Professor Randolph Stone of the University of Chicago Law School responded in the Chicago Tribune to Chicago Treasurer Stephanie Neely's call for the city police to adopt a policy know as "stop-and-frisk". The ACLU has long opposed such policies. In 2003, we represented Olympic Gold Medalist Shani Davis in a lawsuit challenging repeated stop-and-frisk searches by Chicago police.
Professor Stone writes:

In New York City, for example, recent studies revealed that more than nine out of 10 people who were subjected to a stop-and-frisk search were young men of color — that is, simply being a young man of color on the streets of some neighborhoods in New York appears to make one "suspicious" enough to stop and pat down. In 2012, a federal district court judge found that many of those stops did not meet the constitutional standard for police to stop and detain someone. Yet another federal court judge this year stopped part of the policy after finding the standards for such stops to be too vague — including such undefinable definitions as someone engaged in "furtive" movements.

The biggest flaw with Neely's argument is her assertion that a stop-and-frisk policy would be novel or new in Chicago. Chicago has had a stop-and-frisk policy for decades — and that policy (in its many forms) has resulted in the arrest and detention of thousands of young men of color on dubious grounds.

Read the whole thing.

On Wednesday, March 6th, ACLU Senior Staff Attorney Adam Schwartz presented testimony to the Illinois Senate Criminal Law Committee on Amendment 1 to Senate Bill 1587 - the Freedom from Drone Surveillance Act. He stated:

The unmanned drones of the future pose a far greater danger to our privacy than the manned airplanes and helicopters of the past. Drones are far less expensive, so they will be far more common. Drones are small and quiet, so they can be secretly deployed. Drones are highly maneuverable, so they can move in very close to the surveillance target.

Reasonable people expect that the government is not tracking our movements in public places, storing that information in a dossier, and later using it against us. When the government monitors where we are, it learns who we are: whether we went to a political protest, a union meeting, a controversial movie, a psychiatrist, a church, or a criminal defense lawyer.

Download a copy of his testimony.