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
Get FISA Right 
Marcy Wheeler has another post on 215: http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/10/04/the-total-nail-polish-remover-awareness-program-brought-to-you-by-the-democratic-party/
[…] always, Get FISA Right is the go-to site for people who want to get involved, with more links and an activism agenda for […]
Professional journalists have barely covered last week’s Judiciary Committee meeting at all. The lack of attention is odd because there are some really good stories coming out of the exchanges there.
Here’s one of them. A transcript of Dick Durbin’s Thursday remarks:
http://irregulartimes.com/index.php/archives/2009/10/05/transcript-senator-dick-durbin-on-surveillance-terrorism-and-the-constitution/
contains Senator Durbin revealing the existence of some classified “real reason” for the surveillance program — a “real reason” for the 90% of warrantless surveillance that has nothing to do with terrorism:
“I’m especially concerned that the substitute removes one of the most important reforms from the Leahy bill: requirement that the government show some connection to terrorism when issuing a Section 215 order. Now, there are many reasons given for taking out this constitutional protection. But the real reason for resisting this obvious, common sense modification of Section 215 is unfortunately cloaked in secrecy. Some day that cloak will be lifted, and future generations will whether ask our actions today meet the test of a democratic society: transparency, accountability, and fidelity to the rule of law and our constitution.”
That’s an explosive allegation, one that may have something to do with Marcy Wheeler’s Total Information Awareness article yesterday. Some help in spreading the news of Durbin’s allegation would, I think, provide a dramatic hook to bring back some attention to the last week’s and this week’s proceedings.