Court Cases

Lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court challenging the state of California for its retention of genetic samples and profiles from people arrested but never convicted of a felony.

In 2004, the FBI conducted a “threat assessment” of long-time journalists and commentators Justin Raimondo and Eric Garris, as well as their website, Antiwar.com. In violation of the federal Privacy Act, this threat assessment compiled descriptions of the journalists’ First Amendment activities without any apparent law enforcement purpose. Attorneys at the ACLU Foundation of Northern California and Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP represented the journalists in a federal lawsuit against the FBI. Records the journalists received in response to their Freedom of Information Act claims revealed that the threat assessment was based on shoddy investigative work in addition to the apparent targeting of the journalists’ political speech. In the litigation, the FBI asserted that it was entitled to create this threat assessment because of Antiwar.com’s posting of government documents. But the First Amendment has long protected the publication of government secrets and the FBI never even suggested that the journalists or Antiwar.com had violated the law by obtaining or posting those documents.

ACLU Foundation of Northern California lawsuit seeking information about the federal government’s use of location tracking technologies. Specifically, how the government seeks or obtains location information and whether this surveillance practice is constitutional.

We’re suing the Justice Department to disclose when the government tells people it electronically spied on them. 

The ACLU Foundations of California filed a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s Suspicious Activity Reporting program - a vast expansion of the federal government’s domestic intelligence network. The SAR program targets First Amendment-protected activity, encourages racial and religious profiling, and violates federal law. The plaintiffs are five U.S. citizens whose information has been entered into counterterrorism databases for engaging in lawful conduct.

This case arises from the decision by a California trial court to impose an expansive “electronics search condition” on a young probationer that required him to submit his electronic devices and online account passwords for a search as a condition of probation.

The ACLU of Northern California filed a lawsuit against the City of Hayward and its Police Department for charging the National Lawyers Guild unlawful and excessive costs as the price of disclosing body camera footage the NLG requested under the California Public Records Act.