The ACLU’s Phone Record Frenzy

While the government is now seeking to have the NSA lawsuits dismissed, the ACLU are on a phone record frenzy! They are pulling out all the stops with full page ads in the NY Times. While the ads are quite impressive with END OF THE WORLD GIANT PRINT HEADLINES, that read, “IF YOU HAVE USED A TELEPHONE IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS, READ THIS. However, the ACLU’s ads leave out a lot of important details. They also leave out something else important.

The Boston Globe points out the most important thing the ACLU’s ads leave out….context.

But something else was omitted from the ACLU’s ad — something so crucial to this issue that only an organization suffering from acute moral myopia could ignore it: context.

Nowhere in its advertisement does the ACLU make any mention of terrorism or Sept. 11, or of the horrific price we paid that day for failing to “connect the dots” before the terrorists could strike. Nowhere does the ad acknowledge that we are at war or that the jihadists have been able to murder thousands of innocent people by infiltrating free societies and attacking from within. The ACLU is passionate about protecting Americans’ privacy; it says nothing about protecting American lives. How can an organization committed to civil liberties simply disregard the threat posed to the foremost civil liberty of all? Before blasting the government for data-mining through anonymous telephone records, shouldn’t it at least consider whether doing so has prevented any attacks or saved any lives?

It isn’t just the ACLU’s advertising that provides no context for the phone-records controversy. The ACLU’s web site also appears to provide none. There is no mention of preventing terrorism either on its home page or on its “Don’t Spy On Me” page. But there is an animated movie featuring a hero who charges, “Someone has been secretly spying on us — tapping our phones, reading our e-mails, tracking every move we make.” Naturally, the eavesdropping villains turn out to be George Bush and Dick Cheney.

To anti-Bush partisans, the administration cannot possibly have any legitimate interest in domestic telephone records, and it was an outrage for Verizon, BellSouth, and AT&T to have supplied them. “We cannot sit by while the government and the phone companies collude in this massive, illegal, and fundamentally un-American invasion of our privacy,” the ACLU’s executive director, Anthony Romero, thundered last week. Funny — that wasn’t the way he spoke 18 months ago, when the ACLU itself was discovered to be using sophisticated data-mining to amass information secretly about its own members and donors. Of course there is a difference between the two cases. The ACLU’s data-mining was part of a fund-raising effort. The NSA’s is part of the war effort.

Indeed, the ACLU want to paint America as the enemy, and are quick to come to the defense of the real enemy. After 911 our government went to work to provide the best protection it could for us. They are rightly seeking to have the ridiculous lawsuits brought by the ACLU to be dismissed. They know how much damage it could do to our national security to have more details of the programs released so that enemies can evade our efforts. There is always some tradeoff between civil liberty and national security. The ACLU refuse to see this. The ACLU’s efforts are reckless, and if successful will directly undermine our national security. They are a dangerous organization that will only lead us into more danger if we follow their frenzy to its end. I fear too many Americans have fallen back asleep in this post 911 world. The Boston Globe concludes that the ACLU have forgotten that we need to connect the dots. That is an optimistic guess at the ACLU’s motives. It is either that, or they are actively seeking to undermine our war on terror efforts. I sincerely hope it is the former. Either way they need to change before things come back to bite them from behind. Playing with fire very often ends with a burn. If the ACLU wins, America loses.

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