Donate to Chelsea’s legal defense fund to help with her appeal.

In support of this year’s Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon, Chelsea Manning has prepared a special statement that will be read at Saturday night’s Celebration of Hackers and Whistleblowers at the Internet Archive.

HERE IS THE LINK FOR A LIVE WEBCAST OF TONIGHT’S SPEAKERS, at 8:00 pm PST. (Movies only seen by attendees.)

Meanwhile, Chelsea has written an Op-Ed for the Guardian on why the FISA courts should be abolished. (She’s also published a 129-page surveillance reform bill.)

Sign this petition from Fight For The Future to tell your politicians to read Chelsea’s bill.

Fisa courts stifle the due process they were supposed to protect. End them

Intelligence agencies will always seek to collect more data. But the courts that oversee them must be as concerned about due process as they are with secrets

From the article:

 Those courts were established nearly 40 years ago, in response to allegations that the intelligence community was abusing their power in order to spy on US citizens: the US Senate’s Church Committee conducted a massive investigation into the intelligence community and expressed concerns that the privacy rights of US citizens had been violated by activities conducted under pretenses of foreign intelligence collection.

The result then was new procedures and the creation of a new court system – the Foreign Intelligence Court – to process surveillance requests by the government in secret. Unfortunately, it also created a new host of oversight problems: only a similar secret court process can review the actions taken by the courts, leaving many in Congress and all of the American public in the dark.

Some of these systemic problems have finally been examined by non-Fisa courts in the last two years – most notably by the US court of appeals for the second circuit early in 2015. However, because of the continuing secrecy of the Fisa courts, any ruling by a court of appeals was only a symbolic gesture. The USA Freedom Act, for all that it’s trumpeted as the solution to some of the excessed, does little to institute real oversight over the Fisa courts.

The solution: we should abolish the entire Fisa Court system and bring all surveillance requests into the oldest and most tested court system in America: the US district courts and courts of appeal.