News & Commentary

As you may have heard, Justin Bieber is being investigated for egging his neighbor's home in Los Angeles. If the damage is found to be $400 or more, Bieber could be charged with felony vandalism under California law. A wrinkle that makes this different than the average pop star-in-peril situation is that because Bieber isn't a United States citizen, if he is convicted of a felony he could potentially be deported back to his native Canada. This potential loss to America is because under U.S. law, an aggravated felony or crimes of "moral turpitude" by non-citizens leads to mandatory detention and ineligibility for almost all relief.

The ACLU’s Chris Calabrese testified yesterday before the Senate Commerce Committee in a hearing on the economic benefits and the safety, privacy, and First Amendment implications of unmanned aerial vehicles — drones — which are poised to invade U.S. airspace by 2015. The hearing came on the same day as a front-page story in the Washington Post, describing the rapid spread of this new and powerful technology among law enforcement agencies.

Picture it. You’re online, ensconced in a muscled avatar, hacking your way through a World of Warcraft quest. A burly blacksmith appears on screen, and instead of brandishing a blunderbuss, turns to you and whispers: “Nothing is better than joining a peace party.” This might be your first clue that whoever is operating the blacksmith suit has things other than digital conquest on the brain.

Originally posted by the ACLU of Ohio.
Ohio made

Last week, I publicly revealed my identity as a member of the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, a group that in 1971 broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, took documents proving that the FBI had been spying on innocent Americans, and shared them with the public. Since I came forward, I have been repeatedly asked the following: Why would you, a young mother of three, do something so dangerous and with such serious consequences, and put the lives of your children at risk?

In documenting how she was stalked and threatened online, Amanda Hess, a feminist journalist, shines an unflinching spotlight on the ugly misogyny that too often pervades online forums, making women feel unwelcome or even unsafe just for speaking our minds. It is for similar reasons that (much as I cherish the First Amendment) I generally try not to get sucked into reading comments posted on stories covering cases brought by the ACLU Women's Rights Project, where I work.

In the last 25 years or so, the attitude of Courts toward people making rights claims about sexual orientation has undergone a stark reversal. The Supreme Court of 1986 in Bowers v. Hardwick thought it "at best facetious" to claim that the constitution prevented states from making the intimate relationships of gay people a crime. By 2003, the Court said gay people had the right not to have their relationships "demeaned" by laws that did just that. Lawrence v. Texas.

I will be in federal district court in Oregon today for oral argument in the ACLU’s challenge to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s practice of obtaining Oregon patients’ confidential prescription records without a warrant. We represent patients and a doctor whose prescriptions are tracked in the Oregon Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP), a state database intended as a public health tool to help doctors and pharmacists avoid and treat drug overdoses and abuse by their patients. Although Oregon law requires police to get a probable cause warrant from a judge before requesting PDMP records in an investigation, the DEA refuses, and instead uses administrative subpoenas to request the records. Unlike a warrant, those subpoenas involve neither prior approval of a judge nor a showing of probable cause.

Since the Supreme Court's landmark Windsor ruling last June striking down the core of the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act" (DOMA), the federal government has moved, with commendable speed, in a myriad of areas to extend recognition to the marriages of same-sex couples.