News & Commentary

The ACLU has recently been making a lot of noise about modernizing the laws that protect our online privacy. We believe that law enforcement should have to go to a judge and get a warrant that says it has probable cause to believe you've committed a crime before it can read your email, browse through your social networking account, or track your location. Right now, that's not the case. Digital information simply isn't getting the protection it deserves and that the framers would have wanted (if they knew what digital information was). That's why we're working so hard to raise visibility of this issue.

In a blog post Monday evening, Facebook stated that it would be moving ahead with the privacy policy changes it proposed on March 26th without any suggestion that it will make any changes to those proposals, despite extensive criticism of the proposals and a recent web poll showing that 95% of respondents think that the changes are a bad idea.

In 1986, there was no World Wide Web, nobody carried a cell phone, and the president was a man born in 1911. That was the year that the statute that protects the privacy of your electronic life – email, search terms, cloud computing, cell phone location records, postings to Facebook – was passed into law. Even then, Congress recognized that computerized record-keeping would pose privacy issues as information that had formally resided in the home (and been protected by the Fourth Amendment) moved to the hands of businesses.

Today, Facebook released proposed changes to its privacy policy and its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Facebook's newest changes seem to be designed to encourage users to share more information with applications and sites that they visit and use, which fits in with the string of other changes that have been happening on Facebook and with Mark Zuckerberg's world view on changing social norms.

The ACLU filed an amicus brief yesterday to the Supreme Court in the case of City of Ontario v. Quon. At stake in this case is whether public employees have a reasonable expectation of privacy for the text messages they send on devices owned by their employers. But at stake more broadly is the balance between employer access and employee privacy in a world where communications via computers, emails and text messages play a crucial and rapidly expanding role.

We spent the last few days in the middle of the exciting whirlwind of the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival in Austin, Texas. The festival is one of the largest and most influential gatherings of technology and new media players in the world, and we thought that it would be an important and receptive audience for our online privacy message.

Many people are surprised to learn that it costs more to sentence someone to execution than permanent imprisonment, also known as life without parole. This page highlights key findings from the ACLU-NC's report The Hidden Death Tax: The Secret Cost of Seeking Executions in California to answer some frequently asked questions about the costs of California's death penalty system.

Remember hairspray and side ponytails, walkmen and Atari, stirrup pants and legwarmers? They all made a comeback Wednesday night at the ACLU of Northern California's dotRights "Party Like It's 1986" bash.