News & Commentary

Thanks to Edward Snowden’s act of conscience, we’ve made historic strides in our fight for surveillance reform and improved cybersecurity. That’s why today, ahead of this week’s release of the Oliver Stone movie “Snowden,” we’re unveiling a major effort calling on President Obama to pardon the NSA whistleblower. The ACLU is being joined in this campaign by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and we already have

Something historic is happening in North Dakota. People are protesting an oil pipeline. And the people who are protesting the oil pipeline are mostly Native Americans. It’s historic because the 200 or so tribes that are protesting the construction of the $3.7 billion Dakota Access Pipeline have not united together for more than 150 years. Several thousand indigenous people from across the county have journeyed to a little-known pasture on the prairie just miles from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation — where the oil pipeline is slated to cross the Missouri River — to protect the land the tribes consider sacred and culturally significant as well as the water necessary for life. The protectors, as the protesters call themselves, are defending the land and water using little more than the right to assemble and speak freely, a long-standing protection afforded by the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, there is another kind of history happening here. It’s a history that is all too familiar to indigenous p

It’s hard to speak with your face pressed against concrete. Or when you can’t breathe. Or with a broken neck. And even when you manage to speak, people in power seek to silence you. Just ask the San Francisco 49ers’ Colin Kaepernick. The

Police in Aurora, Colorado, got a call about a man pulling a gun on a kid. They had no description of the suspect. On their way to the scene, they stopped two Black men walking down the sidewalk. Darsean Kelley, one of the men, followed the officers’ orders to hold his hands above his head and turn around

Learn about what's happening across the most pressing civil liberties issues of our time, and what you can do.

In February, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and his web-based production company, hitRECord, teamed up with the American Civil Liberties Union to create a five-part educational series on the topics of technology and democracy. The actor became passionate about issues of mass surveillance and digital privacy while preparing for

At a town hall meeting in North Berwick, Maine, last week, Gov. Paul LePage stated he keeps a binder with pictures of “every single drug dealer who has been arrested in our state.” He went on to claim that 90 percent of those arrested are Black or Hispanic. Naturally, we want to see the binder — so we filed a public access request for it. We’re eager to examine the governor’s binder to get to the bottom of his claims. Unfortunately, while the governor s

Last night in the Sherman Park area, Milwaukee police officers in riot gear wrongfully arrested two men for no good reason. But this time, the men they arrested had the means to demand their rights and were released. The men were Jarrett English, an organizer at the ACLU of Wisconsin, and State Representative Jonathan Brostoff. At about 9:30 p.m., a handful of people, including Mr. English and Rep. Brostoff, stood on the northeast c

“Predictive policing” has an enticing ring to it. The idea is that you feed a bunch of data into a mysterious algorithm, and poof, out comes intelligence about the future that tells police where the next crime is going to occur, or even who is going to commit it. What’s not to get excited about? Unfortunately, many predictions made by policing software don’t come true. This is because pre