“During the Democratic primary for President of the United States, the activist base rallied behind the Constitution and the efforts of Senators Chris Dodd and Russell Feingold to deny immunity for telecommunications companies that helped the Bush Administration spy on American citizens without a court order.
Senator Obama pledged to “support a filibuster” of ANY bill that contained retroactive immunity. Now that he has won our votes in the primary, he has decided to vote in favor of retroactive immunity for the telecoms.”
— Mardi, June 26 2008, in Please Don’t … Senator on my.barack.obama.com; links no longer accessible, even in archive.org
“The group was conceived on a listserv for progressive, politically active people, said Mike Stark, an activist who is a law student at the University of Virginia. He wrote an initial e-mail to the group arguing: “Obama is getting mad props for social networking, why don’t we use social networking to let him know that he can’t keep elbowing his progressive base — the people who got him the nomination — away from the policy table?””
— Norm Cohen, Obama Backlash in His Online Backyard, New York Times, July 1, 2009
Please, Senator Obama, Say NO to Telecom Immunity and Get FISA Right launched on June 26, 2008, with posts by Mardi on my.barackobama.com (aka MyBO). The next day, Mike Stark’s post on Open Left kicked off a barrage of posts in the progressive blogosphere. On June 29, our collaboratively-authored Open Letter To Senator Obama: Please Vote NO On Telecom Immunity hit #1 on Digg. The media hook of Obama supporters using his own social network to pressure him quickly picked up mainstream media coverage, first from Ari Melber at The Nation, quickly followed by the Wall Street Journal, Wired, Time, the New York Times …
By July 2, we were the biggest group on MyBO.
On July 3, Obama responded to our open letter on MyBO and the Huffington Post – an event that’s often seen as a watershed for social network activism in the US.*
Get FISA Right’s grassroots energy was a valuable complement to the multi-year work by civil liberties organizations like EFF, EPIC Privacy, and CDT — and by champions in Congress like Russ Feingold and their staffers — and for a moment it seemed like we had tipped the scales. But alas, it wasn’t enough.
On July 9 2008 Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act, including Section 702 – giving the government virtually unrestricted access to collect Americans’ international communications, and granting retroactive immunity to telecoms that had cooperated in illegal Bush-era spying.
In 2012, despite the Snowden revelations, Congress voted to reauthorize FISA Section 702 for another six years.
In 2018, despite years of documentation of how inttelligence agences broke the law and Carter Page incident, Congress voted to reauthorise FISA Section for another six years
In 2024, Congress voted to reauthorize and expand intelligence agencies powers under FISA Section 702 for another two years.
And in 2026 …
“A key surveillance power expired early Saturday amid a congressional stalemate over renewing it”– A Key Spying Power Expired. Will Foreign Surveillance Go Dark?, Dustin Volz, New York Times, June 12 2026
Whoa. Wasn’t expecting that!
Since the FISA Court has authorized the program through March 2027, the “lapse” (as everybody seems to be referring it) doesn’t actually end Section 702 surveillance; Brennan Center’s one-pager and Patrick Eddington’s FISA Section 702 Lapse Assured—What Now? on Cato at Liberty have the details. Still, it’s a huge victory for FISA reformers. As Jake Leperruque of CDT says in the Washington Examiner, there’s only one way out of Congress’s FISA quagmire; congressional leaders need to “stop stonewalling and allow votes on reform” EPIC Privacy notes
“Senators from both sides of the aisle have introduced bills that would reauthorize Section 702 while making crucial reforms: The Government Surveillance Reform Act of 2026 (GSRA); the Security and Freedom Enhancement Act of 2026 (SAFE Act); and the Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act of 2026 (Protect Liberty Act).”
All of these include reforms like a warrant requirement and closing the data broker loophole, which have broad public support as well as bipartisan support in Congress.
Thanks to everybody who’s been involved over the years!
Get FISA Right kept organizing after the vote,:
- In August 2008, we partnered with SaysMe.tv ran crowdfunded pro-civil liberties TV ads during the Republican National Convention
- In January 2009 we allied with DREAM Activists and undocumented youth, the Stonewall 2.0 LGBTQ movement, and peace activists in the Ideas for Change competition, and ran another crowdfunded add in DC in January 2009 for Obama’s inauguration.
- During the unsuccessful JUSTICE Act battle in 2011-12, the first of many not-yet-successful attempts to introduce reforms during authorization, we partnered with Twazzup on a Twitter-based FISA-related news and video aggregator and coordinated regular meetings between civil liberties organizations and grassroots activists.
Since then, as newer groups like Demand Progress, Restore the Fourth,and Fight for the Future have taken the lead, we’ve come back to life from time to time during FISA and Patriot Act reauthorization battles.
Communications have been a huge challenge for the Get FISA Right ever since my.barackobama.com shut down (a huge missed opportunity for the country as a whole, not just us). Our self-hosted forum never got to critical mass, and neither did our Google Group, our Facebook group and page, or our Medium blog. Wetpaint got sold and then went away, so pages like This time, we’re writing the history are only available via archive.org — and the vast majority of the links don’t exist any more.
Still, quite a few Get FISA Right members from 2008 have stayed involved in activism, and it’s always a pleasure to run into you. It’s really amazing what we’ve accomplished as an all-volunteer grassroots group … so thanks to everybody who’s been involved over the years!
Stay tuned!
For years, civil libertarians like Get FISA Right have warned of the risks of the government abusing their broad spying powers. With the administration targeting protestors, immigrants, and anybody who opposes fascism, the stakes of FISA renewal are higher than ever. As Specer Ackerman discusses in Big STELLAR WIND Energy, “an unresolved question is whether the Security State and its allies would actually accept the loss of what the intelligence agencies consistently describe as one of their most important authorities.”
More positively, though, the good news is that there’s much broader awareness of the risks of the surveillance-industrial complex than ever before. The vast majority of Americans have always opposed warrantless wiretapping, but it’s been challenging to mobilize peoiple. With momentum opposing data centers building across party lines, and restance to Flock’s AI-based police surveillance systems exploding,that seems like it’s changing.
This year’s FISA battle is kind of on hold right now, with Democrats refusing to vote for anything as long as the odious Bill Pulte is Acting Director of National Intelligence and Trump holding FISA hostage to try to force the Senate to pass the voter-suppression SAVE America Act, but is likely to heat up again. If they don’t pass anything before the midterms, they can also take a crack at it in the post-election “lame duck” sessions in November and December — or try attaching it to must-pass legislation like the NDAA. So there’s still a long way to go.…
So stay tuned!
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… reposted this!
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