Protect online privacy: Tell your Representatives to support Lofgren-Davidson amendment requiring a warrant for surveillance of online activity.
Note: only one of the following two Congresswomen represents you. To find out which one, click here.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi
SF Office: (415) 556-4862
DC Office: (202) 225-4965
Email Contact: https://pelosi.house.gov/contact-me/email-me
Call the SF office first, but try the DC office if you can’t get through. If you get voicemail, hang up and try a few more times to talk to a real person. Don’t give up! Short direct messages are most effective. Hate the phone? Resistbot is your friend.
Rep. Jackie Speier
San Mateo Office: (650) 342-0300
DC Office: (202) 225-3531
Email Contact: https://speier.house.gov/email-jackie
Keep calling if you don’t get through. Voicemails are logged daily into a central report across offices. Hate the phone? Resistbot is your friend.
Note: Due to shelter-in-place orders during the Covid-19 emergency, it may be more effective to use email or Resistbot to contact the MoC’s office. It is important to use your own words in emails to elected officials, but feel free to use our sample script below as a guide.
Call Script
My name is __________. I am a constituent, and my zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible SF.
The Constitution’s 4th Amendment is clear: federal agencies must have a real warrant to obtain our Internet activity records. While I oppose the USA Freedom Reauthorization Act as a whole, I'm asking you to please follow Sen. Wyden's lead to improve the Lofgren-Davidson amendment and pass it, to protect my privacy and always require a warrant.
Background
Portions of the USA PATRIOT Act/USA Freedom Act have expired, and Congress is trying to renew them. In the Senate, Sens. Wyden and Daines tried to amend warrantless bulk Internet data harvesting out of the bill but fell short of beating a "filibuster" by one vote. Now it's over to the House, and with your help, in unison with a coalition of advocacy groups and Internet companies, we have a chance of adding a requirement of a warrant to collect internet activity data. An amendment by Reps. Lofgren and Davidson authored an amendment similar to Wyden and Daine’s, which we are asking our Representatives to support.
Congress is poised to vote on Wednesday to allow federal agencies to record your Internet activity without a warrant, which may include browsing history, search history, and more. Please call to support the Lofgren-Davidson amendment to require a real warrant for this surveillance.
In the late 1970s Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to address Nixon's abuses of power and to provide a legal framework for federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies to conduct limited foreign-related domestic surveillance. In 2001 Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act, which greatly expanded those powers, including in Section 215 the power to clandestinely collect some domestic business records when approved by a secret FISA court.
Federal agencies have used that supposed authority to record internet activity en masse. In 2015 Congress passed an update, the USA Freedom Act, which ostensibly dropped allowance for bulk network surveillance but was still pretty permissive. Section 215 and other provisions expired in March, and now Congress is trying to renew them. The bill is called the USA Freedom Reauthorization Act, H.R.6172, and it already passed the House once with bulk surveillance in it. The Senate passed it with some amendments, though an important one failed (defeated by one vote with a "filibuster"). That was an amendment by Sens. Wyden (D-OR) and Daines (R-MT) which would've required an actual warrant—as the 4th Amendment requires-for federal agencies to log the content of people's Internet activity.
Now the bill goes back to the House, with a vote likely on Wednesday. Reps. Lofgren (D-CA-19) and Davidson (R-OH-08) authored an amendment similar to Wyden and Daines's. A huge coalition of advocacy groups is pushing the amendment, with some Internet companies joining the effort. This a good chance to include provisions protecting Americans from warrantless surveillance. In coalition with Save Internet Privacy, please join the day of action to call your member of Congress, sign the open letter, and spread the word.