If You Don’t Call Your Congressmember After Reading This, You’ll Regret It

captain-america-shield-surveillance

We’re asking everybody to call their Congressmember (Massachusetts numbers below the fold) to support HR1466, the Surveillance State Repeal Act, a bipartisan bill we helped introduce that would truly end mass surveillance. This is why it matters.

On June 1, the part of the PATRIOT Act that has been used to legitimate the mass collection of all of our phone call information, and much else besides, will lapse, It’s a terrible provision known as “Section 215.” Section 215 allows the FBI – and, it appears, other intelligence agencies too – to collect “any tangible things” that are “relevant” to a terrorism investigation. As it turns out, the intelligence community has argued explicitly that every single call in the United States is “relevant”. So, it appears, if we don’t let the NSA know exactly when I called the Danish Pastry House in Watertown about my one-year-old daughter’s first birthday cake, then ISIS will destroy us all.

There has been no legislation proposed yet from either chamber of Congress to renew Section 215. The intelligence community is panicking, and is apparently literally waving pictures of the burning Twin Towers at our elected officials, and telling them that if Section 215 lapses and there’s another attack, it’ll be the lawmakers’ fault and ISIS will destroy us all.

There may be a bill launched next week that would renew it, called the USA FREEDOM Act. Many civil liberties groups plan to support it, because it would also include reforms to Section 215, and may also reform (not repeal) the government’s other mass surveillance programs. We haven’t seen that bill yet, but it would have to be very strong to make it a better deal than simply letting the government’s Section 215 authority die.

There’s actually no evidence that Section 215’s mass surveillance programs have ever stopped a terrorist attack, and the government’s own reports have repeatedly shown that it has never stopped one. Follow me below the fold for the explanation why, and for the numbers to call!

The best the intelligence community has come up with is that Section 215 may have stopped a San Diego taxi driver, Basaaly Moalin, from wiring $8,500 to al-Shabaab, the East African fundamentalist group. Even there, the point sort of gets lost that he was wiring the money to al-Shabaab fighters in his hometown so that they could fend off a US-supported invasion of the area by the Ethiopian army, but whatever. Al-Shabaab are not good people; but is depriving them of $8,500 really an acceptable trade for allowing the government to have all of our phone call data, for ever?

Not that all mass surveillance is governed by Section 215. Far from it, actually. The DEA runs, or possibly ran, its own mass metadata collection program to support the War on Drugs. Internet collection happens under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. And a Reagan-era executive order, EO12333, gives the President more or less a free hand to intercept the communications of all foreign nationals outside the US, with the result that we now conduct “full take” collection of all phone and Internet traffic in over 25 countries (that we know of).

For this reason, our national organization, along with an extremely broad left-right coalition of other groups, has introduced the SSRA. This magnificent bill would repeal all of the PATRIOT Act, and all of the authorities underlying mass surveillance, provide protections for intelligence community whistleblowers, and reform the rubber-stamping Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

So far, three of Massachusetts’ nine congressmembers (McGovern, Capuano, and Neal) have cosponsored the SSRA. But we really need more. Every single cosponsor on this bill, whether in Massachusetts or any other state, lends weight to the argument that Congress is just not going to reauthorize Section 215 as it stands. So I’m appealing to you for your help. We’d like anybody who is interested to call their reps as soon as possible, asking them to cosponsor it too.

Here are the numbers:

Clark (ask for legislative staffer Mr. John Moreschi): (202) 225-2836.
Keating (ask for legislative staffer Ms. Naz Durakoglu): (202) 225-3111.
Lynch (ask for legislative staffer Mr. Bruce Fernandez): (202) 225-8273.
Moulton (ask for legislative staffer Mr. Steve Snodgrass): (202) 225-8020.
Tsongas (ask for legislative staffer Mr. Bob Schneider): (202) 225-3411.
Kennedy (ask for legislative staffer Mr. Eric Fins): (202) 225-5931.

Make the call. Now is the time. Let us know that you did it. If you’re in the districts of the Mighty Three who have cosponsored, please call them to thank them. If you’re in the districts of the Hesitant Six (Clark, Keating, Kennedy, Lynch, Moulton and Tsongas), please call them and ask them to cosponsor HR 1466, the Surveillance State Repeal Act, and to pledge to oppose the renewal of Section 215. If you’re not in those districts, please use the handy call tool here.

At the same time, please ask them to oppose the renewal of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, and to oppose the passage of CISA, the “Cybersecurity Intelligence Sharing Act”, a pro-surveillance bill that actual cybersecurity experts strongly oppose.

Even in the panicked aftermath of 9-11, Congress recognized that some parts of the PATRIOT Act shouldn’t last forever. That’s why this has a June 1 sunset date. There are voters now who weren’t even in kindergarten when 9-11 happened. It’s time to end this unconstitutional “emergency” legislative experiment with mass surveillance. It’s not good for us.

2 thoughts on “If You Don’t Call Your Congressmember After Reading This, You’ll Regret It”

  1. If you want people to read the stuff that you write, and do something about it, you might consider putting the content of your post in the RSS feed. Came across this today, and it annoyed the crap out of me. You are asking me to do something, but not telling me what it is.

    1. My apologies. Chalk this up to a lack of technical knowledge, rather than intending to annoy.

      I hope that you were willing to take action nonetheless!

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