Get FISA Right

Update, November 22: thanks once again for the great feedback!  Please check out the final draft!

We received some really fantastic feedback from our proposed open letter to Obama and have revised it accordingly — for example, this draft is about 40% shorter. We’ve tried to incorporate everybody’s perspectives … please have a look at this version and see what you think:

Dear President Obama,

In response to Get FISA Right’s July 2008 Open Letter, you promised to run “a White House that takes the Constitution seriously, conducts the peoples’ business out in the open, welcomes and listens to dissenting views, and asks you to play your part in shaping our country’s destiny.”    With Patriot Act and FISA reform once again before Congress, we woiuld would like to accept your invitation.

Last July, you told us of your intention to direct your Attorney General to “make further recommendations on any steps needed to preserve civil liberties and to prevent executive branch abuse in the future.”   Once Patriot Act reform legislation was introduced, AG Holder talked about “a conversation that can be had” about civil liberties concerns.   So far, the conversation has been disappointing. Your administration opposed long overdue and badly needed protections for civil liberties and urged their eventual rejection by the Senate.  Absent this intervention, the legislation emerging from the Senate and House Judiciary Committees would likely include greater civil liberties protections.

We ask you and your administration to take a strong stand to support significant reform of key sections of the Patriot Act, incuding National Security Letters, Section 215, Lone Wolf, Sneak and peak, and material support.  Legislatively, we ask for your public support of HR 3845 and 3846, and amendments adding similar protections to S 1692.

Just as importantly, in light of your promises regarding open government, we ask you to respect the people’s passion regarding our rights as citizens and to respond in an open and transparent way.  Much of the conversation has gone on behind closed doors or via anonymous sources, rather than out in the open.  With your background in constitutional law, and insight into the complex tradeoffs you must make as President, you are uniquely qualified to help all Americans to get beyond the false tradeoff between national security and civil liberties.

President Obama, The Organizing for America caption still reads, “I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington…I’m asking you to believe in yours.”   We believe, and hope you do too.

Americans of all stripes have grown increasingly wary of giving up liberty for the illusion of security.  Get FISA Right’s 23,000 community organizers are the largest grassroots issue-oriented group on Organizing for America, and we are only one of many organizations across the political spectrum working to restore or civil liberties.  If you join us, you can inspire the same wave of grassroots energy that propelled you to the Presidency.  Together we can reject the politics of fear, and turn the page on the abuses to our constitutional rights of the last 8 years

Signed,

By: Harry Waisbren

We are holding a Tweetchat this Tuesday, 8 am PST/ 11 am EST held in our Patriot Act Action Hub.

It will be an ideologically and demographically diverse, expert-infused discussion about the details of the Patriot Act reform legislation that we couldn’t recommend enough!

Furthermore, it is also going to double as a launch event for our new Open Letter to President Obama, which we hope he will once again respond to as he did last summer. We need to build up support though to get to the point, and this Tweetchat is designed to be both a vehicle for promoting our letter while also acting as a resource to educate those just joining us by “delving into the details” of the Patriot Act reauthorizaton legislation.

To participate, you can tweet to #PatriotAct and/or by commenting directly in the chat room in the Patriot Act Action Hub. Hope to see you there!

By: Harry Waisbren

Tonight’s call was organized specifically in light of the release of our proposed Open Letter to Obama (call transcript available here). Now, it’s game time so to speak, as we finish final edits and prepare for its wide release Monday evening.

In particular, we will be firming up the “ask” to go into the details of the specific legislation much more concretely. There are other links to add, words to change, and the general tone to assess, so please continue giving us feedback in the comments. The finish line is in view though, and we’ve begun transitioning from constructing the letter to preparing to distribute it in a major way.

With that in mind, we will be holding a conference call Monday at 4 pm PST/ 7 pm EST to coordinate launch activities. Stay tuned, as we will soon be relaying more details on our tweetchat and crowdsourced-based press outreach strategies.

Thanks to Chip, Amy, Jim, Mark, Korkie, Brandon, and Jon for coming to the call. Momentum is building in a big way, and it’s quite exciting to see more and more people become increasingly vested in this project!

Update, November 21: thanks all for the great feedback!  Please check out the (much shorter) revised draft.

Read the rest of this entry »

By: Harry Waisbren

Out latest call has illustrated that we are successfully building momentum. We have been making major progress on our open letter to Obama in particular, and are soliciting preferred times for our final call this Thursday before we launch this letter to president.

Please let us know when you can make it.

In the meantime, you can read through the call transcript or check below for other key takeaways:

Legislative situation

• There have not been any alerts regarding the scheduling of the Reyes amendment in the House Intelligence Committee, which is reason to believe it will once again come down to the wire.

• The Patriot Act’s sunset is December 31, and a bill must pass the house, senate, through conference, and back before it can be made into law.
• Strategically, this means we are confronted, once again, with a looming deadline.

Open Letter

• We highly encourage anyone/everyone to provide their input ASAP, as the time before Thursday’s call is the last opportunity to do so (for this letter at least). Thanks to Mark for jump starting conversation.
• The launch is scheduled to commence Monday. Afterwards, we will need everyone’s help to spread the letter as thoroughly as we are able. Special thanks to Jessica of Care2 for offering to coordinate efforts and to Amy who has volunteered to take the lead in organizing a press conference!
• Tuesday we are holding a launch event in the form of a tweetchat regarding the nature of our current surveillance laws, including a variety of expert participants from across the ideological spectrum. Jim Burrows has started this conversation on the techie side of getting it right, and we will be providing an update on this soon as well.

Bipartisanship

• As Chip Pitts of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee emphasized on the call, the burgeoning coalition we are developing constitutes many of the independent voters that Obama had previously wooed, yet who have become disenfranchised due to his civil liberties track record in office. Special thanks to Chip as well for offering to host the letter and facilitating signatures through the BORDC!
• Our message is positive, as we want Obama to get this right, and we intend to show him the way back to the views expressed by the Obama from the campaign trail on this integral issue.

• Considering our president’s overt focus on bipartisanship, and his recognition of the political rewards to be reaped from maintaining the support from independents, we hope he will be inclined to listen to the collective voices of those of us attempting to transcend partisanship and ensure that democratic and republican politicians alike may not abuse the constitution or subvert the rule of law.

Thanks to Chip, Jim, Jessica, Jon, Mark, Amy, Korkie, and Soren for joining. We’ve made some major ground but are just getting our largest initiatives revved up. Much more to come!

By: Harry Waisbren

We have made a lot of ground on some of our final conceptions for our open letter to the president, both during our November 10th Patriot Act and FISA organizing call and through messages voiced to us through a variety of communications channels aggregated in the comments section of our last update.

We can use this post and its comments section to go through and discuss some of the broader changes and additions to consider as we take our final steps to edit and launch the letter:

Need for a crisp call to action

We have long been going over the need for a crisp call for action. On our last call, we decided on focusing on transparency from Obama and ending the back room deal making that have defined this debate since the beginning.

Our ask is simple: we want him to speak out about his position more clearly, and then act in accordance with it.

If he does this, then it removes the need for back room deals in the first place…

Broadening the scope

This was another topic broached on our last call in light of a desire to focus more on the larger principles behind the matter rather than on specific, more temporary legislation.

The Patriot Act and FISA are both aspects of a much larger debate about civil liberties in our society that has been going on since the founding of the country. Focusing on the broader issues at hand, such as the role of intelligence in our society, could be prudent.

Tone

Linda Young discussed the benefits of emphasizing working together and avoiding an overtly combative tone. This has long been considered a proof point for GFR, as both our original letter and his response were polite in nature, and clear aspirations towards a civil discourse have been cited as an instigator for his engagement with us.

However, this most definitely does not mean that we must restrict our passion or mask our disappointment. We must be frank and open about how we feel, especially since that is our primary ask from him.

Editing for length

Craig Nazor pointed out that we should edit this letter down to avoid any redundancy. This makes a lot of sense also in terms of being conscious of the length in order to maximize the chances for it to be read.

This project is collaborative by design, so please do let us know what you think (especially if you disagree with the broader changes discussed).

Our open letter has already reaped the rewards possible only through harnessing the power of a crowd, so keep it up!

By: Harry Waisbren

Various news items out to report. Thought this would be a good time to aggregate them, and if you see any others please put the links in the comments section:

Chris Strohm of GovExec.com writes about the Democratic impasse in regards to the Patriot Act.

Declan McCullagh of CBSNews.com writes about the implications to privacy and news as DOJ asks for visitor lists from news sites as they did for indymedia.us.

Julian Sanchez of the CATO institute posts a clarifying post about how The Patriot Act ‘Lone Wolf’ provision is irrelevant to Fort Hood.

Marcy Wheeler cautions us about Sen. Lieberman’s potential exploitation of Ft. Hood to eliminate the Lone Wolf provision, extrapolating on  Julian Sanchez’s definitive piece about Lone Wolf.

Spencer Ackermann posts about the failure of our already expansive surveillance apparatus from preventing the Ft. Hood massacre.

an investigation is necessary to determine if the intelligence agencies did, in fact know about Hasan and why his murderous attack nevertheless succeeded. At this point “radicalization” in the armed services — a surely minute and peripheral concern, even after Hasan — is less important than determining why it was that the architecture of surveillance, pushed on the public so heavily as vital to preventing precisely what happened at Ft. Hood, failed us.

Marcy Wheeler has more analysis about Nidal Hasan and Ft. Hood.

Chip Pitts relayed this article about complaints from lawyers about a “second class” judicial system being developed through military commissions.

By: Harry Waisbren

We once again had a very exciting Patriot Act and FISA reform call with some major action items before us. We’ll have much more to report about where we’re heading soon enough with a myriad of opportunities for participation, but for now you can check here for the call’s transcript/chat log notes or below for some of the key takeaways:

Legislative situation

• The Reyes amendment will be marked up in the House Intelligence Committee within the next few weeks
• We have to make sure that it is the House Judiciary Committee bill and not the House Intelligence Committee bill that is the template when it does come to the floor
• Rep. Nadler has introduced H.R.984 – State Secret Protection Act of 2009, which correlates to our work in terms of the opaqueness to how privacy and civil liberties issues are dealt with.
• Secrecy remains a major unifying concept here, and runs specifically counter to Obama’s promises of transparency

Upcoming Tweetchats and Open Letter

• There is a growing bipartisan concern for this lack of transparency, and we are pushing forward on utilizing the format of our highly successful tweetchats last week to coordinate with an increasingly ideologically and demographically diverse constituency
• Julian Sanchez of the CATO Institute endorsed this strategy and agreed to participate, and we will be working with him in particular as we pursue conservatives and libertarians who care about these issues
• Jim Burrows discussed the difficulty of truly getting FISA right, which prompted the idea of utilizing a tweetchat to engage the technical community to share information about what is really going on amidst such secrecy
• We will be utilizing a tweetchat to launch our open letter to President Obama. We will be making final edits to the letter over the next few days (with more integral help from Amy), and are planning on launching next week.
• However, we most definitely could still use any of your input as we race to the finish, so please chime in with any/all of your ideas!

Thanks to Julian, Jim, Amy, Mark, and Jon for joining the call. We have a whole lot in motion, so stay tuned!

By: Harry Waisbren

Today has been a great one for the fight for civil liberties! The House Judiciary Committee met to finish their markup of the USA Patriot Amendments Act of 2009, and low and behold, we receive a big win as the HJC voted 16-10 to send the bill to the floor with most of the major reforms left intact.

The hearing had began inauspiciously as an amendment by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) to preserve the “lone wolf” provision was narrowly defeated 15-15. However, apprehension gave way to appreciation as we saw civil liberties champions emerge as Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) introduced a House version of the JUSTICE Act (which would fix the Patriot Act while also repealing telecom immunity) and Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) proposed and passed an amendment that requires the declassification and periodic review of FISA and NSL programs.

With these victories in hand, we need to ensure that momentum does not wane as we gear up for the fight ahead. We are already planning for our next organizing call for this upcoming Tuesday, so please let us know what times you can make it.

In the meantime, our suggested tweets provide a variety of options to send, but we are focusing on the following tweets in a carrot and stick approach to these legislators in particular:

@RepTammyBaldwin congratulations on your amendment passing. Thanks for supporting the constitution! http://act.ly/Rh0 #patriotact

RT @eff: thx to Rep. Holt for intro’ing House version of JUSTICE Act to fix #PATRIOTact & repeal telco immunity! http://eff.org/r.5b2

@LamarSmithTX21 is willing to give up liberty for temporary security. How un-American! http://act.ly/Res Pls RT #patriotact

Furthermore, we are pushing forward on our Open Letter to President Obama in a big way, and are striving for as much input as we can get for this crowdsourced effort. We have been making some major progress, but definitely want as much help as we can attain for this 21st century grassroots effort.

Lastly, the two days largely spent tweetchatting away in the Patriot Act Action Hub have been an enormous success. The conversation contained important opinions from experts and lay people alike, and the swift actions and information sharing fostered through the hub are clear examples of the very best qualities that the medium has to offer.

Rounding thank yous to Amy, Kevin, Julian, Jim, Brandon, Rebecca, Jon, Korkie, Jeff, and Brishen for chiming in the chat log, to the myriad of tweeters whose tweets were aggregated in the feed, and to anyone else who followed along. The democratic discourse we engaged in over the past few days is a sort of which our founding fathers only could have dreamed!

Update: even more great news–the HJC referred the State Secrets reform bill to the House floor.