Say Anything Blog

For some reason I get regular newsletters and press releases from the ACLU.  I get a lot of that sort of stuff from all sorts of interest groups and media organizations, but usually I sign up for them or a PR person contacts me and asks if I want to be on the mailing list.  Neither of those things happened with the ACLU.  Apparently somebody signed me up for this stuff.  Either that or the ACLU harvested my email address from somewhere and just started spamming me.

Either way, I’m considering a lawsuit.  Well, not really, but that’s probably what I’d do if I were an ACLU lawyer of one of their clients.

Anyway, today I got the following in an email from the organization:

Dear Friend,

I am writing to tell you about some breaking news of grave importance to the ACLU. Because it is going to be a big battle—with fundamental principles at stake—I wanted you to be the first to hear about it.

This week, the ACLU asked a federal judge to quash a grand jury subpoena that demands that the ACLU turn over to the FBI “any and all copies” of a December 2005 government document in our possession.

The three-and-a-half page document, issued in December 2005, is marked “Secret” and apparently is classified. We received the document, unsolicited, on October 23, 2006.

This attempt by the Bush Administration to suppress information using the grand jury process is truly chilling and is unprecedented in law and in our history as an organization. The subpoena serves no legitimate investigative purpose and tramples on fundamental First Amendment rights. We recognize this maneuver for what it is: a patent attempt to intimidate and impede the work of human rights advocates like the ACLU who seek to expose government wrongdoing.

So, basically, the ACLU is claiming that the Bush administration is trying to “suppress information” by getting some leaked classified documents back.  But isn’t the government supposed to suppress classified information?  Isn’t that the reason it is classified in the first place?  I mean, if the government isn’t supposed to be suppressing classified information, then why are we classifying it in the first place?

And how does the government requesting leaked classified documents back violate the ACLU’s first amendment rights?  Surely the ACLU isn’t suggesting that first amendment rights extend to illegal leaks of private information, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to stop someone who obtained my bank records from somebody at the bank who illegally divulged them from putting my private information on the internet.

I sometimes wonder if the ACLU even takes its own arguments seriously.