News & Commentary

Social media and other emerging technologies are fundamentally altering how students interact and express themselves in school. Staff Attorney Linda Lye explains the history of student free speech, and discusses technology's modern twist on the First Amendment.

The DEA wants to capture the license plates of all vehicles traveling along Interstate 15 in Utah, and store that data for two years at their facility in Northern Virginia. And, as a DEA official told Utah legislators at a hearing this week (attended by ACLU of Utah staff and covered in local media), these scanners are already in place on “drug trafficking corridors” in California and Texas and are being considered for Arizona as well. The agency is also collecting plate data from unspecified other sources and sharing it with over ten thousand law enforcement agencies around the nation.

The big news in the business world this week is Facebook's ongoing Initial Public Offering, where the company is selling shares to the public based on an estimated value of around one hundred billion dollars. [Or, as Dr. Evil would say: one hundred billion dollars.]

By Aden FineACLU National Office

BART has a serious public relations problem. BART Police have been involved in three fatal shootings of passengers in the past three years, including the Oscar Grant incident in 2009, in which an unarmed African-American New Year's Eve reveler was shot in the back while lying face-down on a BART platform by a white police officer who later testified that he meant to use his taser, not his pistol. The shooting, and the controversial verdict in the criminal trial of the BART police officer, spurred widespread protests.

The good news is that SB 1434, the important California privacy law that would make sure that police get a warrant before getting access to sensitive location information, passing its first hurdle and is moving onto a full vote by the California Senate.

Wireless companies are opposing an important new mobile privacy bill in California (SB 1434) because they say they are too busy "working day and night to assist law enforcement," so it would be too much of a burden to tell their customers how often and why they are turning over location data to law enforcement.

Location data from your cell phone or portable device can make it easy to get directions or locate the closest coffee shop. But that location data also says a lot about you – where you go, what you do, and who you know. And outdated privacy laws, written before GPS and other location-aware technologies even existed, mean that all this personal information isn't being properly protected from prying eyes. Don't pay for location-based services by giving up control of your personal information. Demand a privacy upgrade. Demand your dotRights!Wherever you go, companies may followYo

Yesterday, the House Intelligence Committee released proposed changes to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011, also known as CISPA that, according to its sponsors, represent "huge progress" towards addressing the privacy and internet freedom community's concerns.