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ACLU Finally Figures Out What Restoring Liberty Has Been Saying for Months: All Emails, Facebook Messages are Under FBI Surveillance

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Photo Credit: IBTimesWarrants? We don’t need no stinking warrants.

According to new documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, government officials may not always obtain warrants when they snoop through our emails, Facebook messages, and other electronic communications — and the FBI apparently doesn’t even believe it’s legally required to do so.

The documents, which were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request and posted on the ACLU website, suggest that the U.S. Department of Justice is flouting a 2010 federal appeals court ruling that declared warrantless access to email a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

That ruling, a criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, stated that the government must obtain a warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted at the time, “the court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their phone calls and postal mail.”

However, an FBI “Operations Guide” — made public for the first time by the ACLU — tells a more nuanced story. Revised in June of last year, the guide makes exemptions for email stored by a service provider for more than 180 days. That’s basically any message sitting in your Gmail or Facebook folder for longer than six months. Most email messages are stored on cloud servers, and with virtually unlimited storage space, many email users see no need to delete old messages.

Read more from this story HERE.

ACLU Asks Governor For Records Concerning State Interference With Pro-Life Protest

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After Restoring Liberty first publicized the State’s interference with a pro-life demonstration in Juneau last week, a number of national outlets including Life News and Western Journalism picked up the story.

Although the Alaska media has remained silent on the controversy, with several minor exceptions, the ACLU of Alaska recognized the First Amendment implications of using state resources to restrict political expression. As a result, the ACLU issued a Press Release this week calling on the Governor to release all information relating to the state’s interference with the protest.

In the ACLU’s accompanying Public Records Request (you can see it HERE), the group notes that it is “pleased” with the Governor’s statement that he “immediately directed the Department of Administration to look into the [interference with the protest] and ensure it doesn’t happen again” and that he “reiterated [his] support for the constitutional right to free speech.” But the ACLU says it remains “concerned about how the Department of Administration came to block this peaceful protest.”

To get to the bottom of what happened, the ACLU has asked under the Public Records Act for any records concerning

• The Department of Administration’s discovery of this protest;
• The sending of the Department of Administration’s vehicles to the protest, including the blocking of the protestors;
• The removal of these vehicles from the protest;
• The discovery by members of the Office of the Governor, including Governor Parnell, of (a) the protest and (b) the Department of Administration’s sending of vehicles, blocking protestors, and removal of vehicles;
• The direction by Governor Parnell or his Office to the Department of Administration “to look into the matter”;
• The Department of Administration’s “look[ing] into the matter”;
• Governor Parnell’s direction, or the direction by his Office, to the Department of Administration to “ensure it doesn’t happen again”;
• Guidelines, rules, or similar policies about protests, which were effective on Tuesday, April 2 or Wednesday, April 3, 2013; and
• Guidelines, rules, or similar policies about protests – including those that are being developed and have not yet been implemented – that post-date April 3, 2013.

Surprisingly omitted from the ACLU’s requests is any question related to the removal of a pro-life sign from the street adjacent to the capitol as well as to the alleged assault of a disabled man by a government employee.

The ACLU should also seek any information sent by Department of Administration computers to news sites, such as Restoring Liberty, defending the State’s efforts to block the protest or to criticize the publicity given to the State’s interference with the pro-lifers. Restoring Liberty has evidence that multiple submissions, critical of this site or defensive of the State’s actions, were made from Department of Administration computers.

Hopefully, the ACLU’s actions will help bring accountability to any in state government who used state resources to trample on the First Amendment last week.

Even the ACLU Says Reid’s Gun Legislation Threatens Privacy Rights, Civil Liberties

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

As Senate Democrats struggle to build support for new gun control legislation, the American Civil Liberties Union now says it’s among those who have “serious concerns” about the bill.

Those concerns have the capacity to prove a major setback to Sen. Harry Reid’s current gun bill, which includes language from earlier bills introduced by Sens. Chuck Schumer and Barbara Boxer.

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller, a top lobbyist for the ACLU announced that the group thinks Reid’s current gun bill could threaten both privacy rights and civil liberties.

Read more from this story HERE.

ACLU Files Lawsuit After NC Gov’t Officials Refuse To Stop Praying At Meetings

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Photo Credit: AP

Despite a lower court ruling that found prayers at local government meetings in Forsyth County (another community in North Carolina) unconstitutional and the Supreme Court’s subsequent refusal to hear the case, officials in Rowan County aren’t backing down. They, too, have been beginning meetings with invocations — a practice they don’t plan on giving up. As a result, county commissioners become the ACLU’s most recent target of legal action over sectarian prayer at government meetings.

It was last year that the Rowan County Board of Commissioners first defied pressure from the ACLU to cease Christian prayers; the organization called these invocations unconstitutional and has continued to maintain this stance.

At the time, one of the board members (and the county commissioner), Chad Mitchell, defended the prayers said at the opening of each meeting. Apparently, board members are given the chance, via rotation, to give a prayer if they so choose. In the past, some have opted not to be included in the rotation (a choice that the group deems perfectly acceptable).

“The practice of opening with an invocation has been ongoing for many years,” Mitchell explained at the time. ”The earliest book of minutes that we have easy access to is from February of 1971, and the Board of Commissioners at that time was using the same procedure of invocation as we are currently using.”

Read more from this story HERE.

ACLU Sues To Force Removal Of Ohio Middle School’s 65-Year-Old Jesus Portrait

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsTwo advocacy groups have gone to court to force the removal of a large portrait of Jesus Christ which has hung inside a rural southern Ohio middle school since 1947.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio and the Freedom from Religion Foundation filed the lawsuit on Thursday in U.S. District Court in Columbus, reports the Columbus Dispatch.

The suit claims that the portrait hanging in Jackson Middle School violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause by endorsing Christianity.

“The maintenance and display of the portrait has the effect of advancing and endorsing one religion, improperly entangling the State in religious affairs, and violating the personal consciences of plaintiffs,” the lawsuit claims, according to Fox News.

There are three plaintiffs in the suit. One plaintiff is a student at the middle school; the other two are parents of children at the school. The plaintiffs are reportedly only identified as “Sam Doe.”

Read more from this story HERE.

New Justice Department Documents Show Huge Increase in Warrantless Electronic Surveillance

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Justice Department documents released today by the ACLU reveal that federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring Americans’ electronic communications, and doing so without warrants, sufficient oversight, or meaningful accountability.

The documents, handed over by the government only after months of litigation, are the attorney general’s 2010 and 2011 reports on the use of “pen register” and “trap and trace” surveillance powers. The reports show a dramatic increase in the use of these surveillance tools, which are used to gather information about telephone, email, and other Internet communications. The revelations underscore the importance of regulating and overseeing the government’s surveillance power.

Pen register and trap and trace devices are powerfully invasive surveillance tools that were, twenty years ago, physical devices that attached to telephone lines in order to covertly record the incoming and outgoing numbers dialed. Today, no special equipment is required to record this information, as interception capabilities are built into phone companies’ call-routing hardware.

Pen register and trap and trace devices now generally refer to the surveillance of information about—rather than the contents of—communications. Pen registers capture outgoing data, while trap and trace devices capture incoming data. This still includes the phone numbers of incoming and outgoing telephone calls and the time, date, and length of those calls. But the government now also uses this authority to intercept the “to” and “from” addresses of email messages, records about instant message conversations, non-content data associated with social networking identities, and at least some information about the websites that you visit (it isn’t entirely clear where the government draws the line between the content of a communication and information about a communication when it comes to the addresses of websites).

The reports that we received document an enormous increase in the Justice Department’s use of pen register and trap and trace surveillance. As the chart below shows, between 2009 and 2011 the combined number of original orders for pen registers and trap and trace devices used to spy on phones increased by 60%, from 23,535 in 2009 to 37,616 in 2011.

Read more from this story HERE.

Michigan Asks Voters if They’re Legal; ACLU Freaks Out (+video)

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By John Hayward. The American Civil Liberties Union teamed up with the SEIU and a few other interested groups to sue the Michigan Secretary of State, Ruth Johnson, over her addition of a check box to ballot applications, asking voters to confirm they are U.S. citizens who legally have the right to vote. ACLU’s Michigan executive director, Kary Moss, described this as a “cynical voter suppression tactic.”

No, this is not a joke or satire. The ACLU actually thinks a check box asking voters to confirm that they’re legally entitled to vote constitutes “suppression.” The mad scramble to protect vote fraud operations had degenerated into this level of absolute lunacy. Devoid of anything approaching a logical argument, vote fraud defenders are down to describing a simple “Yes or No” question on ballot applications as a “roadblock” that will “confuse” and “intimidate” minority voters.

There is an entirely separate issue here about whether or not the Secretary of State had the authority to make this change on her own. A bill requiring voters to check off a citizenship box was vetoed this summery by Governor Rick Snyder (who, like Johnson, is a Republican.) Moss of the ACLU describes this in hyperbolic terms by saying Johnson has “thumbed her nose at the electorate and flouted the very laws she was elected to uphold.”

Johnson and her staff seem confident that she does have “the power to prescribe ballot forms.” At the very least, it sounds like a debatable point of order, but of course it’s buried under layers of hysterical shrieking about “voter suppression,” which is pitched more for the ears of Michigan voters than Michigan judges.

What got this ball rolling was a dramatic performance by a voter named Rich Robinson, who encountered the awful “Are you a U.S. Citizen?” checkbox at the polls during the August primaries. He refused to answer the question, even though he very obviously understood it, and was clearly a U.S. citizen. His ballot was denied because he wouldn’t answer the question, so he commenced howling about “disenfranchisement.” In a completely unrelated coincidence, Robinson just happens to be the Executive Director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, which bills itself as “a nonpartisan, nonprofit coalition of organizations and individuals concerned about the influence of money in politics and the need for campaign finance reform in Michigan.” Read more from this story HERE.

Read this story on the illegal alien voter fraud in Alaska and then watch this documentary on the massive illegal alien voter fraud discovered in Florida:

Political Correctness Run Amok: Dad-Daughter Dances Axed for ‘Gender Discrimination’

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Father-daughter dances and mother-son ballgames — those cherished hallmarks of Americana — have been banned in a Rhode Island school district after they were targeted by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU, the self-proclaimed guardian of the nation’s liberty, says such events violate the state’s gender-discrimination law. The organization challenged their existence following a complaint from a single mom who said her daughter was prevented from attending a father-daughter dance in the Cranston Public Schools district.

The story has created a furor both online as well as in Cranston, a community located south of Providence and considered one of the safest places in America.

The phones at Cranston City Hall were already ringing off the hook bright and early Tuesday morning when staffers unlocked the doors. The outrage prompted a reaction from Cranston Mayor Allan Fung, even though he has no control over the schools.

“I am utterly disappointed to have such a time-honored tradition under attack,” Fung said in a statement that urged parents to turn their fury on the school district. “I implore the Cranston School Committee to review this decision and find a way to make this work for the children and their parents. I encourage all parents that are upset with this decision to contact their school committee members and make their voices be heard.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Las Vegas Attempts to Cleanup X-Rated Litter but ACLU Threatens Tourists, City

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Photo credit: Moyan Brenn

Some tourists try to dissuade them by directing icy glares their way. Others stare, zombie-like, into the Las Vegas Strip’s ubiquitous video screens and light displays in an effort to ignore the pushy handbill distributors.

But some tourists accept the pamphlets and glossy cards that advertise all-but-nude exotic dancers. Then, more often than not, they toss the material in the trash. Or if a trash can isn’t nearby, onto the sidewalk — creating an endless X-rated litter problem that Las Vegas officials are now trying to clean up.

A new ordinance requires handbillers to pick up litter within a 25-foot radius on the sidewalk. But there’s a hitch: The law might run afoul of the First Amendment.

“If someone takes some material, regardless of what it is, and then walks down the street and decides to drop it, that’s the person who is littering. That’s the person that is responsible, not the person who gave it to them originally,” said Allen Lichtenstein, general counsel for the Nevada American Civil Liberties Union.

Las Vegas police aren’t enforcing the ordinance yet. The ACLU has been meeting regularly with the exotic dancer businesses and police to talk about how that will happen, as well as encourage handbillers to help keep the Strip clean. The group has not yet challenged the law in court.

Read more from this story HERE.

God determines your sex … but not on an Alaskan driver’s license

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Photo credit: Jason Hargrove

New regulations are set to take effect in Alaska that will allow transgender drivers to change the sex designation on their drivers’ licenses.

Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the state on behalf of a transgender woman. The lawsuit alleged the woman, identified only as K.L., was denied a driver’s license listing her gender as female unless she provided proof she’d undergone a sex change operation. ACLU went to court to appeal an administrative ruling in the case.

Earlier this year, in March, Superior Court Judge Michael Spann ordered the Division of Motor Vehicles to adopt a new regulation. He did not suggest the form or scope of the regulation but advised DMV to take into consideration the “constitutional implications” that such a regulation might have on the right to privacy and protection of “sensitive personal information.” He allowed 180 days for the state to comply.

ACLU worked with the state in crafting the regulation, which underwent public comment. The regulation will still require proof for the change in sex designation but in the form of a licensed provider certifying he or she has been involved in the person’s case and expects the change in description to be permanent.

Whitney Brewster, director of the Division of Motor Vehicles, said Thursday that hopefully this will be a fairly easy process to follow. The division plans to provide a form that will need to be filled out.

Read more from this story HERE.