American Library Association, ABFFE, and Tor Join Coalition to Stop NSA Surveillance Program

Posted on June 13, 2013

The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, which was founded to fight book censorship and runs Banned Book Week, and the American Library Association are the latest signatories to an open letter a letter to the U.S. Congress about the newly revealed ongoing surveillance of Americans by the NSA. The letter to Congress says the spying on innocent Americans is illegal under the Constitution: "This type of blanket data collection by the government strikes at bedrock American values of freedom and privacy. This dragnet surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which protect citizens' right to speak and associate anonymously and guard against unreasonable searches and seizures that protect their right to privacy."

The ABFFE is part of a bipartisan coalition of 86 civil liberties groups and Internet groups/organizations which has banded together to stop the surveillance of Americans' communications. Signatories to the letter include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, reddit, Mozilla, FreedomWorks, the American Civil Liberties Union, American Library Association, BoingbBoing, Center for Media and Democracy, Center for Media Justice, Freedom of the Press Foundation, reddit, the World Wide Web Foundation, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Greenpeace USA, Tor and many others.

It's not every day that you see Tea Party groups and Daily Kos signing the petition. The group is asking Congress to immediately halt the surveillance and "provide a full public accounting of the NSA's and the FBI's data collection programs."

You can read the letter to Congress and see who has joined the coalition so far at stopwatching.us.