Words like kindly, hopefully, supportive, understanding, respectfully, and others help us to connect and help the President to hear us more openly.

The tone of the letter now reflects more of an egoic stance rather than one of conciliation and working together.

Peace to all, Linda

I do not think that this is the kind of communication that needs an executive summary. If you add one of those in, it is quite likely all that will be read by the President. It might be a good idea to edit the letter for length – there seems to be a bit of redundancy between the sections, and brevity helps to ensure that the entire letter will be read.

I like the electronic citations very much. This should be done throughout whenever a communication or event is mentioned. It really adds seriousness to the discussion – very powerful to anyone with a scholarly, intellectual bent, and allows those new to the issue to quickly come up to speed (like the aide assigned to draft a response!). It will require a more thoughtful, focused answer.

Whatever opinion anyone harbors towards President Obama at this time, he is the sitting President, and if we want to lobby for change, he is the go-to guy. I also still find him light years better than his predecessor. As a group, we already have a relationship established. A letter such as this seems a very good way to move forward.

I have had to follow events from a bit of a distance because my teaching schedule is such that it has been hard for me to be present for any of the virtual events. I greatly appreciate being able to follow along nonetheless. Thanks for all of the great work!

I’m noe the one to vet your letter. Stylistically I would rather you say ‘you committed yourself to have your Attorney General’ than ‘you committed to have your Attorney General’, but that’s about it.

I’m a Constitutionalist, and Obama’s interest in the Constitution is as a quaint old document of academic interest only.

His negotiating style is that of a crayfish, which is a small invertebrate that can back down faster than a cheetah can run forward.

I agree with ddearborn and suggest adopting her suggestions.

The tone of the letter seems derogatory to the President.
We should be able to site concerns than suggest changes politely.

I’m not sure of the intended audience of your letter– is it to be spread around to educate folks or are you actually trying to communicate with Obama? If the latter, you need an “executive summary” as the first paragraph– no more than 2-3 sentences that tell him exactly what you want from him. [see? like I just did right there.] A restatement of the summary should be the last thing in your letter before the signature.

He doesn’t need to be told about what you don’t want him to do or what he did or what you think about what he did or what you think he might be thinking or anything else. Why would he even need to read rhetorical questions? He needs to hear/read exactly what you want from him. If he (or, rather, one of his aids) actually take the time to read your letter and they have to sift through rhetoric to figure out what you want– well, there’s no “if”, because they’re not going to do that. They’ll spend about 5 seconds trying to get the gist of it and then they’ll just put it on the “send them a ‘pat on the head’ letter” pile. [are you still reading? then you're not presidential aid material; they've already gone on to the next letter.]

If your intent is to educate folks, you should do something similar– put in an executive summary of what you want the reader to get Obama to do, then go on with the supporting stuff.

Folks don’t have time to read long diatribes and histories–if they can’t figure it out from the first couple of sentences, you’re doomed. [only die-hard political junkies are still reading this]

Oh, and make sure you not only open, but also close with essentially a re-statement of what you want from him. That way the people who skip to the bottom instead of just reading the first few lines won’t get left out. [just like that right there.]

Jeff

P.S. If you’ve got something extra to re-iterate, you can put it in a post-script just to make sure he gets it. Oh, and you should get a professional editor to edit the thing. They’re not that expensive and they can make all the difference between an effective letter and what appears to be a high school term paper written by a committee of people who seem to like run on sentences way too much which is what you’ve got going on right now and it makes it really hard to read and you’re surely not really still reading this sentence because nobody else is going to try and figure it out.

P.P.S. Avoid being snarky [I can't help myself; I'm differently-abled that way.] Oh, and don’t use post-post-scripts.

You can place them in comments, shoot me an email at hwaisbren@gmail.com, or generally contact us through any communication stream you prefer.

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2009_record&page=S10934&position=all

in the House:

- short-term priority: HJC scheduled to mark up HR 3845 (Conyers/Nadler/Scott) this Wednesday, 12:30 PM Eastern.

- Reyes, Hastings, and Rupperburger have introdced HR 3969 into HPSCI; it supposedly largely mirrors the SJC bill but may be weaker in some areas.

Senate:

- In addition to the amended Leahy/Feinstein SJC bill (S. 1692), there’s also a Sessions/Lieberman/Bond (S. 2236) bill that would reauthorize with no additional safeguards. boo. floor schedule still unclear.

jon

The tweetchat idea is a great one … thanks to Cover it Live, it’s easy for people to participate via the Patriot Act action hub even if they don’t have Twitter.

And yeah, Amy’s point about stories was a particularly good one. Especially combining it with BORDC’s local ordinances initiative, there’s chance for some great progress here.

jon

Another valuable idea that came up was doing more outreach to Arab-Americans and Muslim Americans. Several Arab-American groups signed the coalition letter; it’d be great to work with them on social network outreach.

Derrick made a great point that the data mining focus is very abstract. Sneak-and-peak and National Security Letters are far more likely to resonate with people. This also relates to a subject we’ve talked about on past calls: focusing on ways the Patriot Act and FISA relate to people’s everyday lives.

Thanks once again to everbody for participating!

jon

jon

Has anybody here hooked into the Public Interest Declassification Board? It proclaims itself to be “an advisory committee established by Congress in order to promote the fullest possible public access to a thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary record of significant U.S. national security decisions and activities.”

At their site, http://www.archives.gov/declassification/pidb/, there is much ado about this presidentially appointed board “representing the public’s interest”. It has been meeting since 2006, has held several sessions to hear out representatives of a number of groups, and provided at least one “Report to the President” on “Improving Declassification.” If the PIDB hasn’t been looked at by this GetFISAright group, it may be worth some study. If it has, I’d appreciate having a link to our conclusions. Thanks.