By Reginald Johnson
After a
successful national protest earlier this month against the sweeping
surveillance over Americans’ phone calls and email activity by the National Security
Agency, it’s critical to keep up the pressure on Congress to rein in the spying programs.
According to the
website “The Day We Fight Back,” which promoted the Feb. 11 event of the same
name, some 555,000 emails were sent to members of Congress urging them to rein
in the NSA through reform legislation;
89,000 phone calls to Congress were made; some 301,000 people signed a
petition demanding privacy as a human right; the website the
daywefightback.org was shared 420,000
times on Facebook; and more than 37 million people worldwide saw the “The Day
We Fight Back” banner on the website the day of the protest.
“Together we
demonstrated that activists, organizations and companies can work in unison to
fight mass surveillance and laid a foundation for escalation over the months to
come,” said a statement on the website following the protest.
The statement added
that the fight still has a long ways to go. “To push back against surveillance,
we need to keep acting to educate and urge our representatives to take action,”
it said.
The Feb. 11 protest
was organized by a coalition of civil liberties organizations, digital rights
groups, companies and activists who are determined to force the government to
curtail the dragnet surveillance that was exposed last year by whisteblower
Edward Snowden. The former contractor for the NSA released a trove of classified
documents which showed that the NSA was tracking the phone records, email
communications, social network activity and
web activity of hundreds of millions of Americans and foreigners.
Billions of records
of phone calling “metadata” --- showing who made a call, to whom, how long the
call was, and the location of those taking part ---- are being swept up by the
government.
According to The
Washington Post, one of the papers which published the revelations made by
Snowden, the NSA is also harvesting both the metadata and content of emails,
web activity, social networks and chats, as part of what the agency calls
“upstream collection.”
The government
claims that the NSA surveillance is both constitutional and a necessary tool in
fighting terrorism.
But civil liberties
advocates claim that the NSA spying program is a clear violation of the
Constitution’s guarantees of the right to privacy, freedom of expression and
freedom of association.
The American Civil
Liberties Union, which is part of the coalition fighting the NSA surveillance,
says that the agency’s “aggregation of metadata constitutes an invasion of
privacy and an unreasonable search” and is unconstitutional under the Fourth
Amendment. Also, the phone tracking program violates the First Amendment
“because it vacuums up sensitive information on associational and expressive
activity.”
The ACLU is suing the
government to end the spying program and have all the collected data deleted.
According to Josh Levy, of the internet rights
group Free Press, the NSA surveillance programs “attack our basic rights to
connect and communicate in private, and strike at the foundations of democracy itself.
Only a broad movement of activists, organizations and companies can convince Washington
to restore these rights.”
During the “Day We
Fight Back” protest, people either calling or emailing their representatives in
Congress were urged to tell them to support the USA Freedom Act, which would
end the bulk collection of phone data by the government and make the
deliberations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) --- which
authorizes NSA surveillance programs --- more transparent.
Another bill is
going through Congress, offered by U.S. Dianne Feinstein, D-Ca., relating to
the NSA. However, the bill, though offering some cosmetic reforms in the FISA process,
would largely keep in place the existing NSA surveillance programs.
Several members of
the Connecticut congressional
delegation were called by this reporter in the “Day We Fight Back” protest. A staff
member for U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4, said the congressman was still weighing
whether to support the USA Freedom Act. A spokesman for U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy
also said the senator hadn’t taken a position on the bill yet.
The position of U.S.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., was clear, however. Blumenthal is a co-sponsor
of the USA Freedom Act, a staffer said.
Activists see an
urgency in rolling back the legal authority for the spying programs, as more
and more revelations keep coming out about how extensive the government
surveillance is, both in the United States
and abroad.
Recently The Guardian newspaper in the UK
reported that the British spy agency GCHQ, with aid from the NSA, had
intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of Internet users not
suspected of wrongdoing.
