Action Alert

**PLEASE PASS ON**

Last December, we learned that the President had broken the law and violated the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution by allowing the National Security Agency to spy on ordinary Americans' communications. Challenges to this massive privacy invasion are making their way through the court system, but now some members of Congress are scheming to let the President off the hook. Most prominently, the White House and Senator Arlen Specter proposed a sham "compromise" bill that will help the government continue to break the law, vastly expanding the president's power to spy on you without any meaningful oversight from Congress or the courts.

Take action to stop the surveillance bills by calling Congress on Tuesday, September 12. The BORDC and other organizations (see below) have declared the weeks of September 5 and September 11 "National Call-in to Congress Weeks" and are asking their constituents to call their members of Congress on a specific day. BORDC supporters will be calling on Tuesday, September 12. If that day is not convenient for you, choose another day, but please call. Let's keep those phones ringing in the Congressional halls for two weeks straight!

The Message

Please call each of your Senators and your Representative and urge them to:

• OPPOSE Senator Specter's S. 2453, Senator DeWine's S. 2455, and Representative Wilson's H.R. 5825. For details including links to bill text, click here.
• OPPOSE any other legislation that would give the executive branch new surveillance powers that are immune to oversight by the courts and Congress
• SUPPORT a full, public investigation of the NSA surveillance program.

To reach your representatives, call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 (24 hours) and ask the operator to connect you. Or use the BORDC Call-in page to find your legislators' phone numbers and to let us know how your calls went.

Sample Talking Points

• Congress should investigate, not legislate. The Administration has not yet answered important questions regarding the program and has blocked investigation into its authorization. A full investigation into the domestic surveillance program is urgently needed to determine the nature and scope of the spying program, as well as the facts surrounding its approval.
• Congress should let the traditional court system do its job. Senator Specter's bill, S. 2453, would pull all lawsuits against the wiretapping program out of the traditional legal system and into a secret court that has no procedures for hearing argument from anyone but the Administration. Anyone who has broken the law must be held accountable by the courts.
• Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) as the exclusive means for conducting domestic surveillance. That law requires that the government obtain approval from a secret intelligence court before eavesdropping on Americans. The proposed new legislation would reward the Administration's stonewalling and failure to follow the laws passed by Congress. The rule of law must be restored before any further changes are considered.
• We cannot allow terrorists to change the core values of America. As Americans, we believe in checks and balances, and we have a system that works. Spying on people without a judge’s permission and without evidence of any crime betrays that system and violates the law.

Organizations supporting the call-in day include: American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, American Civil Liberties Union, Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Center for National Security Studies, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Downsize DC.org, Electronic Frontier Foundation, First Amendment Foundation, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, National Committee Against Repressive Legislation, National Lawyers Guild, Open the Government, Privacy Activism.