Research & Publications

This new ACLU white paper, “Bullies in Blue: Origins and Consequences of School Policing,” explores the beginnings of school policing in the United States and sheds light on the negative consequences of the increasing role of police and links it to both the drivers of punitive criminal justice policies and mass incarceration nationwide. The report traces a line back to the struggle to end Jim Crow segregation during the civil rights movement, and challenges assumptions that the function of police in schools is to protect children. It posits that police are police, and in schools they will act as police, and in those actions bring the criminal justice system into our schools and criminalizing our kids.

This report sets out key legal arguments and strategies for defense attorneys to challenge evidence seized by government-installed computer malware as a violation of the Fourth Amendment and federal law.

Over the past several years, the government has increasingly turned to hacking and malware as an investigative technique. The FBI has begun deploying software designed to infiltrate and control, disable, or surveil a computer’s use and activity. This kind of widespread and secretive hacking by the government is controversial and of questionable constitutionality.

The report assesses recent court decisions evaluating the government’s use of the controversial hacking technique and makes recommendations for the most promising avenues to have unconstitutionally obtained evidence suppressed.

Under the government’s “behavior detection” program, thousands of TSA officers at airports around the country watch passengers for behaviors that the TSA claims are associated with stress, fear, or deception. The officers then flag certain people for additional inspection and questioning.

The program has long been criticized as unscientific, ineffective, and wasteful, and it has been blamed by passengers and TSA officers themselves for racial and religious profiling – but still it continues.

This report, based on documents the ACLU obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, reveals that materials in TSA’s own files discredit this junk-science program.

The report’s key findings include:

The TSA expanded the scope of the behavior detection program and its use of surveillance techniques.
Academic research and other documents in the TSA’s own files reinforce that behavior detection is unscientific and unreliable.
The TSA repeatedly overstated the scientific validity of behavior detection in communications with members of Congress and the Government Accountability Office.
Materials in the TSA’s files raise further questions about anti-Muslim bias and the origins and focus of the TSA’s behavior detection program.
The TSA’s documents reveal details of specific instances of racial or religious profiling that the TSA concealed from the public.

The report recommends that Congress discontinue funding the TSA’s behavior detection program and that the TSA implement a rigorous anti-discrimination training program for its workforce.

About the case

TSA Behavior Detection FOIA Database

This report provides a first-ever national ACLU account of the suffering prisoners with physical disabilities experience in solitary confinement. It spotlights the dangers for blind people, Deaf people, people who are unable to walk without assistance, and people with other physical disabilities who are being held in small cells for 22 hours a day or longer, for days, months, and even years. Solitary confinement is a punishing environment that endangers the well-being of people with physical disabilities and often violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. The report’s revelations about the particular harms of solitary on people with physical disabilities shows the urgent need for far better accounting of the problems they face and the development of solutions to those problems.

The American Civil Liberties Union released an analysis of Sen. Jeff Sessions’ record on civil liberties issues ahead of the Jan. 10-11 confirmation hearings as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general. The ACLU report looks at Sessions’ handling of police reform, voting rights, immigration, mass incarceration, religious liberty, LGBT equality, privacy and surveillance, torture, abortion, and sexual assault issues.