Tag Archive for 'civil liberties'

The American Freedom Campaign

Published
by
mckirsch
on March 26, 2008
in Politics
. 0 Comments

I signed the American Freedom Campaign pledge and fully support this great effort. They asked me to pass along information about the campaign to you. Visit the site and read, for this is truly a noble cause.

From their email, which does a better job explaining the campaign than I could:

  • The American Freedom Campaign was launched less than eight months ago to build a grassroots movement to help restore the Constitution and reverse the violations of civil liberties and human rights that have occurred over the past seven years.
  • Over the past few months, the American Freedom Campaign has filled an important role in Washington by leading the fight to restore our system of checks and balances. While there are many organizations fighting specific policies considered unconstitutional, few, if any, are focused almost exclusively on restraining executive overreach.
  • Consistent with its mission to restore checks and balances, AFC aggressively – and successfully – pushed the U.S. House to pass a contempt resolution against Bush administration officials who refused to comply with congressional subpoenas. The Capitol Hill newspaper, Roll Call, in an article about the contempt vote in the House, cited AFC as an example – in fact, the only example – of an advocacy group generating grassroots pressure on House members.
  • AFC has also helped inject constitutional balance of powers issues into the debate over the nation’s Iraq policy. As the Bush administration negotiates an agreement with the Iraqi government to establish the parameters of the two nations’ bilateral relationship beyond 2008, AFC is working with members of Congress to ensure that no significant commitment is made without the approval of Congress. Toward this end, AFC hosted a conference call on which Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), joined by two constitutional scholars from Yale Law School, introduced a resolution expressing the sense of the House that any major agreement reached without congressional approval will be invalid.
  • As the 2008 campaign moves forward, AFC will play a critically important educational role. We will aggressively push the message that the Bush administration’s dramatic expansion of executive power makes the selection of the next president one of the most important decisions the citizens of this nation will ever make.

The changes to our constitution need to be reversed, and our freedoms returned to us.

Foxes in the henhouse?

Published
by
mckirsch
on February 5, 2008
in Nerd Stuff and Politics
. 0 Comments

Nixon - yesss!Say you’re the President. Don’t like the privacy control board that Congress required you to form? You remember, the one that was created to oversee new warrantless NSA wiretaps on people here in the United States? How would you avoid all of that congressional oversight?

The answer was actually very simple. Just don’t nominate anyone to sit on the the board. And then it won’t exist.

In a 2007 measure implementing 9/11 Commission recommendations, Congress reconfigured the oversight committee, known as the Privacy and Civil Liberty Oversight Board. The intent was to make the board more independent of the White House, require it to be bipartisan and make it more accountable to the public.

The original board was already described as a sham, filled with Bush insiders . The board members functioned as PR shills for the White House. Their role seemed to be to sell the idea that spying on our own citizens somehow makes us all safer. The press wrote that the board would not answer any questions from the press, privacy advocates, or academics during introductory press conferences.

When the original board members’ terms were not renewed, no new board members were seated. Then the board was dissolved when terms for the board’s original members expired on Jan. 30.

It concerns me, more than a bit, that the privacy and civil liberties checks and balances in this new wiretapping initiative has been quietly eliminated. It also concerns me that telcos like AT&T are going to receive retroactive amnesty for spying already done for the NSA.

Stop the Spying!