Street Roots • Jan. 22-28, 2016
News
Page 5
ROGERS, fro m page 4
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previously kept government authority in
check. Things have gotten much worse in
the past 15 years.
In November, we found out the alarming
news that the Oregon Department of Justice
was involved in some level of surveillance of
people who used the Black Lives Matter
hashtag on social media. Surveilling people
based on their political ideas undercuts the
fundamental freedoms that our country was
founded on. If people can be targeted for
speech and activities protected by the First
Amendment, then they will be reluctant to
speak or write openly about their beliefs.
Expressing support for racial justice on
Twitter or Facebook shouldn’t get you a law
enforcement file. Not in a country I want to
live in.
We haven’t figured out the perfect set of
policies that would significantly improve our
overarching digital privacy rights, but we
are working on i t For example, a company
called Cellebrite markets a device that pulls
all of the info off your cellphone, including
your call log, text messages, location data
and more and creates a copy for law
enforcement In 2015, we successfully
championed a bill to require law
enforcement to get a warrant before they
make a copy of your phone’s content We
also tried to limit how long law enforcement
can retain license plate reader records, but
it failed to make it out of committee. We will
unquestionably be bringing proposed
legislation to the 2017 session. (License
plate readers are attached to vehicles and
stationary objects, such as traffic lights and
bridges. They can scan hundreds of license
plates per minute, and store that
information. The plate numbers are checked
against a list of registered vehicles that are
stolen or wanted in association with a .
crime. Willamette Week reported that
Portland police began attaching these
readers to their patrol cars in 2008.)
A particularly difficult hurdle is that
government agencies hide the ball when
they outsource certain kinds of data
collection to private companies. For
example, law enforcement agencies may
contract with a private company to gather
information using automatic license plate
readers or gather cellphone location data
with Stingray technology. Although we
might normally be able to compel the police
to release information about how and if they
are using that technology through Freedom
of Information Act requests, those agencies
are signing binding contracts with
companies not to share any information,
which is completely undemocratic. We will
need to figure out how to bring greater
transparency when third-party, private
companies are involved.
E.G.: What bills will you be watching
closely in the 2016 and 2017 legislative
sessions?
D.R.: The 2016 session is a very short
session, and most issues that will move
forward have been wired to go since the fall
of 2015.
A huge policymaking area where we are
spending significant attention is around
certain ballot measures proposed for the
November 2016 ballot
For example, there is an effort to move a
P H O T O B Y JOE G L O D E
David Rogers is six months into his position at the helm o f the American Civil Liberties Union o f Oregon.
measure forward that would prevent any
public funding of abortions in Oregon.
Terrible stuff. Oregon is the only state in
the country that we are aware of that has no
statutory restrictions to abortion access. We
are proud that Oregon has been able to
successfully defeat a wide range of attacks
on women’s reproductive health over the
past several decades. But we can’t take
anything for granted. The proposed ballot
measure would have a severe impact on low-
income women. And for all the public
employees in Oregon who appreciate having
abortion covered in their health insurance,
they should be concerned as well. The
ACLU filed a challenge to the ballot title
language, and we will continue to work with
a strong group of allies to push back.
There are also three separate ballot
measures that have been filed that are
steeped in anti-immigrant fervor. The ACLU
of Oregon is an active participant in a
coalition organized to defeat all three
measures.
One measure, Initiative Petition 40, aims
to make Oregon an English-only state and
prevent crucial services and programs from
happening in other languages. IP 52 would
make it harder to work by requiring Oregon
businesses to use an inaccurate and
cumbersome federal program, E-Verify, to
check employment eligibility. (Ballot
measures receive the designation “IP,” or
initiative petition, while still in the signature
gathering process.)
And IP 51 would turn back the clock on
voting rights and would eventually purge the
entire Oregon voter list and force people to
re-register, showing physical proof of
citizenship. Oregon could go from having
one of the best sets of voting laws in the .
country to some of the worst
The sad irony of these xenophobic
policies is they would hurt most Oregonians.
These efforts go back to your first
question. The prejudice that is driving these
efforts is advanced by a shameful rhetoric
flowing from several presidential candidates.
The politics of fear is being used to divide
our communities.
We need to remind ourselves of the
strengths of being a country where diverse
cultures have come together. There’s no
contradiction between a nation where we
speak a common language and a nation
where many of us remain proud of our
ethnic and cultural heritage, including our
native languages. There’s no contradiction
between a nation with a shared culture,
founded on the idea of freedom, and a
nation whose culture reflects the melting
pot that is America.
Our collective well-being in Oregon and
this country is very much linked to our
ability to recognize that we have a shared
fate. We have got to move past thinking in
terms of “us” and “them.”
E.G.: Will ACLU Oregon pursue another
bill aimed at making grand jury proceedings
more transparent, and i f so, do you think it
will have a better chance this time around,
given the outrage over the failure of a grand
jury to indict the officers who killed Tamir
Rice?
D.R.: The Oregon Criminal Defense
Lawyers Association was the lead group
advocating for the grand jury transparency
bill, but it was definitely a priority of the
ACLU of Oregon as well. Collectively, we
will absolutely be working to pass a similar
biU in 2017.
It should be well known that the main
barrier to the legislation came from district
attorneys. Frankly, their opposition was
disgraceful. It is appropriate that you
connect this issue to what happened to
Tamir Rice. There is a very real dynamic
people often refer to as the “Thin Blue
Line.” It refers to the ways members of law
enforcement work to protect each other. So,
when a police officer is accused of unjust
violence, other officers resist stepping
forward and sharing what they know or saw
if it might bring accountability to the
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