ACLU sees its membership increase since Sept. 11

WASHINGTON -- Whether protecting the disenfranchised or standing up for the right to offend, the American Civil Liberties Union has sided with those claiming they were wronged, even if it meant a distinctly minority stand.

But since Sept. 11 and the government's expansive campaign of monitoring and detention, people are turning to the 82-year-old organization to help safeguard their liberties. Among them are conservatives who made the phrase "card-carrying member of the ACLU" a political insult, but who now are signing up.

"Larger numbers of American people have realized that the ACLU is fundamentally a patriotic organization." executive director Anthony Romero said. There are now 330,000 dues-paying members, 50,000 of whom joined after the attacks.

The group has been in the thick of legal challenges to the government's broadening anti-terror powers.

Last week, in response to an ACLU lawsuit, the government agreed to tell the group by mid-January which documents it is willing to release about its increased surveillance activities.

Conservative support

Especially notable among the new enthusiasts are conservatives who once thought the ACLU represented everything that was wrong with the left.

"They are very useful and productive force in jurisprudence," said Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill.

Conservatives such as Hyde are mindful of the history of an organization that was lonely in its defense of positions now accepted as universal: Blacks who suffered spurious prosecutions in the 1930s, Japanese interned in the 1940s, books banned as obscene now regarded as part of the literary canon.

Yet the group continues to exasperate some with its uncompromising positions -- against a Ten Commandments monument in a Frederick, Md., park, against the government's attempt to get libraries to use computer filters to block sexually explicit material from children, against drug sweeps that it claims are racially motivated.

The organization has budgeted $3.5 million for a campaign that asks Americans to monitor their government monitors and report abuses. It is a mirror image to the government's plan to empower some Americans to check on their neighbors, under a program known as the Terrorism Information and Prevention System.