• How can the online civil liberties community and our allies across the political spectrum put pressure on Congress to help assure the sunsetting of PATRIOT Act sections 206 and 215 in 2009?
• How do we change the media narrative away from a focus on threats and the false tradeoff of security vs. privacy?
• Looking to 2010, how can we build on our successes in 2009 to achieve substantial reform of domestic surveillance legislation -- and if necessary make this a campaign issue for the 2010 primaries and elections?

Identified strategies

• Build a broad, diverse coalition, focusing on cost, dignity, and human rights issues as well as privacy and constitution. Potential coalition members: the military and veterans community, students, migrant rights groups, the NRA and other gun rights advocates, faith networks, the AARP, libertarians. Build on the existing coaltions and networks from he fight against REAL ID in 2007 and BORDC's anti-PATRIOT Act initiatives several years ago.
• Use anti-corporate activism against the companies supplying equipment and profiting from surveillance, with techniques that have been applied successfull on anti-torture activism and other corporate social responsibility work. Post-meeting note from Jon: the attention to Nokia Siemens Network's surveillance technology in Iran establishes an explicit linkage here.
• Involve the technical community and domain experts, something voting rights activists have done very successfully. To focus on the effectiveness of the systems, we'll need data like how many people go through the system, how many are selected for enhanced search, what percentage of the "bad" people identified are terrorist risks (as opposed to drug-related arrests etc.), costs, and the results of TSA's own tests. How to get the information? Options include working directly with the TSA, working with cooperative local airport authorities, getting it from the companies providing the equipment and (worst case) FOIAing it. For domain expertise, reach out to the intelligence and ex-intelligence community.
  
• Tie it all together. Potential themes: "surveillance industrial complex"; the legal links between torture, military commissions, and PATRIOT Act, FISA; human rights perspectives; "but we won't".
  
• Focus on specific issues like digital strip search and build enough intensity that they have to respond, establishing a meme.
  
• Get celebrities involved (Penn Gillette, Drew Carey, ...) and involve psychologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists.
• Focus on Congress for PATRIOT Act reauthorization, and demonstrate political capital

Tactics for the PATRIOT Act reauthorization

• We need a head count
• Need to find out whether there will be a committee discussion? Might just go through rules committee ...
  
• We want a debate
• Feedback campaign to Congresspeople on Twitter and Facebook. Post-meeting note: MoveOn is currently doing this with Senator Schumer on Health Care; we should learn from their experiences.
• Key Dems to focus on: Reid, Pelosi, DiFi, Jane Harman, .... who on the Republican side?
• Use a powerful visual image; create posters, t-shirts, etc.
• Work towards a viral video campaign. One possible theme: "change the name", building after BORDC's earlier contest.
  
  

A couple of major questions

• There's no good communications structure for the people and organizations involved in this. Can we leverage existing sites and mailing lists? Or is something new needed? If so, who will take the lead on it?
  

• The people currently involved don't have the bandwidth to put a lot of time and energy into this. [These notes are a good example: it took me over a month to post them and get them out to the people who were at the meeting and the Get FISA Right list.] How do we get any kind of momentum in this situation?
  

• When we invited Bruce Schneier to join us, he replied "FISA and the PATRIOT Act? Isn't that over?" How many other supporters like Bruce have this kind of defeatist attitude and aren't aware of (or don't see the importance of) the upcoming PATRIOT vote?

References

• Raw notes from the meeting, taken by Jon Pincus
  
• Recommendations from early 2009
• The Liberty and Security coalition's Recommendations for the Next Administration and Congress
• EFF’s What Obama Can and Should do to Stop Telecom Immunity,
  
• ACLU's transition plan
• CDT's Reform of the National Security Surveillance Laws and Procedures
• Get FISA Right's Strategy and Priorities for 2009
• What does it mean to "get FISA right"?, by Jim Burrows on the Get FISA Right blog, has some principles for changes and additional referenes
  
• Deborah Pierce's FISA: A brief history is a short overview of FISA from 1978 to mid-2008, and links out to more detailed discussions.