The Santa Monica Democratic Club will host civil liberties champion Stephen Rohde as its guest speaker at its June 26 general membership meeting.
Rohde, a constitutional lawyer and the current head of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, will address “Drones Abroad and Spying At Home.”
He will take audience questions on what’s happening to our democracy at a time when we are learning that every major phone carrier has evidently complied with government orders to turn over logs of all phone calls made to, from, and within the country over the past seven years, and that vast, comprehensive troves of information about internet activity have also been monitored by the government.
In a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times published on June 12, Rohde declared that “by monitoring and archiving the date, time, length and phone numbers of all our calls, the NSA is engaging in an unprecedented invasion of privacy. And in March alone, PRISM collected about 97 billion pieces of data, roughly 3 billion of which came from within the U.S., forcing the NSA to admit the ‘incidental’ collection of actual content from Americans.”
He ended by reminding us that “at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, James Madison warned that the ‘means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.’”
The monthly membership meeting is free. Light refreshments will be served and the general public is welcome.
It will be held Wednesday, June 26 from 7-9 pm in the Multipurpose Room of the Main Library, Santa Monica Boulevard at 6th Street (2nd floor, enter parking garage on 7th Street).
DATE: Wednesday June 26, 2013
TIME: 7:00 PM
PLACE : SM Public Library, 2nd Floor Community Room
601 Santa Monica Blvd, Santa Monica 90401
