President Trump announced Tuesday on Twitter that he has decided to elevate Gina Haspel to be the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, succeeding Mike Pompeo, who he has nominated for secretary of state.

While the ACLU does not take positions on nominees, we do take a strong stance against torture.

Haspel is perhaps best known for running a “black site” prison in Thailand, where she oversaw state-sponsored torture at the start of a program designed at the behest of the CIA and approved at the highest levels of the George W. Bush administration. It was at this facility that the agency’s brutal tactics were first tested. One inmate, Abu Zubaydah, was waterboarded 83 times — with cruel methods continuing even after his abusers concluded that he did not have the threat information they sought.

In addition to waterboarding, for 19 days Zubaydah was repeatedly slammed into walls, kept for hours at a time in painful stress positions, denied sleep, beaten, starved, and locked for hours in coffin-like confinement boxes. These torture methods became a “template” for a program designed to psychologically break other detainees held in a network of secret CIA prisons.

Throughout this horror, Haspel reported to CIA headquarters on progress — including the failure to get any meaningful intelligence. Her participation was reportedly hands on. One of the CIA contractor psychologists who designed the program asserted in his memoir that a CIA official, widely understood to be Haspel, walked into an interrogation room to mock Abu Zubaydah, saying, “Good job! I like the way you’re drooling; it adds realism. I’m almost buying it. You wouldn’t think a grown man would do that.”

Yet the Trump administration maintains that Haspel’s role in the torture program is an official secret. Her job title, chief of base, is listed in a study about the torture program released by the Senate in 2014 and in documents released in the ACLU’s torture survivor clients’ litigation, but not her name — and important aspects of her wrongdoing are still blacked out. The Senate cannot credibly carry out its constitutional role to “advise and consent” on her nomination without full access to that information — which must be made public.

The CIA must declassify and publicly release all information relating to Haspel’s participation in the CIA’s torture program before any confirmation proceedings take place. The Senate — and more importantly, the American people — should know the full extent of her role in one of the darkest chapters in modern American history. Only then can senators fully and meaningfully assess whether she has the character, judgment, and experience to serve as CIA director.

The Senate must also look into Haspel’s role in the lawless destruction of videotapes documenting torture at the CIA black site in Thailand, including the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah. Former CIA official Jose Rodriguez reportedly referred to Haspel when he wrote in his memoir, “My chief of staff drafted a cable approving the action we had been trying to accomplish for so long. The cable left nothing to chance. It even told them how to get rid of the tapes. They were to use an industrial-strength shredder to do the deed.” Haspel played a key role in the destruction of evidence of the torture crimes that she herself had overseen in her prior CIA job. The general counsel of the 9/11 Commission has stated that the destruction of the videos may have amounted to obstruction of justice.

Despite this shocking record, Haspel continued to rise through the ranks of the CIA, which she has now been tapped to lead. Her promotion is perhaps the strongest symbol of the impunity granted to the program’s architects, who were effectively let off the hook by former President Obama’s decision to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

Given this deeply compromised background and her position as an agency veteran for over 30 years, Haspel will also likely offer little in terms of independent oversight. Instead, she will become a shining example of the agency’s impunity and recklessness. Particularly now, when the House Intelligence Committee seems to no longer take its oversight role seriously, there are even fewer real checks left on the CIA.

“I love it. I love it, I think it’s great,” Trump said of waterboarding during the presidential campaign. With this nomination, Trump forces the CIA’s shameful past yet again into the present. It’s now up to senators to decide if overseeing a secret torture cell should be a step on the way to running the CIA.

Despite its fluffy sounding name, the recently introduced CLOUD Act is far from harmless. It threatens activists abroad, individuals here in the U.S., and would empower Attorney General Sessions in new disturbing ways. And, now, some members of Congress may be working behind the scenes to sneak it into a gargantuan spending bill that Congress will shortly consider.

This is why the ACLU and over 20 other privacy and human rights organizations have joined together to oppose the bill. Make no mistake, the CLOUD Act represents a dramatic change in our law, and its effects will be felt across the globe.

Today, the information of global activists — such as those that fight for LGBTQ rights, defend religious freedom, or advocate for gender equality are protected from being disclosed by U.S. companies to governments who may seek to do them harm. The CLOUD Act eliminates many of these protections and replaces them with vague assurances, weak standards, and largely unenforceable restrictions.

The bill starts by giving the executive branch dramatically more power than it has today. It would allow Attorney General Sessions to enter into agreements with foreign governments that bypass current law, without any approval from Congress. Under these agreements, foreign governments would be able to get emails and other electronic information without any additional scrutiny by a U.S. judge or official. And, while the attorney general would need to consider a country’s human rights record, he is not prohibited from entering into an agreement with a country that has committed human rights abuses.

That level of discretion alone is concerning. Even more, however, the bill would for the first time allow these foreign governments to wiretap in the U.S. — even in cases where they do not meet Wiretap Act standards. Paradoxically, that would give foreign governments the power to engage in surveillance — which could sweep in the information of Americans communicating with foreigners — that the U.S. itself would not be able to engage in. The bill also provides broad discretion to funnel this information back to the U.S., circumventing the Fourth Amendment. This information could potentially be used by the U.S. to engage in a variety of law enforcement actions.

On top of this, the bill does not require that the Department of Justice or any U.S. government entity review individual requests for information made by foreign governments to ensure that human rights are not being violated. The country of Poland provides a classic example of why this could be a problem, even in a country that some have considered to have a relatively sound human rights record.

According to Freedom House rankings, Poland is rated a one on political rights, the highest rating, and a two out of five on civil liberties. However, in recent months, the Polish government has taken steps to pass laws that restrict speech and, in 2017, the government raided the offices of several human rights groups, seizing documents and computers only a day after women staged a march to protest the country’s abortion laws. The bill would provide no protection against requests in these situations, which wrongly target activists and threaten to undo the progress we have made on global human rights.

The CLOUD Act represents a major change in the law — and a major threat to our freedoms. Congress should not try to sneak it by the American people by hiding it inside of a giant spending bill.  There has not been even one minute devoted to considering amendments to this proposal. Congress should robustly debate this bill and take steps to fix its many flaws, instead of trying to pull a fast one on the American people.

Last fall, Neal Morris, a property owner in New Orleans, commissioned a mural on his warehouse that depicted President Trump’s comments from the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape. The mural displayed Trump’s comments verbatim but replaced some of the words with cartoon pictograms.

Morris expected that the mural, installed on his own property by a local street artist, might stir controversy. But what he didn’t expect was a threatening letter from the city’s Department of Safety and Permits demanding that he take it down or face jail time. The letter accused Morris of a zoning violation and warned that failure to comply would yield “a maximum fine or jail time for each and every day the violation continues plus court costs.”

That’s right. A resident of an American city could face jail time for a mural that depicts comments the president of the United States actually said — on tape. All this because Morris failed to navigate a confusing bureaucratic process requiring artists and their patrons to get government approval and a permit before installing a mural, even on their own property.

This week, the ACLU of Louisiana sued on Morris’s behalf, asserting that murals are a constitutionally protected form of artistic expression and that the permit scheme the city has implemented to regulate them infringes residents’ First Amendment rights.

New Orleans’ murals-permit scheme is a multipronged assault on the First Amendment that requires artists to get government approval before creating their art. Applicants for mural permits are forced to pay exorbitant fees, submit extensive documentation, and are forbidden from installing any mural without a “development plan and design review” by multiple government officials and committees.

The permit approval process is also selectively enforced. Some murals that have been installed without permits, like Yoko Ono’s on the side of the Ogden Museum, are never cited for violations, while others, like Neal Morris’s, are targeted for enforcement.

Mural applicants who want to obtain a permit face a bureaucratic thicket of confusing requirements and undefined standards. The process is so obscure that city officials themselves seem to be confused about what the requirements are and how the regulations should be enforced. The letter Morris received accused him of violating an ordinance that did not exist.

This is exactly the kind of heavy-handed government intrusion that the First Amendment was designed to prevent. The government simply has no business making itself the arbiter of permissible artistic expression. That’s censorship, and it’s totally antithetical to the unbridled creativity that makes New Orleans such an interesting place to live and visit.

By demanding that artists get a government stamp of approval — or face legal consequences — New Orleans’ permitting scheme for murals is a direct assault on the First Amendment and needs to be struck down. And we aim to do just that.