Get FISA Right

By: Harry Waisbren

Our latest suggested Patriot Act and FISA tweets:

RT @GetFISARight: Our next #patriotact & FISA organizing call is this Monday, come join: http://bit.ly/120ubS

RT @jdp23: Social network activism and the future of civil liberties http://is.gd/4HHGD (Please RT) #patriotact (via @getfisaright)

@RepHankJohnson @RepJacksonLee: thanks for sponsoring #PatriotAct and FISA reform! (Please RT) http://act.ly/R19

@RepJaneHarman thanks for sponsoring #PatriotAct reform, please also sponsor H 3846! (Please RT) http://act.ly/R1a

Thanks for helping spread the word!

I’ve got a post up on The Seminal and Pam’s House Blend, highlighting the opportunity to broaden and recharge the civil liberties community.   The thesis is that Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Care2, OFA and other social network sites:

• provide a way to engage with Millennials and other diverse groups of people who care a lot about the Patriot Act — but are not currently involved with civil liberties activism.
• make it easy for people to let their politicians know their feelings — and recruit their friends in the process.
• allow civil liberties organizations to get beyond the media blackout and provide accurate information to everybody.
• complement in-person local campaigns like People’s Campaign for the Constitution’s local ordinances and good ol’ fashioned letters-to-the-editor

The last section of the post has some suggested next steps.   There’s also some cool graphics too.   Please check it out.

As I say in a comment, thanks to the Get FISA Right members and our allies for the hard work.  We’ve been taking the lead on social network activism in the civil liberties area for over a year now, I honestly believe we’re making progress!

jon

By: Harry Waisbren

Our latest organizing call was a smashing success, and we heartily thank Marcy, Mark, Derrick, Mandy, Soren, Jim, Jo,  Jon, Korkie, Amy and anyone else following along on the phone or online for attending!

We made a whole lot of ground discerning our shorter term direction while fortifying our longer term foundation. With much in the works, we decided on next Monday as a followup call and are circulating a poll to find which time—4, 5, or 6 PM PST—works best.

Mandy from the ACLU confirmed that this Wednesday will be the House Judiciary Committee markup of Patriot Act and FISA reform legislation. Get excited, because come Wednesday, we will be holding a live interactive chat in the Patriot Act Action Hub—-which we are also using to coordinate our actions and to roundup news items.

In the meantime, here are some other key takeaways:

• Our priority in the house remains targeting HJC democrats to sign on as co-sponsors to both bills, in particular Rep. Jane Harman  given her influential status (not to mention her upcoming primary battle), but Reps. Schiff, Wasserman-Schultz, Berman, Baldwin, Quigley, and Wexler were emphasized as well. For more, see the targeting discussion call excerpts.
  
• As we construct our narrative, Amy brought up a fantastic idea of more assertively focusing on the personal stories of individuals whose privacy has been violated.
• Jim started a discussion about the need for increased outreach to libertarians and conservatives, and suggested the Campaign for Liberty as an organization we should particularly work to align with while Mark emphasized the NRA.
• We decided to continue building momentum writing our open letter to President Obama despite remaining unsure of when we would release it, as it would not necessarily be a great tactic for our shorter term initiatives.

Remember that you can check the Patriot Act Action Hub for the latest campaigns and news items (or just to contribute in the chat room), and feel free to poise any questions you have in the comments section!

Update: chat log from the call available here.

Here’s the current draft-in-progress for our Fall 2009 open letter — a combination of excerpts from letters Nancy, Lois, and Sally wrote, along with a few points from our discusson on last Tuesday’s phone call and a quote from his previous letter to us.  There are several excellent comments on the wiki with various suggestions that we still need to incorporate — please check them out, and jump into the discussions, or leave your opinions here on the blog.

Dear President Obama,

With FISA reform once again in Congress, we’d like to take the opportunity to continue our dialog.

In July 2008, in your response to our previous open letter, you committed to have your Attorney General conduct a comprehensive review of all our surveillance programs, and to make further recommendations on any steps needed to preserve civil liberties and to prevent executive branch abuse in.  You also told us of your intent as President to run “a White House that takes the Constitution seriously, conducts the peoples’ business out in the open, welcomes and listens to dissenting views, and asks you to play your part in shaping our country’s destiny.”

We have a hard time seeing how your administration’s work behind the scenes with Senator Sessions to weaken privacy and civil liberties protections during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Patriot Act reform manifest this commitment.   In the courts, too, your administration’s repeated backing of Bush Administration arguments for hiding information is troubling.

We urge you to live up to the stated goals of your campaign and avoid continuing the horrific practices of the previous administration. You have taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, and we had every reason to believe that as a professor of Constitutional law, you would honor that pledge.  Please, do not betray our trust.We ask you to …

Please, Senator Obama, reject the politics of fear on national security, and take the lead in restoring our Constitutional rights.

Signed,

…

Hmm.  Just what do we want him to do?

jon

PS: Other feedback welcome too, of course!

By: Harry Waisbren

In my post, Questioning Obama on the Patriot Act, I described how Attorney General Holder’s discussion of the “conversation to be had” about modifications for civil liberties concerns could help dictate our response. In particular, I cited our open letter to Obama last summer as instigating a conversation of sorts with then Senator Obama by way of his follow up post directed to us, and asked whether or not it is time for a follow up–based on our own precedent–through writing another open letter.

As we take steps forward by working together on our collaborative effort to draft a new open letter, we must recognize the enormity of what we did last summer. Our organizing of Obama supporters in a group on his own social network, My.BarackObama.com, was an example of a crowdsourced action that set an entirely new model for communicating with our government. Critical acclaim abounded, as we were cited as part of Fast Company magazine’s rationale from Ellen McGirt for ranking the Obama campaign as the “top startup company of the year” as well as an example of an innovative lesson the Obama administration learned and exhibited in Jeff Jarvis’s book What Would Google Do.

Our precedent, and the innovative model for citizen engagement it exhibited, was explained by Alan Rosenblatt in his post Will They Rise Up and was recently reemphasized during The Progressive Revolution Will be Tweeted edition of the Internet Advocacy Roundtable.

I found this aspect of his post to be particularly poignant:

“when citizens are included in the decision making process, at least in terms of seeing it transpire and having a clear opportunity to engage with government leaders in the process of the policy formation, they become more connected and more supportive……at the core, democracy is about compromise and working together to solve problems for the good of the whole society. When the whole of society feels they are part of the process for solving the problems of the day, they become shared stakeholders, rather than opponents.”

Personally, I know that Obama’s direct engagement with the Get FISA Right community and recognition that we were “shared stakeholders” made me a greater supporter of his, despite any of our ongoing disagreements. I privilege the discovery of new methods for citizens to engage their representatives extremely highly, especially in light of my wholesale agreement with Chris Bowers’ The Medium is the Movement concept. The Get FISA Right experience inspired me to engage with other efforts to communicate in this manner, including Change.org’s Ideas for Change and the collaborative Ask the President effort, and I view the relaunch of Get FISA Right to be an extension of this ongoing effort to improve the way our country engages in democratic discourse and makes decisions.

As we take steps to follow up on our open letter with a new one, we must recognize that we are not only pushing to reclaim our civil liberties. Rather, we must see this as another opportunity to, once again, lead the way in helping innovate new means for citizens to engage their elected officials through tools that our founding fathers only could have dreamed of!

By: Harry Waisbren

Check out our latest Tweeting points below:

@RepHankJohnson @RepJacksonLee: thanks for sponsoring #PatriotAct and FISA reform! (Please RT) http://act.ly/R19

@RepJaneHarman thanks for sponsoring #PatriotAct reform, please also sponsor H 3846! (Please RT) http://act.ly/R1a

I’m not a terrorist–stop spying on Americans! Fix the #patriotact. http://act.ly/Rf Pls RT

Thanks to Reps Conyers, Nadler, and Scott for Patriot Act and FISA reform bills http://bit.ly/2nKcOE #patriotact

Dialin information and a draft agenda is at http://bit.ly/oct27call, which is also where we’ll have the online chat during the call.

Candidate goals:

1. Agree on short-term goals, priorities, strategy
2. Plans, owners, and next steps for Twitter, OFA, Care2, Facebook, blogospheres (tech/new media/libertarians./progressives/moms)
3. Social network activism recommendations for civil liberties organizations and bloggers

If you’ve got a few minutes between now and then, please have a look at Jessica Pieklo’s Justice not dead yet, Harry Waisbren’s Next steps and open questions, and my Social network activism and the Patriot Act (DRAFT).

And let’s use this thread for some pre-meeting brainstorming and discussion about various topics.

For example:

• Who are the right politicians to target?  I’ve got some thoughts from a Twitter-centric perspective in the first comment
• What’s the best timing for an open letter/media release from Get FISA Right?
• What kinds of techniques could work better on Facebook and MySpace?

Or anything else that leaps to mind!

jon

By: Harry Waisbren

Our latest Patriot Act/FISA organizing call exhibited the tidal wave of passion and growing momentum to act amongst civil libertarians of all stripes. A quick summary has already been posted and the complete chat log is available here, but now we must cauterize the flurry of fantastic ideas into action!

Our timing could not have been better, as mere hours beforehand Representatives Conyers, Nadler, and Scott introduced bills to reform the PATRIOT Act (HR 3845 and 3846). Marcy Wheeler has provided a detailed analysis of what is being proposed, and below you will find the next steps and open questions laying before us as we strive to make an impact on this integral issue.

First off, our short-term priority is to ask House Judiciary Committee members (and other Representatives) to sign on as co-sponsors for the bills. We will be complementing the ongoing efforts from other organizations through both our social media perspective in addition to more traditional forms of activism, and are already thanking the politicians courageous enough to stand up for civil liberties with the following tweet:

RT @GetFISARight: Thanks to Reps Conyers, Nadler, and Scott for Patriot Act and FISA reform bills http://eff.org/r.4at #patriotact

The first question before us is how we transition our theme away from the JUSTICE Act while learning from our prior experiences supporting it. One essential lesson is that we must push back against the closed door briefings being cited ominously as a rationale for why civil liberties infringement remains necessary, especially considering some of the members of those meetings (especially Senator Feingold) are directly contradicting that argument. We have to encourage such dissent while working to find ways to make it easier for them to speak out.

This is especially important considering the lingering and widely held notion that relinquishing liberty in order to “stay safe” is worthwhile instead of inherently un-American. Combating this meme is essential, as although it is constantly cited by our mainstream media, if it is explained in simplified and personalized terms Americans will recognize the antithetical nature of the argument to citizenship.

During the call, a consensus emerged during the call that targeting the media has become increasingly essential. We are beginning to discern our narrative as part of our pitch to these opinion makers of why they should cover this, and when we do we will conduct all sorts of new media and more traditional letters to the editor campaigns to try to break this ongoing silence.

Fortunately, the model we utilized last summer did just that, and we will be building upon past practices even more so moving forward. This will be most manifest in our decision to release another open letter to Obama, and we are hoping for as much input as possible as we collaboratively produce this document. However, the more general narrative of our previous campaign also is one we can replicate, as the “democrats vs. democrats” story was one that held a great amount of salience amongst mainstream media members who otherwise would not cover this issue. Unlike last summer though, we have a better understanding of who might become champions in this fight including Arlen Specter (particularly in light of how he has already been pushed to the left due to his primary battle with Rep. Joe Sestak), Rep. Alan Grayson, Rep. Ron Paul, etc.

Despite any congressional targeting though, as we push forward on our open letter we need to transition our sights to president Obama. He, more than anyone else, inspired our nation in large part by his calls for change, yet his capitulation on FISA last summer remains a point of dismay amongst even his most ardent supporters. This is why our fight is part and parcel of Mike Lux’s argument that Obama must fight for regular people, and we must continue our effort to show our president the way.

Americans are not frightened sheep willing to give up our citizenship and become subjects. Our most recent organizing call and this effort in general exemplify this truism, and it is precisely why our fight is about ensuring that the ideal of America will persevere.

There is much left to do, and we hope that you will join us both on our upcoming call next Tuesday (2pm PST/5 pm EST) and throughout the week as we develop new means to make our voices heard!

Harry will have more details and the full transcript later, but I just wanted to give a quick update on today’s excellent phone call.  Our timing was perfect: earlier today, Representatives Conyers, Nadler, and Scott introduced bills to reform the PATRIOT Act and FISA (HR 3845 and 3846).  House Judiciary Committee markup is expected in two weeks.

The short-term priority is to ask House Judiciary Committee members (and other Representatives) to sign on as co-sponsors for the bills.  My guess is that as with the Senate, a lot of organizations will be have phone and email campaigns.  Kevin Bankston of EFF pointed out that we’re uniquely positioned to complement these via Twitter and Facebook.  New members like Judy Chu could use some encouragement; other names tossed around included Wexler, Grayson, and Ron Paul.  As a first step, let’s continue to thank politicians who are courageous enough to stand up for civil liberties.  If you’re on Twitter, could you be kind enough to retweet?

RT @GetFISARight: Thanks to Reps Conyers, Nadler, and Scott for Patriot Act and FISA reform bills http://eff.org/r.4at #patriotact

Another potential opportunity is to couple online activism with traditional letters-to-the-editor campaigns.  Jim C volunteered to write up some bullet points; with additional suggestions from Jon, Sally will help turn this into a blog post.

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