When you must accept surveillance as a condition of receiving a service (including housing): “It’s not convenience; it’s coercion.”

BREAKING: @aclu-norcal.bsky.social, Lieff Cabraser, and Tobener Ravenscroft just sued San Francisco landlords over AI-powered surveillance in people's homes. Our homes are the last refuge of privacy. What happens there is none of your landlord's business. www.aclunc.org/news/aclu-su...

BREAKING: @aclu-norcal.bsky.social, Lieff Cabraser, and Tobener Ravenscroft just sued San Francisco landlords over AI-powered surveillance in people's homes. Our homes are the last refuge of privacy. What happens there is none of your landlord's business. www.aclunc.org/news/aclu-su...

VICTORY: DHS has withdrawn its subpoena demanding the identities of anonymous Instagram users who posted about ICE raids in LA. The First Amendment protects your right to record police, to share those recordings, and do so anonymously.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ @snowjake.bsky.social @aclu.org

Today @aclu-norcal.bsky.social and @eff.org filed a lawsuit on behalf of non-profit advocacy groups challenging San Jose’s warrantless searches as violating the California Constitution’s protections against unreasonable searches and right to privacy. www.aclunc.org/news/lawsuit...

The San Jose PD regularly conducts warrantless searches through its massive license plate reader database, allowing it to reconstruct detailed maps of a person’s movements through the City going back as far as a year. This poses a serious threat to communities’ privacy and freedom of movement.

Your boy has plans, I have plans too.

The case challenged UCLA's decision to dismantle the Palestine Solidarity Encampment, arguing that it violated the plaintiffs' constitutional right to free expression and that the unlawful assembly declaration that caused the arrests of 200+ people at the Encampment was unconstitutional.

BREAKING NEWS: A judge this morning allowed the lawsuit by @aclusocal.bsky.social & Walkup Melodia against the UC Regents on behalf of Palestine solidarity activists from UCLA (2 students and 2 faculty members) to proceed, marking an important preliminary victory for student speech on CA campuses.

A man was arrested for playing Darth Vader's theme music, "The Imperial March," behind National Guard troops walking through Logan Circle. Now the ACLU is suing on his behalf. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Good to be a part of this litigation team.

We at @aclu-norcal.bsky.social and @aclupa.org filed this motion to protect people exercising their First Amendment rights to speak out anonymously. These summonses are intolerable abuses of power by DHS. The court JUST ordered Meta not to reveal anything to DHS until further notice.

If you're going out to protest this weekend and wondering how to protect yourself from digital surveillance, @aclu-norcal.bsky.social has a video for you (featuring, yes, me). We draw heavily from @eff.org's fantastic Surveillance Self Defense resource, available here: ssd.eff.org/module/atten...

📢 BREAKING NEWS 📢 EFF and co-counsel have filed a lawsuit against the Departments of State and Homeland Security for their viewpoint-based surveillance and suppression of First Amendment-protected speech online. (1/5)

Today, Prof. John Clarke at UC Berkeley (who is, full disclosure, my father-in-law) won the Nobel Prize in Physics! He also spoke out about how the Trump administration's cuts would "cripple science" and take a decade to rebuild.

DHS subpoenaed Meta for information about an account that posts names and images of the ICE agents raiding our communities, but @aclu-norcal.bsky.social and advocates are pushing back. Recording federal agents while on duty in public — and sharing that information — is our First Amendment right.

A HUGE WIN! “From Day 1, Secretary Noem acted with a sole intent of stripping TPS holders of their legal status whether or not there was a basis for it. This decision recognizes the illegality of that. As a result, TPS protections should go back into effect immediately.” — Emi MacLean, ACLU NorCal

"This decision is further confirmation that the administration's paramilitary invasion of Los Angeles violated the Constitution and caused irreparable injury across the region." More on our win from this evening: www.aclusocal.org/en/press-rel...

"To them, if you are brown, they will hunt you down. To them, if you have dark skin, they will take you in." @mtajsar.bsky.social laist.com/news/politic...

This is great — here in California, this change will help prevent out-of-state agencies and ICE from tracking drivers, including abortion-seekers and immigrants. Flock points to a CA law that prohibits local/state agencies from sharing this info across state lines. A thread on how that came to be🧵

A fist rapidly made contact with a face, raising punching concerns.

NEW lawsuit: Sonoma County is operating a runaway warrantless drone surveillance program that regularly invades residents' privacy, interrupts personal lives, and instills dread in those targeted. This violates the CA Constitution and we're taking the County to court. www.aclunc.org/news/aclu-su...

Face surveillance isn't just incompatible with a healthy democracy, it's also a threat to public safety, here made worse by an unaccountable watch list, a seeming disregard to false match risks, and camera feeds accessible to an authoritarian federal government www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

Today, our client Rümeysa Öztürk was released on bail from ICE detention in Louisiana, and she will return to New England to continue her studies. 📸 Giancarlo D’Agostaro

A major victory against the world’s most notorious monger of malicious spyware.

BREAKING: In a major civil rights victory, a federal court today issued a preliminary injunction barring Border Patrol from using stop-and-arrest practices that violate federal law and the U.S. Constitution. They can’t target people just because they’re Brown, or day laborers, or farm workers.

There is a time and a place for "et al." and this is neither the time nor the place.

NEW: We just filed an amicus brief urging the California Supreme Court to side with a mother appealing her wrongful listing on the child abuse registry. Parents must have a meaningful opportunity to challenge unjust rulings.

Folks this isn't complicated. AI regulations are sensibly a part of privacy law. Privacy gives people control over the use of information about them. When a computer deprives people of a job or a loan, that's a privacy harm. www.kqed.org/news/1203751...

“It’s unfortunate to see a lot of the industry talking points coming out of a letter from the governor,” said @snowjake.bsky.social, a technology and civil liberties attorney at the @aclu-norcal.bsky.social. www.kqed.org/news/1203751... via @kqednews.kqed.org

Rümeysa Öztürk has not been accused of any crime. Plainclothes ICE agents grabbed her off the street, arrested, and detained her. For nearly 24 hours, Ms. Öztürk’s attorney was unable to locate her as ICE quickly moved her in three different states. We won’t stop fighting to bring Rümeysa home.

Commissioner Slaughter and I just sued to clarify that we're still FTC commissioners. But this is bigger than us. This is about economic stability. If the President can break a 90-year-old Supreme Court ruling to fire us for no reason, he can do it to the Fed, the FDIC and SEC.

Let’s be clear about what’s happening here: the trillion dollar company behind Facebook and Instagram is effectively outsourcing the labor of combatting platform abuse to overworked and under-resourced school employees.

Weak state laws rolling up to federal preemption. It's the big tobacco playbook all over again. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/t...

The president is trying to illegally fire me. Who does this help? Does it help you? Or does it help the billionaires over the president’s shoulder at the inauguration?

I am a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission. Earlier today, the president attempted to illegally fire me. This is corruption, plain and simple. I will see the president in court. My full statement:

Thanks in part to the supposedly progressive city of San Francisco, we now have U.S. Supreme Court rulings that allow the criminalization of homelessness and weaken the Clean Water Act, putting the environment in even greater peril. bsky.app/profile/eliz...

Hello! I used my esoteric knowledge gleaned from my DC years to write about how Congress could EASILY defund DOGE: www.techpolicy.press/how-congress...

So proud of my colleagues for bringing this righteous case. www.sfchronicle.com/california/a...

We (@knightcolumbia.org) just filed a motion in Pres. Trump's criminal case in FL, seeking Volume II of the special counsel's report. Our motion argues that disclosure is required under the common law and First Amendment rights of access to judicial documents. knightcolumbia.org/content/knig...

BREAKING: A federal court temporarily blocked President Trump’s executive order aiming to restrict access to gender-affirming medical care for transgender people under age 19 nationwide. This is a major victory for our freedom to access life-saving care.

It's an exceedingly basic point, but every lawsuit by people challenging the Trump administration's roiling chaotic looting of the government relies on a legal private right of action. This is why people need the ability to enforce their own legal rights, against both companies and governments.

Is it just me or has WIRED been dogwalking the rest of the media on this story

"Preemption has long been the tech industry’s holy grail. But few know its history. It turns out, Big Tech is pulling straight from the toxic strategy that Big Tobacco used in the 1990s... But it’s not too late.We can ensure our civil rights and civil liberties are protected in the digital age."

this paper from a few years back also showed how big tech follows similar strategies as big tech dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

It is very gratifying that my piece on the parallels between Big Tech and Big Tobacco—most saliently their pursuit of federal preemption to eliminate state-law protections—was the 18th most read post on Tech Policy Press in 2024. Out of over 800 posts! ICYMI: www.techpolicy.press/big-tech-is-...

GREAT NEWS: Today the court in Santa Barbara granted the motion to quash, adopting reasoning in our amicus brief. The court recognized that, when the government seeks information impacting speech rights, a much higher showing is necessary.

I am forced once again to gesture in the direction of the sign. |￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣| THE BENEFITS OF SURVEILLANCE TECH ONCE AGAIN FAIL TO MATERIALIZE |＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿| (\__/) || ( •ㅅ• ) || / づ

Excited to share ACLU NorCal's new landing page on Making Artificial Intelligence Work for the People. www.aclunc.org/ai @aclu-norcal.bsky.social

California's Racial Justice Act is supposed to make the criminal legal system fairer. It can help overturn discriminatory convictions. But the law isn’t working like it should. We're fighting to make sure the RJA benefits the people it was intended to help. More at www.aclunc.org/racial-justice-act