News & Commentary

With no fanfare and public notice, many Vermonters' personal medical records have already been put into electronic databases controlled by the state and soon to be accessible to physicians and others working in hospitals and medical offices. While your consent is necessary for your records to be viewed legally, there is no electronic "lock" preventing unauthorized access -- just the threat of what have, in the past, often been weak sanctions meekly administered.

It is hard to imagine a civil society where government officials shoot their own citizens dead. It is harder still to imagine a civil society where government officials don't want to shoot their citizens dead, nevertheless do, yet don't have a plan to stop doing so.

'Profiling' Key Topic At Annual Meeting Saturday The work of a young Vermont filmmaker, DeWolfe Morrow of Montpelier, will provide a spring board for discussion of profiling at this year's American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont annual meeting Saturday, Nov. 9 at the National Life building in Montpelier.

Vermonters are living in a vastly different world than they did just a dozen years ago, speakers at the ACLU-VT surveillance conference said Wednesday, and the difference is the constant surveillance we are all subjected to.

Internationally known for his national security expertise, William Arkin said in a WDEV interview Tuesday that “We have created a (surveillance) system that is so gigantic that no one understands it completely and controls it.” Arkin will be speaking Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the ACLU-VT's "Security On The Northern Border" conference in Montpelier, which is free and open to t

Much of what Edward Snowden has revealed was suspected, but the reality of the NSA's surveillance is nonetheless shocking. That's the view of Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the National ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. Stanley is lead speaker during the afternoon portion of the ACLU-VT's Surveillance Conference Oct. 30 in Montpelier. He appeared Thursday on the Mark Johnson Show on WDEV.

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that police need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a car and track its movements. The case, U.S. v. Katzin, is the first in which a federal appeals court has explicitly held that a warrant is required for GPS tracking by police.

"We are a nation living with two sets of laws, one public...guided by the Constitution and a second, invisible text that exists between the lines of that document." To William Arkin, an internationally known security and military expert and lead speaker in the ACLU-VT's Surveillance Conference Oct. 30, the first is the familiar "ABC" government. The second is the "XYZ" government, "the charter of another realm, one beyond the reach of Congress, the courts, and the people...."

A city and a school district decided this week that surveillance cameras are friend, not foe, and that we better get used to being watched.