NRA and ACLU Make Strange Bedfellows in New Lawsuit
OutdoorHub Reporters 09.06.13
On Wednesday the National Rifle Association (NRA) filed an amicus brief in support of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) against the controversial phone surveillance programs being conducted by federal agencies. According to Reuters, the NRA said the collection methods could allow the creation of a national registry of gun owners, threatening individual privacy and safety.
In its brief, the NRA stated that surveillance of phone and internet records will give “the government not only with the means of identifying members and others who communicate with the NRA, but also with the means of identifying gun owners without their knowledge or consent.”
Information regarding these surveillance programs was leaked earlier this year by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, creating a storm of controversy for the agency. The ACLU filed a lawsuit against the NSA and its leaders soon afterwards, as well as naming the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Defense, and Department of Justice as defendants. Claiming that the surveillance programs violate the First and Fourth Amendments, the suit calls for an immediate halt to the information monitoring and that certain data collected under the program be deleted. Fox News reports that the NRA believes the data could be instrumental in tracking and profiling gun owners.
“If programs like those currently justified by the government’s interpretation are allowed to continue and grow unchecked, they could also—contrary to clear congressional intent—undo decades of legal protection for the privacy of Americans in general, and of gun owners in particular,” the brief states.
The NRA argues that the NSA could simply record the phone numbers of people who called gun stores, gun shows, shooting ranges, or the NRA itself.
“Under the government’s reading of Section 215, the government could simply demand the periodic submission of all firearms dealers’ transaction records, then centralize them in a database indexed by the buyers’ names for later searching,” the NRA states in the brief.
The ACLU gladly welcomed support from the NRA while political commentators said it was a strange, if logical, partnership. In the past the two organizations have been critical of one another due to their sometimes-conflicting agendas. The two groups are backed up by general support from journalists and media professionals. According to The Hill, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Fox, Bloomberg, National Public Radio, and The New Yorker filled a brief alongside the NRA in support of the ACLU’s lawsuit.
