Tag Archives: American Civil LIberties Union

  To read a companion article on Huffington Post, see The Legal Battle Over Cell Phone Location Privacy Did you know the government can be tracking you as you listen to this podcast? In today’s Lawyers.com Radio broadcast, host Matt Plessner interviews Editor in Chief Larry Bodine about an alarming trend going through the courts right now, where the police are making requests to cell phone companies to tell them the location of their customers. “They’re not asking to listen …

Voters in Pennsylvania will not have to show an ID card in order to cast a valid ballot this year, a judge ruled Tuesday. Also on Tuesday, a voter ID law in Mississippi was held for review by federal officials until after the election in order to determine if it will have discriminatory effects. The Pennsylvania ID law had originally been upheld by Commonwealth Court Judge Robert E. Simpson Jr., but the state Supreme Court overturned his decision and dictated …

In a frightening new decision, a federal appeals court says that you have no expectation of privacy when the police want to track your location using your cell phone. U.S. v. Skinner, Case No. 09-6497. The court said that the police don’t need to bother getting a warrant if they want to track you by using the GPS signal in your cell phone to track you. This means that sheriffs can freely track Latinos who could be undocumented, the police …

Despite claims by Illinois police that an anti-eavesdropping law makes it illegal to record them in public, residents of the state can, in fact, make video and audio recordings of the cops, the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled. The ruling came at the request of the American Civil Liberties Union, which had plans to record Chicago-area police, and which sought a court ruling that doing so would be OK despite an Illinois law that prohibits taping a …

The Mississippi Legislature thought it was saying no to Big Brother in passing a law banning the use of traffic cameras three years ago. Now an Arizona-based manufacturer of the cameras is claiming the state has no such right.  American Traffic Solutions has filed suit in Hinds County Circuit Court, claiming that the state’s three-year-old ban on traffic cameras is depriving it of private property without due compensation. ATS claimed that the contract it had entered into with the city …