Privacy & Security

The ACLU-PA will stand with voters to protect their constitutional right to privacy against the federal government’s illegal fishing expedition for highly personal information.

Here's how the First Amendment impacts how government agencies and officials can interact with you on social media.

The ACLU of Pennsylvania, the Public Interest Law Center, and ACLU’s Voting Rights Project have filed a motion to intervene in a federal lawsuit over the federal government’s demand that Pennsylvania turn over its entire voter registration rolls, including with voters’ sensitive personal data such as drivers’ license numbers and partial social security numbers. The motion to intervene was filed on behalf of seven Pennsylvania voters, many of whom were the target of baseless mass challenges to their mail ballots during the 2024 election cycle that resulted from faulty data-matching techniques. The voters’ experiences have heightened their concerns about the privacy of their voting data. Other plaintiffs are two non-partisan, good government organizations dedicated to voter engagement: the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania and Common Cause. If intervention is granted, the civil rights groups will seek to prevent the federal government from forcing Pennsylvania to turn over the entirety of its voter registration database and to protect sensitive data within the voter rolls.

On October 4, 2021, the ACLU of PA filed a motion to intervene on behalf of three advocacy organizations and eight individual voters in a lawsuit filed by the Pennsylvania attorney general challenging subpoenas issued by a state Senate committee for personally identifying information of voters.

On March 11, 2020, the Law Offices of Timothy P. O’Brien and the ACLU of Pennsylvania filed a class action lawsuit against the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Allegheny County on behalf of Cherell Harrington, a resident of the county.

If a defendant in a criminal case refuses to disclose the password to his encrypted computer, does either the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution or Article 1, Section 9 of the Pennsylvania Constitution protect him so that he does not have to reveal it?