"Right now our rights to connect and communicate are in serious jeopardy," said Craig Aaron, President and CEO of Free Press. "I don't think we should believe those who suggest that the American people don't care about this scandal. Those pushing that line are just hoping that people won't find out what's really going on."
Participants on the call emphasized that their coalition consists of members from both the political left and right, but Aaron called out progressives who opposed George W. Bush's assault on civil liberties but aren't ready to condemn Barack Obama's administration.
"This is not about right or left. It's about right or wrong," he said.
Anna Wilmesher with Restore the Fourth said the biggest rallies planned for Thursday will take place in New York City and Washington D.C. "Both rallies are expecting a turnout of more than 1,000 people," she said, adding that they are being held on July 4 because "we stand for the same values that the founders of the U.S. fought for and gained independence."
Later in the call Cusack said he was growing weary of members of Congress playing dumb when it comes to talking about the recent revelations on television. "Most rational people don't admit that the FISA court is a kangaroo court. There's no oversight. There's no checks and balances and so they go on television, it's in federal court. But most people know that it doesn't fall within the checks and balances of the Constitution. So, they need to say that on camera and not just off-camera."
The protest in Tampa at Lykes Gaslight Park is scheduled to take place at 2 p.m. this Thursday.
A national group — formed in the wake of the revelations delivered by NSA contractor Edward Snowden — is planning a series of more than 90 rallies around the country on the Fourth of July to protest NSA surveillance. Tampa's rally will take place in Lykes Gaslight Park.
StopWatching.us has collected more than 531,000 signatures since its creation, and today the coalition's members held a conference call to discuss their anger about the NSA surveillance scandal information that has been printed throughout the past three weeks in The Guardian, the Washington Post, the McClatchy News Service and most recently, the German news magazine Der Spiegel.
"It's unfortunate that this conversation is turning into a debate over Edward Snowden, and I think it's a big distraction to avoid focus on the invasions that have actually been occurring," said Harvey Anderson, Vice President of Business and Legal Affairs with Mozilla, which runs Firefox, the only browser that hasn't received a FISA order to be part of the PRISM program detailed by the Post earlier this month. PRISM is the government code name for a data collection effort that requested companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo! to provide information about their customers usage patterns.
Also participating in the conference call was actor John Cusack, a board member with the Freedom of the Press Foundation. He blasted the mainstream media for focusing on the wrong issues raised by the NSA surveillance story.
"We have prosecution of whistleblowers at an all time high. We have kill lists, we have drone assassination programs, we have people jailed without trial, the destruction of habeus corpus, we have secret courts ... and now these revelations on spying on every citizen and perhaps every human being on the planet. The end of constitutional rights of American privacy. These are not subtle facts. And yet what we hear about from the press is the alleged character defects of the whistleblowers," Cusack said. "Why are so many in our government, our press and our intellectual class so afraid of an informed public?" he later asked.
