NEWSTECHNOLOGY & HUMAN RIGHTS

I was homeless last winter and my gold Starbucks card kept me warm, safe and dry. It also helped me utilize social media to, in very small ways, help the lives other homeless people. I am @From_Nothing on Twitter, and I now have several thousand followers. Being able to access the Internet and tweet with my smart phone, which was paid for by a wonderful friend, while enjoying a warm cup of coffee at Starbucks, was crucial for my survival and eventually helped me end my homelessness.

I imagine that the homeless are a very daunting and sad situation for Starbucks employees and patrons to have to deal with, but in many ways having a safe place to stay helped change my life and the lives of others. I am hoping my story might help you and and others find positive ways to help the homeless.

Thomas Drake is a former National Security Agency (NSA) employee who was being prosecuted under the Espionage Act for retaining, not leaking, classified information about a data collection program that was costly, threatening to Americans' privacy rights, and wholly undeveloped. He did everything by the book, raising concerns through official channels first - including senior NSA management, the Defense Department's inspector general, and Congress.

His concerns were ignored. Drake started, legally, communicating with a reporter -- never sharing any classified information whatsoever. But the consequences looked to be severe, with prosecutors looking to make him spend the rest of his life in prison. So in response, the Government Accountability Project (GAP) ran an all-out campaign, which included a petition here on Change.org with nearly 5,000 signatures, calling for the charges against Drake to be dropped.

Jesselyn Radack is a  former Department of Justice whistleblower. She is currently the homeland security director of the Government Accountability Project, the nation’s leading whistleblower organization.

Former National Security Agency (NSA) senior official Thomas Drake is a whistleblower.   Through legal and proper channels Drake disclosed massive corruption, gross waste and mismanagement to tune of billions of taxpayer dollars, and, worse, widespread illegal domestic surveillance at the NSA.

When president Obama first took office, he applauded whistleblowers as "often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.”  He said that "such acts of courage and patriotism . . . should be encouraged rather than stifled."

Given these remarks, Thomas Drake is exactly the type of whistleblower that the Obama administration should protect. However, under President Obama’s leadership, the Justice Department has labeled Drake an enemy of the state, and charged him with violating the Espionage Act -- an archaic law intended to prosecute spies, not whistleblowers. Drake’s prosecution is selective and retaliatory.

After the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Masaya Uchino - a law student in San Francisco - and his parents waited 12 hours to find out if our family and friends in Tokyo were alright. While waiting, he donated some money by texting the Red Cross with hopes that it would help the millions of other affected by the horrible tragedy.

The following Monday he found out that his donation wouldn’t actually reach Japan for somewhere between 30 and 90 days. So he started a petition asking the mobile phone companies to process donations for Japan in the same way they did for Haiti – so the money would get there straight away.

As the petition climbed toward 50,000 signatures, California Senator Barbara Boxer took note and wrote to the CEOs of the major mobile carriers echoing Masaya’s petition.

In Rwanda, people were incited through radio broadcasts to go on a killing rampage - “kill all the cockroaches” they were told, referring to fellow Rwandans. In a mere 100 days nearly a million Rwandans had been hacked to death by machetes, their corpses littering the roadside. The world was stunned.

Gaddafi has gone on State TV repeatedly and called protesters rats, dogs and traitors. In various speeches he’s said they are drunk and on pills, working with Al Qaeda, foreign agitators and American invaders coming to steal Libyan oil. He encourages followers to search every alley, invade every home and murder those who oppose him. He pledges himself to show them no mercy.

Saif Gaddafi uses state TV to threaten citizens to give up their demands that Gaddafi step down. He warned in a rambling and ominous speech that the streets would run with blood. “We are not Egypt, we are not Tunisia”. Within days the regime made good on their threats and images of unspeakable atrocities showed up without mercy on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Libya Al Hurra TV (the first ever live stream TV broadcast from Free Libya).

At the end of last week, California Senator Barbara Boxer joined the call for mobile phone companies to expedite donations to Japan in the same way the did for Haiti.

With her support, news organizations in San Francisco realized this was a real story, and Masaya Uchino – the law student who created the petition just a week ago – found himself doing interviews with his local news stations as to why expediting donations is such a big deal.

He did a terrific job emphasizing the importance of his petition to a large number of people around the Bay Area, and also had the added benefit of having the news crews calling mobile phone companies to find out why they are treating this emergency differently.

Text-to-give programs have proven a powerful way to collect donations, with the American Red Cross reporting that they raised $32 million from mobile phone donations to help relief efforts in Haiti last year. The effort catapulted mobile phone giving into the mainstream – it was even hailed as a turning point for mobile business more broadly.

But the way donations worked for Haiti is not the way they operate now. For Haiti, mobile carriers passed a donation along to relief organizations as soon as you texted. For Japan, they are waiting until your next billing cycle to pass along the donation.

It’s because of this switch in policy that Change.org member Masaya Uchino created a massively successful petition asking cell phone companies to follow the same policy for Japan as they did for Haiti. He said:

When you text on your cell phone to donate to a charity or NGO, the process works in a peculiar way.

First, the mobile phone company registers that you’ve made a donation and adds that amount to your next bill. Then after you pay the bill, your phone company will transfer the money to a non-profit like mGive, which has partnered with mobile phone carriers to certify charity organizations doing mobile donations. Then mGive transfers your donation to the charity you had specified with your original message. At this point as many as 90 days may have passed.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. As the mGive Foundation notes; “In response to the Haiti Relief Effort, carriers are remitting  donations immediately to nonprofit organizations. “

So why aren’t they doing that for Japan?

Masaya Uchino, a Japanese-American law student in San Francisco, has started a petition asking mGive, Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint to sort it out.

“When I first head about the earthquake I was in total shock.  I called my parents to see if they heard anything from our family. That was about 11:30 at night, and we didn’t hear back that they were all ok until around noon the next day.”

The day has come to submit your “junk” to the United States Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

November 24 is National Opt-Out Day, and as Change.org blogger Kelley Vlahos wrote over on the Criminal Justice blog, travelers are expected to opt-out of the full body scans and ask for pat-downs, in order to cause delays on the busiest day of the year. The activist initiative is designed to send a clear message to lawmakers that Americans will not stand by quietly while airport security officials subject us to naked body scanners and enhanced pat downs in the name of national security.

Hearings in Congress, jokes on Twitter, Foursquare check-ins and campaign sites all serve to demonstrate that this time, the TSA has gone too far. A new Zogby poll reveals that 61 percent oppose full body scans and TSA pat downs with a massive 48 percent seeking alternatives to flying. This certainly is not good news for the airline industry and spells a public relations disaster for the TSA.