twitter users as part of its investigation related to WikiLeaks. The ruling further held that the users cannot learn which other Internet companies were ordered to turn over information about them to the government. Read More

Today four groups announced the 2011 Develop for Privacy Challenge (www.develop4privacy.org), a new competition for mobile application developers to address privacy concerns surrounding mobile phones and other portable devices. Sponsoring the challenge are the ACLU of Northern California, the ACLU of Washington, and the Tor Project, with the assistance of the Ontario Information and Privacy Commis... Read More

In December, officials at a Sacramento-area high school suspended a student for posting to Facebook a message describing one of his teachers as a “fat ass who should stop eating fast food, and is a douche bag.” But this week, officials at the school moved quickly to expunge the suspension after a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California put forth this civics lesson: th... Read More

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC) is alerting travelers to their rights amid the uproar about new Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screening procedures. Some travelers are unaware that full-body virtual strip-search machines are already in place in several major California airports including San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Oakland. In this environment,... Read More

Nearly 50 million people in the United States carry smartphones with capabilities to track and pinpoint their location. Roughly one-fifth of smartphone owners use mobile location-based services – like Google Maps, Foursquare, and Facebook Places – that generate specific information tied to the user's location. But consumers are rightfully concerned about the privacy implications: where we go and w... Read More

The California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) has failed to provide a meaningful explanation for its illegal release of the names of some 5,000 HIV-positive Medi-Cal recipients to a third-party service provider, said attorneys at Lambda Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC), and HIV & AIDS Legal Services Alliance (HALSA). A letter delivered to the ag... Read More

The ACLU of Northern California (ACLU-NC) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are calling for answers to critical privacy and safety questions that loom over a controversial federal program to track preschoolers with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips at George Miller III Head Start program in Richmond, California.In an open letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Servi... Read More

Today Lambda Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC), and HIV & AIDS Legal Services Alliance (HALSA) sent a letter to David Maxwell-Jolly, Director of the California Department of Health Care Services, demanding a full explanation for the unauthorized and illegal disclosures of confidential identifying information of approximately 5,000 HIV-positive Medi-Cal reci... Read More

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California will join thirty one other ACLU affiliates around the country today in asking the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to make public the details of a new FBI program created to collect and "map" information about racial and ethnic demographics, "behaviors," cultural traditions, and "life style characteristics" in local communities with co... Read More

Today the ACLU of Northern California (ACLU-NC) and a lineup of ten of the nation's top privacy groups sent an open letter to Facebook calling for the social networking giant to fix remaining issues concerning user privacy and control. Facebook recently took steps to address some privacy problems, but the groups contend more needs to be done. They are urging Facebook to demonstrate commitment to i... Read More

San Francisco – A lawsuit filed today by the ACLU of Northern California seeks to stop California's policy of mandating that DNA is collected from anyone arrested for a felony, whether or not they are ever charged or convicted. The ACLU opposes this law because it violates constitutional guarantees of privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and because of the rmful impact on comm... Read More