News & Commentary

We are deeply saddened by the apparent murder of 26-year-old Arthur Carmona on Feb. 17, 2008.

A recent policy conference on Internet issues held in Washington, D.C. included the panel, "Social Networking and Privacy: An Oxymoron?" It shouldn't be, but some of the major platforms for social networking seem to be treating the two concepts as if they were mutually exclusive.

The ACLU of Northern California has been a leader in generating public and legislative attention to the privacy, personal safety, and financial security risks associated with the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology in government-issued identification documents, such as drivers' licenses and student ID cards.

The ACLU has released a systematic analysis of the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) final regulations for the Real ID Act. It reveals that the regulations still address only 9 percent of the problems with the act that have been identified.

The Transportation Security Agency has come under significant and ongoing criticism. One major source of concern and irritation are the No-Fly lists, which contain tens of thousands of names and has generated a lot of negative press when U.S. senators, famous musicians and others have been kept off of flights. There are even those who say that TSA is largely engaged in "security theater," meant primarily to psychologically reassure travelers while doing little to actually improve the security of goods and travelers. Luckily, the criticism has not kept TSA from starting a blog, called Evolution of Security. The rather amazing thing — it's open for comments.

SB 31 overwhelmingly passed the California State Senate last week with a vote of 36-3. To read the bill language of SB 31, visit here.

The ACLU released the following statement as a response to today's Washington Post article about Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff defying Congressional extensions and attempting to implement WHTI now.

A recent blog post discussed privacy concerns with the new Bay Area TransLink transit card.

At the Consumer Electronics Show last week, top executives from media giants AT&T, NBC/Universal and Microsoft announced that ISPs may be ready to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.