Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “American Civil Liberties Union”
When a teenager from East Baltimore was asked to describe his neighborhood, he spoke of “big rats going around in people’s trash, vacant houses full of squatters and needles on the ground.” A young woman in New Delhi, asked the same question, described the dirt and the “dirty water found lying on the roads,” while a young man in Ibadan, a large …
The affable, soft-spoken dairy farmer stood outside his 70-stall milking barn on his 230-acre family farm. When his father started farming there in 1950 were about 800 dairy farms in New York state’s Orange County. Only 39 survive. Small, traditional farms have been driven out of business by rising real estate prices, genetic manipulation of cows, industrial-scale hormone use that …
In February, the Director of National Intelligence issued a report summarizing the changes that President Obama has implemented since pledging major surveillance reforms in January 2014. The report chronicles a dizzying number of developments and contains links to several hundreds of pages of supporting documentation. But does this impressive accumulation of activity translate to meaningful reform? The report makes clear that the big picture …
More than thirteen years after the U.S. intelligence community named the prevention of terrorism its number one goal, it seems to have little understanding of what drives terrorism, or how to counter it. And, if the recently increasing criticism is correct, the government’s investment in academic terrorism research isn’t helping. It may be because the government is continuing to fund research supporting discredited theories of terrorist radicalization, rather than objective empirical analyses. After …
John W. Whitehead is a constitutional attorney. As head of the Rutherford Institute he is actively involved in defending our civil liberties. Being actively involved in legal cases, he experiences first hand the transformation of law from a shield of the American people into a weapon in the hands of the government. American civil liberty was seriously eroded prior to …
Fidgeting, whistling, sweaty palms. Add one point each. Arrogance, a cold penetrating stare, and rigid posture, two points. These are just a few of the suspicious signs that the Transportation Security Administration directs its officers to look out for — and score — in airport travelers, according to a confidential TSA document obtained exclusively byThe Intercept. The checklist is part …
From slowing the decline in fatal brain disease, to generating a sense of oneness with one another and the universe, drumming’s physical and spiritual health benefits may be as old as time itself. Drumming is as fundamental a form of human expression as speaking, and likely emerged long before humans even developed the capability of using the lips, tongue and …
A judiciary panel on Monday quietly approved a rule change that would increase the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s surveillance powers, despite concerns over privacy and constitutional rights. The Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules voted 11-1 to modify a rule that gives federal judges more flexibility in approving search warrants for electronic data. If passed, it will allow judges to approve …
A United Nations investigator has accused the U.S. of blocking access to prisons—including state and federal facilities where an estimated 80,000 people are in solitary confinement and the military prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba—leading civil liberties experts to wonder, “Is the United States hiding something?” Juan Méndez, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, told reporters in Geneva on Wednesday that for …
The ACLU has filed a lawsuit, on behalf of Wikipedia and other organizations, challenging the constitutionality of the NSA’s mass interception and searching of Americans’ international communications. (Image: Available logos/with overlay) Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia and one of the most highly-trafficked websites in the world, announcedTuesday that it—alongside a host of civil liberty advocates, news outlets, and privacy rights organizations—has filed …
