News & Commentary

As summer approaches, young people around the country are celebrating graduations and planning for exciting new beginnings in the fall – a new school year, perhaps a transition to middle or high school, or a move onto a college campus. These transitions should be exciting, positive, and healthy experiences for students and their families.

A lawsuit pertaining to the use of license plate readers in San Francisco illustrates how dangerous it can be when police officers turn off their eyes, ears, and brains, and mistakenly rely on imperfect technologies to tell them who’s up to no good.

Right now, something big is brewing in Missouri.

We're like a lot of couples out there. We met in college. We've stuck by each other's side through the ups and downs. And we're involved in our local North Carolina community.

Somebody figured out, once again, how to build a machine that can quantify the life of an African-American man and make money off him. They figured out how to use the value of his body to fuel their machine. They learned how to drive its engine, and how to turn a profit. They call it prison privatization. I call it mining black gold, and I have watched black gold be mined from the streets of my community every day.

In an interview with Martha Raddatz on ABC's This Week on Sunday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that he believes current military regulations that prohibit transgender individuals from serving openly in the military should be reviewed.

The ACLU has been working in states across the country on a variety of laws pertaining to law enforcement agencies and their power to gather and access information about us—including location tracking, drones, automatic license plate readers, and access to our electronic communications content. From my vantage point in the ACLU national office working with our state affiliates to advance legislation, I have a unique view of legislative battles taking place across the nation. And what I have seen is that regardless of the issue or the state, there has been one common theme in law enforcement opposition to the bills: they don’t want you to know what they’re doing.

If you tuned into John Oliver’s new show last Sunday, you were reminded of one indisputable truth of the internet age: there is no wrong time for a viral video of animals being totally adorable. Hats off to the host of Last Week Tonight, who followed up a segment asking hard questions about the death penalty with a video of a hamster eating a tiny burrito.

At the urging of the Department of Justice, the U.S. Courts’ Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure is considering whether to bless procedures that would allow law enforcement to hack into computers, including by the use of controversial “zero-day exploits.” As Bloomberg News reported this morning, the proposed rule change raises privacy concerns. It has the potential to threaten internet security and to facilitate violations of the Fourth Amendment.