Legislation

After a vigorous and spirited debate, the House approved on a 36-25 vote a bill that would have restricted state and local police from collecting or maintaining information about the political associations or activities of individuals.

ACLU lobbying helped to decisively kill one of the most dangerous bills of the session, a pet proposal of the State Police to give law enforcement broad authority to secretly obtain subscriber information, including bank and credit card numbers, from Internet service providers without a warrant.

Prompted by an ACLU lawsuit, the General Assembly has completely revamped the state’s campaign finance law as it relates to ballot question advocacy.

No action was taken on an ACLU bill designed to address the state’s racial profiling problem; among other things, the bill would have strengthened the remedies available to victims and required continued data collection of traffic stops by police.

The Governor’s callous budget proposal, opposed by the ACLU, to cut approximately 4,000 undocumented children off the RIte Care health insurance rolls met with only partial success.

For the second year in a row, the Governor has vetoed an important privacy bill that would restrict the state and municipalities from making use of “radio frequency identification” technology to track students, employees or clients.

Tucked away at the end of a budget article was a paragraph making available to certain legislative fiscal advisors “information that the tax administrator may consider proper” contained in tax returns filed by any “individual or entity that requests legislation benefiting that individual or entity".

Last year, Providence city officials persuaded the General Assembly to approve a bill authorizing the installation of automated “red light cameras,” but only after accepting a bevy of ACLU amendments designed to mitigate some of the privacy and due process concerns they raise.

In response to media stories about the brokering of telephone records, the General Assembly has enacted a law that significantly restricts the procurement or sale of telephone records without the customer’s consent.