ACLU: The fight against the secret moves to make the Patriot Act permanent

[G_j]

The Fight Against Government Secrecy and Surveillance Continues

In the last two days more than 16,000 people wrote and called Congress to demand that the secret campaign to make the Patriot Act permanent be stopped and the debate be made public.

Your action is making a difference! This public outcry has forced Senate Intelligence Committee members to hold a public hearing on this issue next week. Unfortunately they still plan to hold a separate secret debate and vote later in the week. But members of Congress now know that we’re watching and we will continue to put pressure on them to open this secret meeting.

We’re going to keep fighting against unnecessary government secrecy and surveillance. As part of that effort, we launched an initiative against the FBI’s spying on environmental, anti-war, political, and faith-based groups and centers of worship.

Your local police department may be working with the FBI's Joint Terrorist Task Force program. Under this program, local police are taken away from their regular criminal law enforcement activities and used to undertake a wide range of other activities, including monitoring of religious activities and infiltration of peace groups, such as American Friends Service Committee and Amnesty International.

The FBI should not gather information about you just because you attended a rally to protest government policies on an issue you care about, whether it is border security or the war in Iraq. Click here to write your elected officials and urge them to stop this FBI spying.

Documents obtained by the ACLU prove that the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) are gathering information about peace groups, and are intimidating anti-war activists through aggressive questioning. In one example, the Colorado Spring Police Department supplied information on 80 participants of a peaceful demonstration, along with license plate numbers of 30 of them, to the Denver Intelligence Bureau.

This kind of surveillance is chilling to free speech-protected activities. For example, in the days leading up to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, officials identifying themselves as JTTF agents made "visits" to the homes of several activists as well as their friends and family members.

We need to urge state and federal elected officials to halt participation in JTTFs until the FBI assures us it is not routinely spying on political and religious groups. Click here to write your state and federal elected officials.

http://action.aclu.org/FBIspying

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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0518-01.htm

Published on Wednesday, May 18, 2005 by the Boston Globe

ACLU Seeks Files from FBI on Possible Surveillance
by Jonathan Saltzman

The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts is seeking FBI files on behalf of four advocacy groups and 10 activists in the state, saying it believes they have been targets of surveillance because of their politics.

Keith Harvey says a man he confronted outside the American Friends Service Committee’s Cambridge of?ce told him he worked for the US Department of Homeland Security. (Globe Staff Photo / Lane Turner)

The ACLU, in Freedom of Information Act requests it plans to send out today, is requesting all records kept by the FBI and antiterrorism agencies on the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group in Cambridge; the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, which has a state chapter in Boston; the International Action Committee Boston, an antiwar group, and the ACLU itself. The letter also seeks government files on 10 activists and political dissidents, including such liberal heavyweights as Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky.

Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU chapter in Massachusetts, said several activists believe they have been under surveillance for at least a year, including around the time of the Democratic and Republican national conventions last summer.

..more..

[Poppyseedman]

1. I'm no fan of the Patriot Act, but

just how do you make an legislative act of Congress permanent?

Our elected congressman can pass or amend any law on the books unless we have slipped into a sleuth dictatorship unknown to literally millions of Americans were they no longer have any say so in their government officals whom they elect.

[FreedomAngel82]

3. Last time the Patriot Act

was passed it was when the whole anthrax thing was going on and targeting people and people were running around like chicken's with their heads cut off. If they can't pass things without people making a lot of noise and it slipping through the only way they'll do it this next time is if there's some other scandal.

[H2O Man]

2. Good post.

This is the type of thing that DUers should be reading and taking action on. We can have silly debates on what "permanent" means, but that is a foolish waste of time and energy. What we need to be doing is supporting groups like the ACLU and NRDC to begin a series of lawsuits against the federal government, in the hopes that we can use the judicial branch to preserve our rights.

[Poppyseedman]

4. You are right in the fact that we need to support groups that want to

preserve and protect our rights.

I guess my point is the title read like I needed to buy an extra roll of Tin Foil to make a hat, which may lead people to believe the story lacks credibility.

There are lots of lurkers here, especially the bloggers

[G_j]

5. the wording came from the ACLU message

"In the last two days more than 16,000 people wrote and called Congress to demand that the secret campaign to make the Patriot Act permanent be stopped and the debate be made public."

What they appear to be referring to here is the PATRIOT ACT without a sunset clause (which it originally had).

[G_j]

6. kick