News & Commentary

As state legislators accept deep cuts to education and the safety net, the ACLU is challenging Californians to acquire a real-time sense of how the state's bottom line would fare if prisons and jails were placed at the center of the chopping block.

On Wednesday, July 18th the ACLU and community members gathered to support Juana Reyes, who is facing deportation after an arrest for selling tamales outside of the Florin Rd. Walmart in Sacramento and to urge the passage of the TRUST Act.

Why is the FBI spying on Occupy protesters? The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California is determined to find out.

Mayor Ed Lee shocked the city when he suggested bringing New York's failed stop-and-frisk policy to San Francisco. The ACLU of Northern California sent a letter to Mayor Lee yesterday explaining why it's such a bad policy.

This morning's New York Times features a front-page story about an "uptick" in demands for information from cell carriers by law enforcement. As the ACLU's Chris Calabrese writes, the numbers are staggering: 1.3 million requests for information, possibly many times that many users affected, hundreds of full-time employees whose sole job is to process incoming demands, and reports that these demands are increasing by 10% or more every year. While Congress is still debating bills that would address this, a California bill (SB 1434) that would require law enforcement to obtain a search warrant before demanding sensitive location information is already progressing through the legislature with bipartisan support. With your help, California can once again be a leader in protecting individual privacy.

In early June, the popular location based service foursquare overhauled its mobile app. As a result of these changes, users can now see all of their friends' check-ins from the last two weeks. Many users may not understand how much of their location history is visible to their friends, and even those users aware of the details have no practical way to opt out. And while forcing users to share that sensitive information might be popular with hitmen, it might not be popular with foursquare users who now broadcast location history to their friends (and maybe soon to their friends' intensely curious apps?) without expecting or intending to. Help us tell foursquare to give you the tools to control your own location history.

This month, California quietly shed an unwanted title, going from the largest prison system in the country to the second-largest after the state of Texas.

As Facebook has grown from a dorm room project to a publicly-traded company, its users have repeatedly challenged the service on privacy issues, drawing attention from the media and governments as a result. And while Facebook is often perceived as acting like some constitution-less nation doing whatever it wants without regard to user concerns, its very existence as a social networking site depends on users uploading information and trusting the site with that information. Facebook may not be a nation, but it does have a social contract with its users, albeit one driven by revenue and functionality rather than governance. And while user efforts to renegotiate this contract haven't always succeeded, even failed attempts provide some insight into how users might effectively achieve their aims when their wishes conflict with Facebook's actions.