Coalition of More Than 80 Organizations and Internet Companies Calls on Congress to End NSA Spying

On Tuesday, the Free Press Action Fund and more than 80 organizations and Internet companies sent a letter demanding that Congress halt and investigate the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs. The signers include the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla and reddit.

The letter coincided with the coalition’s launch of StopWatching.Us, a site demanding an inquiry into the scope and scale of the NSA’s spying activities.

“Imagine if the government just ripped out everyone’s window curtains — that’s the effect of the NSA’s spying,” said Free Press Action Fund Internet Campaign Director Josh Levy. “Living in a surveillance state makes it harder for the press to hold power accountable, for activists to organize for justice and for everyone to live their lives in private. We urge Congress to shine a light on the NSA’s secret spying programs.”

PRESS CALL:

The lead organizers of both the letter to Congress and the petition site will host a call today at 1 p.m. EST to discuss the revelations about the NSA’s spying programs and the need for swift and decisive reform. The details of the call are as follows:

Call date: Tues., June 11, 2013

Call time: 1 p.m. EST

Call number: 424-203-8405

Dial-in code: 699082

Read the full text of the letter and the list of signers below:

Dear Members of Congress:

We write to express our concern about recent reports published in the Guardian and the Washington Post, and acknowledged by the Obama administration, which reveal secret spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) on phone records and Internet activity of people in the United States.

The Guardian and Washington Post recently published reports based on information provided by a career intelligence officer showing how the NSA and the FBI are gaining broad access to data collected by nine of the leading U.S. Internet companies and sharing this information with foreign governments. As reported, the U.S. government is extracting audio, video, photographs, emails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time. As a result, the contents of communications of people both abroad and in the U.S. can be swept in without any suspicion of crime or association with a terrorist organization.

Leaked reports also published by the Guardian and confirmed by the administration reveal that the NSA is also abusing a controversial section of the PATRIOT Act to collect the call records of millions of Verizon customers. The data collected by the NSA includes every call made, the time of the call, the duration of the call, and other “identifying information” for millions of Verizon customers, including entirely domestic calls, regardless of whether those customers have ever been suspected of a crime. The Wall Street Journal has reported that other major carriers, including AT&T and Sprint, are subject to similar secret orders.

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.

We are calling on Congress to take immediate action to halt this surveillance and provide a full public accounting of the NSA’s and the FBI’s data-collection programs. We call on Congress to immediately and publicly:

1. Enact reform this Congress to Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments Act to make it clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity and phone records of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and that violations can be reviewed in adversarial proceedings before a public court.
2. Create a special committee to investigate, report, and reveal to the public the extent of this domestic spying. This committee should create specific recommendations for legal and regulatory reform to end unconstitutional surveillance.
3. Hold accountable those public officials who are found to be responsible for this unconstitutional surveillance.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

4Chan

Access

Advocacy for Principled Action in Government

The AIDS Policy Project, Philadelphia

American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression

American Civil Liberties Union

American Civil Liberties Union of California

American Library Association

Amicus

Association of Research Libraries

Bill of Rights Defense Committee

Boing Boing

Breadpig

Calyx Institute

Canvas

Center for Democracy and Technology

Center for Digital Democracy

Center for Financial Privacy and Human Rights

Center for Media and Democracy

Center for Media Justice

Competitive Enterprise Institute

Consumer Action

Consumer Watchdog

CorpWatch

CREDO Mobile

Cyber Privacy Project

Daily Kos

Defending Dissent Foundation

Demand Progress

Detroit Digital Justice Coalition

Digital Fourth

Downsize DC

DuckDuckGo

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Entertainment Consumers Association

Fight for the Future

Floor64

Foundation for Innovation and Internet Freedom

Free Press Action Fund

Free Software Foundation

Freedom of the Press Foundation

FreedomWorks

Friends of Privacy USA

Get FISA Right

Government Accountability Project

Greenpeace USA

Institute of Popular Education of Southern California

Internet Archive

isen.com, LLC

Knowledge Ecology International

Law Life Culture

Liberty Coalition

May First/People Link

Media Alliance

Media Mobilizing Project, Philadelphia

Mozilla

Namecheap

National Coalition Against Censorship

New Sanctuary Coalition of NYC

Open Technology Institute

OpenMedia.org

Participatory Politics Foundation

Patient Privacy Rights 

People for the American Way

Personal Democracy Media

PolitiHacks

Privacy and Access Council of Canada

Public Interest Advocacy Centre (Ottawa, Canada)

Public Knowledge

Privacy Activism

Privacy Camp

Privacy Rights Clearinghouse

Privacy Times

reddit

Represent.us

Rights Working Group

Rocky Mountain Civil Liberties Association

RootsAction.org

Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic

Sunlight Foundation

Taxpayers Protection Alliance

TechFreedom

TURN-The Utility Reform Network

Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center

William C. Velasquez Institute

World Wide Web Foundation

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