News & Commentary

Sheriff Lee Baca stunned the public this week by announcing that he will immediately retire as the head of Los Angeles County jails. His announcement marks another milestone in the ACLU's campaign to end the culture of rampant deputy-on-prisoner violence that has plagued the Los Angeles County jails for years.

The Department of Justice and Department of Education announced today what we have known to be true for a long time: yes, race discrimination in school discipline is a real problem.

Take a look at the photograph above. It shows a former police officer in an orange jumpsuit making a court appearance to face a felony charge of evidence tampering, as well as misdemeanor obstruction and theft. I hope that police around the nation will see this image (which comes from here) and realize that this is what can happen when they try to seize and destroy photographs or video taken by others.

You've probably heard politicians or pundits say that “metadata doesn't matter.” They argue that police and intelligence agencies shouldn't need probable cause warrants to collect information about our communications. Metadata isn’t all that revealing, they say, it’s just numbers.

Ars Technica reported yesterday that AT&T has confirmed it will allow web sites to pay money so that data downloaded from those sites will not be counted against customers’ monthly data caps. I don’t know whether this is a business model that will take hold—but if it does, it is dangerous to the openness of the Internet.

Serving life without parole is not the big easy. Prisoners who are sentenced to live behind bars every day until they die are not spending their hours watching football games in air-conditioned cells.

It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community . . . When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law, that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Monday announced six states, chosen from 25 applicants, that will be test sites for integrating drones into domestic airspace: Alaska, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Texas, and Virginia (the Alaska test site plans to also test drones in Hawaii and Oregon, and Virginia will also be testing drones in New Jersey). The chosen test sites belie one of the biggest arguments some governors, state legislators, and industry lobbyists have been using against enacting privacy protections for domestic drone use: that passing privacy legislation would undermine a state’s chances of being selected as a test site and hurt its economy.

What executive order governs the NSA’s surveillance abroad – even when that surveillance sweeps up Americans’ communications?