Live Q&A with Edward Snowden today at 11 AM Eastern

June 17, 2013

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.


Video of Friday, June 14 NSA protest press conference/rally

June 17, 2013

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:

  • Part 1: Sue Udry (Defending Dissent/MCCRC), Shahid Buttar (BORDC), Chris Townsend (United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America)
  • Part 2: Kwazi Nkrumah (MLK Coalition of Los Angeles)
  • Part 3: Zainab Chaudry (CAIR-MD)
  • Part 4: Ginger McCall (EPIC), Dany Sigwalt (Washington Peace Center)
  • Part 5: Naji Mujahid (Jericho Movement); Capitol Hill PD interruption, followed by move to nearby plaza
  • Part 6: Lon Burnam (TX State Representative)
  • Part 7: David Moon (Demand Progress)
  • Part 8: Hendrick Voss, Rachel Reist (School…

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Draft agenda for tonight’s organizing call

June 16, 2013

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!

  • Recap of action items from last meeting
  • Should we endorse legislation?  Should we do votes on the blog?
  • Updates on Restore the 4th and DC protest
  • Where we can add value
  • Preparing for NRN
  • Working groups
  • Tech platform (if time permits)
  • Next steps

 


Joe Biden (2006) Debates Barack Obama (2013) on Wiretapping

June 16, 2013

Via EFF.


Friday noon: press conference/rally about NSA near Russell Senate Office Building

June 12, 2013

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.

“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.”

Read the rest of this entry »


Daniel Ellsberg speaks. . . .

June 8, 2013

I am linking to RSN’s interview with Mr. Ellsberg, whom I had the honor to meet in June 2011 at the Progressive Democrats of America convention in Cleveland, Ohio.
I am tempted to cut and paste the entire article here, as it is so filled with wisdom.  Instead, here is the link (http://bit.ly/ZZa8My), and I will select the following paragraph:
“There’s a very general impression that Bradley Manning simply dumped out everything that he had access to without any discrimination, and that’s very misleading or mistaken on several counts. He was in a facility that dealt mainly in information higher than top secret in classification. He put out nothing that was higher than secret. [Information he published] was available to hundreds of thousands of people. He had access to material that was much higher than top secret, much more sensitive. He chose not to put any of that out.”
And this exchange:
“TL: If you were in Bradley Manning’s situation, would you have released as much information as he did?”
“DE: I probably would not put out materials that I hadn’t read. But now we have three years of experience with essentially no harm, and a great deal of good. [Former Tunisian president] Ben Ali, I think, would still be in Tunisia. I don’t think you could have counted on the New York Times having put out the Tunisian material that Le Monde chose to put out. That was critical in bringing down Ben Ali. That led to bringing down [former Egyptian president Hosni] Mubarak. Looking at that altogether, with that experience, I think his decision to put out a great raft of secret material was justified and I would probably do it myself now if I had the chance.”
O.K., one more:
“I believe there’s strong reason to believe that without Bradley Manning’s revelations, some 20,000 to 30,000 troops would be in Iraq right now. That had been Obama’s plan. He was negotiating to that end. But the disclosure by Bradley Manning of a cable that disclosed that the State Department was aware of an atrocity that we had officially denied, and was neither investigating it further nor prosecuting it, made it politically impossible for the prime minister in Iraq to allow Americans to stay in Iraq with immunity from Iraqi courts.”


Sign the EFF Petition!

June 7, 2013

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.


Well, it has been a long time. . .

June 6, 2013

. . . 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!


FISA Amendments Act Redux

May 27, 2012

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!)

https://www.aclu.org/secure/sem-tell-congress-fix-fisa-and-stop-warrantless-wiretapping?ms=gad_SEM_Google_Search-FISA_FISA-Name_fisa_p_14325892582

Time to get active again!


March 25, 2012

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…

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