In response to comments submitted by the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Joint Commission on Public Ethics announced this week that it would propose a rule change that would ease the standards for allowing controversial organizations to conceal who their donors are.

A federal judge has ruled that a New York City Transit Authority rule requiring people using the city’s transit system to carry ID is unconstitutional. The decision is a victory for the New York Civil Liberties Union, which filed a lawsuit in November, 2011 defending the public’s right to take photographs in the subway system without fear of being arrested or having to show identification to police.

The New York Civil Liberties Union today urged Lewis A. Fidler, assistant majority leader of the New York City Council, to withdraw his threat to withhold funding from Brooklyn College if the political science department continues to sponsor an event tonight with speakers who advocate for Israel’s withdrawal from disputed territories where Palestinians live.

Partnering civil rights attorneys today filed papers in federal court seeking to stop the NYPD from creating dossiers on innocent Muslim New Yorkers and end the Police Department’s ability to initiate investigations into Muslim New Yorkers when there is no belief that they have engaged or are about to engage in unlawful activity or an act of terrorism. The filing is part of the Handschu v. Special Services Division proceeding, a decades-old federal case that has produced a series of court orders regulating NYPD surveillance of political and religious activity.

The New York Civil Liberties Union today filed a federal lawsuit challenging the NYPD’s unlawful arrest of a Brooklyn woman for recording a stop-and-frisk encounter in her Brooklyn neighborhood. The plaintiff, Hadiyah Charles, used her smartphone to record two NYPD officers as they questioned and frisked three black youth whom had been innocently fixing a bicycle down the street from her Bedford-Stuyvesant home. The police officers tried to prevent Ms. Charles from filming the encounter by shoving her, handcuffing her, arresting her, and holding her in a jail cell for 90 minutes.

A federal judge today ruled that the NYPD engaged in unlawful mass arrests and fingerprinting of hundreds of peaceful protesters during the 2004 Republican National Convention in Manhattan.

The New York Civil Liberties Union and the American Civil Liberties Union, together with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Public Citizen Litigation Group, have filed a legal brief supporting Twitter’s appeal of a court order that it turn over three-and-a-half months of information from an Occupy Wall Street demonstrator’s Twitter account to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.

Court testimony released today by the New York Civil Liberties Union and partnering civil rights attorneys affirms that the NYPD’s Demographics Unit spied on Muslim New Yorkers only because of their ethnicity and native language – not because they were suspected of criminal activity – and reveals that the intelligence gathering never resulted in a lead in a terrorism investigation.

The New York Civil Liberties Union this week asked law enforcement officials in the Lower Hudson Valley, Suffolk County, Nassau County and Western New York, as well as the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, to turn over records about how they use automatic license plate readers (ALPR) to track and record New Yorkers’ movements. The request was filed as part of a nationally coordinated public records request with 34 other American Civil Liberties Union state affiliates.

The New York Civil Liberties Union today unveiled Free Speech Threat Assessment – an innovative webpage providing periodic reports on the heavy-handed NYPD policing and harassment of people engaged in protest and other First Amendment-protected activity. The webpage contains four reports documenting the NYPD’s policing of the Occupy Wall Street protests from March 17 to June 17. Future reports will also be posted on the webpage and announced through the NYCLU’s Facebook page and Twitter feed.