News & Commentary

In an important ruling for government transparency and accountability, the Vermont Supreme Court said Friday that the public has the right to see internal investigations of police officers suspected of misconduct. Shame and embarrassment aren't grounds to deny the public access to records that can shine a light on oversight and management of public employees, the court said.

Sen. Patrick Leahy has written the U.S. Department of Homeland Security asking for clarification of plans by the Border Patrol to build permanent internal checkpoints along major north-south Interstate highways in New England, including I-91 and I-89 in Vermont, according to the Valley News. The checkpoints would be miles from any international boundary -- but within the 100-mile zone the Border Patrol claims as its jurisdiction to stop motorists for no specific reason.

More information released by Edward Snowden and reported over the weekend by The New York Times shows that the NSA is tapping into "material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data." That information is added to our e-mails and phone call "metadata." From all these sources, the Times reports, is created a "portrait of an individual, one that is perhaps more complete and predictive of behavior than could be obtained by listening to phone conversations or reading e-mails, experts say."

In 2012, the ACLU of Vermont made a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to federal agencies, asking for details about Border Patrol checkpoints on Vermont highways. Whan we reviewed the information we received, two things stood out. First, the U.S. government has prepared a detailed study of possible sites on which to build eight-acre, permanent Border Patrol checkpoints as many as 100 miles from the Canadian border along north-south Interstate highways in New England. Second, we found that most of the interdiction done at the temporary White River Junction (Hartford) Border Patrol checkpoint on I-91 is seizure of drugs, most of that marijuana, and most of that small amounts of marijuana. Securing the border against terrorists -- the justification for a greater Homeland Security presence in the state -- seems of minor importance, based on federal reports.

Verm

That's the response journalist Justin Elliott got when he filed a FOIA request with the NSA. Eliot was trying to get information about the agency's public-relations efforts in connection with a documentary on the NSA aired by the National Geographic Channel. "There's no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately," the NSA FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) officer, Cindy Blacker, told Elliott. The system is apparently "a little antiquated and archaic," she said.

Vermont stands as one of only a few states nationally that has taken steps to regulate the use of automated license plate readers. The action came in the 2013 legislative with the passage of S. 18. The regulations aren't as narrow as we wanted, but they impose important restrictions that greatly reduce the risk of abuse of ALPR systems.

The National ACLU has released the results of its analysis of more than 26,000 pages of documents from police departments in cities and towns across the country, obtained through freedom of information requests by ACLU affiliates in 38 states (including Vermont) and Washington, D.C. The documents concern the use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs). It's become increasingly clear that we are living in an era of mass surveillance facilitated by ever cheaper and more powerful computing technology.

In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that companies cannot patent human genes. While this may seem like common sense, over the last 30 years the U.S. Patent Office has issued patents on thousands of human genes, including genes associated with colon cancer, Alzheimer's disease, muscular dystrophy, and many other devastating diseases. The status quo meant that companies controlling gene patents had the right to stop all other scientists from examining, studying, testing, and researching our genes.