This Thursday, my colleague Maryam and I will be heading down to D.C. to take part in the StopWatchingUs Rally ::
https://rally.stopwatching.us ||Â https://optin.stopwatching.us ||Â https://twitter.com/stopwatchingus
… including Friday’s Lobby Day on the Hill & Saturday’s march & rally to the Capitol pool – against the NSA’s illegal, un-checked domestic surveillance – organized in part by our hustling friends & sibling non-profit, Fight For The Future. Great work team, shouts to dude Sina Khanifar too.
Down there, we’re excited to show more previews of our next major project, AskThem ::
http://askthem.io/
… the “We The People” for every elected official. Free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan, with open data for net freedom developers to remix. Charitably supported over the past year by the Knight Foundation’s Tech 4 Engagement initiative.
AskThem helps organizations to push elected officials across the country on their issues. It’s a great place for StopWatchingUs coalition members to get their supporters asking key questions to local legislators.
Here’s how it works. Individuals and organizations submit a question to an elected official – for example, asking a U.S. representative, “Do you support the pending NSA transparency bills?â€Â People then sign on to the questions and petitions they support, voting them up on AskThem and sharing them over social media. If the above question from a StopWatchingUs coalition member about NSA surveillance reaches the signature threshold, or a question about internet access in low-income communities reaches threshold for a city mayor, AskThem will promote that question and push for a public response. (Read more in our slide deck.)
Back to the rally this weekend. I’m proud to be listed as an individual supporter of the protest; but what’s incredible is the more than 100 (!!) public advocacy organizations & companies who’ve joined the StopWatchingUs Coalition and who’ve signed-on to end domestic spying.
See you there, friends w/ EFF, FreePress, Mozilla, PK, CDT, 350, dKos, Demand Progress, Occupy NYC, Prometheus Radio, and MoveOn. Come down to D.C. this weekend to demand accountability & reforms, loudly-in-person style, and lobby your members of Congress with advice from public-tech experts.
If basic systems of checks-and-balances b/w exec., leg. & judicial branches of fed. gov’t aren’t rehabilitated to a semblance of working order, representative democracy in our constitutional republic will be inoperative. One could validly argue it has generally been so under the U.S. Constitution, but the depth & breadth of these NSA revelations are so acutely unacceptable, they constitute a clear-cut system fail (and not in the Internet sense of fail).
Ping me anytime while I’m down visiting D.C., email david at ppolitics dot org, and I’ll reply with my mobile phone number to meet up for a preview. Coming next, an introduction from our newest PPF team member & AskThem community manager (and researcher and more), Maryam Gunja.
More on Fight For the Future, their theory of change, and their impact.