Cambridge, Mass - The National Lawyers Guild, Massachusetts Chapter and its Mass Defense Committee have been providing critical legal assistance to New England protest movements for many years. For the past three months, members of the Guild served as legal observers at the #OccupyBoston encampment in Dewey Square, Boston and argued before a Suffolk Superior Court Judge that pro-democracy demonstrators had a first amendment right to use a small portion of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway as a "free speech zone."

BOSTON/Government Center - Eighty people protested at City Hall Plaza early Wednesday evening in solidarity with Boston activists subpoenaed to testify in the ongoing grand jury investigation of WikiLeaks taking place in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia.

The Boston protest was organized by Civic Counsel, a new organization of Boston University and MIT students founded last week in response to the grand jury investigation. News of the subpoenas broke on June 9th when one of the Boston activists, David House, publicly disclosed his identity.

BOSTON/South Boston - Dr. Tarek Mehanna, a 29 year old pharmacist from Sudbury, Massachusetts, entered the courtroom at the Moakley Federal Courthouse on Wednesday wearing an orange prison jumpsuit. Mehanna is being charged with conspiring to commit terrorism and lending material support to a global Islamic jihad against the United States. Defense attorneys, J.W. Carney Jr. and Janice Bassil, made several pre-trial motions, including a request that the judge to set bail so Mehanna could return home pending his trial in October.

Mehanna's family watched the court proceedings along with dozens of supporters from communities of faith, civil rights activists, journalists, and others spilling over into an observation room on closed circuit TV.

BOSTON/State House - Over 100 immigrant and civil liberties advocates held a protest in front of the State House today in opposition to a recent announcement by the Executive Office of Public Safety that Massachusetts will participate in the Department of Homeland Security's Secure Communities program. The controversial program would screen everyone arrested by local and state police to determine their immigration status. Any arrestee found to be in the United States without proper documents would be reported to US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and face detainment and deportation.

BOSTON/Government Center - Temperatures dropped below freezing at the Government Center, but members of the American Civil Liberties Union and allied groups were out in force on Friday, marking the 47th anniversary of Human Rights Day with a vehement protest against what many view as the tacit continuation of U.S. torture policies under the Obama administration.

"We're here because we care about what our country is doing," said Nancy Murray, Director of Education at the ACLU in Massachusetts. "We need to really end torture, not just talk about ending torture. We need to hold people accountable."

Press Pass TV looks at the state of Student Rights within the Boston Public School system and their significance for the future.

BOSTON - In an August, 2007 newspaper article, former Boston Globe national legal affairs correspondent Charlie Savage wrote that the federal Department of Homeland Security is “funneling millions of dollars to local governments nationwide for purchasing high-tech video camera networks, accelerating the rise of a ‘surveillance society’ in which the sense of freedom that stems from being anonymous in public will be lost, privacy rights advocates warn.”

BOSTON - A suit brought against three MIT students last week by the MBTA prevented them from presenting their findings on Boston subway security vulnerabilities at the DEFCON conference in Las Vegas. Professional security researchers have expressed concerns that the gag order and the treatment of the students as criminals may dissuade researchers from identifying vulnerabilities in public systems for fear of litigation. As a result, vulnerable systems may remain unfixed and pose a risk to those who use them.

BOSTON/Government Center - Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner (G/R - District 7) held a hearing Tuesday afternoon at Boston City Hall to solicit public testimony on his proposed resolution to modify t