As you know, the Senate failed to pass a John McCain-authored amendment giving the FBI power to use National Security Letters to spy on your browsing, emailing, chatting, and texting histories -- but they only failed to advance the amendment by two votes, and they could bring it up again literally any minute, so the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Defending Dissent Foundation help you tell your Senators to protect our Fourth Amendment rights and reject the McCain amendment. As usual, supporters of the amendment hide behind technicalities -- the FBI would still need a warrant to access your content, but don't delude yourselves into thinking the FBI wouldn't find out virtually everything about you from your internet metadata. And don't believe the hype that National Security Letters are "precise" tools; they allow law enforcement to gather data without a court order, and without establishing that they're getting the data to investigate an actual terrorist suspect. Certainly don't believe the hype that getting a warrant from a judge is a pain in the ass. Law and order in America is supposed to protect the innocent, even at the expense of the guilty. Free people understand that -- and they also understand that the roots of terrorism lie in an economy that exploits other nations and redistributes worker income to bosses.
Meanwhile, despite our best efforts, the Senate passed that GMO "labeling" bill by a filibuster-proof margin -- but not a veto-proof margin. (The Senate vote was 63-30, but they'd need 67 votes to override a veto.) Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell President Obama to veto the GMO "labeling" bill. I'm putting "labeling" in ironic quotation marks for good reason: the bill doesn't actually mandate proper GMO labeling, but allows food-producing corporations to put "labels" like QR codes (which you may not have the smartphone app to read) or website addresses (because you routinely remember website addresses from supermarket labels, right?) or 800 phone numbers (because you're never in a hurry at the market, are you?), instead of the simple "this product contains genetically-modified organisms," which you don't need a smartphone or a laptop to read. Mr. Obama long ago said he wanted real GMO labeling on food, but I don't believe he ever meant it -- given his USDA Secretary's overt support for things like QR codes, Mr. Obama is more likely to declare the Senate's bill "the real GMO labeling bill we've all waited for," never mind the actual GMO labeling Vermont is now doing (and which the Senate bill would pre-empt). Still, duty is duty, and our duty is to tell him to keep his word and veto the bill.
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