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."
