Tell your Members of Congress: Please vote NO on any legislation that modifies the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act this week. No president should have powers to spy on Americans emails or phone calls without individual warrants, period. Congress must not permit the president to gut the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and cast aside real judicial oversight of the NSA spying program. This issue is too complex and too important to decide in secret and on the fly.
If you feel you must do something, please act as narrowly as possible and do not approve wiretaps without individualized warrants under any circumstances, or grant immunity to telecom companies.
Here are additional talking points you can use. We encourage you to pick the talking points you like best and use as many as you can during your calls: The Bush administration spied on Americans for five years illegally and now they want to make their activities legal. These activities are not legal now, and they should NOT EVER be legal.
President Bush misrepresented the facts to Congress and the American people in his Saturday radio address, when he implied that FISA was out of date and hadn’t been updated since 1978. In fact, it has been updated more than 50 times since 1978, including many times during the current administration.
The director of the NSA admitted that the government does not need warrants to intercept overseas calls. Even if it did, there have been bipartisan bills proposed for over a year that would clarify these foreign calls do not need a warrant. But they were all summarily rejected by the Administration. So what do they really want? They want warrantless wiretapping. Period.
Bush said in his Saturday radio address, “Today we face sophisticated terrorists who use disposable cell phones and the Internet to communicate with each other, recruit operatives, and plan attacks on our country. Technologies like these were not available when FISA was passed nearly 30 years ago, and FISA has not kept up with new technological developments.” But FISA is technology-neutral: it allows the government to spy on any technology, as long as they follow the rules.
President Bush has not yet responded to subpoenas from the Senate Judiciary Committee demanding the legal rationale for the NSA program. If you modify the law now, it is unlikely they will ever comply with these requests in a meaningful way.
Even if you pass this bill with a 90-day sunset, it will allow Bush to control the debate and will put the ball in his court, enabling him to exploit our fears in order to keep these powers forever. Enter your address in the box above to look up phone numbers for your representative right now. When you call, urge them to vote "NO" on any legislation that modifies the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Trouble getting through? We're flooding Congress with calls today. If you get a busy signal, it's absolutely critical you keep trying until you get through.