Senator Obama has consistently said that he opposes telecom immunity and will work with his Senate colleagues to remove it from the FISA bill. Let's be optimistic and assume that his statement to us expresses an interest in working together on this front. There's no question that 12,000 enthusiastic volunteers (or however many of us there are when you read this!) could make a difference here. Let's use this page to collect ideas for how we think we can work with him effectively

A phone campaign

Not sure just what to ask for here, but the Obama campaign's infrastructure and databases could make this a lot more effective -- perhaps something like a phonebanking campaign asking people to use the excellent Blue America tool to call their Senators. Our call suggestions page also has plenty of good raw material ... and with Obama's endorsement I bet we could get a lot of help from other groups like the 570,000 people in the One Million Strong for Barack Facebook group.

Help, please, from people who know the details of what we should be asking for!

Precinct-level campaigns

Feet on the street!

How to combine our energy with the Obama campaign's organization?

Networking together with other organizations

The Strange Bedfellows campaign, Act Blue's work, BlueAmerica, CREDO Action, and a host of others are all doing great stuff on this. Making sure that all of our members have this information, and asking all of their members who support Obama to join this group, would be a great way of magnifying our influence. The Blue America tool for contacting senators and lobbying them on the Dodd-Feingold-Leahy amendment is pretty damn good. Having the Obama campaign direct supporters to it would be the most efficient way to leverage the campaign's strength for telecom immunity.

Working with other Senators

Has anyone been in touch with either the Blue America group doing the Dodd-Feingold-Leahy whip count, or someone in Dodd or Feingold's office? It would be useful for us to know what their game plan is.

Faxes (and emails?) to Senators

In-person and phone are the best way to talk to Senators. Over the weekend, though, their voicemail boxes are likely to get filled -- this happened with Senator Obama yesterday (or was it the day before?). FaxZero.com gives two free faxes a day. One per Senator, how convenient!

[Could somebody like EFF set up a web form-to-fax server interface? They did this for the Stop Real ID Now! campaign and it worked quite well.]

Does it make sense to do something similar with email? Individual emails might not get noticed ... but if when staffers get back to work on Monday and there are hundreds or thousands of emails from different constituents ... it might get some attention.

And ...

What else?