"If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."
Many Americans have said this, or heard it, when discussing the expanded surveillance capabilities the government has claimed since 9/11. But it turns out you should be concerned. Just ask peace activists in Pittsburgh, anti-death penalty activists in Maryland, Ron Paul supporters in Missouri, an anarchist in Texas, groups on both sides of the abortion debate in Wisconsin, Muslim-Americans and many others who pose no threat to their communities. Some of them were labeled as terrorists in state and federal databases or placed on terror watch-lists, impeding their travel, misleading investigators and putting these innocent Americans at risk.
"When the government institutions that are responsible for providing those checks fail to do so, the result is a national surveillance society in which Americans’ right to privacy is under unprecedented siege."
The Fourth Amendment requirement that you must be suspected of wrongdoing before the government searches your private records risks becoming a quaint notion. Congress weakened the laws designed to protect our privacy, while the executive branch secretly re-interprets or simply ignores the law with no consequence. While your privacy is being sacrificed, there's little evidence the new spying programs are catching terrorists.
The question should be, "If you're not doing anything wrong, why is the government snooping on you?"
After 9/11, Congress hastily passed the Patriot Act, the first of many changes to surveillance laws making it easier for the government to spy on you without having any evidence, or even suspicion you've done something wrong, often with no meaningful judicial oversight. These loosened surveillance laws provide access to a growing trove of electronic information about your everyday life: who you talk to or email, where you shop, your credit rating, the websites you visit, where you bank, what you read and more; without having to show a judge any evidence you've done anything wrong.
With a National Security Letter, the FBI can go directly to a bank or internet service provider and compel them to turn over records on people who are not even suspected of having terrorist ties. Audits of the FBI's use of this tool discovered that 40,000 to 50,000 of these letters are issued every year. If the government wants a to make a really deep grab for information, it can go to a secret intelligence court and obtain an order for "any tangible thing" or a yearlong directive for bulk collection of your communications coming into and out of United States.
The FBI has also claimed new powers to investigate you using "assessments," which allow unlimited physical surveillance, using informants, and conducting interviews of neighbors or co-workers, all without having any indication you are engaged in illegal activity or pose a national security threat. The FBI opened more than 82,000 of these assessments from March 2009 to March 2011, only 3,315 of which discovered any information to justify starting an investigation. But the FBI keeps all of the personal information gathered in the 79,000 cases that found no wrongdoing, essentially forever.
These are the programs we know about. Secret government surveillance programs, like the National Security Agency's illegal warrantless wiretapping program, rely on secret re-interpretations of the law to justify ignoring the law. Sen. Ron Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, believes most Americans would be shocked to know how broadly the government interprets the Patriot Act. He recently said there is a "gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says."
There is little evidence these spying programs have thwarted attacks. Inspectors general of key security agencies who reviewed the NSA warrantless wiretapping program found no hard evidence the program made us safer, despite its unprecedented scope. Similarly, though the FBI made close to 150,000 National Security Letter requests from 2003 to 2005, the Department of Justice Inspector General documented only one conviction in a terrorism case using the data during that period, and found no instance in which they helped prevent an actual terrorist plot.
Investigating innocent people doesn't help find guilty people. Spying on innocents makes us less safe by diverting security resources from investigations with actual suspicion of wrongdoing. But rather than learn from these results, the government demands more authority. Last year, it asked to get sensitive records about people's internet use without warrants, and this year, it is proposing a broad new cyber-security scheme allowing communication providers to routinely turn over our private information to the Department of Homeland Security. With so many well-documented cases of abuse, it's long past time for Congress to narrow these surveillance authorities and hold the intelligence agencies publicly accountable.
On Thursday, September 15 at 4 p.m. EDT, we’ll be hosting a live chat onFacebook. We hope you’ll join us; send your questions to @ACLU with #ACLUchat and #911 hashtags, or leave them in the comments section below.
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News & CommentaryDec 2024
Civil Liberties
National Security
Where Defense Secretary Nominee Pete Hegseth Stands on Civil LibertiesWhere Defense Secretary Nominee Pete Hegseth Stands on Civil Liberties
The ACLU has more than 100 years’ experience holding power accountable. As President-elect Donald Trump rolls out his cabinet picks, we analyze how his nominee for secretary of defense will impact civil liberties. -
Press ReleaseDec 2024
Free Speech
National Security
ACLU and Partners Urge Supreme Court to Block TikTok BanACLU and Partners Urge Supreme Court to Block TikTok Ban
WASHINGTON — Today, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to block the enforcement of a law that would effectively ban people in America from using TikTok as soon as January 19, 2025. Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected TikTok’s challenge to the law. TikTok has asked the Supreme Court for a temporary injunction to prevent the app from being banned while the court considers whether to take the case, saying that unless the justices intervene, the law will “shutter one of America’s most popular speech platforms the day before a presidential inauguration.” “The Constitution imposes an extraordinarily high bar on this kind of mass censorship,”said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of ACLU’s National Security Project. “The Supreme Court should take up this important case and protect the rights of millions of Americans to freely express themselves and engage with others around the world.” The brief argues that the D.C. Circuit failed to fully address the law’s profound implications for the First Amendment rights of the 170 million Americans who use TikTok. While the lower court’s decision correctly recognized that the statute triggers First Amendment scrutiny, it barely addressed users’ First Amendment interests in speaking, sharing, and receiving information on the platform. The court also perplexingly attempted to cast the government’s ban on TikTok as a vindication of users’ First Amendment rights, which it is not. The rights groups also explain that the law was intended to suppress certain content and viewpoints that many legislators believe could be amplified on TikTok, including the risk of foreign “propaganda.” But under the First Amendment, the government must meet a very high bar to restrict speech based on concerns about its “motivating ideology” or “perspective,” and the government has not come close to meeting that bar here. “The government should not be able to restrict speech, especially to the extent here, based on guessing about the mere possibility of uncertain future harm,” said David Greene, civil liberties director at EFF. “The Supreme Court should put the TikTok ban on hold while it considers the DC Circuit’s erroneous ruling.” Finally, the brief underscores that the government can’t impose this type of sweeping ban unless it’s necessary to prevent extremely serious and imminent harm to national security. But the government has not provided evidence of impending harm, or evidence that banning TikTok is the only available way to address its concerns. As the brief explains, the D.C. Circuit improperly treated the government’s invocation of “national security” as a trump card and failed to hold the government to its burden. “Restricting citizens’ access to foreign media is a practice that has long been associated with repressive regimes, and we should be very wary of letting the practice take root here,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “It would do lasting damage to the First Amendment and our democracy if the Supreme Court let this ban go into effect even temporarily.” You can find the brief online here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A587/335380/20241217144322392_24A587%20TikTok%20v%20Garland%20Amicus%20Brief%20pdfa.pdf -
Press ReleaseDec 2024
National Security
Religious Liberty
ACLU Statement on New White House Strategy to Counter IslamophobiaACLU Statement on New White House Strategy to Counter Islamophobia
WASHINGTON – The Biden administration today released the first-ever national strategy to counter Islamophobia and related forms of bias and discrimination, including hate against Arab, Sikh, and South Asian Americans. In advance of the strategy, American Civil Liberties Union and its partners had urged the administration to overhaul government programs that reflect anti-Muslim discrimination. In particular, we have called for urgent action to constrain governmental agencies from continuing to exercise their authorities and technology to wrongly surveil and investigate, watchlist, and question and detain Muslims at the border, as well as deny immigration benefits to people from Muslim-majority countries. While the White House raised expectations that many of these issues would be addressed, the final strategy ended up falling far short. The following is a statement from Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project: “While this strategy acknowledges discrimination and its harms, it does little to end them and is a squandered opportunity. For decades, American officials have invoked national security to pass laws and implement programs that disproportionately harm Muslims and people perceived to be Muslim. A serious anti-discrimination strategy would concretely address multiple bias-infused government practices that deny our communities equal participation in civic life and our democracy, like federal watchlisting, surveillance, and investigation. We’re profoundly frustrated that the administration didn’t take even the basic, overdue step of recognizing that anti-Muslim discrimination is uniquely normalized and embedded in government policies.” -
VirginiaDec 2024
National Security
Trabelsi v. Crawford, et al. – Lawsuit Challenging Unlawful Detention and Inhumane Treatment of Acquitted ManTrabelsi v. Crawford, et al. – Lawsuit Challenging Unlawful Detention and Inhumane Treatment of Acquitted Man
Our client, Nizar Trabelsi, is in the United States against his will. The federal government brought him here from Belgium more than a decade ago and charged him with terrorism-related crimes. At trial, the government’s case failed: a federal jury found Mr. Trabelsi not guilty. But instead of allowing Mr. Trabelsi to return to Belgium after his acquittal, the United States placed him in highly restrictive immigration detention and began an ongoing effort to force him to Tunisia, where he was born and where he will very likely be tortured. Mr. Trabelsi’s detention violates the Constitution, immigration law, and the extradition treaty between the United States and Belgium. Through this lawsuit, he seeks to return to Belgium, and he demands an immediate improvement of his detention conditions.