Get FISA Right

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

Shortly after the Obama Administration announced its general support for renewing three sections of the USA PATRIOT Act, U.S. Senators Russ Feingold (D-WI), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and six others today introduced the Judicious Use of Surveillance Tools In Counterterrorism Efforts (JUSTICE) Act.

It’s aimed to “reform the USA PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendments Act and other surveillance authorities to protect Americans’ constitutional rights, while preserving the powers of our government to fight terrorism,” according to Feingold’s office.

— Norman Oder, Library Journal

Julian Sanchez at Cato@Liberty and Kevin Bankston at EFF have more.

I’ve already been contacted by a reporter asking what Get FISA Right will do.

Suggestions?

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The notes from the “birds-of-a-feather” session I led at Computers, Freedom, and Privacy are written up on the CFP Wiki.  Alas, we didn’t get the online aspects to work; still, we had a dozen people there in person, including Get FISA Right members Thomas Nephew and Chip Pitts.  It was a great discussion.  The opportunities we identified include

• building a broad, diverse coalition
• focusing on cost, dignity, and human rights issues as well as privacy and the constitution
• using anti-corporate activism against the companies supplying equipment and profiting from surveillance
• involving the technical community and domain experts

and a lot more.  We also discussed some of the tactical issues about the upcoming PATRIOT Act vote: the need for an accurate vote count; a pressure campaign on key Congresspeople like Jane Harman, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, and Harry Reid; and the importance of powerful visual images.

Check it out!

jon

Ari Melber’s The People’s Press Conference in The Nation introduces Ask the President, a project where people can suggest and vote on questions that will potentially be asked at a White House press conference.   Other sponsors include The Nation, The Washington Times, Personal Democracy Forum, Change.org, Democrats.com (Bob Fertik, whose question continues to lead), and Jack and Jill Politics.

President Obama’s next press conference is at Tuesday, 8 PM Eastern (Facebook event here).

Wouldn’t it be great if somebody asked about FISA and the Patriot Act?

Please vote for our question

Before you were elected, you committed to having your attorney general review domestic surveillance policy. What are your plans and timeframe to get FISA right?

at http://p2pt0.wetpaint.com/page/Ask+the+President/

Also, Bob Fertik of Democrats.com has a question as well, asking President Obama to appoint a special prosecutor.   During the Ideas for Change competition, we overwhelmingly voted to endorse Bob’s special prosecutor proposal, so please consider voting for his question as well.

Bob’s currently in #2 overall at a net of +254 votes.  We’re currently at a net of +31.  Our approval rating is over 90%.  Very cool!

The wiki page has various suggestions for promotion via email, Twitter, etc.    One thing we could really use is for people to  blog about this and include the handy embed widget like Bob has.  If you do, please leave a link in a comment here so that everybody can see it.

The best way to follow updates is here, via the @GetFISARight Twitter account.  If anybody wants to provide updates on the blog here, please let us know in a comment.

Thanks!

jon

Jared Allen reports in The Hill:

More than a dozen of the GOP’s most conservative members on Thursday introduced a bill to reauthorize controversial Patriot Act provisions set to expire later this year.

The group of House Republicans – who include Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind.) and Judiciary Ranking Member Lamar Smith (R-Texas) – want to extend for an additional 10 years the ability of national security agencies to conduct “roving” wiretaps, have access to library patron information and greatly expand the reach of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Those provisions of the Patriot Act were set to expire this year.

Earlier in the year than we had expected …

I didn’t know what to expect before I went to Sen. Russ Feingold’s listening session in Fond du Lac this morning, but all early indications warrant immense confidence that progressive activists in general and Get Fisa Right in particular can leverage these for impressive results. My experience this morning has made me supremely confident that our goals for the “GFR Heart Sen. Feingold” campaign are entirely reachable, and I think it will be a boon not only for our work but for the progressive movement in general if we take advantage of these!

First things first—-a recap of what these listening sessions are like. Sen. Feingold pledged upon his first senatorial run to hold open meetings in all 72 counties in Wisconsin every single year. This must be quite the strain on him, yet this strain did not seem to mitigate the utility of these open meetings as he went beyond the call of duty (and over the time limit) to ensure that he answered EVERY SINGLE QUESTION posed to him.

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My post on Get FISA Right’s dailyish updates is up in the Political Tactics section of The Seminal.   Here’s the introduction:

Every activism campaign faces the challenge of keeping people informed without overloading them. It’s particularly acute for Get FISA Right because we’re explicitly trying to engage with people who prefer to get their information via social network sites (Twitter and Facebook so far) as well as the more traditional blogs and email.* Hopefully our experiences will be useful for other activism campaigns as well.

Our goal is for people who have even a little bit of time available to be able to quickly see what’s up — and where they might be able to help. For active Get FISA RIght members and allies in the civil liberties community, it’ll be a minimum-investment way of staying informed. For the 95%+ of members who only have time intermittently, it’ll be a quick way of coming up to speed when there’s an action alert. And for potential members, bloggers, and the media, it’ll be an easy way of tracking what’s going on and deciding whether it’s interesting.

Assuming we can make it work, that is. It’s worth a try.

Rich Jensen has an entertaning, albeit somewhat inaccurate, summary on digg.  Speaking of which: digg it! And it’s also on reddit, with a much better title: Keeping in touch with the online world.  Yeah, that’s what I meant to call it, really.

Thanks to Josh Nelson and The Seminal for the invitation to guest-blog!  For a new blog like ours, opportunities like this are extremely valuable.

Update, February 9: notes available here.  no download this time, sorry 😦

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