If you're one of the thousands of voters angry over the Democrats' cave on domestic spying and telecom amnesty, a new online grassroots movement is now making it easy to buy a local ad on MSNBC, CNN and several other networks, for less money than you'd think.
The Fight FISA on TV! campaign we're doing in partnership with SaysMe.tv got some major momentum when Sarah Lai Stirand's Opposed to Wiretap Amensty? Run a TV Ad for Six Bucks on Wired's Threat Level got picked up by Slashdot. [Credit where credit is due: Jack and Jill Politics was had covered the ad a day earlier. Looks like they're not as popular with Slashdot readers as Wired is. Who would have guessed?] We're over 3,000 views of the two versions of the video on YouTube ([1], [2]), well on the way to our goal of 10,000-20,000 by September 2, and at least dozen ads have been placed already. OK, nobody's plunked down for the four-figure prices for placements like Fox News in New York yet, but SaysMe.tv's going to be introducing the ability for people to pool their contributions for these pricier placements ... I bet we'll get some premium placements by the end of the month.
And although it's less flashy, our work to influence the platform is also going well. jawboneblue's leading the effort to get our language adopted as part of the Netroots platform, where our Get FISA Right plank has now merged with various others into the highest-ranked civil liberties plank. We've also gotten our position, and in many cases our exact language, adopted in the Obama campaign's in-person "listening" meetings in at least five states; Thomas Nephew's "Listening to America" hears "Get FISA Right" on newsrackblog.com is a particularly good writeup. Once again, our timing's perfect: the existence of these new channels for grassroots influence is tailor-made for groups like Get FISA Right, and our members continue to be great at finding effective ways to work with them.
It's interesting reading different people's perspectives on the ad campaign and more generally on Get FISA Right. A few I found particularly thought-provoking:
The Obama campaign is spending $5 million dollars to air ads during the Olympics. Meanwhile, an individual civil liberties geek can pay less than 0.001% of that amount to put a Get FISA Right ad on cable TV.
"We've got more than a million volunteers on my.barackobama.com. They've planned more than 70,000 offline events through the system, made millions of phone calls from home, and formed thousands of grassroots advocacy groups, including one you might have heard about recently."
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.
At one point during the Get FISA Right campaign, somebody asked me whether I had just put my day job on hold. Fortunately for me, 75% of my day job at this point is working on Tales from the Net, a book about social networks, with my significant other Deborah Pierce and brother Greg (also known as GregoryK of gottabook). So the answer is no, as long as this turns into a chapter in the book. Which I suspect it probably will, so it's cool.
Also fortunately, people like danah boyd, Ari Melber, Nancy Scola, Micah Sifry have done a great job of discussing the Get FISA Right campaign from a social computing and network perspective. So, tempting as it is to focus on the future possibilties of social network activism (a 50-network strategy to build on the 50-state strategy; ways to evolve the Night of Facebook Action idea), in this post I'll instead concentrate on a more pressing topic:
It's been a wild few days with the Get FISA Right activism campaign. Our bare-bones media room is the best place to get a quick summary of all the stuff going on; here are a few hightlights: over 22,000 members in the myBO group, and 1700+ on Facebook; we delivered our response and our asks to Obama's Senate office today (and of course have emailed them as well); and much much more.
With the vote tomorrow, it's time for a final push. Announcing: a night of Facebook action
In our final push to influence the vote, we're creating a Facebook event for us to watch the vote together. People in the DC area who can get passes will try to fill the gallery during the vote tomorrow -- and we're going to have an online component as well, centered around liveblogging, details TBD.
WHETHER OR NOT YOU CAN MAKE IT IN PERSON OR VIRTUALLY, PLEASE ACCEPT THE EVENT, INVITE YOUR FRIENDS, FORWARD THE LINK IN EMAIL, AND MENTION IT IN RELEVANT GROUPS!
It's a long shot but if we can get enough people on Facebook to respond, that could get some more press and show the breadth of the opposition to telecom immunity and warrantless wiretapping. Events are the most rapidly spreading mechanism on Facebook; it's worth a try. With any luck, we might set a record for the fastest-propagating event
More information on the wiki, including troubleshooting and links to groups to spread the word in. If you're on Facebook, or are willing to join, please help out; if you're not, please consider joining -- it's creepy, Orwellian, and privacy-invasive, but there are 30,000,000 people there and it's a great place to do activism. And in any case, please help spread the word about this: blog it, digg it, mail your friends, and call your mom.
Mike Stark's blog post that kicked the event into high gear was titled Will Obama feel the sting of social networking? Since then, we've expanded to a 50-state strategy and are targetting multiple Senators. It's still a good question, though. Facebook's got a lot more people on it than myBO, and far richer functionality for stuff like this. Let's give it a try ...
UPDATE, July 7: Ari Melber's Online Activists Keep the Pressure on Obama has great perspectives and links on the Get FISA Right "net movement". Deborah Pierce's FISA: a brief history discusses how the statute has steadily been broadened since it was first introduced in 1978.
Thank you for taking the time to respond to us with your post "My Position On FISA" dated July 3rd, 2008. In your response, you pledged to "listen to [our] concerns, take them seriously, and seek to earn [our] ongoing support," and in that spirit, we would like to continue this conversation. We ask that you help transfer our passion and political activism into getting the FISA bill right -- now.
I certainly don't mean to trivialize the situation. There's a huge amount at stake and the anger, frustration, and disappointment so many of us (including me) feel comes through in every post. Realistically, the odds are still against us.
Still. We have a chance. We're in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and in a conversation with Barack and his aides. Like the vast majority of us who have weighed in so far, I wasn't particularly thrilled with the content of his response, and I wish it had come out earlier in the day, but even so ... we're managing to get our voice heard. We're not out of it yet.
We could turn the tide; and even if not, at the very least we've succeeded in getting our message out. There are a lot of people in this country who care about civil liberties, and we are getting very tired of telecom donations being put ahead of the rule of law.
It's the Fourth of July, and we're fighting for our civil liberties. How cool is that?
(We continue to hear that they're working on a statement, but it's getting late, so we decided to take the initiative to make sure we have something out before the weekend.
Please repost widely! - promoted by JonPincus)
sent by Mike Stark to Senator Obama's office and his campaign at roughly 11:45 a.m. EDT today. also posted on the Get FISA right wiki and elsewhere)
An Open Letter to Senator Obama
From the 15,000+ (and rapidly growing) members of the my.BarackObama.com group
On October 24, 2007, your campaign spokesman said, "To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies."
On June 20, 2008 you said, of retroactive immunity, "I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses."
As the largest grass-roots group on your campaign website, my.BarackObama.com, and in the spirit of your open/responsive government campaign pledges, we wish to share our ideas for how we may work together to further the goal of eliminating retroactive immunity from the FISA legislation scheduled for debate in the Senate next week. Although this is only one of the problems we see with legislation allows the government to wiretap the communications of its citizenry without a warrant, it's the area we think we can help you the most.
First, Senator Obama, we ask that you make the same tools that we used to call undecided voters in Iowa and New Hampshire available for us to call our fellow citizens in West Virginia, Nebraska, Delaware, Florida and other states that have Senators committed to voting against the amendment that would strip telecom immunity. You have the tools and we have the people power. Together, we are confident we can bring Change; we can make the government listen to the people instead of the telecom lobbyists.
Second, Senator Obama, we ask that you attend the Senate debate and schedule floor time to speak about the violence done to the rule of law when Congress retroactively immunizes the illegal conduct of a special interest. We know you understand that justice should not be sold to the highest special interest bidder; we also know that you can persuade other Senators that are not so clear on the issue. Of course, if you do this, our committed members will surely capture the video of your inspiring oratory, load it to YouTube and spread your words to our friends and family far and wide. We trust in your ability to bring a new way of doing business to Washington and look forward to helping you make that Change a reality.
Senator Obama, the my.BarackObama.com caption reads, "I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington... I'm asking you to believe in yours." We're ready to put these words into practice.
Hopefully everybody has seen the update that the statement from the Obama campaign is now expected tomorrow morning. Let's assume that it comes out at noon.
How best to make use of the time between now and then?
One important thing to do is to redouble our recruiting efforts. Because it's the day before a holiday weekend, it's likely that things will be reallllll slooooooowwwwwwwww ... what can we do to attract more people? It's a good time to hit the social bookmark sites like digg and reddit -- the group's main page is still only at 150 diggs, which looks kind of paltry next to the 2000+ on Steve Elliot's post. More on the wiki under "social bookmarking"*
What else should we be doing? Unsurprisingly I have a few ideas (so expect some more email from me on the list later tonight :-) ) but I'm sure that these are only the tip of the iceberg.
Suggestions?
jon
* there seems to be a bizarre bug in the HTML engine here and so I can't put in a link, sorry
(Now Obama's GOT to notice. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
also sent as mail to the list ...
Lots of attention to the Senator Obama - Please, No Telecom Immunity and Get FISA Right group on my.barackobama.com, now over 6000 members and continuing to grow rapidly. Still haven't gotten into the MSM or tech blogospheres (other than Wired's Threat Level), but these are really solid links:
