Melissa Goodman is a Staff Attorney on the ACLUs national security project and litigates cases concerning surveillance

Melissa Goodman is a Staff Attorney on the ACLUs national security project and litigates cases

concerning surveillance, excessive government secrecy, torture and detention, and the freedoms of

speech and association. Most recently, she has been counsel in the ACLU’s lawsuits challenging

warrantless NSA surveillance, the Patriot Act, the government’s practice of ideological exclusion, and

the cheap mbt sport shoes’s abduction and detention of Khaled El-Masri, a victim of the cheap mbt

sport shoes’s practice of “extraordinary rendition.” Goodman is a graduate of New York University

College of Arts and Science, and New York University Law School.

Oregon attorney Brandon Mayfield discusses his persecution at the hands of the FBI, their holding him

as a “material witness” in order to deny him basic due process, the false accusations linking him to

the March 2004 train bombing in Madrid, Spain, how the FBI refused to budge on their crazy conspiracy

theory until the Spanish authorities proved his innocence beyond doubt, the government’s use of

“sneak and peek” warrants against him and his family, the chilling effect on the attorney-client

privilege from new Justice Department “guidelines” and the prosecution of Lynn Stewart and how his

lawsuits against the government have led a federal district court judge to strike two provisions from

the PATRIOT Act.