EFF Joins with Coalition to Provide Policy Roadmap to Next President and Congress

A coalition of more than 25 organizations, including EFF, yesterday released "Liberty and Security: Recommendations for the Next Administration and Congress", a comprehensive catalogue of policy recommendations on a range of critical civil liberties issues.

This collaboratively-created transition roadmap, coordinated by our friends at the Constitution Project, contains 20 chapters providing policy recommendations on a wide variety of issues, from Guantanamo Bay to warrantless wiretapping. EFF has signed on as an ally in support of the recommendations in eleven of those chapters, concerning issues within EFF's mission to protect free speech and privacy on the electronic frontier.

Most importantly, EFF has joined as a supporter of all the recommendations made in the area of "Secrecy, Surveillance, and Privacy", covering goals such as reigning in NSA spying, updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and reforming the State Secrets privilege (consistent with our Privacy Agenda for the New Administration), as well as combating excessive classification and urging greater transparency in government (as previously described in our Transparency Agenda for the New Administration).

After the jump, you can find links to PDFs of all of the individual chapters of the transition catalogue where EFF has signed on as an ally; the entire document is available here [pdf]. We hope that you — and the next President and Congress — find them enlightening.

Chapter 1. Eliminate unnecessary and counterproductive barriers to legitimate charitable work found in current counterterrorism measures.

Chapter 8. Revising Attorney-General Guidelines on FBI Investigations to Prevent Investigations Based on First Amendment Activities, or on Race, Religion, Ethnicity, or National Origin.

Chapter 9. Updating the Law Governing the Privacy of Electronic Communications.

Chapter 10. Fusion Centers and the Expansion of Domestic Surveillance.

Chapter 11. Preventing the Excessive Invocation of National Security to Prevent Access to Government Decision-Making and Reduce Transparency in Government, and To Preserve Access to Government Documents Regardless of the Form in Which They are Maintained.

Chapter 12. National Security Letters and Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act.

Chapter 13. Reform the National Security Surveillance Laws and Procedures.

Chapter 14. Preventing Over-Classification and Retroactive Classification, and Promoting Declassification, of Government Documents.

Chapter 15. Reforming the State Secrets Privilege.

Chapter 16. Reforming Watchlists.

Chapter 17. Assertion of Executive Authority in National Security Matters.

Related Issues: Privacy

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