embracing apparent contradictions, diversity and change
First-draft scripts for a few different options for our next round of ads are up on the wiki:
Feedback welcome! Discussion thread here …
jon
PS: in case you missed it, I posted a Get FISA Right update earlier today.
Comments Off on Get FISA Right: draft scripts up … feedback please!
Executive Summary
Details
Even though it’s the holiday season, it seems like the group’s energy is really starting to ramp up after the election, so I just wanted to take a moment to update people on what’s happening. I realize that our communications are very, um, challenging right now and appreciate everybody’s forbearance. One of the important things going on is a plan for improved communications in 2009; please have a look and see what you think!
Our short-term priorities are the Ideas for Change competition, working with SaysMe.tv on our next round of cable TV ads, and continuing our 2009 strategy planning.  And there a bunch of civil liberties questions on change.gov’s new Open for Questions, including a FISA-related idea with a great backstory.
Read on for more …
After discussions with people in Get FISA Right as well as others (including EFF, ACLU, privacy advocates, and journalists), I’ve put together a proposal for a 2009 Strategy. There’s also a Strategy Backgrounder, with a brief history, and a discussion of our strengths and challenges — as well as challenges for the anti-FISA forces in general.
This is the first published draft, so it’s far from final. Feedback, suggestions, criticisms, all very welcome! There’s a thread on the wiki here; replies to to this post are welcome too.
A quick overview:
In response to the consistent feedback that we need to simplify our communications mechanisms, there’s a proposal up on the wiki. A summary:
More details on the wiki page.
“We are going to have new attorney general,” Walker interjected in Tuesday morning’s hearing in a San Francisco courthouse. “Why shouldn’t the court wait to see what the new attorney general will do?”
— Ryan Singel, Obama Will Fight For Wiretap Immunity, Bush Lawyer Tells Judge, Wired’s Threat Level
Unsurprisingly, Nichols did his job and responded by saying that the Obama administration would defend the constitutionality of the statute, noting that “The Department of Justice rarely, if ever, declines to defend the constitutionality of a statute.”  Well, yeah, he would say that, wouldn’t he?
In reality, it’s very difficult to predict how the new administration will react. Prominent Catholic Obama supporter Douglas Kmeic, quoted in Carol Williams’ LA Times article, describes the tensions:
“They would want to get rid of these cases, to move on,” Pepperdine University law professor Douglas W. Kmiec said of the incoming administration. “But I also think there will be a proper impulse within the Obama Justice Department to get the law right. It’s one thing to have a clean worktable, and another to have a clean worktable where the laws have been brushed to the floor and all lie broken and scattered.”
Updated info available at the top ideas list on the change.org site
Ideas for Change in America is a citizen-driven project that aims to identify and create momentum around the best ideas for how the Obama Administration and 111th Congress can turn the broad call for “change” across the country into specific policies….
The top 10 rated ideas will be presented to the Obama Administration on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009 as the “Top 10 Ideas for America.” We will then launch a national campaign behind each idea and mobilize the collective energy of the millions of members of Change.org, MySpace, and partner organizations to ensure that each winning idea gets the full consideration of the Obama Administration and Members of Congress….
A week after the official launch of the site, and with a month to go until the first round of voting ends, it’s still early days for the contest … but as any sports fan knows, you don’t have to the wait until the playoffs to start watching the standings!
The top three ideas in each category advance to the second round, and the site makes it easy to see who’s leading in each category — for example, the Criminal Justice page currently has Jose Torres’ Legalise the Medicinal and Recreational Use of Marijuana in the #1 position,* followed by my Get FISA Right, repeal the PATRIOT Act, and restore our civil liberties and Paul Lange’s Fair Investigations of Bush Administration, with change.org blogger Matt Kelley’s Provide Alternatives to Incarceration only a few votes out of the top 3.
Nancy Scola’s Ideas for Change, and a Roadmap in techPresident’s “Daily Digest†discusses Change.org’s Ideas for Change in America:
The social-action hub has just announced that the project now has the backing of MySpace and a broad coalition of supporting partners, including techPresident, the Sunlight Foundation, Netroots Nation, VotoLatino, GOOD Magazine, Change Congress, Campus Progress, and People for the America Way…. once the top ten ideas are identified, “we will then build a national campaign to advance each idea in Congress, marshaling the resources of Change.org, MySpace, and our dozens of partner organizations and millions of combined members.â€
Sounds intriguing. It’s hard to know just what the “national campaign” will look like, but these are certainly great groups to be partnering with. If Get FISA Right (and all the other pro-civil liberties groups out there) can get our act together and Get FISA Right, repeal the PATRIOT Act, and restore our civil liberties is one of their top 10, then we’ll recruit some significant allies. Seems worth a try.
Apologies to my friends and relatives for being out of touch this summer….
Rather than going to the beach, I instead hung out in a variety of exotic online locales: my.barackobama.com, Wetpaint, Facebook, and the blogosphere (especially OpenLeft, Shakesville, Pam’s House Blend, and Jack and Jill Politics). It was kind of a working vacation, engaging in and observing activism projects while thinking about the chapter on social network activism for Tales from the Net.  With the equinox and fall upon us, it seems like a good time to take stock.
At that point, we cracked the mainstream media (MSM) in a big way: The NY Times! Time! Meet the Press! And I did my part too: on Radio Nation’s Air America, mentions in a bunch of articles including the Washington Post and Wired, a brief snippet on CNN … fifteen seconds of fame 🙂
Constitution Day has arrived without major statements from Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain on the need to restore this country’s commitment to the rule of law.
— John Nichols, Constitution in Crisis, Candidates in Denial, The Nation
At the risk of showing my age, I grew up with the impression that the Constitution was supposed to guide us 365 days a year … ah well. Times change.
In Get FISA Right: on the air in St. Paul I lamented the lack of discussion of Constitutional issues in the election campaign. Turns out that Dahlia Lithwick and I weren’t the only ones who are disturbed by this:
Even though I push back on the media’s framing of civil liberties as a partisan issue — libertarians, greens, and “classic” conservatives value the Constitution just as highly as progressives — there’s no denying the Republican party’s party-line vote on FISA and McCain’s enthusiastic support for the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping efforts. With the conventions signalling a shift into high gear in the campaign, it seemed like a great time for Get FISA Right to complement our earlier non-partisan Don’t let our Constitution die ad.
As the discussion threads on the wiki page show, there were a lot of different ideas for what we might do. There was a tight deadline in order to get things ready to air by the RNC, so we wound up going with a very simple visual; and after some discussion, chose a couple of different voiceovers. We got the usual stellar help from saysme.tv, and I’m really happy with how the ads came out. Here’s one of them:
DRAFT!
Revised version posted at Pam’s House Blend and (under a different title, and minus the introduction ) Open Left.
DRAFT! Please see the revised version on OpenLeft.
— Barack Obama, Netroots Nation video
Hey! That’s us! 🙂
There’s a lot of energy in the Get FISA Right group these days. The getFISAright.net website is the best jumping-off place to find out what’s going on, and the Strategy page on the wiki gives a big-picture overview. It’s all interesting, it’s all timely … and I’m going to ignore most of it in this post and focus on the “Don’t let our Constitution die” video.
A day or two before the July 9 Senate vote, some folks from LA-based startup SaysMe.tv approached us with an intriguing suggestion: would we be interested in working with them to get ads about FISA on cable TV? SaysMe’s community-funded ad model, where people can pay for a single placement of ads in various markets, seems a great match for our grassroots style. And the timing’s perfect — it’s a great chance to spread the word that while we’ve lost a battle, the fight to roll back government surveillance and restore the rule of law isn’t over yet.
The video came together remarkably quickly; we revised the script collaboratively on the wiki and message board and email and IM, getting input from over 20 people. Cognitive diversity in action: we had lawyers, journalists, techies, ad execs, marketing people, a professional comedian, and plenty of “just plain folks”, and virtually every piece of input was valuable.
