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The Senate report released earlier this week is mainly about the CIA personnel who authorized and used torture.

This summer, Tennessee thumbed its nose at doctors, nearly every national medical association, addiction experts, and women's right activists and passed a law that essentially criminalizes pregnancy. In short, this deeply misguided law risks the health of women and babies by threatening expectant mothers who struggle with addiction or substance abuse with jail time, forcing those women who need health care the most into the shadows.

In the last 24 hours, pundits have spoken at length about the Senate Intelligence Committee's landmark torture report, the executive summary of which was released yesterday. For good reason. Despite all of the leaks, the previously released documents, and the reports already written, the cruelty and illegality exposed in the 525-page document are astounding. It's hard to believe that an American government agency engaged in such systematic brutality and has faced no meaningful accountability.

We are the founders of PubPeer.com, an online forum for scientific discussion of research scholarship. We and many of the users of our website are anonymous. That anonymity is important for free speech, for academic freedom, and for scientific inquiry. But it’s being threatened, which is why we’re going to court to defend the First Amendment right to anonymity.

Last month, an Australian woman sunbathing topless in her back yard was accidentally captured in a photograph by a drone snapping pictures for a real estate listing. The picture was placed in online ads and billboards before the mistake was caught. With the U.S. working on regulations for commercial drones, you might think that cases like this would be part of the conversation. But so far, both Congress and the FAA have passed the buck on creating privacy protections for domestic drones. Some of the little work that has been done on privacy protections has fallen to the FAA’s six drone test sites across the country.

Late last week, the Arkansas Medical Board initially voted 7-6 not to intrude into the relationship between women and their doctors. They declined to require medical providers to perform an ultrasound exam for a woman seeking abortion care, and then – regardless of the patient's wishes – to inform her if the exam detected a fetal heart tone.

This piece originally appeared at Slate's Outward blog.

My mother, Estela, and I arrived in the United States in 1988. I was two years old as she carried me in her arms across the Mexico-U.S. border. I was too young to understand what was happening, but my mom has told me many times why we left.

After five long years of investigation, declassification, and redaction – not to mention outright obstruction by the CIA – the Senate Intelligence Committee today shone more light on CIA torture and made a historic and necessary contribution to public scrutiny, debate, and our nation's values.