Earlier this week, the Supreme Court issued a decision interpreting the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a federal anti-hacking law from the 1980s which has proven ill-suited to the modern internet. The Supreme Court’s opinion in Van Buren v. United …
Has the ACLU lost its way? This appears to be a perennial question. In 1994, then-ACLU President Nadine Strossen wrote a 17-page article with 54 footnotes, responding to the charge that the organization “is abandoning its traditional commitment to free …
Breonna Taylor, Walter Wallace Jr., Daniel Prude, and Rayshard Brooks were just a few of the 1,127 people brutally killed by police in 2020. In fact, there were only 18 days last year during which a police officer in the U.S. did not kill a civilian. But …
This piece first appeared in Just Security. The opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) sometimes have far-reaching implications for Americans’ privacy and free speech rights. Until very recently, though, the notion that the First …
On March 13, 2020, Louisville police officers killed Breonna Taylor, a Black medical worker, during a botched no-knock raid on her apartment. Her death was one of the thousands of police killings that drove the largest protests in American history that …
In the early 1920’s, Black Americans were under the siege of direct and indirect racial violence with widespread lynchings, Jim Crow laws, and race riots across the country. And yet the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma was thriving. Its streets …
The 2021 Democratic primary for district attorney in Philadelphia had all of the elements of a political drama: a reformer incumbent who spent his career challenging the criminal legal system versus a career prosecutor whom the current DA fired at the …
This piece first appeared in Just Security. Over 100 days into his administration, President Joe Biden has yet to act on a Trump administration policy denying thousands of immigrants serving in the U.S. military the path to citizenship promised to them by …
Last week, my staff and I watched alongside the rest of the nation as the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it would consider a case challenging Mississippi’s ban on abortion starting at 15 weeks of pregnancy. This news left us feeling scared about the …
Four and a half years ago, the use of surveillance technologies by local police and governments was growing exponentially. There were many factors behind this rapid growth, but the two most significant were (1) the ever-increasing pool of federal grant …
In a year that has seen many horrific attacks on transgender people, among the cruelest and most dangerous is Arkansas’ new law that bans gender-affirming care for trans youth. If it goes into effect in July, this law will cause catastrophic harms to …
One week ago, the Supreme Court announced it would consider a major case about abortion. The case, which directly challenges Roe v. Wade, raises the question of whether states can ban abortion. The legal right to abortion is at stake. Yet, missing from …
One year ago today, George Floyd was brutally murdered in broad daylight by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin over 9 minutes and 29 seconds as he pleaded for his life. Floyd’s murder sparked the largest protests in U.S. history. What has changed in …
Until last year, Surjit Singh’s beard had never been trimmed or cut. A devout Sikh, Mr. Singh believes that hair is a divine gift and removing it from the body dishonors God. But in a shocking incident last August, correctional officers processing Mr. …
Daunte Wright and Kobe Dimock-Hesiler should still be alive today. Instead, both of their lives were cut short by Brooklyn Center Police. Daunte Wright was killed at just 20 years old after being pulled over due to expired registration. Wright’s killing …
For more than 30 years, Grand Rapids, Michigan police have engaged in the egregious, unconstitutional practice of detaining people on the street and then fingerprinting and photographing anyone who isn’t carrying an ID, all without a warrant. In the …
Three million Americans currently suffer from Opioid Use Disorder, or an addiction to opioids. Today, adults between the ages of 25 and 44 are more than twice as likely to die from opioid overdose than from COVID-19. When we zoom in on the prison …
Kimberly Vazquez and Yashira “Yoshi” Valenzuela are two Baltimore high school students who live in households that experience frequent power cuts, particularly when too many electronics are plugged in at once. When their classes went virtual last year, it …
After years of advocacy, grassroots organizing, and on the cusp of the one-year anniversary of when hundreds of thousands of people joined in solidarity with Black organizers by marching to support Black lives and to divest from racist policing, we’ve …
There’s been a lot of discussion recently over whether to create a new system of digital vaccine “passports.” But that conversation is just a small part of a much larger movement aimed at creating a digital identity system, including a push by companies, …
