Friend,

There’s no time to waste. With the federal government poised to shut down in just a couple of days unless funding legislation is passed, both chambers of Congress are jamming unsavory provisions into this must-pass package. We’re horrified at how government agencies have sought out and exploited loopholes to secretly monitor everyday people. It’s even scarier that the Senate might reauthorize the government’s continued violation of our basic rights.

Please join us in demanding that Congress protect our civil liberties: Will you add your name to our letter calling on Senate leadership to block warrantless surveillance?

Thanks for speaking up,

All of us at Free Press Action

Friend,

Let me cut to the chase: We need your help right away to stop Congress from continuing a domestic-surveillance regime. Congress passed Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) 15 years ago and has reauthorized it every year since. This law gives intelligence agencies like the NSA and the FBI limitless jurisdiction to collect data about us without any public or judicial oversight.

The initial framework enabled secret collection of all communications among non-citizens without a court order and has since been exploited to conduct hundreds of thousands of warrantless searches of Americans’ calls, texts, emails, locations and internet activity. Let’s not mince words: Section 702 of FISA is a domestic spying tool.

Tell lawmakers you’ve had enough: No more domestic surveillance.

The NSA and the FBI are harvesting our data and using it for malicious purposes far beyond their claims of national security. We’ve seen peaceful protesters, journalists, judges and others investigated and intimidated because of this law, and NSA agents have been — I promise I’m not making this up — spying on their own dating-app matches. We are also aware of ICE, Customs and Border Protection and the FBI illegally acquiring and stalking smartphone location data, which has us especially on edge when states are targeting people who seek out reproductive care without the protection of Roe v. Wade.

We have a very narrow window of opportunity to reform this clandestine authority — but we need to act now to make sure Congress doesn’t take the easy way out and rubber-stamp warrantless surveillance. We’ve joined with more than 20 peer organizations like the Brennan Center for Justice and the ACLU to call on Senate leadership to keep a reauthorization of Section 702 out of the funding package that Congress must pass to avert a government shutdown on Friday.

We need your help to make sure he gets the message: Sign here if you agree that the government should not abuse its powers to spy on everyday people.

Thank you for your advocacy,

Nora and the rest of the Free Press Action team
freepress.net

P.S. Privacy is always on our minds here at Free Press Action, and you can read more about our findings on tech companies’ violations in our new report: Insatiable: The Tech Industry’s Quest for All Our Data.