News & Commentary

Shortly before next week's one-year anniversary of the Oakland Police Department's brutal crackdown on Occupy Oakland, Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern announced that he was seeking funds to purchase a drone to engage in unspecified unmanned aerial surveillance. One of the many unfortunate lessons of OPD's Occupy crackdown is that when law enforcement has powerful and dangerous tools in its arsenal, it will use them. Drones raise enormous privacy concerns and can easily be abused. Before any drone acquisition proceeds, we need to ask a threshold question – are drones really necessary in our community? – and have a transparent and democratic process for debating that question. In addition, if the decision is made to acquire a drone, do we have rigid safeguards and accountability mechanisms in place, so that law enforcement does not use drones to engage in warrantless mass surveillance? The ACLU of Northern California has sent the Sheriff a Public Records Act request, demanding answers to these crucial questions.

Late last week, Gawker's Adrian Chen "unmasked" Violentacrez, a notorious "troll" on the content aggregator Reddit. Violentacrez is a remarkably unsympathetic figure; as the article put it, his "specialty is distributing images of scantily-clad underage girls," and he "also issued an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore, misogyny, incest, and exotic abominations yet unnamed." Yet while the story and Violentacrez' subsequent decision to delete his Reddit account drew cheers from some, it also prompted at least one group of Reddit editors to ban Gawker content in retaliation and sparked a broader conversation about the role of free speech, anonymity, and privacy online, with plenty of outrage on all sides.

When Apple expanded the availability of its FaceTime videochat app to cell networks, AT&T responded by announcing that only iPhone and iPad users with a high-priced "Mobile Share" data plan would get to use the app on its network. In other words, ordinary AT&T customers—many of whom pay the carrier both for their mobile device and for the data they use—have been cut off from an easy way to communicate with friends and family. We are disappointed to see AT&T use its position to hinder, rather than help, its customers' communications, and we urge you to join advocates for Internet free speech and the deaf by voicing your concerns.

It should come as no surprise to Californians that our public schools are in crisis. Headlines regularly decry California's fiscal crisis and its devastating impact on our schools. One issue recently receiving a lot of attention is the shockingly high rates of suspension and expulsion, particularly for students of color, across the state.

We did it. After years of work from the ACLU of California and our allies, dangerous shackles and restraints can no longer be used on pregnant women in our state's prisons and jails. Last week Governor Brown signed AB 2530, authored by Assemblymember Atkins, after it passed the legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support.

The Location Privacy Act of 2012 was intended to ensure the privacy of Californians by requiring law enforcement and other government entities to get a search warrant before obtaining information about the location of an electronic device. As a result, it garnered broad bipartisan support in its passage through the California legislature. Unfortunately, Governor Brown ignored this support and chose to veto the bill, leaving Californians with uncertain protection for these sensitive person data.

One year after the implementation of California's historic prison realignment plan, the state has failed to adopt the kinds of reforms necessary to ensure its success and a lasting reduction both in the number of people behind bars and recidivism rates.

Last week, LA Weekly ran a story indicating that the Los Angeles Police Department is using a device called a "Stingray" to track cell phones. Law enforcement seems to think that because these devices can track cell phones without going to the trouble of even interacting with mobile carriers, they don't need a search warrant. Please tell Governor Brown to sign the Location Privacy Act of 2012 into law and ensure that law enforcement gets a search warrant before obtaining location information, whether by using a Stingray or demanding records from cell carriers.