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Category Archives: Civil Liberties

Arkansas Law Criminalizing Librarians Ruled Unconstitutional

AP: “A federal judge on Monday struck down key parts of an Arkansas law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors. U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks found that elements of the law are unconstitutional. “I respect the court’s ruling and will appeal,” Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said in a statement to The Associated Press. The law would have created a new process to challenge library materials and request that they be relocated to areas not accessible to children. The measure was signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders in 2023, but an earlier ruling had temporarily blocked it from taking effect while it was being challenged in court. “The law deputizes librarians and booksellers as the agents of censorship; when motivated by the fear of jail time, it is likely they will shelve only books fit for young children and segregate or discard the rest,” Brooks wrote in his ruling. A coalition that included the Central Arkansas Library System in Little Rock had challenged the law, saying fear of prosecution under the measure could prompt libraries and booksellers to no longer carry titles that could be challenged…”

Review of DOJ Process to Obtain Records of Members of Congress, Media

DOJ Oversight and Review Division 25-01. Redacted For Public Release. A Review of the Department of Justice’s Issuance of Compulsory Process to Obtain Records of Members of Congress, Congressional Staffers, and Members of the News Media: “In the spring and summer of 2017, CNN.com (CNN), The New York Times, and The Washington Post published articles… Continue Reading

What is your digital footprint and how can you protect it?

Proton VPN Blog: “Whenever you do something online, you leave a trail of information behind that can be used to uniquely identify and track you. This is your digital footprint(new window). In this article, we’ll look at: What is a digital footprint? Digital footprint examples Why does your digital footprint matter? How to check your… Continue Reading

BirdVoxDetect: Large-Scale Detection and Classification of Flight Calls for Bird Migration Monitoring

V. Lostanlen et al., “BirdVoxDetect: Large-Scale Detection and Classification of Flight Calls for Bird Migration Monitoring,” in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, vol. 32, pp. 4134-4145, 2024, doi: 10.1109/TASLP.2024.3444486. “Sound event classification has the potential to advance our understanding of bird migration. Although it is long known that migratory species have a… Continue Reading

American Autocracy Threat Tracker

State Democracy Defenders Action: “President-elect Donald Trump has said he will be a “dictator on day one.” Our American Autocracy Threat Tracker comprehensively catalogs all of Trump’s and his allies’ Project 2025 and other specific plans and promises. We also catalog potential bipartisan solutions to address the threat both now and should it come to… Continue Reading

Rebel Yell

Tablet – Part I: Donald Trump broke the back of the GOP establishment by driving blue-collar and lower-middle-class politics in a Southern direction. His gentry Republican critics have only themselves to blame. Donald Trump’s first and in many ways most enduring political accomplishment is not the humiliation of the Democratic Party he has toppled in… Continue Reading

Beyond Fairness in Computer Vision: A Holistic Approach to Mitigating Harms and Fostering Community-Rooted Computer Vision Research

Timnit Gebru and Remi Denton (2024), “Beyond Fairness in Computer Vision: A Holistic Approach to Mitigating Harms and Fostering Community-Rooted Computer Vision Research”, Foundations and Trends® in Computer Graphics  and Vision: Vol. 16, No. 3, pp 215–321. DOI: 10.1561/0600000102. “The field of computer vision is now a multi-billion dollar enterprise, with its use in surveillance… Continue Reading

Guide to Abortion Privacy – Digital Defense Fund

Keep Your Abortion Private & Secure –  This page is organized into different security-related threats. You can jump to the ones that most concern you. Along with each scenario is a list of digital security tips to neutralize the threats. These are possible concerns you might have: Seeing advertisements related to pregnancy/abortion Tech companies like… Continue Reading

Location data firm helps police find out when suspects visited their doctor

Ars Technica: “A location-tracking company that sells its services to police departments is apparently using addresses and coordinates of doctors’ and lawyers’ offices and other types of locations to help cops compile lists of places visited by suspects, according to a 404 Media report published today. Fog Data Science, which says it “harness[es] the power… Continue Reading

The Ocean Investigations Guide

Via Ian Urbina:  “Investigative reporting about activities at sea is a unique specialty requiring distinct tools and tactics. How can I find open-source footage evidence of human rights abuses or illegal fishing on ships? Is it possible to connect ships to the specific seafood buyers?  Is there a way to track ships even when they… Continue Reading

Searchable archive of DOJ Civil Rights Division reports and findings letters

Tyler McBrien. DOJ Police Department Pattern or Practice Reports and Findings Letters. A searchable archive of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division reports from investigations into patterns and practices of excessive force, biased policing, and other unconstitutional practices by law enforcement. Continue Reading