Live Q&A with Edward Snowden today at 11 AM Eastern
Post your question at the Guardian. As he makes his way through the thread, they’ll embed his replies as posts in the live blog. You can also follow along on Twitter using the hashtag #AskSnowden.
Live Q&A with Edward Snowden today at 11 AM Eastern
Post your question at the Guardian. As he makes his way through the thread, they’ll embed his replies as posts in the live blog. You can also follow along on Twitter using the hashtag #AskSnowden.
Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition
On Friday at noon, near the Russell Senate Office Building, Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition and a number of other organizations held the press conference/rally announced in the press release posted here and elsewhere last week. Here is video of that event, recorded, edited, and uploaded by Norman van der Sluys — thank you!! — and organized as a single playlist.
Individual videos:
View original post 104 more words
We’re having an organizing call at 10 PM Eastern/7 PM Pacfic tonight. Here’s the draft agenda. Suggestions welcome, here on the blog or in the PiratePad document — which is also where the notes will be!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 12, 2013
Contact:
Martine Zundmanis – 202-531-0748
Shahid Buttar – media@bordc.org / 202-316-9229
What: Civil liberties coalition challenges secret dragnet spying
Where: the corner of Delaware and Constitution Avenues near Upper Senate Park
When: June 14, 2013 at 12:00 pm
let the NSA know you’re coming at the Facebook event page! 🙂

“Boundless Informant” screen shot; click for larger image. Via The Guardian.
A press conference and rally protesting the National Security Agency’s abuses of law-abiding Americans will be held on Friday, June 14, 2013 at 12 noon on Capitol Hill, at the corner of Delaware and Constitution Avenues near Upper Senate Park.
The action has been called by a coalition of local and national organizations in the Washington, DC, metro area, including the Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition, Defending Dissent Foundation, CODEPINK, the Washington Peace Center, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, the Council on American–Islamic Relations-Maryland, Demand Progress, Institute for Policy Studies, Bradley Manning Support Network and others.
“We are outraged that our government has given itself the power to conduct intrusive spying on us through our phone records, emails and other digital media,” said Thomas Nephew of the Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition. “It’s no accident that these powers of surveillance were barely explained to Congressmembers, let alone to the general public for an open debate. The only way this extensive intrusion of privacy could occur was behind an undemocratic cloak of secrecy.”
Just want to refer folks to the EFF—they have a petition to investigate the actions of the government the way the Church Commission did in the 1950s. Sign, donate if you are able and motivated, and keep spreading the word.
. . . but today’s news brings me back here to process the insanity. It has been revealed that Verizon has been sending records on all telephone traffic to the NSA. The entire Twitter community, it seems, is sharing a joke—800,000 Tweeting, “Can you hear me now?” And, courtesy of the Washington Post, we have details about just how much our government is spying on us: http://wapo.st/1ba8gQL shows that they are mining data from nine Internet service providers.
Did the 23,000 of us who originally formed the group that ultimately set up this blog make the wrong call back in July 2008 and after, when we told our candidate, “You made the wrong choice on the FISA warrantless wiretapping act, but we will support you anyway”? Would we have been better to walk away and support a third-party candidate? There is no way to know, of course; the much-desired glimpse into an alternative universe for comparison is not possible except in science fiction. The clear truth is that we are at least disappointed, at most frightened for our democracy.
While we can still post here, spied upon or otherwise, welcome back to the conversation!
The FISA Amendments Act is back, and our candidate from 2008 is sadly acting true to the form he established, which caused so many of us such distress back then. As he voted in July 2008, so now he is asking for full reauthorization of warrantless wiretapping. See the following article for details:
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/24/warrantless_spying_fight/singleton/
Here is a petition to sign and forward (Thanks, ACLU!)
Time to get active again!
Looking for video creativity here — we’re hoping videographers will make counter-announcements using the WMATA random bag search announcements played over the PA system on the DC subway system. We provide one example, but we think you can do better!
Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition
Anyone who’s used the Metro for any length of time practically knows it by heart –two little chimes, followed by this announcement by Metro Transit Police Chief Michael Taborn:
The Metro Transit Police will be performing random inspections of carry-on items throughout the Metro system…
Now everyone else can listen in too, thanks to the magic of digital recording devices and the tedium of switching one on every time I went into the Metro for weeks on end — except when I forgot to, which was invariably when the announcement would play.
The announcement closes, “…and remember: if you see something, say something, and call the Metro Transit Police” at 202-962-2121.
So the video above says what *we* see: suspicionless, warrantless searches, security theater, Fourth Amendment violations, and more. The video also reminds people they’re free to refuse the search, but notes that Chief Taborn has also famously warned that…
View original post 189 more words