Freedom of Who's Speech?

I am a proud Reagan conservative and in my opinion the ACLU is a left-of-center liberal organization. With those facts in mind, whenever I find myself on the same side of an issue as the ACLU, I check my moral compass, beliefs and bearings.
When the ACLU defended the free speech rights of Nazis in Skokie, Illinois in the late 1970s, as repugnant as their views are and were, I understood the value of free political speech.
When the ACLU filed a "friend of the court" brief during the NRA’s challenge of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Laws, I cheered loudly from the sidelines.
So as the Obama administration and the Democrat controlled congress has introduced legislation calling for free speech curbs on the Internet, the ACLU’s silence has been deafening.
On November 10th a story on the CBS News website caught my eye: A federal grand jury in Indianapolis had served a supoena on a self-described, left-of-center blog and news website, Indymedia.us. The supoena demanded, "IP addresses, (the unique, largely unknown address every computer carries) times, and any other identifying information including email addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts" of Indymedia site visitors. The supoena did not seek information on writers or contributors of information to the site; it wanted this very private and personal information about the site’s visitors. The supoena further demanded, "Indymedia’s readers’ Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers and so on."
If Indymedia had instructions for making truck bombs or suicide vests on it’s site, the supoena would be reasonable. That’s not the case. The site is a site about OPINION and ADVOCACY. Agree or disagree with their views, opinion and advocacy is a large part of political free speech.
Oh, just one more thing, I originally found the link to this story on drudgereport.com. Even though the supoena was eventually withdrawn, the Department of Justice threatened to charge the site’s administrators with obstruction of justice for disclosing the existence of the supoena. In one man’s opinion, the ACLU’s complete silence on this issue and on the issue of federal control over political free speech on the Internet speaks volumes.