To candidates seeking office

For those seeking the open National Senate and Congressional Seat in 2014, campaigning has already been underway for a while. For the first time in years, it is quite likely that we will see both a new Congressman and Senator join the ranks of only three that represent Montanans in DC.

During these cycles we get to hear the same rhetoric reiterated such as “I don’t want to leave Montana/I hate DC”; “fighting business as usual”; “not a career politician”; etc. I personally find it hard to understand how those who love the state so much are working their tails off for the opportunity to spend much of their time so far away from here. That said – someone’s gotta do it.

For those who are choosing to step up to the plate, I have a few considerations via an open letter to all candidates:

Dear Senate/Congressional Candidate,

The budget, the economy and foreign policy are massive issues that are important to Montanans and are significantly impacted by the work that you may do as our elected official. You will speak about it loud and often, and we understand.

I would expect, as a fellow Montanan, that you will advocate for policies to keep the Federal Government out of our day-to-day lives. Good.

If you are actively looking for specific instances where the Federal Government has overreached its power and bounds that you can tackle, I have taken the liberty of compiling a laundry list of issues you ought to consider closely if unwarranted surveillance of innocent American citizens is something that is important to you.

-Logs of nearly every single phone call made between Americans in the states are kept and stored by the Federal government.

-Front-end direct access to Outlook, Facebook, Google, Apple, Skype, Yahoo and other programs, their data and communications by voicecall or email are accessible by the NSA without warrant. The programs that run these operations are called XKeyscore and PRISM.

-Datacenters owned by Google and Yahoo, as revealed in recent days, have been secretly compromised and hacked by the NSA to pull off data on the back end that the companies work so hard to protect. This operation is called MUSCULAR.

-Any private organization or entity that provides individuals the privacy that they should naturally expect in their communications is shut down by the Federal Government, such as the former email provider lavabit. Further, as reported in the CS Monitor, they have also actively attacked TOR Browsing, another non-profit aiming to provide users with some degree of privacy in internet browsing from data collection.

-Even by its own written self-regulations, the NSA has violated its own rules on use and investigation of private data nearly 3,000 times in the last year. These violations, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, include instances such as willfully snooping on soldiers’ calls back to their wives to be entertained by the romantic nature of the calls.

-The Senate is now considering a bill, The FISA Improvement Act, which would in statute approve many of the extra-legal power the NSA has been grabbing for years.

-If that weren’t enough, a novelty store owner who had the “audacity” to poke fun of the Bureaus with T-shirts such as “NSA: The only part of government that still listens” has been served with cease-and-desist letters from the Federal Government.

Now, dear candidate, if I were to even do a brief highlight reel of the spying on foreign civilians and politicians I would easily exceed my word limit.

These issues are of paramount importance for our time and we are looking for leaders to publicly address this excessive surveillance. State level protections are little help when most of the issues are on the Federal level. We are watching, where will you stand?