[bestbits] Delivery of International civil society letter to Congress to follow up from HRC statement

[parminder]

Hi All

Sorry, have been behind on this and could not follow closely due to some 
pre occupations.... Did not suspect we have such a close deadline for 
delivery. I thought we had time.... I am unable to respond right now but 
have some comments which I can make only later in the day... Can we wait 
a day or two.... But pl go ahead if it is urgent...

Two things bother me about the statement

1. While I am not against addressing it to the US gov normally, I have 
been appalled that in all the post PRISM clarifications, everything has 
eclusively been about protecting US citizens' interests, and saying that 
they would not do such a thing to US citizens (meaning very clearly that 
non US citizens are a very different matter). Not a word has been 
uttered about the rights of non US citizens, even when the worst 
transgressions have been made against them. I resent such an attitude of 
US gov, which makes me think whether I want to address it at all on this 
issue.. And even if addressed, this  point has to be foregrounded. 
Especially the hypocrisy of all the speak of "global Internet community' 
when the issue is critical Internet resources oversight, and that 
category of thought completely disappearing when real Internet 
governance issues come up need to be highlighted.

2. I am unable to understand why are we so soft on the involved 
companies. I need to know more why they did what they did and how, and 
why they could not be more transparent to their global customers.... In 
India here most people feel a deep breach of trust.... I am not at all 
convinced that they are entirely clean on this, and they told us all 
that they legally could. Do we write a seperate letter to them.... In 
fact, my view is, we write a general statement on the issue, not 
addressed to anyone, which covers both US govs's and these companies' 
culpabilities, or at least asks the needed probing questions from the 
latter. I have many such questions.

parminder



On Thursday 13 June 2013 01:57 AM, Deborah Brown wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I wanted start a separate thread on delivery of the statement, as it's 
> looking like we're getting close to finalizing the text.
>
> Jeremy set a deadline of noon GMT on Thursday for edits, I believe. 
> I'm hearing that it would not be wise to deliver the letter this week 
> because Congress is consumed with immigration reform and the farm 
> bill. Plus delivering it on Friday would not be ideal if we want media 
> attention.
>
> How do others feel about aiming for a Monday or Tuesday delivery? Then 
> as Joana mentioned, those who will be at the Freedom Online Coalition 
> meeting in Tunis can deliver it to officials there as well.
>
> If the plan is to deliver this to all members of Congress, we would 
> need contact information for all offices. Is that what others had in 
> mind? A number of groups that regularly do DC-based advocacy already 
> have this information, so perhaps it would make the most sense to work 
> with one of the more international groups with a DC presence on 
> delivery. Amnesty International and HRW come to mind, but there are 
> probably others. What do others think?
>
> Best,
> Deborah
> -- 
> Deborah Brown
> Policy Analyst
> Access | AccessNow.org
> E. deborah at accessnow.org <mailto:deborah at accessnow.org>
> @deblebrown
> PGP 0x5EB4727D

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/bestbits/attachments/20130613/e8439854/attachment.htm>