News & Commentary

Welcome to Alabama, the state of the never-ending seat belt ticket.

Something remarkable happened last night: A bipartisan majority in the House of Representatives agreed on something.

In the second season opener of Orange is the New Black, the show's heroine Piper uses her breakfast to paint a bird on the wall. A month alone in a cell the size of a parking spot has clearly messed with her head. Thirty minutes later, a row of naked prisoners opt to bend over and "spread 'em" rather than be sent to solitary. Mentions of "the SHU" — Security Housing Unit or Segregated Housing Unit — continue like this. In almost every episode of the second season of Orange Is the New Black, solitary confinement looms large, representing a villain even more terrifying than Vee, the show's new violent and manipulative matriarch.

By all accounts, Landon Wilson served with honor in the U.S. Navy during a short, but distinguished military career. He was trained as a cryptologic technician, at great expense to the military, and eventually served in Afghanistan where he assisted with Special Operations missions. The reason Landon's military career was cut short was not of his own choosing, and it was certainly not a reflection on his capabilities or desire to serve.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision today in Jones v. Dirty World Entertainment, a case in which the ACLU filed an amicus brief alongside other organizations urging the Sixth Circuit to reverse a lower court’s decision holding a website and its editor accountable for defamatory posts submitted by the website’s users. (Here is our prior blog post explaining the case, and the website itself, TheDirty.com.)

It was a frigid winter night, and my daughter Sarah was in her college years. She called to ask me to drive up to Burlington, Vermont, as soon as possible. She had something important to tell me. During the four-hour drive, my mind raced with the possibilities of what could be wrong. When I got there Sarah burst into tears. She wanted to tell me that she and a female friend were in love and were moving in together.

At a time when Americans seem to be increasingly polarized on almost every conceivable issue, a recent study found one issue the vast majority can agree on: Our electronic privacy laws are out of date.

In March of this year, Peoria resident Jon Daniel set up a satire Twitter account using the name of the town’s elected mayor, Jim Ardis. Using slang and swearwords, Daniel then tweeted a series of jokes. No one in their right mind would have thought this naughty, unprofessional account was actually that of the elected Mayor. That’s why it was funny.

Cell site simulators, also known as "stingrays," are devices that trick cellphones into reporting their locations and identifying information. They do so by mimicking cellphone towers and sending out electronic cues that allow the police to enlist cellphones as tracking devices, thus revealing people's movements with great precision. The equipment also sends intrusive electronic signals through the walls of private homes and offices, learning information about the locations and identities of phones inside. Initially the domain of the National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies, the use of stingrays has trickled down to federal, state and local law enforcement. In one Florida case, a police officer explained in court that he "quite literally stood in front of every door and window" with his stingray to track the phones inside a large apartment complex.