News & Commentary

In 2001, an African-American student at Grace Davis High School in Modesto was involved in a fight with another student over race–the other student called him a "nigger." While the black student was suspended for more than a month and then transferred to another school, the white student was suspended only briefly.

It was a child's simple refusal to give up a bandana belonging to his recently deceased grandfather that led to a landmark settlement regarding discriminatory discipline against Native-American students at the hands of the Bishop Union Elementary School District (BUESD).

Bishop, located in the eastern Sierras, has a population of about 3,400, with approximately 1,500 members of the Paiute Tribe living on a nearby reservation.

Violent Incident
In October 2005, a campus police officer, also known as a school resource officer (SRO), demanded that an eighth-grader hand over the bandana he was wearing, citing the school's dress code.

In an important victory for privacy rights, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday reinstated a portion of California's landmark financial privacy law that allows consumers to prevent banks from sharing information with affiliated companies about a customer's savings account or buying habits.

On blogs, personal and political websites, and through user-generated content sites, ordinary citizens in extraordinary numbers are recreating a public sphere and reinvigorating the democratic debate at the core of our political system. 46% of Americans have already used the Internet in connection with the political campaign- more than during all of 2004. User-generated content is playing a particularly integral role, with 35% of Americans watching online videos and 10% using social networking sites to engage in political activity.

"We didn't do anything wrong," said Victor Lopez, one of the Latino students at Rodriquez High School (RHS) who in March 2007 were lined up in front of their peers, accused of being gang members, and photographed by Fairfield police. "I was just talking to my friends. The police shouldn't assume we're gang members just because we're Latino and wearing certain colors. Lots of kids were wearing the same thing we were on that day and nothing happened to them."

The Federal Communications Commission chastised Comcast for throttling peer-to-peer applications today, calling the practice unreasonable and ordering Comcast to change its network management policies.

Planning a vacation? Thinking about traveling outside the country?

In a clear victory for free speech, a federal court once again held that the ACLU is right and the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a law that would criminalize constitutionally protected speech on the Internet, is unconstitutional.

Dutch and British transit cards, California Senate ID cards, HID building access cards, some new generation credit cards, and now FasTrak.