News & Commentary

Last week, a state court judge in Orange County, California, declared the end of a landmark lawsuit called Campbell v. Barnes. The suit was filed last summer at the height of the pandemic and sought the release of people in the county’s jails due to the unsanitary and crowded conditions, which put incarcerated people and staff at serious risk of COVID-19. T

The trove of revealing data held by phone and email providers is proving too great a temptation for the Justice Department, even when the government’s spying threatens the freedom of the press. The department’s existing rules, which were supposed to prevent abuse, have failed and it’s time for new, robust limits that will adequately protect journalists — and the free press on which our democracy depends. In a welcome step, the Biden administration and Justice Department have announced a ban on efforts to uncover confidential sources by seizing reporters’ phone and email records. And today, the Justice Department’s Inspector General announced he would conduct an investigation into what occurred. But that’s not enough. A

This piece was published in partnership with The Nation. O

The confidentiality of patient-doctor communications is a cornerstone of medical ethics and effective care, and rightly so — the information we divulge in the course of treatment is often highly sensitive, intimate, and revealing. We need patient privacy rules that are up to the task of protecting it. That’s why we recently sent a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) opposing proposed modifications to the HIPAA Privacy Rule that would radically erode patient privacy protections and facilitate unnecessary disclosures of patients’ health information without their consent. T

I’m proud to lead a nationwide constituency of Black women dedicated to organizing around issues that greatly impact us, our families, households, and communities — including financial independence. Black women carry more student loan debt than any other group, and this is a direct result of the

The cruelty of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency was on full display this past year. The agency refused to take vital measures to curb the spread of COVID-19 in its detention centers, even in the face of its own experts’ findings that the crude facilities were “tinderboxes” for the disease. D

As we enter Pride month, I am reflecting on the interconnectedness of our joy and our struggle. I

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 States, narrowing the scope of the CFAA, will have positive consequences for online civil rights testing, research, and data journalism. A

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 speech and other classic civil liberties and is becoming a ‘trendy’ liberal organization primarily concerned with equality and civil rights.” Sixteen years before that, in 1978, J. Anthony Lukas wrote a feature for The New York Times Magazine titled “The ACLU Against Itself,” recounting the controversy over whether the group should have represented a group of Nazis who sought to march in Skokie, Illinois. The question is not new. B