Dr. King was targeted by warrantless government surveillance. Now, we are too.

Many wouldn’t realize it today, but over 50 years ago the U.S. government wanted to “destroy Dr. King as the leader of the civil rights movement.” (The Washington Post)

To do that, the FBI turned a blind eye to the U.S. Constitution and secretly began to wiretap Dr. King’s private communications, without a warrant or court authorization. They wanted to find whatever they could, under any means necessary, to smear and delegitimize Dr. King in the public’s eye. So just two days after Dr. King delivered his “I have a dream” speech, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI declared Dr. King one of their “most dangerous” suspects, labeled him a national security threat and began secretly wiretapping him until his assassination in April 1968. (Slate)

It’s tragically ironic that tomorrow, the day after our nation honors the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the U.S. Senate will vote on a bill that would extend government mass spying programs that sweep-up and store our communications da­­ta without a warrant for another 6 years.

The good news is that we only need 41 senators to oppose the bill in order to stop the vote. (Medium)

Click here to call your senators now. Tell them to protect your right to privacy and oppose S. 139 — a bill that seeks to reauthorize and extend the authority that lets the NSA collect, store, and monitor our online communications data.

With total disregard to the Fourth Amendment, it was Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy that personally approved the wiretapping of Dr. King in 1963, not a court.

Fast forward more than 50 years to today — the era of the Internet and digital technologies — and the U.S. government, under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, is now conducting suspicion-less and warrantless surveillance of not just foreigners (who most claim are not protected by the U.S. Constitution, never mind internationally agreed upon human rights to privacy), but of U.S. persons, too.

And as Edward Snowden revealed, these Section 702 authorized NSA spying programs collect and store a tremendous amount of our communications data, effectively creating a massive Google-like database of our private lives for agencies like the FBI to then monitor and search, without needing a warrant to do so. (The Intercept)

S. 139, the bill senators will vote on tomorrow, would reauthorize Section 702 for another 6 years and codify into law, for the first time in U.S. history, a loophole that lets the FBI spy on U.S. persons not implicated in open criminal investigations! (The Intercept)

Under the hyperbolic guise of defending our national security, the U.S. government has quietly and slowly built a mass surveillance program unlike any state-sanctioned spying program in history. Without whistleblowers like Snowden, the public may never have known to what extent the U.S. government is spying on all of us. But because of these exposures, we now also know that security and intelligence experts, as well as independent commissioners, agree that dragnet surveillance programs actually make us all less secure and less safe. (The Washington Post)­

Investigations that honor our rights to privacy and are based on checks and balances work — so we must all demand that Congress tell the NSA to get a warrant and stop spying on all of us.

The right to privacy is a cornerstone to freedom. We believe that so much that we’re willing to crowdfund billboards targeting the Democratic Senators claiming to be members of “the resistance” if they vote YES on S. 139 tomorrow. (Fight for the Future) The power to turn the Internet into a weapon for mass surveillance is too dangerous for any government to have, but it’s unthinkable in the hands of the Trump administration, which has clearly shown it will use these powers to target the most vulnerable people in our country.

Just as Dr. King, Cesar Chavez, W.E.B. DuBois, and, most recently, Black Lives Matter and American Muslim neighborhoods at large, have fallen victim to the government’s mass surveillance programs, history and facts have proven that the most powerful government in the world will always use these surveillance programs to divide, silence, and intimidate the most powerless amongst us.

Tomorrow, lawmakers can take a historic stand and fight for our right to privacy, security, and safety. We must demand that they do so.

Call your senators now.