Watch footage from the hearing for the Terkel v. AT&T case (labeled here as Hepting v. AT&T) in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the argument made by the ACLU of Illinois' Legal Director Harvey Grossman (at around 00:20:30).
In light of the 10th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, ACLU of Illinois' Executive Director Colleen Connell was invited to join a discussion on WBBM News Radio 780 about privacy and security concerns in a post-9/11 world. The main frame of the conversation centered around the balance between security and civil liberties in a time when government surveillance has become a preventative measure against terrorism, while also an invasion of privacy for many Americans.
As Connell stated,
"...What has happened post-9/11 is that the United States has become, in many respects, a surveillance state, by which i mean the government at all levels: local, state and federal, monitors the telephone records, cell phone records, the email records, and actually the location of millions of innocent Americans who have engaged in absolutely no wrong-doing let alone terrorism."
The State-Journal Register published an article about heightened security measures since the September 11th terrorism attacks. The State Terrorism Information Center (STIC) was created as Illinois' "fusion center," one of many across the country that faciliatates the gathering, storage, sharing, and analysis of information about suspected criminal activity among federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies regarding potential terrorism threats. The ACLU of Illinois has filed FOIA requests with the Illinois State Police to release details about the types of information they are collecting and their privacy policies.
“We have concerns with what sorts of controls are put on those entities in terms of privacy protections for innocent persons,” said the ACLU's Edwin Younka. "There's been some issues around the country when these (kinds of centers) pull together information they have access to, who gets targeted for investigations and labeled as a threat."
Younka said the ACLU hasn't received the information it wants, even though discussions have gone on for a year.
