Tuesday, February 11, 2014 has become “the day we fight back against mass surveillance” and in Providence a rally against NSA spying was held outside the Federal Building next to Kennedy Plaza downtown. Five minutes after protesters representing MoveOn.org and the Rhode Island Coalition to defend Human and Civil Rights (RICHCR) unfurled a large banner that said, “Dear U.S. Government, STOP SPYING ON US!!” a white Homeland Security vehicle pulled up and a representative of that agency kept a watchful eye, even going so far as to leave his vehicle and physically patrol the protest. It wasn’t long before members of the U.S. Marshall Service and the Providence Police arrived as back up.

One might wonder why members of three law enforcement agencies were required to keep the sidewalks clear for pedestrians and to keep the protesters from using the stairs when giving speeches. One may further wonder why a small crowd of peaceful demonstrators, standing up for their constitutional rights, should be prohibited from using the stairs of a public building for short speeches to a small crowd.

As Greg Gerritt said during his short talk, “Clearly the Department of Homeland InSecurity and the Providence Police have nothing better to do than to watch a bunch of gray haired people hold signs in front of the federal building.”

Speaking at the event were Chris Curry of MoveOn.org, Randall Rose of RICHCR, RI Future columnist Greg Gerritt, Robert Scott Perry of Portsmouth and others. It was as the last speech ended that the officer from Homeland Security informed the organizers that the protest was over and that it was time to leave. According to Randall Rose, who pointed out that the protest was taking place on public property, “[The Homeland Security officer] said that the sidewalk was federal property and ordered us again to stop protesting and leave.  He said that we’d already had our protest.”

It is the height of irony and government hubris that a government official, charged with protecting the Constitution, should approach a group of citizens agitating for Constitutional protections and decide for them the limits of their rights pertaining to free speech and free assembly.

The presence of so many officers (from at least three different agencies) was meant to intimidate free citizens and to curtail protest.

Segal, a former RI state rep who ran for Congress in 2010, and Swartz together created Demand Progress, a progressive organization that fights for net neutrality and against domestic internet spying by the US government.

Today that organization is leading some of the biggest names on the web in a national day of action to draw attention to the NSA proactively searching everyone’s computer for evidence of wrongdoing. Occupy Providence helped organize the action at Kennedy Plaza at 1pm today.

“Today the greatest threat to a free Internet, and broader free society, is the National Security Agency’s mass spying regime,” Segal said in a press release. “If Aaron were alive he’d be on the front lines, fighting back against these practices that undermine our ability to engage with each other as genuinely free human beings.”

Demand Progress is joined by the ACLU, Upworthy, the Progressive Democrats of America, Reddit, Tumblr, Mozilla, Greenpeace and Amnesty International in sponsoring this day of action. And the National Journal reports that Google, Facebook, Twitter, AOL and Microsoft also joined the cause Monday.

According to National Journal:

“organizers are promising that banners will be prominently displayed on websites across the Internet urging users to engage in viral activity expressing their opposition to the NSA. Additionally, those banners will ask readers to flood the telephone lines and email in-boxes of congressional offices to voice their support of the Freedom Act, a bill in Congress that aims to restrict the government’s surveillance authority. It remains unclear to what extent Facebook, Google, and the others will participate, or whether they will host such banners on their individual sites [Ed note: no doodle today].

And if you don’t yet understand why you should care about the mass surveillance sweeps the NSA is doing to every American, watch this video:

Monday Jan 13, 2013
North Kingstown, RI – Good morning, Ocean State. This is Bob Plain, editor and publisher of the RI Future blog podcasting to you from The Hideaway on the banks of the Mattatuxet River behind the Shady Lea Mill in North Kingstown, Rhode Island.

It’s Monday, January 13 … and while last week we wondered if Rhode Island was the only state in the nation to have a governor who surfs, this week we’ll be wondering if we’re the only state to have a gubernatorial hopeful responsible for a traffic fatality.

The Providence Journal reports this morning that in 1989, a 19-year-old Allan Fung, now mayor of Cranston who is running for governor, was arrested for the death of a man after a car accident he caused on Interstate 95. The charges were later dropped. Fung was coming home from college for the weekend and he allegedly lost consciousness, or maybe he fell asleep at the wheel, crossed three lanes of traffic and hit and killed a man who was changing a tire in the breakdown lane.

Wow … what a life-changing event for Mayor Fung. A lot of folks wouldn’t have the courage to enter public service after such an experience. I applaud him for telling this story, and more so for being able to move on from it.

That said, Sam Howard penned an important piece about both Republican candidates for governor late last week … both Fung and Barrington millionaire Ken Block agreed to boycott John DePetro and/or WPRO, but quickly abandoned their commitment as soon as the hateful shock jock’s month in exile was over.

On NBC 10 News Conference this weekend, we debated the merits of legalizing marijuana. Justin Katz, the ostensibly small government libertarian-leaning conservative, said he’s afraid it will lead to a government monopoly over drugs and prostitution. Ironically enough his opposition to marijuana smacks of paranoia.

I can’t believe I actually have opportunity to say this, but the ProJo editorial page has a more nuanced and reasonable reason for opposing legalization this morning. They write the legalization could increase use among kids. Experts don’t necessarily agree.

In December, East Greenwich school drug counselor Bob Houghtaling joined Jared Moffat and Rebecca McGoldrick of Regulate RI here in the RI Future newsroom to talk about just this topic. Houghtaling thinks it will be easier to teach kids how to make healthy choices about pot if we take a less punative approach.

In other news about potentially progressive legislation this year from the State House … Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed said last week that her chamber will focus on addressing poverty this session as a means to fixing Rhode Island’s ailing economy.

And in New Hampshire this week, the talk is about campaign finance reform. Harvard professor and Rootstriker Lawrence Lessig organized, with Demand Progress and Rhode Island’s own David Segal, a two week march through the Granite State to get residents to demand presidential candidates take a stand against money dominating politics.

Friend of RI Future Mike McCarthy is there for the entire two weeks and we hope he’ll be checking in with us on occassion. In the meantime, here’s my interview with McCarthy from Friday … he stopped by the Hideaway to borrow my sleeping bag for his trip. Listen to our conversation about his adventure here.

Progressives will “confront” Congressman Jim Langevin at a town hall meeting he is hosting in Cranston tonight at 6:30 for his support of the NSA spying on Americans.

“It’s time for him to hear from his constituents,” said David Segal, a former Rhode Island state representative who is the executive director of Demand Progress, a nationally-known advocacy group that supports civil liberties and internet freedom. The Rhode Island Progressive Democrats and other left-leaning groups are also planning on attending the town hall.

“The tide has turned: Americans are no longer willing to sacrifice their constitutionally enshrined civil liberties,” Segal said in a statement released this morning, “Yet Rep. Langevin steadfastly supports the monitoring of nearly every American under these secret programs, instituted under a secret process, justified by a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act.”

In a post on this site on July 25, Segal thanked his former opponent David Cicilline for supporting legislation that would “curtail the NSA’s regime of domestic surveillance,” he wrote. “Meanwhile, Rep. Langevin took a disappointing vote, as activists came up just short of overwhelming the efforts of the NSA, White House, and others to continue collecting Americans phone records and other data.”

Many progressive Democrats and civil libertarians are extremely upset with Langevin for not supporting what is known as the Amash Amendment, legislation sponsored by Rep. Justin Amash, R-Michigan, that if passed would have stopped the “National Security Agency’s secret collection of hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone records,” according to the AP.

In response to his vote, Langevin said in a statement “…while I respect the deeply-held convictions of those who disagree, I could not support the Amash Amendment. This amendment would have undermined a valuable intelligence collection tool that was initiated in 2001 and reauthorized by Congress multiple times with bipartisan support, most recently in 2011.”

Langevin is a moderately-liberal Democrat who has been moving to the left in recent years. He has long showed a progressive streak on economic issues and has shifted to the left on social issues, such as abortion and same sex marriage. Cyber-security has been an important issue to Langevin.

A federal judge made permanent on Wednesday her order blocking enforcement of a U.S. law’s provision that authorizes military detention for people deemed to have “substantially supported” al Qaeda, the Taliban or “associated forces.”

U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest in Manhattan had ruled in May in favor of non-profit groups and reporters whose work relates to conflicts in the Middle East and who said they feared being detained under a section of the law, signed by President Barack Obama in December.

In an attempt to woo so-called “Internet voters,” both the Republican and Democratic parties are considering adopting official positions supporting a free and open Internet in their upcoming party platforms at their respective conventions, according to sources familiar with party platform drafting.

There’s a race of sorts on to be the first party to corner Internet voters… and Internet dollars.  The Republicans are doing an unusually good job securing support from Silicon Valley, as US News notes:

Both Republicans and Democrats are in a race to capture the Internet’s voting power, but if campaign donations are anything to go by, Republicans seem to have a slight lead. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, 54 percent of the $4 million that Silicon Valley-based PACs have donated have gone to Republican causes and candidates. Companies that have given more to GOP PACs include Intel, Microsoft and Facebook, while Google and Oracle have given more money to Democrats.

This represents a shift from the norm: Repubs were faster to peel off of SOPA and have been actively wooing tech support.  There’s a strong libertarian streak among VCs and start-up entrepreneurs (too many of whom forget that the creation of the Internet was a publicly financed endeavor) that comports well with certain strains within the GOP.  The Dems are still better on Net Neutrality and privacy, but SOPA was a much bigger deal both to most web entrepreneurs and rank-and-file netizens — and the Dems stood by SOPA for far too long, likely largely because they were worried about losing Hollywood’s support.  The Repubs didn’t have that counterweight to consider, and were more able to make a more swift play for tech votes and bucks.

The Dems need to catch up, and fast.

You can still email your lawmakers and ask them to oppose the legislation by clicking here.

“No person or organization shall be deprived of their ability to connect to others at will without due process of law, with the presumption of innocence until found guilty. Neither governments nor corporations should be allowed to use disconnection from the Internet as a way of arbitrarily furthering their own aims.”

The Internet Blacklist Bill — S.968, formally called the PROTECT IP Act — would violate those principles by allowing the Department of Justice to force search engines, browsers, and service providers to block users’ access to websites that have been accused of facilitating intellectual property infringement — without even giving them a day in court. It would also give IP rights holders a private right of action, allowing them to sue to get sites prevented from operating. Demand Progress’s new mash-up, posted here, explains the bill in more detail.

S.968 has passed the Senate Judiciary Committee, but Ron Wyden (D-OR) is temporarily blocking it from getting a floor vote by using a procedural maneuver known as a hold, noting that “By ceding control of the internet to corporations through a private right of action, and to government agencies that do not sufficiently understand and value the internet, PIPA represents a threat to our economic future and to our international objectives.”

The House is expected to take up a version of the legislation in coming weeks.

“We encourage Americans to mark this 20th birthday of the World Wide Web by defending the principles that underpinned its creation — now under persistent threat by overzealous governments and corporate interests across the globe,” said Demand Progress executive director David Segal. “In particular, the Internet Blacklist Bill would undermine the basic integrity of the Web, and we expect Congress to take it up when they return from their summer break.”

More than 400,000 Demand Progress members have urged their lawmakers to oppose the Internet Blacklist Bill. You can email your Senators and Representatives and ask them to oppose S.968 by clicking here.