News & Commentary

The blogosphere has been bubbling over the past few weeks over the subject of laptop searches and seizures at international borders. The source of the buzz? A couple of recent court cases.

A federal grand jury on Thursday issued an indictment against a Missouri woman accused of creating a fake MySpace page to bully a 13-year old girl who later committed suicide. The high profile, and emotionally charged case, has drawn media attention from around the world.

Today is the day we’ve been working for—a watershed for basic fairness and human dignity. The California Supreme Court has recognized that equality means that everyone must be free to marry the person they love.Profound social change starts in California, and

When the ACLU of Northern California learned in October of 2006 that the City of Fresno was violating the constitutional rights of its homeless residents by seizing and immediately destroying their possessions, we, along with the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and the law firm of HellerEhrman LLP, filed a class-action lawsuit in federal district court.

The FBI has withdrawn an unconstitutional national security letter issued to the Internet Archive after a legal challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As the result of a settlement agreement, the FBI withdrew the NSL and agreed to the unsealing of the case, finally allowing the Archive's founder to speak out for the first time about his battle against the record demand.

The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation can today reveal their participation in a long fight with the FBI over free speech and government-imposed secrecy.

The government uses National Security Letters (NSLs) to demand access to sensitive records in the custody of Internet service providers, financial institutions, credit reporting agencies, and many other kinds of organizations. In almost all cases, recipients of the NSLs are served with gag orders that prohibit them from disclosing that they have received the letters.

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In response to a letter from the ACLU of Northern California, the Linden Unified School District will not read private text messages stored on students' cell phones unless there is good reason to believe that the search will show that a law or school rule was violated. The District's new policy also limits the scope of the search to the alleged infraction leading to the seizure of a cell phone.