LibertyVoice

The ACLU took to the airwaves this week to advance its advocacy against the implementation of Assault Intervention Devices — invisible microwave beam weapons originally developed by the military — as a way of subduing inmates at the Los Angeles County Jail by focusing a microwave beam on them to make them feel intolerable heat.

Margaret Winter, associate director of the ACLU National Prison Project, told host Sonali Kolhatkar on the show "Uprising" on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles yesterday that because we don’t have a full understanding of just how dangerous this weapon can be, subjecting inmates to this technology puts their lives at risk — a clear violationof the Eighth Amendment and the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The military incarnation of the device was briefly fielded in Afghanistan this past June before being withdrawn in July without ever being used. While the device was being tested by the Air Force, a miscalibration of the device’s power settings caused five airmen in its path to suffer lasting burns, including one whose injuries were so severe that he was airlifted to an off-base burn treatment center.

This morning, on the KPFK program "Sojourner Truth with Margaret Prescod," Peter Eliasberg, managing attorney with the ACLU of Southern California, said, "the fact that this weapon was never used by the military should be red flag enough for people to be angry and outraged and to contact the Board of Supervisors and say this is an experiment that shouldn’t be allowed to go forward."

Earlier today, New York Gov. David Paterson signed the first law ever in the United States to give domestic workers the same protections that most other workers have enjoyed for decades. The enactment of the New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights means that the over 200,000 nannies, in-home caregivers, housekeepers, and other domestic laborers throughout New York State will now finally be guaranteed an eight-hour work day, overtime pay, one day of rest each week, paid vacation days, protection against workplace sexual harassment and racial discrimination, and temporary disability benefits.

This is a remarkable victory for domestic workers and advocates. The New York Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU Women’s Rights Project were proud to actively support this bill and lobby alongside Domestic Workers United, a coalition of domestic workers and advocates, which for years has been the powerful and effective driving force behind the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.

But perhaps even more remarkable is that it has taken us this long to grant these most basic protections to the hardworking women and men whose labor forms the backbone of our economy. At a panel event in March, domestic workers and advocates, Linda Oalican, Barbara Young, and Nahar Alam, shared their personal stories and spoke about the exploitation, abuse, and indignities they experienced as domestic workers after migrating to the U.S.

Stories like these are not isolated. Nor are they an accident. Rather, they are a result of a very deliberate decision in the 1930s to exclude domestic workers and farm workers (the occupations held by the majority of African-Americans at the time — a legacy of slavery) from federal labor laws, as a concession to staunch segregationists in Congress. In New York, 93 percent of domestic workers are women, 95 percent are people of color, and 99 percent are immigrants (see Home Is Where the Work Is), making clear that the exploitation, abuse, and enslavement of domestic workers is directly related to discrimination based on sex, race, class, and immigration status.

Today marks a major turning point in domestic workers’ struggle to overcome discrimination and to achieve human rights and dignity. This is cause for celebration, but also for rededication to the ongoing fight, which is far from over. Getting a law on the books is just the first step; there is a long road ahead towards ensuring that these rights are enforced, and that further protections — including notice of termination and collective bargaining rights — are realized.

We hope that soon other states, as well as the federal government, will follow New York’s example in granting domestic workers these long overdue rights. And we hope that here in New York, the spirit of fairness and justice that was exhibited in the signing of this historic new law, will soon be extended to farm workers as well.

We’re pleased to announce that the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University are co‐hosting a conference on September 25, 2010 entitled &quo…

[Update: This post was featured on Slashdot.]
[Update: There are two discrete ways of asking whether a court decision is “correct.” The first is to ask: is the law being applied the same way here as it has been applied in other cases? We can call thi…

Just three days after filmmaker Simon Klose started a fundraiser to complete his upcoming Pirate Bay documentary, the seed funding goal of $25,000 has already been reached. The Pirate audience has been extremely generous, with a full 27 days left the counter currently sits at $28,099.

Mathew Ingram wrote an interesting piece on Gigaom entitled Privacy is Hard Because People Change Their Minds.  From the article: “Why is privacy so hard? Sociologist Danah Boyd, who specializes in the way people use social networks, says in the latest issue of MIT’s Technology Review magazine that it’s because “the way privacy is encoded into [...]

There are tens of thousands of people out there receiving letters from lawyers which demand payments to make potential copyright infringement lawsuits go away. Those wrongfully accused have been fighting back in a number of ways, and not without success. Now a team of lawyers is offering to coordinate a group action, with the aim of gathering compensation for victims through harassment claims.

We are all familiar with how the death penalty works. A crime (usually murder) is committed. It’s investigated by law enforcement. A suspect is arrested, charged with the crime, and goes to trial. The government shows the judge or jury the evidence against the accused. The accused can defend against the accusations. The jury delivers a verdict. If it’s a guilty verdict, the defendant might be sentenced to death.

The process, from arrest to sentencing, is the Fifth Amendment in action, the part that states: "no person…shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law."

But earlier this year, the Obama administration asserted it has the authority to carry out "targeted killings" of U.S. citizens outside armed conflict zones. In February, then-Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that the U.S. was authorized to take “direct action” against suspected terrorists and that “if we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.”

It was reported widely, in fact, that the government keeps secret "kill lists," which function as standing authorizations to use lethal force against anyone on the list, including American citizens.

Today, the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a lawsuit challenging the government’s asserted authority to carry out targeted killings of U.S. citizens outside armed conflict zones.

Now, no one disputes that the United States is at war. But wars are waged in specific geographic areas. Currently, the U.S. is at war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The U.S. is not at war in Somalia. Yet that is where a missile strike killed Ruben Shumpert, a U.S. citizen from Seattle.

The U.S. is also not at war in Yemen. Yet that is where Anwar al-Aulaqi, a U.S. citizen, is purportedly in hiding, and where the government has attempted to assassinate him as many as a dozen times using armed drones.

The Constitution protects all Americans’ right to life, whether they’re living at home or abroad. If the government thinks you should be dead, it should at least tell you why. The fact that the standard that puts Americans on the "kill list" is a secret is itself unconstitutional. As our complaint states, "U.S. citizens have a right to know what conduct may subject them to execution at the hands of their own government. Due process requires, at a minimum, that citizens be put on notice of what may cause them to be put to death by the state."

No one would dispute either that the United States has the right to protect and defend itself against its enemies. But outside of zones of armed conflict, both the Constitution and international law prohibit targeted killing except as a last resort to protect against concrete, specific, and imminent threats of death or serious physical injury. The fact that many on the "kill list" have been on the list for months makes clear that the administration’s targeted killing program is broader than the law permits.

The government isn’t perfect, and this targeted killing program leaves too much room for error. The American government detained almost 800 men at Guantánamo as terrorists, only to release 600 of them after it was found that there was insufficient evidence to hold them. In other words, it made mistakes. Lots of them. And the consequences are far more serious when the end result is death.

A few weeks ago, ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer was on Democracy Now talking about the targeted killing program. He said: "A lot of us agree that the last administration’s argument for worldwide detention authority, the authority to detain people without charge or trial, was extreme and unlawful. This administration is claiming worldwide execution authority." It’s death without due process, far from any battlefield, which is alarming, dangerous, and unconstitutional.

A few weeks ago, we wrote about United States v. Maynard, a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit requiring the government to obtain a warrant when it uses a GPS tracking device to monitor someone’s movements.

Last Friday, Judge James Orenstein in the Eastern District of New York recognized that Maynard‘s reasoning also applies when the government tries to retrace a person’s whereabouts using historical cell phone location information stored by cell phone carriers. Judge Orenstein rejected each possible factual difference between GPS vehicle tracking and historical cell phone tracking, and concluded that cell phone tracking is just as intrusive to Americans’ reasonable expectations of privacy in the details of their everyday lives as GPS tracking.

We believe that Judge Orenstein got it exactly right. In coming to the decision, the court’s opinion noted:

a growing recognition, at least in some courts, that technology has progressed to the point where a person who wishes to partake in the social, cultural, and political affairs of our society has no realistic choice but to expose to others, if not to the public as a whole, a broad range of conduct and communications that would previously have been deemed unquestionably private.

Concluding that "[t]he Fourth Amendment cannot properly be read to impose on our populace the dilemma of either ceding to the state any meaningful claim to personal privacy or effectively withdrawing from a technologically maturing society," the court denied the government’s application for almost two months’ worth of historical cell phone location information that it had sought to access just by showing that it was "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation" — a standard far short of a warrant required by the Fourth Amendment.

The same issue regarding the constitutionality of warrantless access to historical cell site location is currently pending in the 3rd Circuit, where the ACLU submitted a friend-of-the-court brief (PDF) with the ACLU Foundation of Pennsylvania, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Center for Democracy and Technology. The 3rd Circuit will be the first appellate court to decide this question, and we hope that it, like Judge Orenstein, will understand the necessity for Fourth Amendment protections against invasive technology like cell phone tracking that has the potential to eviscerate our notions of privacy.

As anyone who has been following the debate regarding the "future of journalism" knows, there have been a lot of ink (and bytes) spilled arguing over the role news aggregators are playing in the "decline" of traditional journalistic…