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Advocacy Blog
Thursday, March 22, 2007
"Dissent is not Terrorism"
This article titled "Dissent is not Terrorism" from TomPaine chronicles the government spying on the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a pacifist Quaker organization. The article describes the government's documentation of peaceful protests planned by AFSC as terrorist in nature, revealed in documents released through a FOIA request. OMB Watch has followed this trend of the government spying on peaceful nonprofit organizations throughout the country.
News of this has been around for a while, but as the Democratic-led Congress focuses its attention on open government, the experiences of the Service Committee highlight the excesses of an unaccountable government and the importance of tools like the Freedom of Information Act to preserve that accountability. . . . We expect our elected officials to uphold the rule of law, and we ask Congress to assert its role to create checks and balances on other branches of the government in order to protect our civil liberties.
Meanwhile, according to the Washington Post:
The Justice Department is opposing bipartisan Senate legislation that would require federal agencies to disclose to Congress data-mining programs they use to find patterns of criminal or terrorist activity, saying that it duplicates a reporting requirement mandated in the 2006 renewal of the USA Patriot Act.
Posted by Amanda Adams
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