News & Commentary

The ACLU of California has obtained records showing that Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram provided user data access to Geofeedia, a developer of a social media monitoring product that we have seen marketed to law enforcement as a tool to monitor activists and protesters.

California now has some of the strongest protections against policing for profit in the country. Although we had several legislative successes this year, two important, ACLU-sponsored bills died in the Legislature.

In the 2010 Citizens United decision, the US Supreme Court ruled that independent political expenditures by corporations and unions are protected speech. Citizens United became a flashpoint because Americans are increasingly concerned about the impact of economic inequality on our political system.

It goes without saying that speaking out against police violence or government overreach shouldn’t land you in a surveillance database. But it can, and it does.The ACLU of California has

When you are having meetings about transparency and building trust with law enforcement, the last thing you expect to hear is that they may be secretly spying on you. But that is exactly what happened to us as community activists with Fresno Faith In Community/Live Free.

Public cynicism about government is at an all-time high – and we all know the reasons. That's why it's pretty remarkable when activists use public government processes to attack a scary and overwhelming problem like surveillance – and it works.

When Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA in 2013, I didn’t yet know that my own city of Oakland had futuristic surveillance problems of our own. Oakland had quietly embarked on a path towards building a city-wide surveillance network called the Domain Awareness Center (DAC), comprised of over 700 cameras throughout schools and public housing, facial recognition software, automated license plate readers (ALPRs), and 300 terabytes of storage for all the data they anticipated collecting on Oakland residents.

School is back in session, and by now, many students and teachers have returned to their classrooms to new and improved lactation accommodations policies.

It’s a victory for free speech and academic freedom – but Cal’s move to cancel the course for no good reason should never have happened in the first place.