A federal court in Sacramento issued a preliminary injunction this week protecting the free speech rights of a deputy sheriff in Trinity County to speak out about drug legalization and other political issues, in a suit brought by the ACLU of Northern California and the law firm of Keker and Van Nest LLP.

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.

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.

For more than a decade, the ACLU of Northern California has been working to ensure that sex education in public schools is science-based, free of bias, medically accurate and age-appropriate. The law we co-sponsored with Planned Parenthood in 2004 has become a model for other states and for the national REAL (Responsible Education About Life) Act. After years of Bush Administration support for ineffective, biased and harmful abstinence-only education, the nation is poised to take a new direction, and many are looking to California as a leader.

In the span of four years, California voters three times rejected a ballot initiative that would require doctors to notify a pregnant teen's parent before an abortion. Propositions 73, Proposition 85 and Proposition 4 all proposed to amend the state Constitution to reverse the state Supreme Court ruling in an ACLU lawsuit that teenagers have fundamental rights to decide whether to end an unintended pregnancy.

Until December 2008, California required that women reside here for six months before they were eligible to receive essential health services through the state's Access for Infants and Mothers program. The ACLU of Northern California joined with other public interest organizations to challenge the rule on behalf of Maternal and Child Health Access, a non-profit organization.

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.