The American Civil Liberties Union says the U.S. violated Padilla's rights when it labeled him an "enemy combatant" a decade ago and subjected him to interrogation that amounted to torture, including sleep and sensory deprivation in solitary confinement.

The watchdog legal group told The Associated Press it had filed a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which serves as the human-rights investigation arm of the Washington-based OAS.

The U.S. has argued in the past that it is not bound by the commission and views its findings as "only recommendations that the United States can ignore or it can follow," according to Steven Watt, the ACLU lawyer who filed the petition. But the findings could still prove awkward for the U.S., which sees itself as a leader on human rights and is quick to criticize other countries it views as falling short on that front.

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A handful of recent decisions highlight this less-watched area of corporate clout. In two rulings this year, federal courts have concluded that secular for-profit businesses have First Amendment religious rights. In another ruling, a business that challenged its inclusion in a federal consumer product complaint database won and then successfully sealed federal court records, with the judge saying that protecting the firm’s economic reputation was a higher constitutional priority than keeping court records public.

In other instances, federal courts have upheld arbitration agreements that customers must sign for a range of services that include daily necessities, blocking people from going to court when disputes arise. And in the patent law arena, a range of individuals -- from farmers who want to protect their seed stock to health advocates concerned about privatized cancer research -- have been losing to corporations that have patented seeds and even human genes.

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Franken was expressing concerns about the Next Generation Identification system, a database the FBI has been steadily building over the past several years that harnesses the data-gathering power of an emerging slew of forensic technologies. When fully deployed, NGI will allow the bureau to integrate a vast array of forensic data culled from local and state law enforcement agencies, including fingerprints, palm prints, scar and tattoo records, and facial photos. Multiple reports peg the cost of the facial-recognition software upgrade alone at $1 billion.

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The ACLU of Northern California, alongside other civil rights organizations, announced on Thursday that they will question and challenge the sheriff's plans. According to the Occupied Oakland Tribune, "The ACLU of Northern California has sent County Sheriff Ahern a public records request, asking for basic information about why drones are needed, how much they would cost to acquire, operate and maintain, and how the drones would be used."

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As Colorlines noted, "The class-action lawsuit, submitted in a federal court a stones throw from the New York Stock Exchange, alleges that Morgan Stanley [via now-bankrupt financial agent, New Century Mortgage Company] intentionally steered blacks in the Detroit metropolitan region into subprime loans. Blacks who were credit-worthy and qualified for traditional mortgages were caught up in Morgan Stanley’s biased dragnet."

Of the 9 million foreclosures since 2007, four out of 10 have been against people of color. Both Bank of America and Wells Fargo have settled discrimination lawsuits over steering black and Latino borrowers into subprime loans. "Race was laced throughout Wall Street’s activities," Colorlines' Imara Jones commented.

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Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union said brief periods of isolation may be needed as a security measure. However, they contend that longer spans of solitary confinement can cause serious psychological and physical harm to young people, including heightened risk of suicide.

Solitary confinement of adults also can be harmful, the report said. "But the potential damage to young people, who do not have the maturity of an adult and are at a particularly vulnerable, formative stage of life, is much greater."

The report, "Growing Up Locked Down," said lack of detailed state data made it impossible to estimate the number of juveniles subjected to solitary confinement and other forms of isolation at any given time. But it described the practice as widespread, notably among juveniles held in adult facilities.

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Using methods that don't require a probable-cause warrant, the DoJ has been able -- with little effort -- to track phone and internet communication information, including numbers dialed and email senders and recipients. Under the Obama administration, between 2009 and 2011, there was a 60 percent rise in orders from the DoJ for warrantless tapping, with 37,616 original orders sent to judges in 2011 compared to less than 6,000 in 2001.

In order to surveil communications using "pen register" or "trap and trace" methods, federal agents need only send an order to a federal judge to ceritfy that the information being gathered (phone numbers, email addresses) is relevant to an ongoing investigation. To read the content of emails or listen in to calls, a warrant is needed.

The ACLU's Noami Gilen's posted on the organization's blog:

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Images of "pepper-spray cop," campus police officer John Pike, blasting sitting demonstrators with orange pepper spray garnered viral attention. The district attorney determined Pike's behavior "not objectively reasonable," but did not seek criminal charges.

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Immigrant rights activists, having protested and fought the legislation in court for two years, have now geared up to deal with its impact on the ground.

A bilingual hotline, hosted by ACLU of Arizona and established by immigrant rights activist Lydia Guzman to advise on issues around SB 1070, has already been inundated with calls from concerned parties.

ACLU of Arizona executive director Alessandra Soler told Salon Friday that she expects in the next couple of weeks that calls will come in reporting stops and detentions by police. As of now, the hotline, which launched in June, has received more than 3,500 calls from people seeking advice on preemptive action.

"People are asking very smart questions," she said, "such as whether a passenger in a car needs to carry identification." But there is concern that police officers might stop a car for a driving violation and conduct immigration checks on all passengers.

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As Reuters reported, the American Civil Liberties Union has set up a hotline where individuals questioned or detained under the law can call in. "[We'll] be looking very carefully to monitor for civil rights violations in the state," Karen Tumlin, managing attorney with the National Immigration Law Center, one of a coalition of groups that challenged the law, told Reuters.

Around 50 activists demonstrated outside ICE agency offices in Phoenix late Wednesday to protest the law going into effect. Undocumented activists are working to spread information and advice to fellow immigrants who are in the country illegally; some groups are advising undocumented individuals to leave any papers detailing their country of birth at home, and to give only their name and birthday to police if stopped.

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Administration officials regularly celebrate the drone war’s apparent successes — often avoiding details or staying anonymous, but claiming tacit credit for the U.S.

In June, a day after Abu Yahya Al-Libi was killed in Pakistan, White House spokesman Jay Carney trumpeted the death of “Al Qaeda’s Number-Two.” Unnamed officials confirmed the strike in at least ten media outlets. Similarly, the killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki by a CIA drone last September was confirmed in many news outlets by anonymous officials. President Obama called Awlaki’s death “a tribute to our intelligence community."

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Conventional analysis treats these four domains of data gathering as separate and distinct; government agencies focus on security issues and corporate entities are concerned with commerce. Some overlap can be expected as, for example, in case of a terrorist attack or an online banking fraud.  In both cases, an actual crime occurred.

But what happens when the boundary separating or restricting corporate-state collaboration, e.g., an exceptional crime-fighting incident, erodes and becomes the taken-for-granted operating environment, the new normal?  Perhaps most troubling, what happens when the traditional safeguards offered by “watchdog” courts or regulatory organizations no longer seem to matter?  What does it say that the entities designed to protect personal privacy rights seem to have either been effectively “captured” or become toothless tigers?

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Her 18-year-old son, Tyler, was dead from gunshot wounds to the head and chest.

Two years later, when police arrested and charged Jose Fuentes-Pillich, a 23-year-old who she thought was Tyler's friend, Coward had already joined a campaign against the death penalty.

When she contacted Fuentes-Pillich after his conviction in 2010, she explained why she didn’t wish him dead.

“I told him it would be wrong for me to say, ‘You should die.’ That’s not in me. That’s in God’s hands … the first thing I need to do is forgive you for taking my son’s life,” Coward recalled in an interview with The Crime Report.

Connecticut became the 17thstate to abolish the death penalty in April. As opponents step up their national campaign, they are discovering some surprising allies among people like Coward — challenging the long-held stereotype that the families of murder victims automatically support capital punishment.

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Much is still not known about the apparent large-scale effort in racial profiling, partly because the documents the ACLU obtained through public records requests are heavily redacted.

The FBI maintains that the mapping program is designed to "better understand the communities that are potential victims of the threats," but the ACLU says it is plainly unconstitutional.

To learn more about the FBI program, its implications for civil liberties and the questions that remain unanswered, I spoke to Michael German, policy counsel at the ACLU's Washington office and a former FBI agent.

What is the new information that has come to light here?

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Each time U.S. citizens in the post-9/11 era have accused government officials in federal court of violating the Constitution or otherwise acting illegally with how they spy on Americans, the Justice Department employs one of two secrecy weapons to convince courts they must not even rule on the legality of the domestic spying: (1) they insist the spying program is too secret to allow courts even to examine it (the Bush/Obama rendition of the "state secrets" privilege); and/or (2) because the spying is conducted in complete secrecy, nobody can say for certain that they have been subjected to it, and the DOJ thus argues that the particular individuals suing the Government -- and, for that matter, everyone else in the country -- lacks "standing" to challenge the legality of the spying (because nobody knows on whom we're spying, nobody has the right to sue us for breaking the law). 

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The ACLU decided to use the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attack to comprehensively survey the severe erosion of civil liberties justified in the name of that event, an erosion that -- as it documents -- continues unabated, indeed often in accelerated form, under the Obama administration.  The group today is issuing a report entitled A Call to Courage: Reclaiming Our Liberties Ten Years After 9/11; that title is intended to underscore the irony that political leaders who prance around as courageous warriors against Terrorism in fact rely on one primary weapon -- fear-mongering: the absence of courage -- to vest the government with ever-more power and the citizenry with ever-fewer rights.  Domestically, the "War on Terror" has been, and continues to be, a war on basic political liberties more than it is anything else.  The particulars identified in this new ACLU report will not be even remotely new to any readers here, but given the organization's status among progressives as the preeminent rights-defending group in the country, and given the bird's-eye-view the report takes of these issues, it is well worth highlighting some of its key findings.

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That's a concise summary of a new trend first reported by National Public Radio last week -- the trend whereby law enforcement officials have been trying to prevent civilians from using cellphone cameras in public places as a means of deterring police brutality.

Oddly, the effort -- which employs both forcible arrests of videographers and legal proceedings against them -- comes at a time when the American Civil Liberties Union reports that "an increasing number of American cities and towns are investing millions of taxpayer dollars in surveillance camera systems."

Then again, maybe it's not odd that the two trends are happening simultaneously. Maybe they go hand in hand. Perhaps as more police officers use cameras to monitor every move we make, they are discovering the true power of video to independently document events. And as they see that power, they don't want it turned against them.

But wait -- why not?

Though you'd expect that uncomfortable question to evoke dissembling, Fraternal Order of Police spokesman Jim Pasco was quite straightforward about it.

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The ACLU recently sent a letter to the Maryland Department of Corrections in reference to a blanket policy requiring applicants to submit social media log-ins and passwords for routine background checks, reports the Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal. The letter details the experience of Officer Robert Collins, a seven-year veteran of the department, who spoke out about the new policy after applying for a new position. In a statement for ACLU Maryland, Collins described his employer's request and his reaction:

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