News & Commentary

Yesterday, voters in Albuquerque, New Mexico stood up for women and families, turning out in force to defeat a proposed ban on abortion after 20 weeks by a 10 point margin. Time and again, we've seen women and families raise their voices to oppose harmful restrictions on a woman's ability to make her own decisions about whether to continue a pregnancy. In Texas, the people's veto (when thousands of activists in the Senate gallery yelled that they didn't want abortion restrictions and) temporarily halted the harmful abortion ban that we continue to fight in court. In Mississippi, voters decisively defeated a so-called personhood measure that would have banned abortion. The people have voted down abortion bans and restrictions around the country from Colorado to South Dakota to Florida. It's clear that a majority of Americans agree that the decision to end a pregnancy belongs with a woman, her family, and her doctor.

This piece originally appeared at Defense One.

"I developed techniques to survive. I've learned to play chess with other [kids] through a six-inch wall to keep myself occupied. But for others, it breaks them, makes them either violent or suicidal."

We’ve written before about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1998 — a federal law that protects the robust diversity of free speech we’ve come to know and love (and hate) on the Internet. Last night, the ACLU and the ACLU of Kentucky had a chance to put our money where our mouth is. We filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of the user-generated gossip website TheDirty.com (warning: not just a clever name) and its publisher Nik Richie, who were recently — and wrongly — held legally responsible for someone else’s internet trolling. Our brief, filed alongside a star-spangled list of organizations dedicated to free speech, argues that the decision could be a disastrous precedent for Internet speech.

The ACLU and the ACLU of Northern California filed a friend-of-the-court brief yesterday on behalf of three of Congress’s most staunch defenders of Americans’ privacy rights — Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Mark Udall (D-Colo.), and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) — in a challenge to the NSA’s mass collection of the phone records of virtually all Americans.

Solitary confinement can eat away at someone's mind, making mental illness worse and leaving many people depressed, suicidal, hopeless or hallucinating. It's no place for individuals with mental illness.

Picture a death row trial in Alabama. The twelve jury members have spent days, maybe even weeks, listening to testimony and evidence about the crime, the defendant, and his life. They are sent back to a room to make the difficult decision whether the defendant should be sentenced to die or serve life without parole. In Mario Woodward's case,after deliberation, the jury voted 8 to 4 that he should be imprisoned instead of put to death.

This year, anti-choice forces coordinated a nationwide attack on reproductive rights. From Arkansas to North Dakota, Texas to North Carolina, the goal is clear: banning abortion completely.

Some leading police officials around the nation seem to be realizing that high-technology surveillance systems need to be deployed with great care, lest they prompt a public backlash. As the Atlantic Cities pointed out in a piece Friday, the Seattle police department has unilaterally pulled the plug on a new citywide mesh surveillance network after a local newspaper highlighted the department’s lack of rules and policies surrounding how the network would be used, and lack of public awareness or input surrounding the system.