REDISCOVERING CIVIL LIBERTIES?

I'm not a fan of the American Civil Liberties Union, and the price I pay for occasionally purchasing something from the British Broadcasting Corporation store (or is it requesting a Democrat ballot in the open primary) is one of their Trump-deranged surveys pushing me to send them money (not a chance) and comment on how awful any impediment to immigration, abortion, or sex-change operations must be.

The organization is still putting wokeness ahead of liberty.

The [union] also alleges that, by protecting the due-process rights of those who have been accused of sexual assault, the administration is violating Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which, among other things, guarantees women equal educational opportunities. Or, put another way, the ACLU alleges that unless men who are accused of rape are discriminated against to the point at which their guilt is preordained, women will be unable to enjoy their own legal rights. Once upon a time, this line of argument was repugnant to [it] — and to the point at which it was happy to defend the speech rights of neo-Nazis who were explicitly trying to upset minorities. Now, it is not only happy to pick sides, but to pretend that it is doing so in the name of equality.

We’ve never been fans of the [union], but at least it once had a purpose. Now, it has become just another progressive interest group, beholden to nothing but the weathervane.

Perhaps so, although when Common Dreams picks up an objection to widespread contact tracing, perhaps all is not yet lost.

"We don't yet know if any of these technologies will work, but we do know that we currently lack many of the protections needed to guard against abuse or overreach," [senior legislative counsel Neema Singh] Guliani added. "If we as a country decide to go down the path of tech-assisted contact tracing, our lawmakers must first enact robust safeguards to prevent these tools from exacerbating existing disparities and violating our civil rights and liberties."

I bet that doesn't mean it's unconstitutional to track home-schoolers or vaccine refuseniks, but that's a second-order quibble.  The "progressive interest group" allegation is not wrong.

"Instead of expending resources on the development of immunity passports, policymakers should focus on the implementation of widespread, free, and quick testing for Covid-19, without creating a new privacy-invasive data infrastructure that threatens everyone's rights," [senior staff attorney Esha Bhandari and Racial Justice Program director ReNika Moore] wrote. "There are better ways to both advance public health and protect individual rights that we should focus on in order to emerge from this crisis."

By "free" they mean "tax-supported."  That was the case for the polio vaccines on a sugar cube, and the smallpox shots the public schools used to administer, and yes, that's a less intrusive strategy than having the social media companies providing the contact tracing applications and selling masks and estate planning services as a way of financing them.