News & Commentary

The Wyoming Department of Corrections (WDOC) prohibits Jewish prisoners in Wyoming from wearing a kippah (also known as a yarmulke) anywhere other than in their own cells or during religious services. Today, the ACLU and the ACLU of Wyoming sent a letter to the WDOC on behalf of an Orthodox Jewish prisoner, Clarence E. Fisher, whose religious beliefs require him to wear his kippah at all times. By prohibiting prisoners from wearing religious headgear outside of their cells and religious services, the WDOC forces Fisher and other prisoners to violate their core religious beliefs, and that violates the law.

It's a new year, and by now you've probably made your resolutions to be a new you. We wish the same were true for some anti-choice members of Congress. They've decided they rather enjoyed living in the past, particularly 2011, also known as the year of the war on women, and have resolved to again pass the misleadingly titled No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act (H.R. 7). This is definitely one bill that should be forgot and never brought to mind again.

While I was semi-disconnected from the grid over the holidays, one of the things I missed was an article in the Washington Post detailing the results of a poll on Americans’ privacy attitudes. The article, which contains lots of “man on the street” interviews with a range of views on privacy (including the usual “I have nothing to hide” viewpoint), correctly points out that in the interpersonal realm, “there are not yet widely accepted norms about who may watch whom and when and where tracking is justified.”

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.