As might have been expected, today the New York Civil Liberties Union sued the city over its new practice of searching the bags of subway passengers, despite reports that the public doesn’t seem to be resisting.
ACLU: Fourth Amendment rights violation and “unlikely to have any meaningful deterrent effect on terrorist activity”!
NYC: The searches meet all legal requirements, preserving “the important balance between protecting our city and preserving individual rights”!
Who will win? Stay tuned.
P.S. Amusing New York-vs.-the-rest-of-the-world bit about the searches in the “Letters of the Week” section of this week’s Village Voice:
Editor’s note: Chisun Lee’s article about Tony Lu, an immigrant rights activist who designed T-shirts declaring his objection to the new random bag search policy in New York’s transit systems [“NYers to NYPD: ‘I Do Not Consent to Being Searched,’ ” July 21, villagevoice.com], received an extraordinary response from readers. Nearly all disagreed with Lu’s protest, many were angry, and some voiced their opinions in the most extreme terms. At deadline, the Voice had not received a letter from a New Yorker.