And if you can't afford to donate money, maybe you could donate some of your skills and time, or help spread the word about the good work they're doing.
Happy to see the EFF leading this initiative for change, one of the few companies I would trust to do all they can and not to be commercially influenced or leveraged into accommodating the wishes of the NSA/US Govt.
I've always thought the EFF was driven by tin-foiled paranoia, but recent events are now showing that our worst big-brother fears that were initially inconceivable, are now from the limited info we're allowed to know, closer to reality.
The secret courts where "justice" and misinterpretations of the constitution are decided behind closed doors and suppressed, puts in-place about the most corrupt framework I can think of.
This is not the country I want to participate in, so I'm doing my bit and have just shown my support by donating to their cause: https://supporters.eff.org/donate
I may have disagreements with their policy at times, but both the ACLU and the EFF seem to do an amazing amount of good work. I'm surprised that people perceive the EFF that way.
They've pretty much always been on the right side, except that during their stay in Washington they were too willing to compromise — with results like CALEA, which later got amended to remove the internet-exemption concessions the EFF had managed to extract.
Anyone who thought they were "driven by tin-foiled paranoia" was just naïve.
I'm curious how this will turn out. It's obvious that the State will try to assert state secrets, but we've already seen another court say that now that the information is public, they can no longer assert that privilege.
When Snowden first came out, I was skeptical that the information leaked would actually cause any real change to occur within governmental institutions. If lawsuits like this continue to pop up, we may begin to see the courts restraining the executive in a significant way.
A big problem here is that people in the executive firmly believe that these programs deter terrorism in the same way they believed that torture would provide actionable intelligence. They need to stop and re-evaluate whether other tactics may be as or more effective than blanket surveillance.
It's not about terrorism anymore, but instead these broad-sweeping and baseless spying programs are integrated in their regular intelligence briefings regardless of whether they're terrorism-related.
I wouldn't be surprised if they can cut a significant amount of their intelligence infrastructure because of the operational efficiency, I'd even go a step further and say that the DHS has been coaxing all of the state local law enforcement to pool all of their data centrally to the NSA -- so now all levels of law enforcement rely entirely on the NSA's data processing capabilities.
The amount of data-gathering by the local and state law enforcement agencies is massive and they likely have very little/no infrastructure to handle this data, so they'd pass it off to the federal government.
I have never been disappointed to see how my contributions to the EFF are being spent. I have just renewed my membership for the second time in less than a month and am thankful that I am fortunate enough to do so.
I understand that not everyone who wants to contribute is able to do so, financially. If that's you, please review the EFF's list of "Ways You Can Help EFF" (without spending a dime): https://www.eff.org/helpout
They're playing this smart. Among the plaintiffs are three religious groups and three gun-related organizations.
The standing issue is going to be a little challenging for Count I (1st amendment). The EFF's argument is basically that these organizations' expression has been chilled by the general knowledge that their communications are being collected. Laird v. Tatum seems like challenging precedent to overcome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laird_v._Tatum (Court held that the fear that the army might cause some harm in the future with information collected pursuant to surveillance was an insufficiently concrete injury to support standing).
The Due Process claim is iffy because it does not seem that any plaintiff has actually been prosecuted pursuant to a vague legal interpretation. If some poor sap got prosecuted in a case involving that legal interpretation, that would be a much better basis for a lawsuit.
I hope they make some progress with this, but I'm not optimistic because of the standing issues.
When you think about it, the 18th amendment is a marvel. Prior to the 18th amendment, the federal government derived 30-40% of its revenues from liquor taxes. The beer barons had paid off plenty of political types. The nation was full of Irish and German immigrants who loved to drink. Yet, in 1919, the Anti-Saloon league and associated lobbyists got the 18th amendment passed to ban liquor. It was an incredible political maneuver.
They didn't accomplish this via litigation. They accomplished it via single-minded politics: Wayne Wheeler would lend the League's support to anyone who was in favor of Prohibition, regardless of their stances on other issues. He drew on the Protestant community, anti-Catholic sentiment, and the womens' vote (the suffrage movement in the U.S. was heavily driven by the desire of womens' groups to ban alcohol). They had a singular, clear, if ambitious, end-goal: the banning of alcohol.
If people are interested in electronic privacy, I think there is a lot to be learned from the success and methods of the Anti-Saloon league.
Laird v. Tatum definitely bares some insight as to what the EFF is up against, the case is one of countless others in which the Supreme Court has considered the "chilling effect" of various government policies on protected expression.
If you're interested in this concept, take a closer look at Wieman v. Updegraff (where the term "chilling effect" was first used), Socialist Workers Party v. Attorney General, a case very similar to Laird, and Meese v. Keene.
The following paper goes quite deep into the matter:
And the pro-RKBA org, Calguns, is very legitimate. The other two are an association of California Federal Firearms License (FFL) holders, that covers everyone in the business from gun stores on up, and a gun customization company, you could score them as a manufacturer or gunsmith, and they would hold an FFL.
"If people are interested in electronic privacy, I think there is a lot to be learned from the success and methods of the Anti-Saloon league."
I agree, but I would add that the key difference here is that the Anti-Saloon League had a clear, concise, understandable goal. Privacy and anonymity advocates are all over the place.
> Privacy and anonymity advocates are all over the place.
They are not only all over the place, but they're often idealists who are unwilling to put aside their other political viewpoints to focus on the issue of privacy. This dooms them to political impotency and irrelevancy.
Which is why I'm so encouraged by the EFF's bringing religious organizations and gun associations on board. There are some very powerful organizations (the anti-abortion lobby, religious organizations, gun rights folks) who have a lot to lose from government surveillance, and also can be scared into action by the idea of someone like Obama snooping on their communications. I think it would be politically foolish not to capitalize on that state of affairs.
For that matter, the pro-abortion^wpro-life movement could be in here as well, do we really want everyone to know that the GF you had on the side was emailing to/from an abortion clinic?
I agree, it seems the EFF has learned from previous quasi-legal justifications for having their cases dismissed, so they want to have all their bases covered and approach from different angles.
As far as I know it has never used that as an example.
In the arena of national politics the NRA is almost entirely defensive. At the state level it varies, it had a hand in the 1987-2011 nationwide sweep of shall issue concealed carry laws, but that was mostly the work of locals, like the Calguns organization. And now the most fruitful arena is the Federal courts, which e.g. just forced Illinois to change from no issue to shall issue; the Second Amendment Foundation is the #1 player there.
Right. They're just doing it to make a political statement and pull in donations/new members. Maybe they could get a religious organization that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a member of in Denver to join as a plaintive and argue that by killing citizen members of their group the government was interfering with the practice of their religion. But, I don't think that would even pass in US courts since you couldn't prove Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was under direct surveillance while on US soil and that it played a role in his killing. The American Intelligence Community is completely untouchable. Honestly, I don't even think Obama is powerful enough to stop the surveillance if he wanted to. It would just go "compartmental" in the organization or they'd get rid of Obama.
The state as an institution is the final arbiter in judgments against itself. So it often surprises me that folks think they can achieve any kind of success against the state by litigating in this way. The grade school civics class that Americans are taught as children that there are separate branches of government competing with each other and keeping each other in check is an incredible caricature of what actually happens. These "branches" of government are all part of the same institution - the state - and the only competing they do is which of them can arrogate as much power to themselves as possible at the expense of the population, not at the expense of each other.
Vijay is, as usual, correct. It's typically better to rely on mathematics than the law to protect privacy.
But I would add one thing, and that is that court decisions can be influenced by public opinion. And if public opinion turns significantly against the NSA by the time this is up before the 9th Circuit or the Supremes, this will prove a worthwhile exercise for EFF et al.
You're probably right to be skeptical, but the hope is that the hunger to power and greed will in part help us out here.
Very simplistically, the power of the judicial branch of government is diminished by the executive branch flaunting their control. Hopefully they will want to recover some of that power by reigning in the executive branch.
However, of course, if all the branches are benefiting too much from the military-industrial complex, then the system could easily fall apart.
I wonder how much better this would be for an NSL receiver to publicly challenge it; at least they would have standing to contest the whole idea of a secret request.
Guys, pardon my ignorance as I do not have extensive knowledge on US law, I could not see EFF among the plaintiffs. Are they referred to under another name?
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