Have you seen? Over 215,000 people have signed onto the stopwatching.us campaign we launched one week ago. And we’ve made huge waves in the media with a coalition of companies and organization that the Atlantic called “perhaps the most diverse collection of groups in the modern history of American politics.”

But we’re not done yet. Today, we’re launching a campaign to call members of Congress. Can you help out?

We need you to make a quick call to ask your elected officials to investigate surveillance practices of the NSA and stop the illegal spying.  A call will take you from 2 to 4 minutes—and it can send a huge message to Congress.

We’re teaming up with our friends from Fight for the Future to make it easy for you to demand reform. Here are two ways you can speak out (note, if you are outside of the United States you should go here to take our international alert).

1. Dial 1-STOP-323-NSA (1-786-732-3672). The automated system will connect you to your legislators. Urge them to provide public transparency about NSA spying and stop warrantless wiretapping on the communications of millions of ordinary Americans. Visit CallDay.org for more info.

Or…

1. Visit the EFF action center. We will look up the phone number of your elected officials. Call them and tell them you oppose NSA’s spying programs.

Phone calls can make a huge difference in Washington: we saw scores of lawmakers change positions in response to the call-in campaigns we organized during the SOPA fight. Let’s repeat that victory by driving tons of phone calls to Congress today to stop NSA spying.

Thanks for helping us fight back against NSA spying. If you’d like to support our efforts to beat back invasive government surveillance, please become a member of EFF. We wouldn’t exist without members like you.

Defending your rights in the digital world,

Rainey Reitman
Activism Team
Electronic Frontier Foundation

Important notes about your privacy: we’ve required that the automated tools above promise to protect your privacy by insisting that your phone number be used for this campaign and nothing else unless you request additional contact. If you don’t want your information processed by the automatic calling tools, use the EFF page to get a phone number and call directly. Learn more by visiting the privacy policies of Fight for the Future and Twilio.

priceofliberty:

stopprism:

Yesterday, the Guardian released a comprehensive poll showing widespread concern about NSA spying. Two-thirds of Americans think the NSA’s role should be reviewed. The poll also showed Americans demanding accountability and more information from public officials—two key points of our recently launched stopwatching.us campaign.

But there’s more. So far, Gallup has one of the better-worded questions, finding that 53% of Americans disapprove of the NSA spying. A CBS poll also showed that a majority—at 58%—of Americans disapprove of the government “collecting phone records of ordinary Americans.” And Rasmussen—though sometimes known for push polling—also recently conducted a poll showing that 59% of Americans are opposed to the current NSA spying.

The only poll showing less than a majority on the side of government overreach was Pew Research Center, which asked Americans whether it was acceptable that the NSA obtained “secret court orders to track the calls of millions of Americans to investigate terrorism.” Pew reported that 56% of Americans said it was “acceptable.” But the question is poorly worded. It doesn’t mention the widespread, dragnet nature of the spying. It also neglects to describe the “information” being given—metadata, which is far more sensitive and can provide far more information than just the ability to “track the calls” of Americans. And it was conducted early on in the scandal, before it was revealed that the NSA doesn’t even have to obtain court orders to search already collected information.

Despite the aggregate numbers, many of the polls took place at the same time Americans were finding out new facts about the program. More questions must be asked. And if history is any indication, the American people will be finding out much more. Indeed, just today the Guardian reported that its working on a whole new series with even more NSA revelations about spying.

One thing is definitely clear: the American public is demanding answers and needs more information. That’s why Congress must create a special investigatory committee to reveal the full extent of the programs. Democracy demands it. Go here to take action.

Oh how surprising, people don’t like being spied on?

Yeah, but that’s only for the moment because it’s in the spotlight. Here in about a month, it will become normalized and people will stop caring. It’s the bi-product of a system designed against the citizenry. Watch this video: http://beatyourselfup.com/post/52883726312/the-transformation-of-society

86 Civil Liberties Groups and Internet Companies Demand an End to NSA Spying

Today, a bipartisan coalition of 86 civil liberties organizations and Internet companies – including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, reddit, Mozilla, FreedomWorks, and the American Civil Liberties Union – are demanding swift action from Congress in light of the recent revelations about unchecked domestic surveillance.

In an open letter to lawmakers sent today, the groups call for a congressional investigatory committee, similar to the Church Committee of the 1970s. The letter also demands legal reforms to rein in domestic spying and demands that public officials responsible for this illegal surveillance are held accountable for their actions.

The letter denounces the NSA’s spying program as illegal, noting:

This type of blanket data collection by the government strikes at bedrock American values of freedom and privacy. This dragnet surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which protect citizens’ right to speak and associate anonymously and guard against unreasonable searches and seizures that protect their right to privacy.

The letter was accompanied by the launch of StopWatching.us, a global petition calling on Congress to provide a public accounting of the United States’ domestic spying capabilites and to bring an end to illegal surveillance.

The groups call for a number of specific legal reforms, including reform to the controversial Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the “business records” section which, through secret court orders, was misused to force Verizon to provide the NSA with detailed phone records of millions of customers. The groups also call on Congress to reform the FISA Amendment Act, the unconstitutional law that allows, nearly without restriction, the government to conduct mass surveillance on American and international communications. The letter and petition also demand that Congress amend the state secrets privilege, the legal tool that has expanded over the last 10 years to prevent the government from being held accountable for domestic surveillance.

As Mark Rumold, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who focuses on government transparency and national security, says, “Now is the time for Congress to act. We don’t need a narrow fix to one part of the PATRIOT Act; we need a full public accounting of how the United States is turning sophisticated spying technology on its own citizens, we need accountability from public officials, and we need an overhaul of the laws to ensure these abuses can never happen again.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is urging concerned netizens to join this campaign by signing their names to StopWatching.us.

Full text of the open letter:

Read More

Last night, we received confirmation from a report in the Guardian that the National Security Agency (NSA) is currently collecting the call records of every Verizon customer in America. The NSA order forces Verizon to provide “on an ongoing daily basis” all call records for any call “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls” and any call made “between the United States and abroad.”

And that’s not all. Today, the Washington Post and the Guardian published reports based on information provided by a career intelligence officer showing how the NSA and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies. The government is extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

Mounting Evidence of the NSA Warrantless Surveillance

EFF has so much evidence of the surveillance now that we’ve created a timeline.

In brief, America first learned about the secret surveillance in a 2005 New York Times exposé which disclosed one aspect of the NSA’s domestic surveillance program. We learned that the Bush Administration had been illegally tapping phone lines in the U.S. without warrants or court permission immediately following the 9/11 attacks. President Bush himself admitted at least some of what the government was doing.

In early 2006, EFF received photos and blueprints from former AT&T technician Mark Klein. These undisputed documents show that AT&T installed a fiberoptic splitter at its facility in San Francisco which sends copies of all AT&T customers’ emails, web browsing, and other Internet traffic to the NSA.

Later in 2006, USA Today and a number of other newspapers published a story disclosing that the NSA had compiled a massive database of call records from American telecommunications companies, which included AT&T, Verizon, and Bell South. This was confirmed by a number of members of Congress.

Information has continued to trickle out over time. In 2009, the New York Times reported the NSA was still collecting purely domestic communications in a “significant and systematic” way after the FISA Amendments Act was passed in 2008.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act and Verizon

The news of the last few days has confirmed the records portion of the surveillance, and gave us some additional hints about the government’s arguments in support of its actions.  The secret court order issued to Verizon was a Section 215 order (50 U.S.C. sec. 1861), a controversial legal instrument greatly expanded when George Bush signed the USA PATRIOT Act into law on October 26, 2001. It allows the government to seek “any tangible things” in connection with an authorized investigation and is often known as the “business records” provision of FISA.

Section 215 allows for secret court orders to records that are “relevant” to a government investigation – a far lower threshold and more expansive reach than a warrant based on probable cause.  The list of possible “tangible things” the government can obtain is seemingly limitless, and could include everything from driver’s license records to Internet browsing history.

We’ve long suspected that the government has been using Section 215 to conduct dragnet surveillance. Now we have incontrovertible evidence. Senator Ron Wyden has warned that “when the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.”

Senator Wyden is right.

What EFF is Doing

First of all, we’re leading the charge to stop the NSA’s domestic surveillance program in the courts. Since 2006, EFF has challenged the NSA surveillance in two landmark lawsuits, Hepting v. AT&T and Jewel v. NSA. These cases, in which we represent AT&T customers, include both the wiretapping claims arising from the fiberoptic splitter that Mark Klein found and the scooping up of communications records referred to in the Verizon order. We also have fought back against other PATRIOT Act surveillance abuses, including bringing a case that resulted in National Security Letters being declared unconstitutional — which is currently on appeal to the Ninth Circuit.

We’re also fighting for transparency. In 2011, we filed a FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Justice for records about the government’s secret interpretation of Section 215. Last week we submitted a brief to the secret FISA court itself in that case.

And we’re pushing for legislative reform. We’ve organized tens of thousands of concerned citizens to speak out against the surveillance powers in the PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act, and now we’re calling on the public to demand a full, public accounting of the government’s surveillance programs.

Join the Fight

We’re asking individuals to email Congress right away to tell them in the strongest possible terms that you do not consent to dragnet domestic surveillance. Tell your elected officials that you object to this mass domestic spying program. Demand that they initiate a full-scale, public investigation immediately with the results of the investigation made public as much as possible. Demand that the public officials responsible for this program are held to account. Click here to speak out now.

And we’re also asking individuals to support our work. Become an EFF member today and join the fight to defend fundamental liberties in the digital world.

Learn more

NSA Spying Overview

Timeline of NSA Spying

Frequently Asked Questions

State Secrets Privilege

Washington Post story on Internet surveillance

Guardian story on Internet surveillance

Guardian story on phone record surveillance