News & Commentary

This morning's media event was Facebook's announcement of "Graph Search," a new tool to find content and data on Facebook that could wind up making information about you far easier your friends or just about anyone else to find. Graph Search allows you to search Facebook for specific people, places, or content – for example, "friend of friends who live in New York and like sushi" or "restaurants liked by friends who also like Taco Bell" – using a brand-new interface. Here's what that means – and how you can follow Mark Zuckerberg's suggestion to "take some time to review your stuff" so that your private information isn't suddenly available to others.

In response to an ACLU of Northern California Public Records Act request, the California Emergency Management Agency, the state entity that administers federal homeland security grant funds, recently confirmed that the Alameda County Sheriff's Office is the only agency in the entire state of California to have applied for or obtained grant funding from Cal-EMA for a drone.

In a disturbing trend that can have a chilling effect on free speech, law enforcement agencies around the country are seeking wide-ranging information about the social networking activity of political activists. The San Francisco District Attorney recently issued subpoenas to Twitter for tweets by two political protesters, Lauren Smith and Robert Donohoe, who had been charged with rioting and unlawful assembly during a Columbus Day demonstration last year. They had been active on Twitter but disabled their accounts after the protest. The ACLU and EFF filed a brief in support of the protesters' motion to quash the subpoenas.

The next time a cop sees a picture of you, that picture may not have been taken by a person at all. Unmanned flying drones can allow their operators to remotely - and cheaply - monitor and record individuals, groups, or locations. These drones pose significant threats to privacy when police can use them to peer into homes or track an individual's actions from afar. While law enforcement agencies around the country, including, most recently, the Alameda County Sheriff's Office, are already expressing interest in acquiring drones, the federal government has done little to address privacy concerns - hardly surprising given that Congress is just now addressing decades-old privacy issues with electronic content such as email and cloud storage. We need to consider drone privacy protections now, and that means approaching these issues at the local and state level as well as pushing for federal drone privacy rules.

For the first time yesterday, California Attorney General Kamala Harris publicly weighed in on the hotly-contested federal immigration program, Secure Communities (S-Comm).In an information bulletin to local law enforcement agencies, she provides much needed clarification to these agencies about the parameters of their cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Her statement should finally put to bed any lingering doubt that immigration detainers are voluntary requests and that each local agency may make its own decisions about whether or not to enforce the requests, at its own expense.

Buried on the Board of Supervisor's 66-item agenda for its December 4, 2012 hearing was a surprising request by the Alameda County Sheriff's Office for approval to "apply for, accept and administer" funds from the California Emergency Management Agency (Cal-EMA) to buy a drone.

Think Facebook is only interested in your online activity? Think again. The company recently announced a partnership with information broker Datalogix, which operates many of the loyalty card programs we use to get a discount at stores like CVS. The partnership — one of Facebook's three new advertising programs —allows Facebook to gauge the effectiveness of its ads by learning about the offline purchases of ad viewers. Unfortunately, Facebook has not given its users the ability to see what information is actually being shared with Datalogix or to opt out of the program from Facebook's end. Datalogix's opt-out option is not enough – these companies should allow individual users to see how their information is being watched and traded.

You don't surrender your constitutional rights based on who you work for. That's why the ACLU of Northern California sued on behalf of a deputy sheriff in Trinity County who was censured at work after publishing letters to the editor in the local paper.