Get FISA Right

By: Harry Waisbren

The ACLU blogs about the USA PATRIOT Act Sunset Extension Act markup and vote this Thursdsay. Within the post they linked to two of our act.ly petitions on Twitter:

you can thank Senator Feingold for introducing the amendment by tweeting a message here and Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA)for voting for it by tweeting a message here.

They also repeat their call to congress to reform the Patriot Act, while specifying the following call to action:

These are the Democratic committee members who, in concert with all of their Republican colleagues, voted against adding  modest privacy protections that would have reined in the infamous “library records provision” and  need to hear from you: Senators Leahy (D-VT), Kohl (D-WI), Feinstein (D-CA), Schumer (D-NY), Kaufman (D-DE, Klobuchar (D-MN), Franken (D-MN) and Whitehouse (D-RI). These Senators need a reminder that Americans are actually pretty interested in keeping our Fourth Amendment rights.

And make sure to call Senators Specter and Cardin to thank them for supporting Feingold’s important amendment last Thursday and urge them to keep supporting the Constitution.  Call these Senators on the Judiciary Committee and tell them to protect your privacy this Thursday and vote for JUSTICE Act amendments that will truly reform the Patriot Act.

Perhaps we can help out reminding these senators about their oath of office via social media? I already wrote up a listing of all the social network accounts for the SJC Democrats, and it’d be great if we could use it to complement a campaign like this.

Either way, if you have a few minutes, take the ACLU’s advice and hit the phones!

By: Harry Waisbren

Josh Gerstein from The Politico relays the transcript of Attorney General Eric Holder discussing the Patriot Act.

Jon flagged a key excerpt on the GFR-Discussion group:

I think that the provisions that are being considered for reauthorizations right now provide us with a lot of useful tools that we have used not only in this matter but in others to protect our nations. I think there’s certainly a conversation that can be had about do they need to be re-examined, do they need to be modified in some way to be more sensitive to civil liberties concerns. But I can say that the tools as they exist are valuable ones and not in a theoretical sense, valuable in the sense that we have used them.

Holder’s statement here is part and parcel of what Marcy Wheeler has dubbed the Zazi justification for Patriot. I.E. that these “tools” have been used and have been “valuable”, so that must mean that we have to give up liberty in the name of security indefinitely.

However, I see a very key part here in the “conversation” he cites since our open letter to Obama last summer turned into a conversation through his follow up post directed to us.

With Holder’s suggestion, perhaps it is time for us, once again, to try to directly engage them precisely for that kind of discussion?

By: Harry Waisbren

Below are some Patriot Act news items via Twitter. If you’re on Twitter we could really use your help, and if any of you stumble onto any other stories slap it in the comments section or tweet it to us!

RT @HarryWaisbren: @emptywheel reports Conyers letter to make more info on section 215 in #patriotact public http://bit.ly/IZmlp

RT @HarryWaisbren: @emptywheel announces “Use Zazi to Gain New Surveilance Powers Day” http://bit.ly/N6jmc #patriotact

RT @GetFISARight: RT @jamesmcookusa: Durbin: classified #patriotact “real reason” 4 warrantless surveillance isn’t about terrorism http://tinyurl.com/ybxlpca

RT @GetFISARight: RT @normative My piece on the expiring #PatriotAct “lone wolf” provision now up on @reasonmag: http://tr.im/lonewolf via @matttbastard

RT @GetFISARight: RT @opednews: Your Privacy Matters: Daniel Ellsberg, the USA PATRIOT Act and You http://bit.ly/2YT0tz #patriotact #p2

RT @GetFISARight: RT @aaiusa: ACTION ALERT: Talk to your senators about amending the Patriot Act! http://bit.ly/Tqpdz #patriotact

RT @GetFISARight: RT @privacyint: Fact Check on FOX News’ Misleading #patriotact Reporting http://eff.org/r.79 (via @EFF) Good work from Cato.

RT @GetFISARight: @glenngreenwald eviscerates the Obama admin defense of the #patriotact http://bit.ly/3mWnZ2

By: Harry Waisbren

Our Facebook Action to Fix the Patriot Act starts tonight which will be complemented by a whole lot to of tweeting.

We came up with this campaign during our organizing call with the specific goal in mind of centralizing the moral nature of this fight while making its impact on regular Americans much more concrete.

To start, please change your status to this:

I’m not a terrorist–stop spying on Americans! Fix the patriot act.

We are coordinating this activism to correlate with our event during Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee Patriot Act hearing. Our big push for Patriot Act reform tonight and throughout the week is designed to build up to this larger event which will include live blogging from Marcy Wheeler and others in addition to Q and A’s from experts commentators.

As always, thanks for your help, and let us know if you have other ideas or questions in the comments!

As always we appreciate your RT’s!

@RussFeingold and @SenDurbin, thanks for your tireless efforts to reform the #patriotact http://act.ly/kn (please RT)

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

RT @GetFISARight: Come take part in our #patriotact Facebook status update campaign: http://bit.ly/A7CfA Pls RT

RT @novenator: Can Skittles help fix the Patriot Act and FISA? http://digg.com/d316Krc #patriotact || please #digg!

Thanks again!

—Harry

By: Harry Waisbren

We had an extremely productive call yesterday (scheduling note: so much so that we decided to cancel our bloggers cal). You can check out the call transcript, otherwise below are some of the key highlights:

Legislative Situation

We have to broaden our more narrow call beyond supporting Feingold and the JUSTICE act given how Leahy and Dianne Feinstein are watering down Leahy’s original legislation. At particular issue is the treatment of the reauthorization of section 215 and the presumably massive data mining project behind it. Unfortunately, they are trying to get this through without anyone knowing what is going on–similarly to how they passed the Patriot Act in the middle of the night–which is why naming and shaming them (particularly Leahy who knows this is all BS) has become so much more important.

Fortunately, key members of the House recognize this situation and are pushing back. Conyers, Nadler, and Scott wrote a letter to Attorney General Holder requesting that he make more information on the way Section 215 is used public, signifying that no matter what happens Thursday this fight is far from over!

Twitter/Facebook campaigns

We are pushing for tweets and FB status update changes tonight. The goal is to get a baseline number doing this while utilizing bloggers to advertise these campaigns to their communities as well. The particulars of the messages will be provided in a separate post for these purposes [Here for tweeting points; here for Facebook status update campaign], but generally we have decided to frame these arguments in a much more moralized tone that will resonate with the non-wonky.

Thursday event

Marcy will be liveblogging the hearing at her site, and we have decided to use Twitter as a relay system for her and anyone else covering it. This can be part and parcel of our activism—-especially if we target journalists with pointed tweets through this system—and in general can congregate experts and concerned citizens alike to share information by centralizing and distributing it on twitter. Much more to come on this as well!

By: Harry Waisbren

Point blank: we need to be more ambitious and innovative than what we have done so far with our social media campaigns.

Breaking the silence on the watering down of and delay to the Patriot Act and FISA reform efforts is no easy feat, especially since the political-media axis has either been yawning at this story or even trying to sweep it under the rug. Fortunately, we are chock full of resources at our disposal to break past these filters and push this story into the national dialogue.

Jon posted about using the #Skittles model for campaigns like ours, and we need to take his advice and help fill in the details on how we can best do this.

The basic idea’s straightforward: try to get enough momentum that the campaign goes viral on Twitter and Facebook, and then target some key politicians and journalists. At that point, hopefully traditional media wakes up and takes notice — and politicians are confronted with the overwhelming opposition online to the government surveillance and telecom immunity. With luck, it leads to a success like Get FISA Right had last summer organizing on my.barackobama.com with the support of progressive and technology blogospheres.

From this straightforward idea we need to discern how we can go viral with the highest chance of achieving media attention that further confronts politicians with the reality of such overwhelming opposition. We currently have campaigns in the works on both Twitter and Facebook, and we will be using both our organizing and blogger calls to come up with the best strategies for employing them.

In particular, we can use this kind of campaign to coordinate directly with the myriad of outlets who covered us last summer. I made a comprehensive Media Contact List that will act as an organizing hub for this outreach, and will have much more to report as this plan of action takes shape!

As always, any retweeting assistance is appreciated!

@SenArlenSpecter: Thanks for your #patriotact vote.  Please support @RussFeingold this Thursday! http://act.ly/mp (pls RT)

RT @getfisaright: Twitter and Facebook activism to fix the Patriot Act http://bit.ly/BMlLQ #patriotact #privacy

RT @novenator: Can Skittles help fix the Patriot Act and FISA? http://digg.com/d316Krc #patriotact || please #digg!

RT @normative: Your Monday #PatriotAct reform link roundup: http://tinyurl.com/patriotlinx

Also, if you’ve got a digg account, please vote for Can Skittles help fix the PATRIOT Act and FISA? …

Thanks as always!

jon

By: Harry Waisbren

The vote delay on the Patriot Act reauthorization has given us more time which we will be taking advantage of and then some in the days before Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee meeting.

Big moves are a foot, and below are some ways you can help make sure we take advantage of our best chance yet to get the Patriot Act and FISA right!

Monday 5 PM PST/8PM EST is our organizing call

We will be hearing expert updates on the legislative situation and will be fine tuning the launch of our Twitter/Facebook campaigns.

Tuesday 2 PM PST/5 PM EST is our bloggers call (time subject to change)

We will further discuss the legislative situation and will coordinate our social media campaign to ensure it is working in tandem with the interrelated work of our fellow blogger friends.

Other resources

• Jon posted in The Seminal about how we can use the extremely successful #Skittles model for our social media campaign
• Marcy Wheeler posted about Dianne Feinstein’s effort to completely eliminate “any requirement that the Section 215 records have to pertain to someone with a known contact with someone suspected to be an agent of a foreign power”
• Our tweetreach for #patriotact is over 20,000 via 50 tweets,  i.e. the total number of different people who would have seen tweets on this topic in their Twitter stream (h/t Tracy Viscelli)
• Sign our act.ly petition thanking Arlen Specter and asking him to support Feingold this Thursday.
• Lessons learned post and discussion in the comments section
• Update on last week’s SJC mark-up

This Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee plans to vote on two key amendments from Russ Feingold to the Patriot Act Reauthorization Bill.  Supporting these amendments is the best chance yet to convince the Senate to fix the Patriot Act.  We’re building on last week’s promising start on Twitter/Facebook action with another social media activism campaign.

Please join us — and let your friends know.

Here are four easy ways to help:

• On Twitter, thank Arlen Specter for his vote last week
• On Facebook, sign up for the Action to fix the Patriot Act event and invite your friends
• If you’re a blogger, repost these instructions to let your readers know — and write your own post if you have time.
• Help get the word out by sharing this information with your friends — via Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, email, and carrier pigeon.

Thanks!  Check back tomorrow for updates … and pass the word!

jon