News & Commentary

While studying for a doctorate, San Francisco-based engineer Satinder P. Singh chose to specialize in the retrofitting of bridges. He joined a team charged with evaluating the structural soundness of the Bay Area's bridges following the Loma Prieta earthquake. Soon thereafter, Singh was hired as a Caltrans engineer. And in 1999, he founded his own structural engineering firm."At the time, I did not believe that there

Today Facebook is rolling out a series of changes to its privacy controls. We reviewed the changes in detail on Tuesday; now here's how you can take advantage of these changes:

Quick quiz: where did a government agency shut down cell service yesterday to disrupt a political protest? You wouldn't expect the answer to be San Francisco, but that's exactly what happened on Aug. 12, 2011. BART blocked cell service on trains and platforms in San Francisco after notifying riders that there might be demonstrations near Civic Center.

I was raped by a fellow soldier when I was stationed in Korea. I found out I was pregnant as a result of the rape when my commander called me into his office one day to charge me with adultery. A doctor at the medical center had told my commander – but not me – that I was pregnant. I hadn't reported the rape because I was trying to "soldier on" and I didn't trust my chain of command. As it turns out I was not charged, not because I was raped, but because I was divorced.

This morning, Facebook announced its latest set of changes to its privacy controls that will start rolling out on August 25. The upcoming changes are intended to make it easier for you to understand and choose who can see both content you post yourself and tags created by other users. Allowing you to pre-approve tags and giving you better tools to manage your own profile is a positive step, and we encourage Facebook to turn settings like these on by default and to continue to develop and improve features and tools that give you control over your own personal information.

In May, in Brown v. Plata, the U.S. Supreme Court spoke definitively: California must stop imprisoning so many people. The High Court concluded that California's prison system is so bloated that it poses extreme risks to prisoners and to staff, and that reducing the number of people in state prisons is the only way to end grossly inadequate health care and "needless suffering and death." The Court invoked the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.The Plata decision, 10 years in the making,

The Golden State has a problem. An addiction problem. California is addicted to incarceration. We've hit rock bottom, and it's time for an intervention. To help the state break the addiction, yesterday the ACLU of California sent a 12-step plan to every county in the state, as part of a larger ACLU comprehensive public safety realignment report. The report urges a fundamental shift in criminal justice policies toward smart on crime alternatives to incarceration.

BART is the first known government agency in the United States to block cell service in order to disrupt a political protest. In this case the demonstration was to protest the recent fatal shooting of a passenger by BART police. Pulling the plug on cell phones is the wrong response to political protests, whether it's halfway around the world or right here at home.

The Develop for Privacy Challenge, organized by the ACLUs of Northern California and Washington, the Tor Project, and the Information & Privacy Commissioner's Office of Ontario, was launched to highlight some of the best privacy-enhancing mobile apps out there—apps that improve, rather than erode, our ability to protect and control our own private information. After our judges evaluated many qualified applicants, we were delighted to recognize secure chat and instant messaging app Gibberbot as our inaugural Challenge winner, and to fly a representative of the development team out to Las Vegas to accept the award and discuss the app at our awards ceremony held during DEF CON 19.