News & Commentary

Too little attention and effort have been given to ways that scientific discoveries and new technologies can solve civil liberties dilemmas.

Instead, we almost only ever hear about how modern advances reduce or violate civil liberties. It is true that scientific and technological advancements often have led to violations of the right to privacy, the right to dissent, and free association.

But, what if we could skim one percent of the problem-solving genius in our science, technology, and engineering communities and put it to work for the good of our social and constitutional values?

There are already many examples to inspire us.

In science, bioscience companies are succeeding in deriving the cells from embryos without destroying the embryo, and others have begun to assemble evidence that it is possible to sprout human embryonic stem cells from something other than a human embryo. To the extent these efforts are successful, they bypass a flash point in the culture wars between those who seek to save lives through research and those who worry about the destruction of embryonic life.

Technology has helped to advance civil liberties in many positive ways. Some of the most exciting and pioneering advancements are technologies that empower people with disabilities to be full participants in society, such as devices that move computer cursors by tracking eye movements. Another ripe area for innovations is privacy protection tools, such as encryption devices that protect emails from identity thieves and government snooping. Camera surveillance can invade privacy, but it can also serve to protect people's rights, such as dashboard cameras in police squad cars that videotape police-civilian interactions and prove or disprove allegations of abuse.

In this section of our site, we will collect examples to encourage this type of problem solving.

Please note as well our three awards for youth projects that promote or reduce the harm to civil liberties at the Greater San Diego Science & Engineering Fair.

If you would like to help us, or if you have examples to share, please e-mail us at scitech@aclusandiego.orgl.

When he first took office, President Obama made two related pronouncements: (1) America will not engage in torture (who would have thought that an American President would one day feel compelled to make this clear?), and (2) he will reform the way the federal government responds to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and will insist on a presumption of disclosure of government information. These pronouncements were critically important to the ACLU because we've been leading the effort to use aggressive FOIA lawsuits to uncover evidence of torture by U.S. personnel during the Bush administration. Thus far, we've secured over 100,000 pages of government documents relating to abuse and torture of prisoners in U.S. custody, but we're far from done.

Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) Secret Torture Memos

In April 2009, one of the biggest successes of our Accountability for Torture initiative occurred when the Department of Justice (DOJ) finally released OLC legal memoranda commissioned by the Bush administration to provide the legal framework for the CIA's use of waterboarding and other interrogation methods that violate domestic and international law. Released in response to an ACLU FOIA lawsuit, the memos show that policies justifying and promoting the use of torture were devised at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

Defense Department Photos of Prisoner Abuse

In response to an ACLU FOIA lawsuit, the Defense Department in May agreed to release photos depicting the abuse of inmates by U.S. personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan at locations in addition to Abu Ghraib. The importance of these photos cannot be overestimated; they convey what words could not and undermine the Bush administration's claim that prisoner abuse was aberrational and not systemic. The President then did an about-face and decided not to make the photos public, instead asking the federal court for more time to pursue other legal options.

CIA Videotapes of Waterboarding

The ACLU learned, again through the FOIA, that the CIA had destroyed 92 videotapes that captured CIA interrogators waterboarding prisoners. We persuaded the federal court to order the CIA to disclose records related to the destruction of these tapes. We want the public to know what was on those destroyed videotapes and who authorized their destruction in flagrant violation of the law. The new CIA Director Leon Panetta is trying to change the court's mind, arguing, like his predecessor, that release of the records would provide 'ready-made' propaganda for our enemies.

CIA Internal Report on Interrogation Program

In our FOIA litigation, we discovered the existence of an internal report written by the CIA's inspector general in 2004 about the agency's secret detention and interrogation program. The government disclosed a version of the report last year but its contents were almost entirely blacked out. The report, we're told, analyzes interrogations of "high-value detainees" in the "war on terror." Congressional insiders have deemed it the "holy grail" because it details torture in unprecedented detail and casts doubt on the claim that torture "works." A less redacted version of the report was supposed to have been disclosed to us weeks ago but the DOJ has repeatedly postponed the disclosure date.

Records about Treatment of Prisoners in Afghanistan

In April 2009, the ACLU filed a FOIA request seeking records about the detention and treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody at Bagram Airfield prison in Afghanistan. We believe that the U.S. is detaining about 600 prisoners there, including non-Afghans captured thousands of miles away. Some of them have been held as long as six years without charge. Many fear that Bagram is or may soon be the next Guantanamo.

State Secrets to Cover Up Extraordinary Rendition

- Mohamed v. Jeppesen DataPlan
In what has become the major court test of the Bush administration's self-serving use of the "state secrets privilege," the ACLU in 2007 sued Jeppesen DataPlan, a subsidiary of Boeing, on behalf of five foreign nationals who had been kidnapped and flown to U.S.-run prisons or foreign intelligence agencies overseas to be interrogated under torture and subjected to other cruel and degrading treatment as part of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program. We believe that Jeppesen worked with the CIA to transport our clients for these illegal purposes. Shortly after we filed suit, the Bush administration intervened to assert the state secrets privilege, claiming that further litigation would undermine national security interests even though much of the evidence needed to try the case was already publicly available.

In April 2009, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court dismissal of the case, declaring that the government can invoke the state secrets privilege only with regard to specific evidence and not to dismiss the entire case. In June, the DOJ asked the 9th Circuit to reconsider its decision.

- Seeking Help from the United Nations
In June 2009, the ACLU joined with Geneva-based Alkarama for Human Rights in requesting that two U.N. Special Rapporteurs investigate the circumstances of Abou Elkassim Britel's forced disappearance, rendition, detention and torture, and raise his case with the governments of the U.S., Morocco, Pakistan and Italy. A victim of "extraordinary rendition" and a plaintiff in our Jeppesen case, Britel is currently being held in a Moroccan prison based on a confession coerced from him through torture. We're taking this unusual step in asking for international action because victims of the "extraordinary rendition" program detained at Guantanamo and other prisons throughout the world are being ignored by the U.S. government whose unlawful program landed them there in the first place.

Looking Forward

While pursuing accountability and justice in the courts, the AC