As BART’s board meets to discuss the agency’s decision to disrupt its riders’ cell phone service, Demand Progress has delivered a petition decrying such censorship.  More than 20,000 Demand Progress members from California and across the country have signed the petition, encouraging the FCC to investigate BART’s actions and prospectively condemning any future attempts by public entities to disrupt the public communications.

Said Demand Progress’s David Segal: “BART’s disruption of communications is deplorable and part of a disturbing trend.  We’ve seen officials across the globe threaten and take similar actions in recent months: from dictators trying to cling to power in the Middle East, to Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, to Senator Joe Lieberman and his Internet Kill Switch legislation.  We need to fight this fight against censorship at BART to make it clear that we won’t tolerate the creeping threat of ever more censorship, no matter where it manifests.”

Supporters can sign the petition HERE.

by morgan | No Comments »

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in federal court on Monday, August 15^th, 2011 on behalf of four organizations. It is against a Missouri school district for blocking access on its public computers to websites that are dedicated to gay and lesbian awareness; these four organizations, Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), Dignity USA, the Matthew Shepard Foundation, and Campus Pride, represent four websites that were censored.

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by Mary | No Comments »

“A direct assault on Internet users” is what the ACLU is calling it. Just before the break, a House committee approved HR 1981, a broad new Internet snooping bill. They want to force Internet service providers to keep track of and retain their customers’ information — including your name, address, phone number, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses.

They’ve shamelessly dubbed it the “Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act,” but our staunchest allies in Congress are calling it what it is: an all-encompassing Internet snooping bill. ISPs would collect and retain your data whether or not you’re accused of a crime.

According to CNET : , the “mandatory logs would be accessible to police investigating any crime and perhaps attorneys litigating civil disputes in divorce, insurance fraud, and other cases as well.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who led Democratic opposition to the bill said, “‘It represents a data bank of every digital act by every American’ that would ‘let us find out where every single American visited Web sites.”

You can click here to join the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Library Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Demand Progress, and 25 other civil liberties and privacy groups in urging Congress to reject this mess of a bill.

And you can watch our new video about the Internet Snooping Bill here:

by morgan | No Comments »

On June 27, 20011, several groups such as the Maine Civil Liberties Union and the League of Women Voters announced their campaign to petition against the ban on same-day voter registration (read my blog post here). Within 90 days, their task is to collect a minimum of 60,000 valid signatures.

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by Mary | No Comments »

President of the Arizona State Senate Russell Pearce recently filed a suit challenging the procedure and signatures on the recall petition. Maricopa County Superior Judge Hugh Heygi denied his appeal, but Pearce’s lawyer, Lisa Hauser, intends to bring the appeal to the Arizona Supreme Court. Read more about the case here.

by Thea | No Comments »

Our suspicions were confirmed: Texas governor Rick Perry announced this past Saturday that he’s running for president. It all makes sense now–the covert trip to the Koch Brothers retreat in Aspen, the pandering for the support of the evangelical community by organizing the Response, his increasing emphasis on the religious aspects of his gubernatorial position, were all in preparation for his presidential campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

by Sonya | No Comments »

It was twenty years ago this week that Tim Berners-Lee, while working at CERN, put the world’s first website online.  It announced his new creation: the World Wide Web.  Last year while urging Internet users to sign Demand Progress’s petition against the Internet Blacklist Bill, Berners-Lee wrote this about the principles that underpin his project: Read the rest of this entry »

by Sonya | No Comments »

In previous years, the NCAA has snooped through social media accounts of athletes in search of any possible violations they might have shared virtually. In June, the NCAA declared that it is the responsibility of universities to adequately and consistently monitor the social networking activities of their athletes in order to discover any violations as early as possible. Read the rest of this entry »

by Mahilet | 4 Comments »