American Civil Liberties Union: United States

United States Dept: Jameel Jaffer , a Kingston, Ont., native and Upper Canada College graduate, is the head of the American Civil Liberties Union s Center for Democracy, and in the past 10 years, he has emerged as one of the most prominent critics of secretive national security policies in the United States, according to The Star. If you had proposed 12 or 13 years ago that the United States was going to be under a Democratic president and the first African-American president, and the United States would have indefinite detention at Guantanamo, would have a statute authorizing warrantless wiretapping . . . have a targeted killing program under which the government was killing people, including American citizens, in half a dozen countries around the world without any process, you would have been thought crazy, he said in an interview last week and nEW YORK The sharpest thorn in the U.S. administration s side, when it comes to civil rights in a post-9/11 world, is a mild-mannered 41-year-old Canadian who gave up Wall Street a decade ago to slip down a legal rabbit hole. Jaffer said he had naively believed his work would slow under the Obama administration. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.