Privacy

Guest writers from the COS-DC coalition detail what it's like for sex workers to be under the constant watch of government surveillance, and how it connects to historically harmed neighbors and even residents across the District.

The release of the D.C. Police Reform Commission report recognized D.C.'s need for surveillance oversight legislation, an action the Community Oversight of Surveillance has advocated for the past few years. Is D.C. ready to recognize the dangers of unchecked government surveillance?

The ACLU-DC has asked the D.C. Superior Court to reconsider two parts of its November 9 order regarding the personal Facebook accounts of D.C. activists Legba Carrefour and Lacy MacAuley.

Marijuana is decriminalized in D.C., but remains criminalized under federal law.

The Department of Homeland Security has ordered multiple Internet Service Providers and social media companies to disclose sensitive information about users who criticized DHS’s practices. DHS has issued these demands through administrative summonses or subpoenas, which require approval only by DHS itself and not a neutral judge. This case challenges another instance of this disturbing trend. Plaintiff John Doe regularly criticizes President Trump and DHS on X and other social media platforms, with his posts collectively receiving well over 100,000 views. Now, DHS wants to obtain detailed information about Mr. Doe and his activities. The government sent an administrative summons to Google, ordering it to disclose “[a]ll records and other information” it possesses relating to the Gmail account Mr. Doe linked to his X account. DHS’s demand expressly includes Mr. Doe’s name, his location information, and data on his online activity—records that could allow the government to trace Mr. Doe’s physical movements and discern the things he reads online and the people with whom he communicates there. Court cases challenging similar summonses have involved the U.S. government targeting people inside the U.S. This case represents a potentially new and troubling development, as Mr. Doe is a Canadian citizen and resident. If DHS can surveil him, it may be able to monitor any critic anywhere on the globe. DHS’s actions in this case are unlawful. The government can act only based on authority conveyed via the Constitution or a statute and here, the statute DHS invoked provides no basis to issue the summons. Represented by the ACLU-DC and the ACLU of Northern California, Mr. Doe brings this case to stand up to DHS’s blatant abuse of government power.

The U.S. Department of Justice has launched an illegal and unprecedented quest to stockpile millions of Americans’ confidential voter data. DOJ has demanded that nearly every state and the District of Columbia turn over their unredacted statewide voter registration lists, which can include sensitive personal information such as Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, signatures, dates of birth, home addresses, places of birth, political party affiliation, and voter participation history. Never before has a federal agency centralized this volume of Americans’ voting data in a single record system. And in doing so, DOJ has flouted legal safeguards designed to ensure transparency and public participation in the federal government’s collection of Americans’ personal information. DOJ’s apparent purpose in collecting this data is to conduct its own state-by-state voter list maintenance operation and compel states to purge eligible voters from their voter rolls as part of the Trump Administration’s attempts to take over elections from states and subvert the 2026 midterm elections. DOJ is using this highly sensitive data to build—without Congressional authorization—a sprawling new voter surveillance and purging system that endangers millions of Americans’ fundamental voting and privacy rights. Heeding President Trump’s repeated calls to “take over” and “nationalize” elections, DOJ is now compiling these state voter files in order to create a national voter registration record system. DOJ is moving rapidly to interfere with the States’ lawful authority over elections and impose its own secretive “verification procedures” for identifying “ineligible voters” and then requiring states to remove those individuals from their voter rolls. DOJ has told federal courts and state officials that it will run states’ entire voter registration lists through the Department of Homeland Security’s flawed Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (“SAVE”) system. In 2025, DHS haphazardly expanded SAVE—which was previously a limited tool to determine eligibility for certain benefits—to conduct mass “voter verification” citizenship checks using unreliable data. The faulty new system has already falsely identified significant numbers of U.S. citizens as non-citizens, endangering their fundamental right to vote. And the system has proven especially unreliable for citizens born outside of the United States (e.g., naturalized citizens), who are at great risk of being falsely identified as non-citizens. Centralizing hundreds of millions of Americans’ state-level voter data in a single federal system also presents major cybersecurity risks, creating a new target for hackers and foreign actors who seek to undermine our elections and Americans’ data security. In addition to making bulk disclosures to DHS, DOJ plans to disclose voter registration lists data to unidentified private “contractors” to assist with its “list maintenance verification procedures.” Most states have resisted DOJ’s unprecedented data demands. But at least 12 and, according to DOJ, as many as 19 states have acquiesced to DOJ’s demands for their Confidential Voter Lists, including Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming. These states have disregarded the privacy and voting rights of millions of Americans who never consented to disclosing their sensitive personal data to the federal government for undefined purposes and without statutory authorization. On April 21, together with the National ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Protect Democracy Project, and the Democracy and Rule of Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, we filed this lawsuit on behalf of Common Cause, an organization dedicated to upholding the core values of American democracy, and four of its individual members, to block the Trump Administration’s unlawful efforts to invade voters’ privacy and subvert our democratic elections.

Our homes are our sanctuaries, which is why, absent rare exceptions, the Fourth Amendment requires government officials to get a neutral judge’s permission through a warrant before entering. This basic principle governs every police department in the country. But now, the Department of Homeland Security has authorized its agents, including ICE, to ignore it. In a secret memo, made public by a whistleblower, DHS purported to authorize its officers to forcibly enter any home if a DHS official—not an independent judge—concludes that an individual inside is subject to a final order of removal. Under this policy, DHS can enter homes and make arrests on its own say-so—even if the target of the final removal order has rights to seek further review or resides with people who are not subject to deportation. Last December, DHS entered Abdulkadir Sharif Abdi’s home without a warrant, acting on an administrative form alone. Agents arrested him and detained him for 23 days until a federal judge ordered his release. Operating under the same sort of authority, DHS used a battering ram to enter the home of Teyana and Garrison Gibson Brown a few weeks later and then stormed into Noe Alfredo Salguero’s home after that. DHS officials have engaged in similar conduct around the country. On April 2, we joined a coalition of legal organizations to file a lawsuit challenging DHS’s policy of authorizing agents to enter homes without judicially signed warrants.