Last week, a federal appeals court ruled that the Commonwealth of Kentucky was liable for $224,000 for the actions of Kim Davis, who refused to do her job and issue marriage licenses (to same-sex or different-sex couples) as county clerk.

While Davis’ story made national headlines, her case isn’t the only one in the past year where a court case filed by the ACLU has led to a bill for discrimination for the actions of a government official. It isn’t the officials that have to pay out, however. It is the taxpayers of the jurisdiction that violated LGBTQ people’s rights.

WISCONSIN - Alina Boyden and Shannon Andrews

Alina and Shannon are state employees in Wisconsin. Both were denied gender-affirming care under the state’s insurance plan. In order to pay for her care, Shannon dipped into her retirement fund. Alina put off some gender-affirming care.

After Shannon and Alina spoke before a jury, Shannon was awarded $479,000 and her co-plaintiff, Alina, was awarded $301,000. When combined with costs and fees associated with the case, taxpayers were sent a bill for $1,670,000.

Read the case

IOWA - Jesse Vroegh

Jesse Vroegh was a staff nurse at the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women (ICIW) for over seven years. When he asked for gender-affirming health care along with use of the men’s locker room, he was denied.

Jesse also had to appear before a jury and have his life put under a microscope. In the end, the jury said what happened to Jesse was unjust and awarded him $120,000.

Read the case

In a non-ACLU case, an Iowa jury determined that another state employee who faced employment discrimination for being gay was owed $1.5 million in June.

These numbers do not include the millions of dollars Kentucky, Iowa and Wisconsin have spent on their own attorneys to defend these discriminatory actions.

Being turned away when seeking a marriage license was humiliating for our clients. Being denied medically necessary health care is dangerous. Being told that you cannot use the same facilities that any other employee uses is isolating. And, sadly, the Trump administration thinks this is OK.

These cases aren’t just about the damages awards, they are about seeking justice.

If you are a taxpayer that is upset about paying this bill, the answer is simple: tell your officials not to discriminate against LGBTQ people.

James Esseks, Director, ACLU Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender & HIV Project

Date

Thursday, August 29, 2019 - 12:15pm

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The Transportation Security Administration is planning to test a face recognition system that could be used on all domestic U.S. fliers, according to a document the agency released today. That would represent a significant expansion of face recognition in daily life.

In the test, which will occur at McCarran airport in Las Vegas, passengers entering the TSA security area will be photographed and a face recognition algorithm applied in an attempt to tell whether they match the photograph on their IDs. The system adds face recognition to a technology that the TSA has been working on for years called Credential Authentication Technology, which scans a passenger’s driver’s license or other ID document and attempts to automatically determine whether it is authentic.

If the TSA decides that the system works well, we can assume the agency will use it to replace human document checkers throughout the domestic aviation system. This program is part of the TSA’s sweeping vision to deploy face surveillance at the nation’s airports, and comes on the heels of a similar deployment by CBP at the gates of departing international flights. If widely deployed, the TSA's program would (as we said of the CBP program) socialize people to accept face recognition and normalize the technology, inevitably be subject to mission creep, and expose people to the judgments of unreliable and biased algorithms.

For purposes of this test, the TSA says it will only run the system on passengers who volunteer to participate. “The passenger’s facial image, along with certain biographic information from the passenger’s identity document, will be collected by TSA and retained for subsequent qualitative and quantitative analysis” by DHS technical experts. Names and identification numbers will be obfuscated before the data is transferred for analysis, the agency says, and the data will be deleted within 180 days.

But the real question is what data will be collected and how will it be handled if this technology moves beyond tests? Will passengers be able to opt out? Will the agency want to collect and store passengers’ photographs to improve the training of their face recognition algorithms? Will passengers’ photos be run against photographic watch lists, exposing every passenger to the risk of being misidentified as a serious terrorist or other criminal every time they fly?

And what are the implications of introducing a technology for the automated checking of IDs? Like many airport security measures, such technology may very well expand beyond the airport and into daily life. When ID checks can be done by machines that are much cheaper and easier to deploy than human guards, will we find ourselves being subject to ever-more-frequent checks? When ID checks become cheap and easily scalable they will inevitably be over-used, as we have seen happen with other surveillance technologies.

Finally, as I have explained in depth before, one of the biggest problems with this use of face recognition is that it represents an ever-growing investment by the TSA in identity-based security — security based on knowing more and more information about people and trying to use that information to assess their “risk to aviation.” The TSA should instead be focused on making sure that nobody — no matter who they are — can bring guns or explosives onto aircraft. Face recognition is an investment that is bad for security and that is likely to have bad side effects on our society to boot.

Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project

Date

Tuesday, August 27, 2019 - 5:00pm

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This piece was originally published in Just Security

For more than three years, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University have been litigating a series of Freedom of Information Act requests relating to “prepublication review.” Under this far-reaching censorship system, millions of current and former government employees, contractors, and even interns must submit their manuscripts for official review prior to publication. Virtually everyone seems to agree that the system is broken.

The thousands of documents that have been released in response to our FOIA litigation paint a picture of a system that is fractured and incoherent. Because there is no executive- branch–wide policy on the review process, each agency has its own. Agency regimes comprise a tangle of regulations, policies, and nondisclosure agreements. Submission and review standards, review timelines, and appeals processes are vague and confusing.

Today, we’re releasing an interactive chart that reflects our effort to make sense of this system. We’re hoping that the chart will enable users to study and compare the key features of the prepublication review regimes of the seventeen intelligence agencies, and of three of the standard agreements those agencies typically require individuals to sign as a condition of access to classified information. The chart also includes links to annotated versions of the underlying regulations, policies, and agreements. Many of these were not available publicly until we sued for their release.

While we hope the chart goes some way towards clarifying the system, we can’t claim to have it all figured out. (In fact, the incoherence of the system is one of the things we pointed to in arguing, in a complaint filed a few months ago, that the system is unconstitutional.)

Ramya Krishnan, Staff Attorney, Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University

Date

Tuesday, August 27, 2019 - 4:00pm

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