We’ve long known that the war on drugs is a major driver of not only mass incarceration but also excessive government surveillance and other Fourth Amendment violations. Here in Massachusetts, the latest example of government overreach in the war on drugs astounds:...
Can the police seize your cell phone simply because they suspect you’ve committed a crime? Can law enforcement get a warrant to rifle through your digital life on the basis of a hunch, or because their prior experience tells them that people...
I’ve been doing a lot of Boston media this week about a story that seems to have touched a raw nerve. It’s reminded me of a frustrating problem I encounter whenever a technology and privacy issue is hot in the news: Some...
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...
There are two overarching goals in the fight for digital civil liberties: first, to establish privacy-protective legal rulings and statutes; and second, to make sure law enforcement and judges apply those standards throughout the criminal justice system. Oftentimes conversation about law reform...
If the FBI were to obtain broad powers enabling its agents to hack into thousands of computers all around the world, you’d expect congress to debate and authorize those new powers, right? You might assume congress would seek input from technical experts, and...
In recent months, the FBI has taken to the press and to congress to complain about how the increasingly widespread adoption of end-to-end encryption in commercial technologies like the iPhone and Whatsapp is resulting in an intelligence blackout, a process the feds...
Yesterday, the Massachusetts legislature did something historic: both chambers unanimously passed significant public records reform legislation. Now the Governor has the opportunity to push the reform effort over the finish line and make it the law of the land. It’s not an...
The Sunlight Foundation has ranked Massachusetts among the worst states in the nation on government transparency. Journalist Joshua Eaton’s recent correspondence with the Boston Police Department shows just how absurd that secrecy looks on the ground. In June 2014, fellow Boston-based muckraker Evan...
Today the ACLU of Massachusetts testified before the state legislature’s Joint Transportation Committee in support of proposals to regulate law enforcement and corporate use of license plate readers and the data they produce. If you haven’t heard of license plate readers, here’s...