Get FISA Right

I am posting here, almost in its entirety, a Rapid Response e-mail that I got today from Fight for the Future.  (well, not quite—we don’t fund-raise, certainly not for ourselves [we are barely here, anymore!] and not since we supported Russ Feingold in his last run for the Senate [We miss you, Russ!], so donation buttons have been removed, but not the “pitch”, as we really like Fight for the Future, and would seriously not object to any donations to them)

The quick version is this: Check out the Fight for the Future day of action next Tuesday, May 26th, 2020, here: SaveInternetPrivacy.org.

For background and details, read on:

The Senate just voted to reauthorize the USA Patriot Act and FISA surveillance authorities. That’s terrible.1

But here’s the deal: we just got handed a once in a lifetime opportunity to finally stop one of the worst types of government spying, by passing an amendment that would require a warrant for accessing Internet activity like web browsing and search history.

But it will only happen if we can mobilize a massive rapid response to force House leadership to act. And we’re expecting a vote early next week, which means they’re deciding right now.

We’re pulling together an EMERGENCY day of action this Tuesday.

Congress makes everything more complicated than it needs to be, but here’s the basics of what’s going on:

The Senate voted to pass the USA Freedom Reauthorization Act, which reauthorizes the Patriot Act and some FISA surveillance powers. That’s bad.

But, they also voted to pass a good amendment from Senators Lee and Leahy that will create some new protections to prevent surveillance based on solely on constitutionally protected political activity or religion. That’s good.

They failed to pass a bipartisan amendment offered by Senators Wyden and Daines that would require the FBI to get a warrant before spying on Internet activity. It lost by only one vote, but that’s only because there were several senators not present when the vote happened. That’s heartbreaking.

But here’s the good news: the bill as amended now goes back to the House. And now that we know we have the votes to pass the good amendment in the Senate, there’s absolutely no excuse for Speaker Pelosi to not allow a vote on it in the House. If she does, it will pass, and then it will pass the Senate.

And that would be a HUGE DEAL. Our position is that the Patriot Act should be repealed in its entirety, but getting this amendment passed would be the one of the most meaningful limitations placed on government surveillance in the last two decades.

Will you help us fight against the Patriot Act and stop the government from creeping on everything we do online? Please rush a donation right now.

We’ve heard from our allies in DC that House leadership is trying to find ways to sneak through a vote to reauthorize the Patriot Act WITHOUT allowing a vote on the good amendment that would require a warrant for Internet spying. But they’re scared they won’t have the votes.

If we can flood them with phone calls and emails and tweets right now and show them there will be massive backlash unless they allow a vote on the Wyden/Daines amendment, they’ll cave, and it will be a huge victory in the fight for Internet privacy and basic rights.

We’ve set up an email and call-in tool at SaveInternetPrivacy.org, and we’re helping build a big coalition of organizations from across the political spectrum to drive phone calls. Websites like Tumblr and Reddit are helping spread the word.

But it costs us money to connect the phone calls, send mass texts to supporters to generate actions, and mobilize our network of websites and advocacy groups. And no one was expecting this opportunity to arise. So we urgently need to raise the funds to cover these costs.

We know many people are struggling and not everyone can donate right now. But if you’re in a position to help, please chip in now so we can seize this chance to finally stop one of the worst types of Patriot Act surveillance.

For freedom,

Evan at Fight for the Future

Footnote:
1. The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/14/21257782/surveillance-bill-congress-senate-pass-usa-freedom-reauthorization-act

and if you have made it this far, take a look at this article that I just found on the Fight for the Future site: https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2020-05-23-facebook-told-my-followers-i-was-spreading-misinformation-about-government-surveillance-i-wasnt-63622dd7ae56/

We advocate rejecting the politics of fear, revisit the flawed FISA Amendments law and Patriot Act, and safeguarding the people’s rights under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

– Get FISA Right

Please, Senator Obama, Say NO to Telecom Immunity and Get FISA Right launched on June 26, 2008, with posts by Mardi on my.barackobama.com and Mike Stark on Open Left.  The media hook of Obama supporters using his own social network to pressure him with an open letter got a lot of coverage, and by July 2, we were the biggest group on MyBO.   On July 3, Obama responded to our open letter on MyBO  – an event that’s often seen as a watershed for social network activism in the US.*

Alas, it wasn’t enough.  Obama declined to support the filibuster by Senators Feingold and Dodd.   On July 9 2008 Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act – giving the government virtually unrestricted access to collect Americans’ international communications, and granting retroactive immunity to telecoms that had cooperated in illegal Bush-era spying.

We kept organizing after the vote, running crowdfunded pro-civil liberties TV ads during the Republican National Convention that August and in DC in January 2009 for Obama’s inauguration. In early 2009 we allied with DREAM Activists and undocumented youth, the Stonewall 2.0 LGBTQ movement, and peace activists in the Ideas for Change competition.  Since then, as newer groups like Restore the Fourth and Fight for the Future have taken the lead, we’ve come back to life from time to time – most recently, to let people know about Get FISA Right alum Shahid Buttar’s Congressional campaign.

Our tenth anniversary’s a good opportunity to check in, reflect on the past and what we can learn, and talk about what next.

So whether or not you were part of it back in the day, we’d love to hear your memories of Get FISA Right – and thoughts about the future of civil liberties activism.

Here’s a few thoughts to kick things off …

The view from 2018

As we predicted in 2008 (and even after the Snowden revelations highlighted the intelligence agencies’ abuse of their power), Congress has repeatedly expanded the scope of warrantless wiretapping – and failed to introduce any meaningful safeguards.  With the Trump Administration becoming increasingly authoritarian, and Democratic leadership complicit, risks that seemed abstract or hypothetical to many people a decade ago are overwhelmingly real.

And social networks have become a much more challenging place for activism since the glory days of Get FISA Right, Un Millón de Voces contra las FARC, and Join the Impact in 2008:

• As soon as he got elected,  Obama’s “Digital” team shut down my.barackobama.com’s organizing abilities – a huge lost opportunity.   In the decade since then, nothing’s emerged to replace it.
• Facebook has made their platform far less useful for activism than it used to be, while instead optimizing it to promote genocide and steal elections, and routinely suspends activists’ accounts (especially women of color)
• Twitter has helped the alt-right weaponize their tactics to the point where Amnesty International describes it as “toxic place for women”.

And so on.  It’s almost like people with power are scared of what might happen when people organize online and are doing their best to stop it.

Restore the Fourth protest in New York, 2013

Still, as Restore the Fourth reminded everybody in 2013 – and hundreds of thousands of people around the country are once again showing this week at ICE facilities as part of the week of action – grassroots energy remains out there — and people continue to connect on social networks. And as grim as the overall situation is, there’s also been substantial progress in a lot of areas. For example:

• Groups like Black Lives Matter, the Water Protectors, and StopLAPDSpying – along with intersectionally-focused leadership in civil liberties coalitions and academia – are increasingly highlighting the relationship of government surveillance to the prison-industrial complex, immigration, racism, and environmental justice.
• Momentum has shifted against Facebook and Twitter, and new decentralized platforms like Mastodon may prove to be better environments for civil liberties activists
• Explicitly anti-oppressive new projects like Torn Apart / Separados and Douglass, and new tools for activism like Signal, Loomio, SecureDrop, better.place, and Pursuance, are still at a relatively early stage but point the way to new possibilities

Learning from the past – and looking forward

As Get FISA Right heads into its second decade, there’s still a big potential role for grassroots social network activism in the fight for civil liberties – and for justice.   There’s a lot to learn from our experiences.  What worked?  What didn’t?   How would we adapt things to today’s, and tomorrow’s environment?

So please share your perspectives – in the comments here, on the Get FISA Right wiki, on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Mastodon, and Diaspora, or wherever else works.  We’ll collect the responses and follow up with a post in a week or two.  In the meantime,  help us get the word out by sharing, liking, tweeting, emailing, and otherwise letting people know.

Thanks to everybody who’s been involved with and supported Get FISA Right and the fight for civil liberties over the last decade.  Looking forward to the next ten years!

* The hundreds of the replies to Obama in the MyBO conversation are gone, but here’s the copy of Obama’s response the campaign cross-posted to the Huffington Post.   The Get FISA Right wiki has more of the context, including A brief history, Coverage, and  This time, *we’re* writing the history.

Tweet at your Congressmember today to prevent a sneak vote for mass surveillance!

In the House, surveillance hawks are trying to ram through a bill extending mass surveillance, without time for debate or amendment.

If we can delay or defeat this vote, every day will make a huge difference in this fight. Section 702—the legal authority the NSA relies on to engage in this mass surveillance—theoretically expires in 12 days; the closer we get to that deadline, the more leverage we have to pass real reforms.

The vote on this is likely to happen today, so there’s no time to make phone calls or send emails. Please tweet at your members of Congress using www.decidethefuture.org and urge them to vote NO on H. R. 4478.

Many thanks to Restore the Fourth for providing this timely notice to their subscribers, and apologies for reposting it here, but we are a shoestring volunteer group. We encourage our readers to get involved with Restore the 4th , which works to protect us from overreaching, unconstitutional mass government surveillance.