News & Commentary

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?

The ACLU filed an appeal on Thursday in New York challenging the dismissal of our lawsuit against the NSA's mass call-tracking program. Through the program, the government collects records on every call made and received in this country, allowing it to construct detailed maps of Americans' everyday lives.

Remember that amazing Daily Show segment a couple years ago in which a correspondent asked Florida Governor Rick Scott to pee into a cup? Governor Scott was dead set on forcing some of the state's poorest, most vulnerable citizens to submit to humiliating and expensive drug tests before they could receive public benefits. According to the Daily Show correspondent, it should follow then that lawmakers, including Governor Scott – who also cash checks that come from public funds – should receive the same treatment.

Coloradans take a lot of pride in our pioneer spirit.  Today, we are pioneers once again as the first legal marijuana stores open and Colorado becomes the first state in the country where you can carry marijuana and use it in your home without the threat of arrest and criminal prosecution.

Over the last seven months, we have learned an incredible amount about the government's post-9/11 surveillance efforts. But there is a crucial gap in our basic understanding. We now know, for example, a good deal about how the government conducts surveillance that targets Americans, and about surveillance of foreigners that sweeps up Americans' international communications when the actual surveillance takes place on U.S. soil (for example, from a Google facility in the United States). But we still know very little about Executive Order 12,333, which governs the NSA's surveillance abroad — even when that surveillance sweeps up Americans' communications.
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As 2013 comes to a close, political pundits will no doubt say that the big immigration story of the year was the paralysis of national immigration reform inside the Washington D.C. beltway. That may be so, if all you're doing is counting lines of copy. But something else happened this year, an arguably bigger and certainly more decisive 2013 immigration story: over a dozen states approved one or more significant pro-immigrant measures, including common sense reforms advancing immigrant integration and equality in areas under the state's proper control. And for the second straight year, no new state followed Arizona down into the sinkhole created by its infamous SB 1070 law, which requires all police to verify the immigration of status of anyone they suspect to be undocumented.

In the late hours on Thursday evening, the U.S. Senate, by a vote of 84-15, passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), sending the measure to President Obama for his signature.  Included within the sprawling annual defense authorization is a repeal of the military’s stigmatizing and discriminatory ban on private, consensual intimate conduct – defined in Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) as "unnatural carnal copulation."