Despite previous promises to protect Americans’ privacy, including Internet privacy, the Obama administration wants to give the FBI more power to access e-mail records, according to the Washington Post.

(more…)

The ACLU-VT has joined ACLU affiliates around the country in asking the FBI for records related to the agency’s collection and use of race and ethnicity data in local communities.

(more…)

Summer is here. And usually, that means politics takes a holiday. That’s not true in Vermont this year. Campaign races are heating up. Voters are in the driver’s seat. The politicians are listening to you. But what to ask? Check out civil liberties questions you can ask candidates.

If you wanted to erase your digital footprint, could you do it? Probably not, concludes a report earlier this month in the San Francisco Chronicle.

(more…)

It’s been six months since the Homeland Security coordinator at the Vermont Police Academy killed himself and the director resigned. Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell has announced the investigation into what happened at the academy is complete — but he’s not going to show the report to anybody.

(more…)

It sounds like a carbon copy of the Henry Louis Gates’ racial profiling case of last summer, only this time here in Vermont.

(more…)

Barre police again dipped into their arsenal of 21 Tasers to zap a hot, depressed man whom a judge subsequently found not much of a bother to anyone.

A rare thing has happened in the Henry Louis Gates incident of last summer, when the African-American Harvard professor was arrested in his own home on suspicion of burglary. Through a yearlong investigation and report, an impartial review committee has shone a bright light on what occurred at the Cambridge, Mass., residence and whether police racial profiling took place.

(more…)