News & Commentary

Late last night, the ACLU and ACLU of Virginia filed an amicus brief urging a federal appeals court to overturn a contempt-of-court finding against Lavabit, the now-defunct secure email service provider. The company had been resisting a court order to hand over the private encryption keys relied on by the company’s 400,000 users to keep their information secure. (You can read our brief here, filed with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va.).

The piece below was first published as part of the New York Times Room for Debate feature "If We're Spying, Are We Still ‘Allies'?" which discussed: After surveillance revelations, Brazil, France and Germany may be having second thoughts about the U.S.: In what sense are they "allies"?
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The military commission attorneys and judge are in Guantanamo Bay this week for the continuation of the 9/11 pretrial hearings – along with the ACLU's Chandra Bhatnagar, who is monitoring the proceedings.

If the government had its way, no one would have any idea that it regularly tracks all of our phone calls and much of our online activity.

New York's Muslims have a very good reason to be suspicious — and even fearful — of their city's police department. For over a decade, the NYPD's Intelligence Division has targeted Muslims for discriminatory surveillance based on nothing but their faith, spying on them in their places of worship, businesses, and even homes.

British citizen Kerim Yildiz, a leading London-based human rights advocate for the Kurdish people, has been waiting for more than a year and a half for a visa for travel to the United States to speak at Harvard, the ACLU, and two prominent foundations. Today, the ACLU, the American Association of University Professors, and the PEN America Center sent a letter to the Departments of State and Homeland Security protesting this extraordinarily long delay without explanation. (You can read the letter here.) This is the second such delay, and we worry that the government's actions relate to Yildiz's human rights advocacy.

We have written extensively about online data brokers and their penchant for mining public records and secretly following you around the web in order to create profiles based on personal information they glean. They then share that information with marketers, insurance companies, background check companies, and even law enforcement.

Last week, the Supreme Court of the State of Washington took an important step forward in the fight to ensure the rights of victims of domestic violence. The Court ruled unanimously in favor of the daughters of the late Baerbel Roznowski, Carola Washburn and Janet Loh, who had filed a lawsuit against the City of Federal Way for police negligence that led to their mother's death.

If it weren't for the serious life-altering implications of the anti-abortion bills passed this year all over the country, it would be downright comical. From legislators in North Carolina tacking abortion legislation onto a motorcycle safety bill, to politicians in Texas insisting that shutting down abortion clinics because of the size of their parking lots is really an attempt to protect women's health, the lengths politicians have gone to deny women their basic constitutional rights is nearly laughable. Politicians must think we're stupid.