July, 16 2012, 02:04pm EDT

For Immediate Release
Contact:
Robyn Shepherd, ACLU national, (212) 519-7829 or 549-2666; media@aclu.org
Renée Soto/Meghan Stafford, Sard Verbinnen & Co, (212) 687-8080
Jennifer Carnig, New York Civil Liberties Union, (212) 607-3363 / (845) 553-0349
Supreme Court Asked to Review Edie Windsor's Challenge to "Defense of Marriage Act"
Edith "Edie" Windsor, who sued the government for failing to recognize her marriage to her late spouse, Thea Spyer, asked the U.S. Supreme Court today to hear her challenge to the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act" (DOMA).
The petition for certiorari was filed on Windsor's behalf by her attorneys at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Stanford Law School Supreme Court Litigation Clinic.
WASHINGTON
Edith "Edie" Windsor, who sued the government for failing to recognize her marriage to her late spouse, Thea Spyer, asked the U.S. Supreme Court today to hear her challenge to the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act" (DOMA).
The petition for certiorari was filed on Windsor's behalf by her attorneys at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Stanford Law School Supreme Court Litigation Clinic.
In June, a federal district judge in New York ruled in Windsor's favor that section three of DOMA unconstitutionally discriminates against married same-sex couples. The Justice Department and the leadership of the House of Representatives recently asked the Supreme Court to hear DOMA challenges in two other cases, including a case, like Windsor's, that is still pending in a federal appeals court.
"With Edie's case and the two others, the high court has before it striking illustrations of the many different harms that DOMA inflicts on many thousands of married same-sex couples all across the country," said James Esseks, director of the ACLU Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Project. "Edie and Thea got married after making a life-long commitment to each other, and it's just wrong for the government to pretend that they were legal strangers."
Windsor and Spyer lived together for more than four decades in Greenwich Village. Despite not being able to marry legally, they were engaged in 1967. In 1977, Spyer was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and Windsor helped her through her long battle with that disease. They were finally legally married in May 2007.
When Spyer died in 2009, she left all of her property to Windsor. Because they were married, Spyer's estate normally would have passed to Edie as her spouse without any estate tax. But because of DOMA, Windsor had to pay more than $363,000 in federal estate taxes. Payment of the federal estate tax by a surviving spouse is one of the most significant adverse impacts of DOMA since the amount owed, as was true in this case, is often quite substantial.
"Edie Windsor, who recently celebrated her 83rd birthday, suffers from a serious heart condition," said Roberta Kaplan, a partner at Paul Weiss and counsel to Windsor. "Because the District Court's ruling in her favor is entitled to an automatic stay of enforcement, Edie cannot yet receive a refund of the unconstitutional estate tax that she was forced to pay simply for being gay. The constitutional injury inflicted on Edie should be remedied within her lifetime."
"The impact of DOMA is felt most dramatically today here in New York," said NYCLU executive director Donna Lieberman. "At least 10,000 same-sex couples have been married in New York since our marriage law went into effect. But DOMA subjects gay and lesbian married New Yorkers to a form of second-class citizenship. All married couples should have their marriages respected by the federal government, once and for all."
In the meantime, Windsor will continue to defend her victory before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which has agreed to hear her case on an expedited basis.
More on this case can be found at: www.aclu.org/edie
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
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'You Are Heroes': CDC Staff Stage Mass Walkout in Support of Officials Who Resigned in Protest
"We need congress to intervene," said one of the CDC officials who stepped down this week.
Aug 28, 2025
Staff members at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia on Thursday staged a mass walkout in a show of support for three top officials who resigned in protest this week.
The three officials in question—Demetre Daskalakis, Daniel Jernigan, and Debra Houry—resigned on Wednesday night to protest the ouster of former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Susan Monarez, who had just been confirmed weeks ago by the US Senate.
All three officials came to the CDC headquarters to clear out their offices and, as they left the building on Thursday afternoon, were followed out by hundreds of workers who cheered them and thanked them for their work at the agency.
Marissa Sarbak, a reporter with NBC Atlanta, posted a video showing the crowds that had gathered to support the departing officials.
Hundreds of people have come out to Roybal campus to show solidarity and support for the CDC leaders that resigned today following CDC Director Susan Monarez’s firing. We’re expecting the leaders who resigned to walk out in a few minutes. @11AliveNews pic.twitter.com/ptMuWcQMnY
— Marissa Sarbak (@MarissaSarbak) August 28, 2025
Sam Stein, a journalist at The Bulwark, reported that Houry gave a short speech outside the building in which she warned that the agency was in danger of falling apart and that more resignations would be coming soon unless drastic changes were made.
"We need congress to intervene," she emphasized.
Jernigan, who until Wednesday has served as the director of the CDC's National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, told The Washington Post that his "last straw" was being forced to work with David Geier, who has long pushed false theories linking childhood vaccinations to autism.
"The current administration has made it very difficult for me to stay," said Jernigan, who has nearly two decades of experience working at the CDC. "We have been asked to revise and to review and change studies that have been settled in the past, scientific findings that were there to help guide vaccine decisions."
Monarez was reportedly pushed out by Health Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, like Geier, has also in the past pushed conspiracy theories linking vaccines to autism.
Kennedy's decision to oust Monarez has drawn bipartisan concern. Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Tina Smith (D-Minn.) have both called on President Donald Trump to fire Kennedy, while Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) called for HHS to postpone its scheduled Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices meeting, given what he described as "serious allegations" that have been made by the resigned CDC officials.
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'Nightmare Scenario': Watchdog Says AI Cybercrime Shows Vital Need for Regulation
"Countries with lax regulations, like the US, are prime targets for these crimes," said Public Citizen's J.B. Branch.
Aug 28, 2025
The San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup Anthropic revealed Wednesday that its technology has been "weaponized" by hackers to commit ransomware crimes, prompting a call by a leading consumer advocacy group for Congress to pass "enforceable safeguards" to protect the public.
Anthropic's latest Threat Intelligence Report details "several recent examples" of its artificial intelligence-powered chatbot Claude "being misused, including a large-scale extortion operation using Claude Code, a fraudulent employment scheme from North Korea, and the sale of AI-generated ransomware by a cybercriminal with only basic coding skills."
"The actor targeted at least 17 distinct organizations, including in healthcare, the emergency services, and government and religious institutions," the company said. "Rather than encrypt the stolen information with traditional ransomware, the actor threatened to expose the data publicly in order to attempt to extort victims into paying ransoms that sometimes exceeded $500,000."
Anthropic said the perpetrator "used AI to what we believe is an unprecedented degree" for their extortion scheme, which is being described as "vibe hacking"—the malicious use of artificial intelligence to manipulate human emotions and trust in order to carry out sophisticated cyberattacks.
"Claude Code was used to automate reconnaissance, harvesting victims' credentials and penetrating networks," the report notes. "Claude was allowed to make both tactical and strategic decisions, such as deciding which data to exfiltrate, and how to craft psychologically targeted extortion demands."
"Claude analyzed the exfiltrated financial data to determine appropriate ransom amounts, and generated visually alarming ransom notes that were displayed on victim machines," the company added.
Anthropic continued:
This represents an evolution in AI-assisted cybercrime. Agentic AI tools are now being used to provide both technical advice and active operational support for attacks that would otherwise have required a team of operators. This makes defense and enforcement increasingly difficult, since these tools can adapt to defensive measures, like malware detection systems, in real time. We expect attacks like this to become more common as AI-assisted coding reduces the technical expertise required for cybercrime.
Anthropic said it "banned the accounts in question as soon as we discovered this operation" and "also developed a tailored classifier (an automated screening tool), and introduced a new detection method to help us discover activity like this as quickly as possible in the future."
"To help prevent similar abuse elsewhere, we have also shared technical indicators about the attack with relevant authorities," the company added.
Anthropic's revelation followed last year's announcement by OpenAI that it had terminated ChatGPT accounts allegedly used by cybercriminals linked to China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.
J.B. Branch, Big Tech accountability advocate at the consumer watchdog Public Citizen, said Wednesday in response to Anthropic's announcement: "Every day we face a new nightmare scenario that tech lobbyists told Congress would never happen. One hacker has proven that agentic AI is a viable path to defrauding people of sensitive data worth millions."
"Criminals worldwide now have a playbook to follow—and countries with lax regulations, like the US, are prime targets for these crimes since AI companies are not subject to binding federal standards and rules," Branch added. "With no public protections in place, the next wave of AI-enabled cybercrime is coming, but Congress continues to sit on its hands. Congress must move immediately to put enforceable safeguards in place to protect the American public."
More than 120 congressional bills have been proposed to regulate artificial intelligence. However, not only has the current GOP-controlled Congress has been loath to act, House Republicans recently attempted to sneak a 10-year moratorium on state-level AI regulation into the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The Senate subsequently voted 99-1 to remove the measure from the legislation. However, the "AI Action Plan" announced last month by President Donald Trump revived much of the proposal, prompting critics to describe it as a "zombie moratorium."
Meanwhile, tech billionaires including the Winklevoss twins, who founded the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange, are pouring tens of millions of dollars into the Digital Freedom Fund super political action committee, which aims to support right-wing political candidates with pro-crytpo and pro-AI platforms.
"Big Tech learned that throwing money in politics pays off in lax regulations and less oversight," Public Citizen said Thursday. "Money in politics reforms have never been more necessary."
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GOP Investigation Pressures Wikipedia to Reveal Identities of Editors Accused of 'Bias' Against Israel
The effort furthers the goals of the Heritage Foundation, which has launched a plan to "identify and target Wikipedia editors" using a number of underhanded tactics.
Aug 28, 2025
A pair of House Republicans is moving forward with an investigation that will seek to reveal the identities of Wikipedia editors who have edited articles to include information that portrays Israel negatively.
On Wednesday, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chair of the House Oversight Committee, and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), chair of the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation, sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that owns the free encyclopedia.
The representatives asked Wikimedia's CEO, Maryana Iskander, for "assistance in obtaining documents and communications regarding individuals (or specific accounts) serving as Wikipedia volunteer editors who violated Wikipedia platform policies as well as your own efforts to thwart intentional, organized efforts to inject bias into important and sensitive topics."
The letter requested information about "nation state actors" or "academic institutions" that may have been involved in efforts to "edit or influence content identified as possibly violating Wikipedia policies."
A spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation told The Hill that they were reviewing the request.
"We welcome the opportunity to respond to the committee's questions and to discuss the importance of safeguarding the integrity of information on our platform," the spokesperson said.
The GOP investigation coincides with a long-standing objective of the far-right Heritage Foundation, which has accused Wikipedia of anti-conservative bias and promoting content that portrays Israel in a negative light, and sought to unmask the identities of the internet users who run it.
The letter sent by Comer and Mace requests that Wikimedia provide Congress with "records showing identifying and unique characteristics of accounts (such as names, IP addresses, registration dates, user activity logs) for editors" who have been "subject to actions" by Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee, which resolves internal disputes between editors.
It was, in essence, a request by Congress for Wikipedia to "dox" many of its editors.
"In the culture of Wikipedia editing, it is common for individuals to use pseudonyms to protect their privacy and avoid personal threats," wrote tech writer and Wikipedia expert Stephen Harrison for Slate in February. "Revealing an editor's personal information without their consent, a practice known as doxing, is a form of harassment that can result in a user's being permanently banned from the site."
Of chief concern to the legislators is investigating Wikipedia's handling of content related to Israel. They cited a report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a pro-Israel lobbying group, which the legislators said "raised troubling questions about potentially systematic efforts to advance antisemitic and anti-Israel information in Wikipedia articles related to conflicts with the state of Israel."
The ADL report makes the allegation that 30 "bad-faith" Wikipedia editors, whose identities are not public, were collaborating to edit pages about the Israel-Palestine conflict by "spotlighting criticism of Israel and downplaying Palestinian terrorist violence and antisemitism," and in the process violating Wikipedia's commitment to neutrality.
That report, however, has been heavily criticized, including by some of the academics it cited. In a piece for The Forward, Shira Klein, whose research on Wikipedia's documentation of the Holocaust appears in the report, said the ADL "inaccurately" used her work, and the work of others, as part of its "ramped-up efforts to police public discourse about Israel," and quoted other researchers who felt the same.
Klein described the study's interpretation of the facts as "very skewed" and said it was reliant "on a faulty premise: that criticism of Israel or Zionism is inherently antisemitic."
"To establish foul play, the ADL would need to demonstrate that Wikipedia content about Israel and Zionism regularly expresses as fact ideas that diverge from broadly held scholarly opinions on the matters in question," Klein said. "But where is the evidence of editors repeatedly misrepresenting or contradicting peer-reviewed literature? There is none. The report simply wants us to take the ADL's word for it."
The ADL's report, as well as a similar report from the Atlantic Council alleging that Wikipedia editors had conspired to spread pro-Kremlin propaganda, are the sole pieces of evidence cited by Comer and Mace in their request for identifying information on Wikipedia's editors.
However, right-wing efforts to undermine Wikipedia's independence and attack the privacy of its editors go back much further.
In January, documents obtained by The Forward's Arno Rosenfeld revealed a secret plan by Heritage, the think tank behind the authoritarian Project 2025 playbook, to "identify and target Wikipedia editors" who the organization said were "abusing their position."
Among the methodologies it directed Heritage employees to use include "analyzing text patterns, usernames, and technical data through data breach analysis, fingerprinting, [human intelligence], and technical targeting."
The targeting methods also included "creating fake Wikipedia user accounts to try to trick editors into identifying themselves by sharing personal information or clicking on malicious tracking links that can identify people who click on them."
According to Rosenfeld, "The Heritage Foundation sent the pitch deck outlining the Wikipedia initiative to Jewish foundations and other prospective supporters of Project Esther, its roadmap for fighting antisemitism and anti-Zionism."
Jewish Voice for Peace has described Project Esther as Heritage's "blueprint for using the federal government and private institutions to dismantle the Palestine solidarity movement and broader US civil society, under the guise of 'fighting antisemitism.'"
"Even if you take issue with how the site is currently framing the conflict, that doesn't justify Heritage's plan," Harrison wrote. "Targeting Wikipedia editors personally, instead of debating their edits on the platform, marks a dangerous escalation."
Coming amid the Trump administration's crackdowns against campus protests and efforts to deport immigrants over pro-Palestine speech, critics have described the House Republican investigation as the latest GOP attempt to censor criticism and the spread of unflattering information about Israel.
Adam Johnson, a co-host for the political podcast Citations Needed, described it in a post on X as "House Republicans working with the ADL and Atlantic Council to discipline Wikipedia into parroting the Israeli and NATO line."
Johnson noted that this push was coming as the clear majority of Americans, including an overwhelming number of Democrats, now oppose US support for Israel, with many now believing the country is committing a genocide.
"Rather than end the genocide," Johnson said, "the response instead is to continue firing, doxing, smearing, and attempting to censor inconvenient narratives."
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