ACLU Accused by One of Own of ‘Squelching Free Speech’

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The New York Sun

For an organization dedicated to First Amendment freedoms, the American Civil Liberties Union hasn’t seemed happy lately with some free press and free speech.


After the New York Times reported Saturday that the ACLU was using a sophisticated software program to collect personal information about members and donors as part of a fund-raising effort, the organization’s former executive director, Aryeh Neier, who remains a board member, wrote “to question the editorial judgment that led The New York Times to elevate a minor dispute within the American Civil Liberties Union stirred up by a perennially disgruntled board member … to a scandal worthy of a front page article.”


The board member he alluded to, Michael Meyers of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, was quoted by the Times as objecting to the practice, and another board member, Wendy Kaminer, called the data-mining “hypocrisy.” The ACLU has criticized, vocally, the collection of personal statistics by the government and credit firms, even when that information – like the data compiled by the ACLU – is in the public domain.


“I don’t know how,” Mr. Neier wrote in a letter to the newspaper’s executive editor, Bill Keller, “but I think The New York Times should seek an opportunity to make amends to the ACLU.”


Mr. Keller said he was “puzzled over the meaning of that phrase.”


“I can’t believe that Mr. Neier is cynical enough to believe any credible newspaper would make amends for a story that the ACLU didn’t like by writing something the ACLU would like,” he told The New York Sun.


“Maybe he meant that the Times should send people over to the ACLU to give them back rubs, or that we should remember them in our prayers,” Mr. Keller said. “It would be so offensive if he meant we should publish flattering pieces about the ACLU that I can’t believe he meant that.”


Mr. Meyers, for his part, told the Sun: “Aryeh Neier’s letter to the New York Times’s editor, endorsed by the president of the ACLU, is a bold and reprehensible effort at squelching the free speech of directors and of the media’s independent inquiry – the fundamental tenet of a free press.” He also called Mr. Neier’s identification of him as “perennially disgruntled” a “brazen attempt at character assassination of dissidents like myself on the board of the ACLU.”


A columnist for the Village Voice and the Washington Times who writes often about First Amendment issues, Nat Hentoff, called the argument in Mr. Neier’s letter “a violation of the principles of free speech.” He said the whole scenario reflected badly on the ACLU’s leadership, to the detriment of the organization’s work.


In July, following another New York Times piece about ACLU fund-raising practices, the ACLU’s executive director, Anthony Romero, and president, Nadine Strossen, issued a “gag order” telling board members to reroute all press inquiries to the press office, breaking with a principle of allowing board members to speak freely, Mr. Meyers said.


A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Heather MacDonald, who has often battled the ACLU over the Patriot Act and other domestic antiterror measures, saw these episodes as attempts by the ACLU “to have it both ways.”


If the ACLU regards “an insensate computer analyzing reams of commercial data as a privacy violation when the government does it to try to protect the public from terrorists, it is certainly an equal privacy violation when the ACLU does it to try to bulk up its coffers so it can sue the government for the same alleged privacy violations that it itself is committing,” Ms. Mac-Donald said.


As for the letter, Ms. MacDonald thought it was evidence of a double standard. “They allegedly support the freedom of the press, yet they seem to think they are above any press analysis. It’s just amazing,” Ms. MacDonald said.


“They can dish it out, but they can’t take it,” she added.


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