News & Commentary

The Verge had a story last week (expanding on an August report from the Chicago Tribune that I’d missed) that the Chicago police have created a list of the “400 most dangerous people in Chicago.” The Trib reported on one fellow, who had no criminal arrests, expressing surprise over having received a visit from the police and being told he was on this list. A 17-year-old girl was also shocked when told she was on the list.

In the spring of 1958, civil rights leader and future Georgia Congressman John Lewis met Jim Lawson, an organizer with a nonviolent organizing group called the Fellowship Of Reconciliation (FOR). Lawson introduced Lewis to the FOR's popular comic book The Montgomery Story, which provided a compelling graphic narrative of the Montgomery bus boycott, as well as an accessible outline of FOR's broad ethic of nonviolent civil disobedience. Lewis has recently described the comic as a "Bible" and "guide" for Southern civil rights organizers of the time—an invaluable source of both emotional inspiration and practical guidance to the growing family of nonviolent resistors.

The 2014 Winter Olympics concluded last night in Sochi, Russia in spectacular, if not somewhat bizarre fashion, with the infamous giant bear mascot shedding a tear during the closing ceremony before the torch was passed to PyeongChang, South Korea, host of the 2018 Winter Olympics.

How many Japanese Americans were relocated to American concentration camps seventy one years ago?

There has been a lot of press coverage in the past couple of weeks about the Department of Homeland Security posting a solicitation for contract proposals regarding access to a national license plate reader database—and DHS’s decision, once mainstream news outlets began covering the story, to withdraw the solicitation. That has led to a lot of triumphant talk about how the agency shelved the plans in the face of widespread public outcry and bad press.

I get paid to defend unpopular speech. And, I’m the first to jump at the slightest hint of government censorship or coercion in the free market of ideas, as our recent comments critical of the IRS’s plans to regulate non-partisan political speech will attest.

"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world", as Percy Bysshe Shelley put it. I was reminded of this power that poetry has to illuminate social and political realities while reading Jamaal May's "There are Birds Here." May was born and raised in Detroit and his poem, dedicated to his native city, insists that Detroit is no desolate wasteland, but a place where children live, play and dream.

I watched a man yesterday plead guilty to war crimes in a military commission, and it troubled me. It troubled me because just the day before, I watched the defense counsel in another commission proceeding taking place at Guantánamo this week make compelling arguments that the very same charges should be dismissed because they are not legitimate war crimes.

Our crack communications staff here at the ACLU have taken the graphical blog post I did on location tracking, and what it might look like in the future, and turned it into a snappy new video.