The New York Civil Liberties Union is condemning an employer for taking extra efforts to specifically recruit "people of color." Oh, wait, the employer is the military -- that explains it; I guess they should be scrupulously color-blind in their recruiting (though the NYCLU's allies in supporting affirmative action have long pointed to the military's use of race as an affirmative action success story), even though other employers should indeed specifically recruit non-whites.

The story also reports:

Eleni Angelos Healey, a senior at Trinity School in Manhattan and one of the plaintiffs in the suit, said she had been harassed by letters and e-mail from military recruiters. Her repeated efforts to stop them had failed, she said.

"I'm really glad," Ms. Healey said, "that there's going to be a much easier way for kids to get their names off these lists as soon as possible."

Well, I certainly don't support spam, and if someone asks to be off a mailing list -- including the military's mailing list -- their request should be honored. But it doesn't strike me as a terribly serious civil liberties violation.

(The NYCLU has also apparently been complaining about the military's use of its recruiting database, and the story reports that the Defense Department settled the NYCLU's lawsuit by "agree[ing] to use the database only for recruiting, giving up the possibility of sharing it with law enforcement and intelligence agencies." I assume that the basis of the lawsuit was some statutory objection to the use of the database -- there are no constitutional that I know of -- objections to the use of such a database -- but I don't know the statutory scheme governing the question and thus have no opinion on the subject.)