Get FISA Right

By: Harry Waisbren

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing “Reathorizing the USA PATRIOT Act: Ensuring Liberty and Security” is scheduled to begin at 7:00 am PST. I’ll be watching the webcast and doing some more live-tweeting from @GetFISARight, and if you’re so inclined come say hi or just comment on what you think about the #PatriotAct!

Update: The hearing just finished, and you can check here on the wiki for a log of the #patriotact tweets.

By: Harry Waisbren

I live-tweeted on @GetFISARight during Tuesday’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties hearing on the USA PATRIOT Act.

The tweets are saved here on our wiki, and I’ll be back at it tomorrow for the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing “Reathorizing the USA PATRIOT Act: Ensuring Liberty and Security”. Definitely say hi if you’re watching or paying attention to the feed (and if you do, we’re focusing our attention on the #patriotact tag).

There is a lot going on very quickly, so if you come by a relevant article/blog post it’d be a big help if you can relay the link to us in the comments or to @GetFISARight. We could use these links for our news roundup posts especially, which we’ll be making for these hearings and more as we progress.

By: Harry Waisbren

The ACLU has come out with a campaign to Tell Your Senators You Want Patriot Act Reform. Their rhetoric is aggressive, including their descriptions of “The Bush administration’s calculated assault on our civil liberties and privacy rights”, the creation of a “surveillance superstructure”, and the need to investigate the abuses in its call for sweeping reform.

It calls for us to—

Please contact your Senators and your Representative right now and tell them it is time to re-examine our security superstructure to restore our civil liberties.

The link leads to an email petition that promotes our “opportunity to bring the Patriot Act in line with the Constitution”. This opportunity, however, requires that we “make sure the Senate Judiciary Committee supports the Feingold JUSTICE Act.”

They argue that in order to adequately reform the Patriot Act, “at the very least”, Congress must make these four critical reforms:

• Limit electronic surveillance laws such as the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act so that they are targeted only at suspected terrorists and spies and so that personal information about innocent Americans is no longer swept into government programs and databases.
• Amend the criminal material support statute expanded by the Patriot Act so that it criminalizes only behavior intended to further terrorist activity, not good faith charitable activities of Americans.
• Amend the ideological exclusion provisions of immigration law expanded by the Patriot Act so that foreign scholars, experts and advocates are not denied visas solely on the basis of their beliefs.
• Prevent federal agents from spying on individuals and infiltrating organizations based solely on their exercise of First Amendment rights such as religious practice or political protest activities, as permitted under recently revised Attorney General Guidelines.

There’s absolutely no doubt that people will be screaming about how this sort of reform will be to blame for an upcoming sequel to 9/11, which is precisely why I’m such a fan of the ACLU’s aggressive, blunt attitude here. While writing this post I thought about how refreshing it is to hear from civil liberties stallwarts who do not kowtow to “They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security” as Ben Franklin described them in his day.

Anyways, good for the ACLU, and when you have a minute, send an email and help their push for Patriot Act reform!

To help prepare for a weekend social media activism campaign, we’ve scheduled a couple of organizing phone calls:

• Thursday, September 24, 5 p.m. Pacific/8 p.m. Eastern
• Saturday, September 26, noon Pacific/8 p.m. Eastern

The goals for Thursday’s meeting include introducing people to each other, a shared understanding of strategy, identifying key deliverables and working, and establishing a media outreach plan.  On Saturday, we’ll finalize our collateral (instructions for Twitter and Facebook, sample emails, and more details for bloggers), officially launch, see where we are on the media front, and figure out what next.

It should be exciting … stay tuned!

Here’s the Anyvite invitation with the details on Thursday … or if you’re on Facebook, here’s the event.

jon

By: Harry Waisbren

I’m happy to report that we are moving forward on our media strategy, the need for which I described yesterday. Jon took action and started a Justice Act Media List on the wiki, and I have been preparing initial outreach via Twitter in particular using TPM’s Twitter Rooms.

I will have more to say about Twitter soon, but I want to emphasize a comment I made to Jon’s wiki page about utilizing our members’ media capacity to the fullest. The importance of this was further described in my Targetting the Media Post:

Fortunately, the constituency of our community remains chock full of new media entrepreneurs—some of whom are amongst the most adept in the world of leveraging new technologies to break past older filters that close down democratic discourse.

Our community includes media mavens participating in various capacities such as Ari Melber, Marcy Wheeler, Mike Stark, Jon Pincus, Tracy Viselli and many, many more. If we are able to hone the capacity of our bi-partisan media community to amplify our message through various mediums (blogs, social networks, web-video, print, etc) I have absolutely no doubt that it would rival any other kind of coverage we could hope to get—in fact, it would act to spur much wider mainstream media coverage as is.

By: Harry Waisbren

I think we have a lot more work to do determining how we can best leverage the media in our efforts.  I commented in the strategy section of the JUSTICE Act Organizing wiki page that we need to start thinking about this, and I also posited that a Twitter campaign targeting media members could be particularly helpful at this early juncture.

The importance of media became even more self-evident to me while contemplating the earlier post about Get Fisa Right’s size. That post notes that it’s hard to say how big we are right now, especially given the difficulty of leveraging particular services to efficiently reconnect us with past participants. However, a missing aspect here is that as we start achieving media coverage reaching out will become dramatically easier and focusing on achieving new members will quickly become more important.

Last Summer we had the phenomenal success of helping to directly change the national discourse. However, the role of achieving mainstream media attention must be acknowledged here if we are to repeat the success. Fortunately, the constituency of our community remains chock full of new media entrepreneurs—some of whom are amongst the most adept in the world of leveraging new technologies to break past older filters that close down democratic discourse.

Media doesn’t control what we think…but they do control what we think about. This is why we must use media to help the country think about civil liberties again!

Things are expected to move quickly in the Senate; I’ve heard that the SJC may report a bill out as early as October 1.  So that’s likely to be where a lot of the action is.  Center for Democracy and Technology’s Patriot Act Sunsets Should Prompt Re-consideration of Anti-terror Powers ends with a useful section on What’s next in Congress for the Patriot Act?

In the short term:

• 11 a.m. Tuesday, September 22,  House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and
  Civil Liberties hearing on the USA PATRIOT Act, chaired by Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY).  Speakers include Suzanne Spaulding and Michael German of the ACLU, former GOP Representative Tom Evans, former GOP Representative from Delaware, and former DOJer Kenneth Weinstein.
• 10 a.m. Wednesday, September 23: Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on on reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act.

Also, for those wanting to know more about the JUSTICE Act, here are various organizational endorsements:

Read the rest of this entry »

Here it is.

Thanks to Julian Sanchez for posting it, and Ben Masel for the info.  Julian’s blog post PATRIOT meets JUSTICE ends with

Obama’s Justice Department has called for the renewal of the expiring PATRIOT provisions but declared itself “willing to consider” possible “modifications” that would enhance accountability and due process. Now let’s see if the folks who held Obama’s feet to the fire when he reneged on his promise to filibuster the FISA amendments will push him to throw the weight of his office behind JUSTICE.

Hmm.  I wonder who he’s talking about?

We’re working on a talking points page on the wiki … thanks to Chip Pitts for kicking things off.  More here.

jon

How big is Get FISA Right?  Hard to say …

• President Obama, please get FISA Right Organizing for America (formerly MyBO) has 23,198 members.   Of these, about 2570 subscribe to the mailing list; we don’t have a good way of getting in touch with the others
• Change.org idea: has 12796 supporters; we don’t have a good way of getting in touch with them.
• Facebook group: 2023 members.
• Wetpaint wiki : 165 members.
• Twitter account: 148 followers.
• Google group: 139 members.
• MySpace page: 78 friends (but nobody knows the password)
• Facebook page: 61 fans