In 2011, the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that we have the right to record the police in the public performance of their duties. But what does the right to record the police mean if you cannot exercise it? Not much....
Today 21 civil rights, civil liberties, religious, and community organizations sent Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and Boston Police Department Commissioner William Evans a letter calling on the city leaders to drop a controversial proposal to spend $1.4 million on social media monitoring...
Yesterday dozens of people turned out to a Boston City Council meeting hosted by the council’s Committee on Public Safety and Criminal Justice to raise their voices in opposition to the Boston Police Department’s plans to buy $1.4 million worth of social...
Today at 1:30 PM I’ll be delivering the following testimony to the Boston City Council’s Committee on Public Safety and Criminal Justice. The Committee is meeting to vote on approving a $14 million DHS grant to the Metro Boston Homeland Security Region,...
The Boston Police Department plans to buy a $1.4 million social media surveillance tool capable of building out complex associational profiles of users, tracking posts by location, performing ‘sentiment’ analysis, and much, much more. A detailed description of what the department is looking...
A lot of people are wondering what to do right now. The answers are the same as they were in October: organize and secure your digital papers and effects. Now perhaps more than ever in recent memory, the action is at the state...
Tomorrow is Election Day—finally. There’s a lot at stake in this contest, but no matter who wins, those of us who care about civil rights and civil liberties will continue to have our work cut out for us. Here are three...
In conversations about civil liberties reform, we often come face to face with the inescapable fact that our world and our issues are interconnected. It’s not possible to fully address systemic racism in the criminal system without also addressing economic injustice. Drug...
The New York Times reports activists from cities and towns across the country plan to descend on Cleveland this summer to protest the Republican National Convention and its presumptive nominee, Donald Trump. Deb Kline of Cleveland Jobs with Justice told a reporter she...
The House and Senate intelligence oversight committees were established to provide a check against intelligence abuses run amok in the shadows. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was set up for the same reason. But in the decades since these institutions were created, they...