News & Commentary

Chelsea Manning, currently in the seventh year of a 35-year court-martial sentence, has already served longer in prison than any other whistleblower in the history of our country. On Monday, more than a dozen LGBT organizations — led by the ACLU — sent

When she was 17 years old, Rosa* fled her home country and came to the U.S. seeking a better life.  As she made her way across the border, she was raped. After she arrived in the U.S. alone, she was taken into federal  custody and then placed with a Catholic organization that receives taxpayer money to provide services to young women like Rosa.Already afraid and alone, Rosa learned she was pregnant, adding to her trauma. She requested an abortion. But instead of helping Rosa get the care she needed — as required by law — Catholic Charities kicked her out of its federally funded program. Rosa became so distraught by the prospect of not being able to obtain an abortion that she was hospitalized for suicidal thoughts.  Her story doesn’t end there. The Obama administration tried to place Rosa with another religiously affiliated or

In a surprise development, the Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC), an expert panel of law enforcement, national security, military, and other experts who advise the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security voted on Thursday to recommend that the agency shift away from using private prisons to detain immigrants. Under public pressure, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson in August had convened a special subcommittee of the HS

Since 2014, at least 14 people have been killed by police officers wearing body cameras that were either not turned on or not operational. Roughly two months ago, an officer in Charlotte failed to activate his body camera before fatally shooting Keith Lamont Scott. (On Wednesday, news broke that the officer who killed Scott will not face charges.) Days earlier, an officer in Washington, D.C., failed to turn on his body camera before fatally shooting Terrence Sterling. And this past July, an officer in Chicago failed to activate his body camera before fatally shooting Paul O’Neal in the back. These unrecorded killings threaten to undermine confidence in body cameras. If these cameras are only as good as

Even if you like to share thoughts and photos on social media, there are certainly plenty of things that you’d like to keep between yourself and a select few. ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project Director Ben Wizner sat down with our principal technologist Christopher Soghoian for a Facebook Live video Q&A on how to keep the government and other snoopers out of your private digital business. Here are some highlights from their answers to questions from people on Facebook: Protecting Yo

A great deal of nation attention recently has been drawn to abortion rights—and justifiably so. The president-elect has vowed to nominate justices committed to overturning Roe v. Wade. And yesterday he nominated Rep. Tom Price for Secretary of Health and Human Services. Price is a man who at every opportunity has voted to take away people’s access to health care, to deny women the right to have an abortion, to cut off access to contraception, and to defund Planned Parenthood.But while we worry about the future of abortion rights at the federal level, far too many women  wake up in states where their right to abortion remains so inaccessible that the right is more theoretical than real. And that is because of state laws like those we are challenging today which are expressly designed to prevent a woman who has decided to have an abortion from actually getting one. Today the ACLU has joined forces with the Center for Reproductive Rights and Planned Parenthood in a new wave of lawsuits to

The recent abusive border search of a Canadian photojournalist should serve as a warning to everyone concerned about press freedom these days.   Ed Ou is a renowned photographer and TED senior fellow who has traveled to the Unite

When intelligence agencies operate with insufficient oversight, they often harm the very people they are meant to protect. Few know this as well as the 15 former Senate staffers who have called on President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch to show leniency to whistleblower Edward Snowden. The 15 staffers made their case in a

President-elect Donald J. Trump tweeted today that anyone who burns a flag should be jailed or even stripped of their U.S. citizenship. The idea that the government could use citizenship as a punishment for political speech is not simply unconstitutional, but fundamentally un-American. This tweet offers not one but two ideas that are staggeringly wrong from a constitutional point of view: