News & Commentary

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU of Northern California filed suit in federal court today to protect the privacy and free speech rights of two San Francisco Bay Area community organizations after the groups' computers were seized and the data copied by federal and local law enforcement. Both organizations, Long Haul and the East Bay Prisoner Support Group (EBPS), are publishers of information for social and political activists.

We all want to live in safe communities, where we have an equal opportunity to succeed. To effectively build safe and healthy communities, we need to solve more violent crimes—especially murders—and we need to prevent more violence by investing in our children. But we don’t have the resources needed for these vital programs because the death penalty is draining millions of dollars every year from our local and state budgets.

Losing a loved one to homicide is a devastating and life-changing event. In Oakland alone, 148 residents were murdered in 2006, leaving behind hundreds of family members and loved ones whose lives were forever changed.

A report released today evaluating San Francisco's surveillance cameras concludes that the cameras have failed in their mission of reducing violent crime in the city. Following an outside evaluation of the City's ill-advisory video surveillance program, independent researchers at the University of California Berkeley issued today's report.

'tis the season for private browsing, or so it seems. Apple's Safari Web browser led the pack in introducing a "private browsing mode" in 2005; in recent months, the other browsers on the market have finally followed suit, with Google's recently-released Chrome and beta versions of Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer adding similar features.

YouTube has been making news this week, mostly about its recently-announced policy that makes "sexually suggestive" or "profane" content harder to access on the site. These new censorship policies which impact access to protected speech have triggered significant backlash among the YouTube user community as well as concerns that YouTube is suppressing some forms of content simply in order to "clean[] up its act to persuade Madison Ave. that the site is advertiser-friendly."

By Rachel MyersACLU Nationwide

Microsoft recently announced the Windows Sensor and Location Platform, a component of the next release of the Windows operating system that allows applications to access sensors, including location sensors. Tracking a user's location, and sharing that information with any application that requests it, carries serious privacy concerns. Other tools, such as Mozilla Geode, allay some of these concerns by giving the user control over whether and how location information is shared with Web sites. Windows, unfortunately, does not currently provide such controls, forcing the user to choose between eschewing location-aware applications entirely and giving every application complete knowledge of her present location.

Search users trust companies like Google to keep the contents of their search private. Recently, Google threatened that trust in using search queries to track flu outbreaks. Even though the motivation for this use may be wholly altruistic, and the information may be entirely aggregate without any personal identifiers, this still demonstrates that Google considers search queries Google property to be used as the company sees fit and not private communications from individual users.