An alarming story out of Houston, where US Marshals have arrested a man over unpaid student loans dating back to the 1980s: Paul Aker says he was arrested at his home last week for a $1500 federal student loan he received in...
Torture is a subject of debate in the 2016 GOP presidential primary campaign. Last week, republicans debated whether waterboarding is torture (it is), and whether they would “bring it back” if they were elected president. Donald Trump said he would not only...
Two big ACLU lawsuits are in the news this week. First, stingrays. My colleagues at the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) successfully sued the NYPD to force the release of documents pertaining to the department’s use of controversial cell site simulators,...
A police officer is not immune from accountability after he points a gun at a non-threatening person, with his finger on the trigger and the safety off, and accidentally fires. So ruled the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston last week, in...
After considering some 50 amendments to the popular legislation, the Massachusetts state senate today unanimously voted to approve strong public records reform legislation. Following the passage of weaker legislation from the house, the two chambers must now meet to hammer out a...
Granting the ACLU and the public access to staffing, budgetary, and statistical information about the Boston Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) and FBI would mean “the public would know where the FBI was putting its resources,” warned an Assistant US Attorney in...
New reporting on the fallout at the University of Missouri over student protests alleging administration racism reveals that the FBI has been tracking the movements of “a significant Ferguson protester,” most likely DeRay Mckesson. Student activists and the UM football team succeeded in...
This week I have the pleasure of speaking onstage with two policy experts I respect very much. Tonight, I’ll be talking about the legality and morality of US drone operations with Andrew Bacevich. Thursday night, I’m speaking at an event where Noam...
Brandeis is hosting a bunch of great social justice related events in a series called Deis Impact. Among the many fantastic events is a screening of the 2014 documentary about the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI’s 1971 robbery of a Media, Pennsylvania...
The National Institute for Justice is seeking applications in 2016 for a grant program focused on “research and technology development leading to the introduction into practice of new, innovative means for: collecting digital evidence from mobile devices or large-scale computer networks, or for detecting...