News & Commentary

Yahoo! executives faced harsh criticism this week from the House Foreign Affairs Committee for the company's role in the Chinese government's arrest of journalist and democracy advocate Shi Tao.

Today's news story that Comcast is blocking customer use of peer-to-peer program, BitTorrent, provides yet another glimpse into a future without net neutrality.

On September 27, we blogged about Verizon’s attempt to discriminate based on content when it announced that it would block the text messages of NARAL. After a firestorm of bad press, Verizon quickly retreated and said that it had all been a misreading of their policy. But, whether or not companies will be able to function as a bottleneck on protected speech is at the heart of the debate over net neutrality.

In late September, US District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the PATRIOT Act's changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures.

State Senator Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) announced today that Governor Schwarzenegger signed his Senate Bill 362, which would prohibit employers and others from forcing anyone to have a radio frequency identification (RFID) device implanted under their skin. The bill will go into effect on January 1, 2008.

Last November we learned that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been secretly compiling data on millions of innocent Americans. According to the Washington Post, the DHS has been using its Automated Targeting System (ATS) originally developed for cargo security to generate "terrorist" risk ratings on American travelers. This past August the DHS proposed a rule that would continue the controversial ATS program. In response, the ACLU has filed comments with the DHS urging that the program be scrapped because it violates not only federal law but the privacy of all innocent Americans traveling internationally.

The ATS draws information on travelers from government databases, airline passenger information, and other sources. It then uses it to analyze each person's background or behavior, and assigns them a numeric "terrorist" risk rating.

Until recently, the scope of information collected by the ATS was all but unknown. Things have become clearer since the Identity Project succeeded in getting the Department of Homeland Security to hand over ATS records on several travelers.

Over the last week, Americans in places as far as upstate New York and as nearby as downtown San Francisco have noticed ads on billboards and taxi cabs for Google's new service, Google 411.

In case you missed it on our National ACLU blog, here is an entry written by the ACLU's Catherine Crump about the government's latest attempt to censor the Internet.

A controversial new program to use spy satellites for domestic surveillance has been postponed due to concerns brought to the attention of Congress by the ACLU and other civil liberties groups.