News & Commentary

The Rhode Island ACLU has today filed a lawsuit against the Town of Narragansett, challenging the constitutionality of its highly-publicized ordinance which allows police to charge tenants and landlords with allowing, and to place orange stickers on houses that have allegedly been the site of, “unruly gatherings.” The lawsuit, filed in R.I. Superior Court by ACLU volunteer attorney H. Jefferson Melish, is on behalf of the URI Student Senate, as well as four students and three landlords who have been affected by enforcement of the ordinance. The suit argues that the ordinance violates the plaintiffs’ rights to procedural and substantive due process, privacy and freedom of association. 

The Rhode Island ACLU today sharply criticized state Attorney General Patrick Lynch for urging Congress to pass a law giving telephone companies retroactive immunity for having illegally shared telephone records with the National Security Agency as part of the government’s “war on terror.” The Congressional bill, if passed, would also pre-empt any state investigations of violations of customer’s privacy rights by the companies. This would kill a pending consumer complaint that the local ACLU filed in May 2006 with the Division of Public Utilities and Carriers against Verizon and AT&T.

Claiming that the program raises “enormous privacy and safety concerns,” the RI ACLU has called on Middletown school officials to halt a planned pilot program in which elementary school children will be tagged with electronic chips to monitor their whereabouts. The program, using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, will track the movements of Aquidneck Elementary School students who take school district buses by placing RFID chips on the children’s backpacks.

The ACLU of Rhode Island today filed an “open records” lawsuit against the Providence Police Department, challenging its refusal to turn over any documents relating to police use of video camera surveillance in public places. The suit, filed in R.I. Superior Court by ACLU volunteer attorney Staci Kolb, seeks a court order requiring release of the records, and the imposition of fines and an award of attorneys fees against the Department. The lawsuit comes exactly one week after the ACLU issued a report that documented widespread non-compliance with the state’s Access to Public Records Act by government agencies, and particularly by police departments.

At a Department of Business Regulation hearing scheduled for tomorrow, the ACLU of Rhode Island will be raising significant privacy concerns over proposed regulations that would require many employees at Lincoln Park and Newport Grand to provide detailed financial and other information about themselves. National privacy expert Robert Ellis Smith will be testifying on behalf of the ACLU to note, among other things, that the proposed intrusion on the privacy of employees will likely be of little use to the state, but could be a magnet for identity thieves.

The Rhode Island ACLU today said the state Department of Education had failed to adequately review a harmful abstinence-only-until-marriage curriculum developed by Heritage of Rhode Island before letting it back into the schools.  In a five-page letter submitted to the department today, the ACLU urged officials to reconsider the decision, saying that the curriculum raises serious medical accuracy and discrimination concerns.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and lawsuit filed earlier this year, the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island today announced it had received documentation confirming that federal officials entered information about a local peaceful protest into a terrorism database.

Responding to a complaint the ACLU of Rhode Island filed last month with the Division of Public Utilities and Carriers regarding allegations that Verizon and AT&T have improperly shared telephone records with the National Security Agency, the two phone companies are claiming that “national security” bars them from addressing the complaint’s allegations and further bars the DPUC from engaging in any investigation of the matter. The ACLU today called the responses “appalling.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island today joined a federal lawsuit filed in Philadelphia by the National ACLU to force the Department of Defense to turn over records it wrongly kept on peace groups throughout the country. Along with the National ACLU and five other state affiliates, the ACLU of Rhode Island is seeking to uncover any surveillance documents kept by the Pentagon on local peace groups, as well as on the RI ACLU itself.