ACLU: A Legacy Of Hypocrisy
In case you haven’t heard, a group of dissenters from the ACLU are rebelling and calling for a change in the current leadership of the main organization. The summary of things this new group is fed up with is hypocrisy and the ACLU is full of it. Purging the ACLU of its hypocrisy is bound to be a Goliath task.
Where do we even begin with the ACLU’s hypocrisy? How about its odd stance on the Second Amendment? They have decided that the term “the people” that is contained in the Second Amendment does not apply to “the people” as it does in all of the other rights contained in the Bill of Rights. Instead they say that the Second Amendment only applies to militias such as the National Guard. They defend even the most radical free speech issues as individual rights, but somehow have adopted the opposite position on the Second Amendment.
In August of 2005 the New York ACLU sued against random bag searches on the NY Subway. Ironically the NYCLU HQ has a sign warning visitors that all bags are subject to search.
The ACLU have (sic) fought tooth and nail against the Bush administration’s NSA program, a program designed to track international phone calls being made to or from suspected terrorist organizations. They have hailed themselves defenders of the right to privacy and labelled the program an illegal “secret” program of “domestic spying”. All the while the ACLU has its own “secret” program of domestic spying of its own members and their personal financial information. This program has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with the real bottom line of fund-raising. Former ACLU board member Michael Myers was shocked at this discovery.
The American Civil Liberties Union is using sophisticated technology to collect a wide variety of information about its members and donors in a fund-raising effort that has ignited a bitter debate over its leaders’ commitment to privacy rights.
Some board members say the extensive data collection makes a mockery of the organization’s frequent criticism of banks, corporations and government agencies for their practice of accumulating data on people for marketing and other purposes.
The group’s new data collection practices were implemented without the board’s approval or knowledge and were in violation of the ACLU’s privacy policy at the time, according to Michael Meyers, vice president of the organization and a frequent internal critic. He said he had learned about the new research by accident Nov. 7 during a meeting of the committee that is organizing the group’s Biennial Conference in July.
He objected to the practices, and the next day, the privacy policy on the group’s Web site was changed. “They took out all the language that would show that they were violating their own policy,” Meyers said. “In doing so, they sanctified their procedure while still keeping it secret.”
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