NCAC has joined a coalition of 20 organizations led by the ACLU in urging the Biden Administration to appoint privacy and civil liberties-minded candidates to fill the existing vacancies on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) and uphold government transparency. The PCLOB, created based on a recommendation of the 9/11 commission, was charged by Congress in 2007 to [...]
NCAC joined with more than 90 civil society groups, led by the Center for Democracy and Technology, in submitting a letter to Apple urging the company to abandon its plans to build surveillance capabilities into iPhones, iPads, and other Apple Products. The plans, announced on August 5, 2021, are designed to protect children and reduce the spread of child sexual abuse [...]
NCAC urges Facebook to resist government pressure to end its use of end-to-end security encryption.
Thirty-nine organizations are pressing for Congress to investigate whether the government has exceeded the limits of what is allowed by Section 215 of the Patriot Act.
The PCLOB has now lacked a quorum for over 19 months, hamstringing its ability to function.
NCAC has joined a bipartisan coalition of 44 organizations to urge members of the House of Representatives to vote "yes" on the USA RIGHTS amendment and "no" on the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act (S. 139) if the USA RIGHTS amendment does not pass.
Right to publicity laws protect a person’s privacy interests, limiting how their name, image and likeness can be used for commercial purposes. Expanding the laws may impede journalistic and artistic freedom.
This is a good, concise history of abuses by the intelligence community and offers a great argument against warrantless surveillance. Without that break-in by the Media 8, J. Edgar Hoover’s “shadow FBI,” a criminal conspiracy at the heart of a developing national security state, might never have been revealed. (The CIA, officially banned from domestic spying on Americans, turned out [...]
As Facebook continues to dominate the social media sphere, new competitors emerge to challenge the weaknesses apparent in its design. One of the most recent of this breed is the social networking site Pidder. Drawing on fears of data-mining and even “social media background checks”, Pidder focuses on privacy protection to a user-unfriendly extreme. After using Pidder we concluded [...]
The battle over same-sex marriage has taken many twists and turns. One of the more unusual cases pitted the privacy rights of those who signed a petition to repeal a Washington law on domestic partnerships against supporters of the law who claimed the public records law required disclosure of the names of the petition signers. Both claimed the First Amendment [...]
