Patriot Act organizing: Action items and notes from the “Make some noise” meeting

February 7, 2011

Great call. Thanks to Rainey, Kevin, Jim, Patrick, Harry, Matt, Sally, Shahid, Lou, Rachna, and anybody else who was there!

Key takeaways

  • Short-term activism over the next 24+ hours focused on HR514; Thursday morning, launch a campaign focused on the Senate
  • Leahy (S.193) is better than other alternatives, nowhere near as good as JUSTICE Act, unlikely to make it to Senate floor
  • Clock is ticking: end-of-Feb deadline to reauth, Congress is on recess last week of the month. A two- or three-month extension is arguably the least awful of the options
  • Need to start preparing now for possible scenarios like: extension until December and next battle is in the shadow of 9/11; Feinstein bill extends patriotact and FISA until 2013.
  • Focus Twitter energy on the #patriotact hashtag.
  • Worth investigating POPVOX as an additional tool — it’s designed to work well in a situation where advocacy orgs are aligned on an issue but not in a coalition, also good functionality for focusing on specific votes.

Next steps

  • Online event tomorrow at 6 p.m. Eastern/3 p.m. Pacific, right before the House vote
  • Next phone call/chat Wednesday.  When’s good for you?  Please fill out the Doodle poll.
  • Senate campaign to launch Thursday.

Action items

  • Harry and Jon write up notes from meeting
  • Sallie to do a post tonight or tomorrow for the GFR blog (Chip has been giving feedback in email), Patrick to help
  • ? to do tech support for the blog
  • BORDC to shoot for Thursday morning launch
  • Jon and Harry to set up online meeting during vote tomorrow; Jim and Patrick to get word out on Facebook, Mark on myBO
  • Jon to follow up wtih rainey at EFF
  • Sallie and Rachna to follow up on ‘commerical address’ PopVox issue
  • Rachna to report other bugs to engineering
  • Rachna to send POPVOX one-pager, ? to post on the blog
  • all to try out POPVOX and let us know about any issues

There was a lot of great discussion at the meeting.  If you missed it, Harry’s excellent notes are almost as good as being there.  Even though it’s not a great situation, I was really encouraged by the energy on the call. So, let’s make some noise and see what happens!

jon

3 Comments | planning | Permalink
Posted by jdp23

The “techie” side of “Getting It Right”

November 13, 2009

The following posting is intended as part of the background information for a forthcoming Get FISA Right chat on the technological issues in “getting FISA right” or more generally balancing needed foreign intelligence gathering with the rights reserved and protected in the Constitution. We eagerly seek your comments here and your participation in the chat. Please post as comments here not only critiques of this posting, but also any ideas regarding who should participate in such a discussion, when we should hold it and any of the ideas that should be discussed.

We will also discuss the logistics of the chat at our next regular organization conference call or two Please join us.

— Jim Burrows

Introduction

One of the knottiest problems in “getting FISA right” is the question of precisely how to insure that our Constitutionally guaranteed rights are protected while any email is being spied upon. It’s a purely technical problem in one sense, but one that has huge repercussions in the Constitutional and political areas. As a dedicated nerd and and civil libertarian, let me see if I can lay it out clearly.

Read the rest of this entry »

7 Comments | Getting FISA right, planning, technology | Permalink
Posted by Jim Burrows

Bloggers wanted, part deux

March 4, 2009

First of all, apologies to everybody for being so quiet — I was sick for the last couple of weeks.  I’m feeling better now but am overwhelmed by other stuff so don’t expect to hear a lot from me.

Which is a pretty natural transition to the topic of this post.  Now’s a great time to transition the blog from being Jon-centric to being a group effort.  So we’re looking for bloggers — you, hopefully.  In particular:

  • volunteers to do the “dailyish updates”.  it’s pretty straightforward: check the blog for recent posts, look at the Google group and discussion board on the wiki to see if there are any hot topics, and check the news.
  • a weekly legal roundup, summarizing what’s happening and linking out to other analyses.  You don’t need to be a lawyer to help here, but you have to be comfortable with the level of detail that’s typically discussed by emptywheel, Threat Level, or Glenn Greenwald.
  • guest posts in the “what does it mean to get FISA right series”.  See Jim Burrows’ first post and my comment for more.

Other topics are welcome too…

If you’d like to help out, please reply in a comment!

Thanks,

jon

PS: Experienced bloggers are welcome, of course, but if you’re new to blogging, this is a great chance to learn.

Leave a Comment » | planning | Permalink
Posted by jdp23

GFR (heart) Sen. Feingold: continuing the planning for our February/March discussions

February 11, 2009

The planning’s for Get FISA Right taking advantage of Senator Russ Feingold’s upcoming visits to Wisconsin continues.  With the first opportunity this Saturday on Valentine’s day (February 14) at a Listening Meeting in Chilton, I’ve decided to dub this project “Get FISA Right (heart) Senator Feingold”, or “GFR heart Sen. Feingold” for short.*

There’s a lot going on here, with additional events in Madison and Milwaukee on March 1, a potential cable advertising opportunity in Green Bay on March 4, and an event in Kimberly on March 15.  To keep track of it all, we’re going to use a wiki page as the planning hub for this.  For example, here’s the current versions of our goals for the project.

  • get a better understanding of the situation in Congress and Senator Feingold’s strategy
  • get Sen Feingold to make a video on “what it means to get FISA right”
  • introduce ourselves to Senator Feingold and get a working relationship in place
  • pilot techniques that we can use as part of a 50-state strategy
  • get blog and media attention, at least at the local and state level, and hopefully nationally as well

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment » | planning | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by jdp23

Senator Feingold to listen to Get FISA Right! (Help wanted)

February 10, 2009

Update: please digg here.

One of the topics that came up in our phone call on Saturday was Senator Russ Feingold’s early March visit to Wisconsin.  Green Bay resident Jean told us that at his Listening Meeting there on March 4, she and several others were planning on bringing up domestic spying.  And lo and behold, Green Bay is on the ever-growing list of cities our partner SaysMe.tv supports!

So it’s a great opportunity to introduce ourselves to Senator Feingold and his staff, and to get some media attention as well: at least in Green Bay, probably in Madison and statewide, and hopefully even more broadly.  And in the broader context, this is a prototype for something that we’re going to want to replicate in all 50 states.

There are several different things we’ll need to be working on in parallel for this:

Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment | planning | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by jdp23

Next Entries »