News & Commentary

Imagine you are taken from your community and family and sent to an institutional environment where everything is separated by sex. Once you get there the officers in charge of your every moment tell you that you are not the sex you have always known yourself to be but instead are the opposite sex and will be considered that sex for all purposes. Then, you are stripped of all your clothes so that officers can observe your genitals. This is a common form of sexual assault that transgender and gender non-conforming individuals in prison and jail are regularly subjected to. Why? So guards can decide which jail or prison cell to assign them to.

Last week, the ACLU joined a constitutional challenge to the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA), the statute that allows the NSA to engage in dragnet surveillance of Americans' international phone calls and emails. With the Federal Defenders Office, we filed a motion on behalf of Jamshid Muhtorov, the first criminal defendant to receive notice that he had been monitored under this controversial spying law. But Mr. Muhtorov received this notice only after the Department of Justice (DOJ) abandoned its previous policy of concealing FAA surveillance in criminal cases — a policy that violated both the statute itself and defendants' due process rights.

The U.S. Department of Transportation announced on Monday that it is proceeding with an effort to reduce traffic accidents by creating a “Vehicle to Vehicle” wireless infrastructure (known as V2V) through which cars can communicate with each other while on the roads and automatically avert certain accidents. Details can be found in this story by the Associated Press, and in this in-depth look by Ars Technica.

The lead statement of the House GOP immigration standards released last week says, "Border Security and Interior Enforcement Must Come First." While catchy, this phrase suggests that enforcement has not been taking place. The reality is that since 1996, our nation's singular immigration policy has been enforcement-first and enforcement-only. This folly of decades of enforcement-first has come at a tremendous cost – to American taxpayers who have funded it, to immigrant families torn asunder, and to all of our civil liberties.

The following op-ed was originally published by Roll Call.

The girl, known in court documents as Susan Doe but now known to the world as Nicole Maines, was the subject of a court case over the rights of transgender students to use the correct bathroom for their gender. And last week she won. On January 30, 2014 the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled that Nicole's school violated the Maine Human Rights Act (MHRA) when it required her to use the staff bathroom rather than the bathroom used by all other female students.

Last week, there was a lot of emphasis on income inequality, social mobility, and class concerns, but not all of the attention came from President Obama and his State of the Union message. It was also "School Choice Week," and proponents of taxpayer-funded vouchers for students to pay for private and religious schools seized the opportunity to claim that vouchers will solve these challenging societal issues. However, when "school choice" means vouchers, what it really offers is discrimination and unaccountability.

Our country's federal prison population has grown by nearly 800% in the last 30 years.

Last week was a big week for immigration for two very different people: Justin Bieber and House Speaker John Boehner.