H.R. 699, the Email Privacy Act, passed the House by an astounding 419-0 vote, which is rare, especially for a good bill that actually protects the email privacy of Americans. And Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Charles Grassley (R-IA) plans to bring the bill up for consideration by his committee this week. You see what's coming, right? Government agencies wanting exceptions to the bill so they can snoop on your emails "in case of an emergency," like "emergencies" don't somehow become more "common" as time goes on, or like making government agencies get warrants to look at emails is somehow onerous. Hence Save the Fourth helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 699 without get-out-of-jail cards for certain government agencies. And let's be clear: if the Securities and Exchange Commission wants to investigate bankster wrongdoing and wants to look at bankster emails, or Internal Revenue wants to catch tax cheats by looking at their emails, then they should have to get a damn warrant. If we work and fight to protect freedom and privacy, then we work for all of us, not just the people of whom we approve. If freedom and privacy aren't for everyone, then they're for no one, and I'm not having that, not in my America.
Meanwhile, over a month after the House passed H.R. 2666, the No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act, the bill's still sitting there in the Senate, awaiting action, even though it's been on the Senate Legislative Calendar for almost as long as it's been out of the House. What could they be afraid of? And don't say "a promised Obama veto," because I don't think the Senate is afraid of that per se, though the President did, in fact, promise to veto H.R. 2666 if it got to his desk. There may just be one thing they're afraid of -- getting their phone lines jammed by angry constituents who actually use broadband and pay for broadband who not only recognize H.R. 2666 as a lateral attack on net neutrality, but who wonder why on Earth anyone in their right mind would think "rate regulation" is an unqualified evil. After all, people who use broadband, and pay for broadband, are sick of their cable company jacking up their rates whenever they feel like it, and all of the solutions to that problem (breaking up monopolies, actually regulating rates) actually involve their government working on their behalf. So let Free Press help you tell your Senator to protect internet freedom by rejecting H.R. 2666.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject S. 2807, the so-called Preserving Public Access to Public Waters Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. How could we oppose a bill called the Preserving Public Access to Public Waters Act? Long story short: the bill doesn't do what it says it'll do. Long story somewhat longer: what the bill does instead is allow states to open federal waters to "residential and commercial fishing," as if the Secretary of the Interior might not have good reasons to close off National Park waters to fishing, as if states should have jurisdiction over federal anything. Seriously, if the states want the waters that badly, they should petition to their reps in Congress to formally turn them over to the state, not change the law so that "federal" and "state" are meaningless terms. And note well the phrase "residential and commercial fishing" -- like how they put "commercial" second like that's not what they care about most? In addition to letting states usurp federal power without due process, the bill also constitutes an attempt to hand over our waters (and the fish in them, fragile ecosystems be damned) to fishing corporations in a corporate welfare scheme -- all under the guise of letting grandpa do more fishing.
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