Get FISA Right

By: Harry Waisbren

Our Facebook Action to Fix the Patriot Act starts tonight which will be complemented by a whole lot to of tweeting.

We came up with this campaign during our organizing call with the specific goal in mind of centralizing the moral nature of this fight while making its impact on regular Americans much more concrete.

To start, please change your status to this:

I’m not a terrorist–stop spying on Americans! Fix the patriot act.

We are coordinating this activism to correlate with our event during Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee Patriot Act hearing. Our big push for Patriot Act reform tonight and throughout the week is designed to build up to this larger event which will include live blogging from Marcy Wheeler and others in addition to Q and A’s from experts commentators.

As always, thanks for your help, and let us know if you have other ideas or questions in the comments!

As always we appreciate your RT’s!

@RussFeingold and @SenDurbin, thanks for your tireless efforts to reform the #patriotact http://act.ly/kn (please RT)

I’m not a terrorist–stop spying on Americans! Fix the #patriotact. http://act.ly/Rf Pls RT

RT @GetFISARight: Come take part in our #patriotact Facebook status update campaign: http://bit.ly/A7CfA Pls RT

RT @novenator: Can Skittles help fix the Patriot Act and FISA? http://digg.com/d316Krc #patriotact || please #digg!

Thanks again!

—Harry

By: Harry Waisbren

We had an extremely productive call yesterday (scheduling note: so much so that we decided to cancel our bloggers cal). You can check out the call transcript, otherwise below are some of the key highlights:

Legislative Situation

We have to broaden our more narrow call beyond supporting Feingold and the JUSTICE act given how Leahy and Dianne Feinstein are watering down Leahy’s original legislation. At particular issue is the treatment of the reauthorization of section 215 and the presumably massive data mining project behind it. Unfortunately, they are trying to get this through without anyone knowing what is going on–similarly to how they passed the Patriot Act in the middle of the night–which is why naming and shaming them (particularly Leahy who knows this is all BS) has become so much more important.

Fortunately, key members of the House recognize this situation and are pushing back. Conyers, Nadler, and Scott wrote a letter to Attorney General Holder requesting that he make more information on the way Section 215 is used public, signifying that no matter what happens Thursday this fight is far from over!

Twitter/Facebook campaigns

We are pushing for tweets and FB status update changes tonight. The goal is to get a baseline number doing this while utilizing bloggers to advertise these campaigns to their communities as well. The particulars of the messages will be provided in a separate post for these purposes [Here for tweeting points; here for Facebook status update campaign], but generally we have decided to frame these arguments in a much more moralized tone that will resonate with the non-wonky.

Thursday event

Marcy will be liveblogging the hearing at her site, and we have decided to use Twitter as a relay system for her and anyone else covering it. This can be part and parcel of our activism—-especially if we target journalists with pointed tweets through this system—and in general can congregate experts and concerned citizens alike to share information by centralizing and distributing it on twitter. Much more to come on this as well!

By: Harry Waisbren

Point blank: we need to be more ambitious and innovative than what we have done so far with our social media campaigns.

Breaking the silence on the watering down of and delay to the Patriot Act and FISA reform efforts is no easy feat, especially since the political-media axis has either been yawning at this story or even trying to sweep it under the rug. Fortunately, we are chock full of resources at our disposal to break past these filters and push this story into the national dialogue.

Jon posted about using the #Skittles model for campaigns like ours, and we need to take his advice and help fill in the details on how we can best do this.

The basic idea’s straightforward: try to get enough momentum that the campaign goes viral on Twitter and Facebook, and then target some key politicians and journalists. At that point, hopefully traditional media wakes up and takes notice — and politicians are confronted with the overwhelming opposition online to the government surveillance and telecom immunity. With luck, it leads to a success like Get FISA Right had last summer organizing on my.barackobama.com with the support of progressive and technology blogospheres.

From this straightforward idea we need to discern how we can go viral with the highest chance of achieving media attention that further confronts politicians with the reality of such overwhelming opposition. We currently have campaigns in the works on both Twitter and Facebook, and we will be using both our organizing and blogger calls to come up with the best strategies for employing them.

In particular, we can use this kind of campaign to coordinate directly with the myriad of outlets who covered us last summer. I made a comprehensive Media Contact List that will act as an organizing hub for this outreach, and will have much more to report as this plan of action takes shape!

As always, any retweeting assistance is appreciated!

@SenArlenSpecter: Thanks for your #patriotact vote.  Please support @RussFeingold this Thursday! http://act.ly/mp (pls RT)

RT @getfisaright: Twitter and Facebook activism to fix the Patriot Act http://bit.ly/BMlLQ #patriotact #privacy

RT @novenator: Can Skittles help fix the Patriot Act and FISA? http://digg.com/d316Krc #patriotact || please #digg!

RT @normative: Your Monday #PatriotAct reform link roundup: http://tinyurl.com/patriotlinx

Also, if you’ve got a digg account, please vote for Can Skittles help fix the PATRIOT Act and FISA? …

Thanks as always!

jon

By: Harry Waisbren

The vote delay on the Patriot Act reauthorization has given us more time which we will be taking advantage of and then some in the days before Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee meeting.

Big moves are a foot, and below are some ways you can help make sure we take advantage of our best chance yet to get the Patriot Act and FISA right!

Monday 5 PM PST/8PM EST is our organizing call

We will be hearing expert updates on the legislative situation and will be fine tuning the launch of our Twitter/Facebook campaigns.

Tuesday 2 PM PST/5 PM EST is our bloggers call (time subject to change)

We will further discuss the legislative situation and will coordinate our social media campaign to ensure it is working in tandem with the interrelated work of our fellow blogger friends.

Other resources

• Jon posted in The Seminal about how we can use the extremely successful #Skittles model for our social media campaign
• Marcy Wheeler posted about Dianne Feinstein’s effort to completely eliminate “any requirement that the Section 215 records have to pertain to someone with a known contact with someone suspected to be an agent of a foreign power”
• Our tweetreach for #patriotact is over 20,000 via 50 tweets,  i.e. the total number of different people who would have seen tweets on this topic in their Twitter stream (h/t Tracy Viscelli)
• Sign our act.ly petition thanking Arlen Specter and asking him to support Feingold this Thursday.
• Lessons learned post and discussion in the comments section
• Update on last week’s SJC mark-up

This Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee plans to vote on two key amendments from Russ Feingold to the Patriot Act Reauthorization Bill.  Supporting these amendments is the best chance yet to convince the Senate to fix the Patriot Act.  We’re building on last week’s promising start on Twitter/Facebook action with another social media activism campaign.

Please join us — and let your friends know.

Here are four easy ways to help:

• On Twitter, thank Arlen Specter for his vote last week
• On Facebook, sign up for the Action to fix the Patriot Act event and invite your friends
• If you’re a blogger, repost these instructions to let your readers know — and write your own post if you have time.
• Help get the word out by sharing this information with your friends — via Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, email, and carrier pigeon.

Thanks!  Check back tomorrow for updates … and pass the word!

jon

If you’re up for some twitter-vism, we would certainly appreciate some #patriotact retweeting to keep the momentum going! Here’s a few for your consideration:

RT @getfisaright: Will you have time next week to help fix #patriotact and FISA?  http://bit.ly/oct2poll

RT @getfisaright: #patriotact lessons learned so far? http://is.gd/3RyKx

#ff for #patriotact coverage : @seasonothebitch @normative @emptywheel @hegemommy @myrnatheminx @theseminal @maegancarberry

ACLU: “Not enough votes for progressive reform” of PATRIOT Act http://bit.ly/2nrsDi (via @AdamSerwer)

—Harry

As we head into our online activism before Thursday’s key Senate Judiciary Committee vote, we’re trying to estimate how many people will have time to help with activism next week.

Please let us know!

jon

PS: if you said you could help on Facebook, thanks — please sign up for our Action to fix the Patriot Act event and invite your friends!  And if you’re on Twitter, please help out by tweeting:

RT @getfisaright: Will you have time next week to help fix #patriotact and FISA?  http://bit.ly/oct2poll

As Harry’s update describes, it’s not over yet.  Feingold is going to introduce a couple more amendments in next week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing: NSLs and immunity.  It may make sense to take another run at social network activism, using a similar pattern: build strength over the weekend, try to catalyze blogging on Monday and Tuesday, and build momentum on social networks Tuesday and Wednesday to try to break into the traditional media.  And even if we decide not to do that, there’ll be future battles as the legislation goes through the House, Senate, and committees.

So now’s a good time to learn from the experience.

Thoughts?

Please include positive lessons as well as negative ones!

jon