News & Commentary

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.

At a moment when the federal government is taking racial profiling seriously, it was gratifying to read that Attorney General Eric Holder "told colleagues that he believed that border agents did not need to consider race or ethnicity." Racial profiling is demeaning, offensive to American values, and ineffective. As today's revised Department of Justice (DOJ) guidance makes clear, "it is patently unacceptable...for law enforcement officers to act on the belief that possession of a listed characteristic [like race, religion, national origin, or ethnicity] signals a higher risk."

As early as tomorrow, the long-awaited Senate torture report will finally see the light of day. If all goes as planned, the Senate Intelligence Committee will release the roughly 500-page executive summary of its 6,000-page report concerning the CIA's "rendition, detention, and interrogation" program. The report is said to be highly critical of the program.

We cannot allow Eric Garner's sadly prophetic words, "It stops today," to refer only to his life.

Nydia ya tenía asilo en los Estados Unidos cuando fue deportada dos veces por agentes fronterizos de nuevo al peligro del cual ella huyó. Nydia, una mujer transgénero de México, dijo a los oficiales que ella tenía estatus y que había sido violada y atacada en México cuando regresó para el funeral de su madre.