News & Commentary

When Donald Trump takes the oath of office, he will inherit an unprecedented surveillance state that includes expansive powers and databases filled with information on millions of people.

As of this week, Twitter has made sure that federally funded fusion centers can no longer use a powerful social media monitoring tool to spy on users. After the ACLU of California discovered the domestic spy centers had access to these tools, provided by Dataminr (a company partly owned by Twitter), Dataminr was forced to comply with Twitter’s clear rule prohibiting use of data for surveillance. 

On January 20, President Obama will hand Donald Trump the keys to the surveillance state. What can you do to protect against government spying?

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.

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.

The ACLU and EFF are urging the Federal Communications Commission to order local police to stop using Stingrays, at least until the FCC can create rules to protect against excessive secrecy and abuse.