The below statement can be attributed to Nusrat Choudhury, legal director at the ACLU of Illinois:

“The Consultant’s public report on stop-and-frisk by Chicago police officers is a critical reminder of the need for vigorous enforcement of the ACLU’s agreement first reached with the City in 2015.

While we have seen the raw numbers of Chicago police stops and frisks fall dramatically since 2015, the proportion of these intrusive police encounters that involve Black Chicagoans has remained far too high. From 2016 to the present, Black people account for 69% of pedestrian stops, despite representing just 30% of the City’s population in 2019. We are also concerned about the skyrocketing number of Chicago traffic stops from less than 90,000 in 2015 to nearly 600,000 in 2019 – with more than 83% of the 2019 traffic stops targeting Black and Latinx motorists. As we have seen in Chicago and around the country, when police stop Black and Brown people – whether in a pedestrian or traffic stop – too often, the result is needless escalation, the use of force, and even death.

We are pleased that the Monitor in charge of the Chicago Police consent decree will serve as the Consultant on this agreement and will closely examine data, policies, and training concerning when and how Chicago police stop and frisk people. We are especially heartened that the Consultant team is committed to engaging community members in this process – particularly people from Black and Brown communities most impacted by police stops, frisks, and searches. This process must move expeditiously.

We warned years ago that pedestrian stops were simply a pretext for Chicago police to search, question, and harass Black and Brown men in our City. The Chicago Police Department’s current system for overseeing pedestrian stops and reporting the reasons for these stops does not ensure that police do not stop and frisk Black and Brown Chicagoans without legal justification or based on race or ethnicity. And, as noted, Chicago’s dramatic, more than six-fold increase in traffic stops that disproportionately impact Black and Latinx people has never been explained.

Such practices must be rooted out and vigorous enforcement of the stop-and-frisk agreement with the engagement of Chicago communities is one way to advance this end.”

Don’t gut Illinois law that prohibits the secret sale of our fingerprints and other biometric information
Under the guise of helping small businesses, lawmakers are trying to repeal or eviscerate Illinois’ pioneering Biometric Information Protection Act.

By the Chicago Sun-Times Editorial Board

At the very same time rapidly advancing technology is making it easier for companies to snatch and secretly sell our personal biometric information, such as our fingerprints, clueless Illinois lawmakers are trying to do away with one of the strongest privacy protection laws in the nation.

The Legislature should reject these efforts — a slew of bills aimed at repealing or watering down Illinois’ pioneering 2008 Biometric Information Protection Act — and turn its attention to measures that serve the people of Illinois rather than sell them out.

The Biometric Information Protection Act, widely called BIPA, is not an unreasonable burden on small businesses, as critics claim. Far from it. It merely requires that companies gathering fingerprints, retinal scans, facial recognition or other biometric information inform users they are doing so, explain how the data will be used or sold and obtain users’ permission.

BIPA doesn’t bar anyone from gathering biometric information. It simply requires that if, for example, a company decides to use thumbprint data to identify customers, the company had better be upfront about it.

If anything, the law should be stronger.

Tech firms vacuum up data
In truth, the companies that would benefit most by eviscerating BIPA are not small businesses. They are, rather, the sprawling tech firms that get insanely wealthy by vacuuming up as much information as possible to build individual dossiers on everyone.

It’s telling that the lawmakers who claim BIPA has hurt small businesses have been unable to produce any substantial evidence of this. Where is the parade of horribles showing that specific small businesses have suffered?

Unlike your credit card numbers, biometric identifiers such as thumbprints, retinas, irises and faces can’t be changed if the information falls into wrong hands through dark web sales or data breaches. Once the information is out on the web, stalkers or others with evil intent can use facial recognition, for example, to gain access to your full electronic profile, including your home address, birth date, phone numbers and any other information that might been scattered online through endless data breaches.

Your anonymity is gone, and you don’t even know it.

Track you anywhere
If we’re not careful, widely dispersed biometric information will allow online leviathans to identify and track us wherever we go, whether it is to an airport, a church or a protest. When the use of biometrics makes mistakes, which is a particular burden for African Americans, who are more often misidentified, the repercussions can be severe.

In 2004, an Oregon lawyer was erroneously jailed in connection with a Madrid train bombing because the FBI made a mistake in identifying the most basic of biometric information, a fingerprint.

BIPA was written in 2008 after a hacking incident in which biometric information was stolen, and it has been an indisputably effective law since then, partly because it includes a “private right of action” that lets victims sue for violations.

Last month, a federal judge ordered Facebook to pay $650 million for capturing and storing face scans of 6.5 million residents of Illinois without getting consent. In 2016, L.A. Tan settled a case for $1.5 million for not following BIPA guidelines. Last year, the ACLU sued the software company Clearview AI for gathering 3 billion online faceprints without the knowledge or consent of those whose pictures wound up in Clearview’s database.

No doubt, some companies would rather get rid of BIPA than bother to comply. But the Illinois Supreme Court has ruled that taking biometric information without consent damages individuals. Without a law such as BIPA, those who are harmed would have no recourse.

Legitimate purposes
It’s not that biometric information doesn’t have its useful purposes. Obviously, it does.

It can help you establish your identity. It can be a convenience for doing things such as logging onto your cell phone. It can help people keep up to date with each other by tagging photos on the internet. Libraries can use fingerprints to allow patrons to check out books. Law enforcement can use biometric data to solve crimes.

The key, though, is that government must ensure biometric information is closely protected and used legitimately.

Other states and cities have begun to enact their own biometric protection laws, often modeled after the Illinois law. And instead of trashing the protections Illinoisans have, the Legislature should expand them.

For example, websites, e-services and apps should be required to disclose when they scoop up information about our online activities and resell them through the interconnected Big Brother that has more information about us than most people imagine.

Biometric information is as personal as it gets. Let’s keep it that way.

Law Violates Young People’s Human Rights, Can Delay Their Care

An Illinois law that requires a young person seeking an abortion to involve an adult family member is dangerous for youth in the state, violates their human rights, and threatens their health and safety, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Illinois said in a report released today. The Illinois General Assembly should repeal the law, the Illinois Parental Notice of Abortion Act, as a matter of urgency according to the report.

Under the Parental Notice of Abortion Act, a doctor providing care to a young person under age 18 seeking an abortion in Illinois must notify a designated adult family member – a parent, grandparent, step-parent living in the home, or legal guardian – at least 48 hours beforehand. If there is a reason that the young person is not able to have one of these family members notified, the young person can go to court and ask a judge for permission to have the procedure without this forced family involvement, in a process known as “judicial bypass.”

The 73-page report, “‘The Only People It Really Affects Are the People It Hurts’: The Human Rights Impacts of Parental Notice of Abortion in Illinois,” is the product of a collaboration between Human Rights Watch and the ACLU of Illinois. The groups found that young people often seek judicial bypass because they fear physical or emotional abuse, being kicked out of the home, alienation from their families or other deterioration of family relationships, or being forced to continue a pregnancy against their will. The groups also documented the hardships faced by young people forced to involve unsupportive family members in their abortion decision or navigate an unfamiliar court system to obtain a judicial bypass, and the additional stress and delays in seeking care this caused.

“This law may force young people to continue pregnancies against their will or to endure abuse, humiliation, and punishment by unsupportive parents,” said Margaret Wurth, the lead author of the report and a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. “And their alternative as they try to make decisions about their own bodies and lives may be to face a difficult and even traumatizing court experience.”

Human Rights Watch conducted in-depth interviews with 37 people – including attorneys, healthcare providers, a retired judge, and others – and analyzed approximately three-and-a-half years of data and other information gathered by the ACLU of Illinois concerning young people who have gone through the judicial bypass process.

Human Rights Watch also assessed the law in light of international human rights standards. Human rights experts have consistently called for the removal of barriers that deny access to safe and legal abortion, and have commented specifically on parental involvement requirements posing a barrier to abortion care. Human Rights Watch concluded that Illinois’ forced parental notice law violates a range of human rights for young people, including the rights to health, to be heard, to privacy and confidentiality, to nondiscrimination and equality under the law, to decide the number and spacing of children, and to be free from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

The ACLU of Illinois operates a Judicial Bypass Coordination Project to provide free legal assistance to youth impacted by the law, representing more than 500 young people in the past seven years since the law went into effect in judicial bypass proceedings around the state. Of this number, only one young person’s request for a bypass was ultimately denied.

“After years of representing young people before judges in bypass cases around the state of Illinois, it is clear that this law is unnecessary and harmful,” said Emily Werth, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Illinois. “The law should protect young people seeking to end a pregnancy, not erect unnecessary barriers and delays that stand between them and receiving safe health care from a qualified provider.”

The groups noted that most young people involve a close family member in their decision to terminate a pregnancy regardless of any law, and when young people seeking abortion do not talk to a parent, they have good reasons. A healthcare provider relates in the report that one patient under 18 seeking abortion care told her: “My mother is very strict with me. If she knows I’m pregnant, she’ll definitely throw me out of the house.”

The groups also found that the notice law can lead to significant delays for young people that affect their access to medical care. Working with a lawyer and surreptitiously arranging for a court appearance adds a week on average (and sometimes much more) to a young person’s timeline of obtaining abortion care. Those days can be critical – a young person may pass the point of eligibility for a noninvasive medication abortion, or may need a procedure requiring multiple appointments over consecutive days.

One young person forced to go to court to seek a judicial bypass described the process as “very stressful and nerve wracking.” Another said, “It was scary at first not knowing what to expect.”

The report also presents cases in which young people were forced to continue a pregnancy against their wishes because they were unable to comply with the notice law or navigate judicial bypass, or because their parents interfered in their decision and prevented them from accessing abortion care. Describing one such case, a social worker interviewed for the report said her patient became “a prisoner in her own home,” when her parents prevented her from accessing abortion care and forced her to continue a pregnancy. “Her autonomy was completely removed, taken away from her,” the social worker said.

Earlier this year, Illinois State Senator Elgie R. Sims, Jr. and State Representative Anna Moeller introduced measures in both Illinois General Assembly chambers aimed at repealing this harmful law – SB 2190 and HB 1797, respectively. Votes are anticipated in both chambers before the end of May 2021.

“Illinois leaders have repeatedly affirmed their commitment to protecting reproductive rights in the state,” Wurth said. “Passing legislation to repeal the parental notification act is essential to fulfilling that commitment.”

For the Human Rights Watch Report, please visit:
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/03/11/only-people-it-really-affects-are-people-it-hurts/human-rights-consequences 

To read an interview on the potentially dangerous consequences of this law, please visit:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/03/11/interview-law-putting-illinois-young-people-risk

For more Human Rights Watch reporting on abortion, please visit:
https://www.hrw.org/topic/womens-rights/reproductive-rights-and-abortion 

For more Human Rights Watch reporting on sexual and reproductive health and rights, please visit:
https://www.hrw.org/topic/health/sexual-and-reproductive-health

For more ACLU of Illinois reporting on women’s and reproductive rights, please visit:
https://www.aclu-il.org/en/issues/reproductive-rightsissues2/reproductive-rights