Here’s how our new #BorderWrites tool will get your Member of Congress to rethink Border Privacy

Our new tool will let you send a letter to be featured in newspapers all across the nation —  a mass message on border privacy Members of Congress simply cannot ignore. 

The time to stop warrantless searches of your phone and laptop by U.S. border guards is NOW. As you’re reading this, politicians are considering whether or not to support legislation that would stop these searches.

Having already flooded these politicians with over 50,000 outraged voices from our Defend Border Privacy petition, we’ve moved onto some new, creative steps to keep the pressure going — enter, OpenMedia’s new Letter to the Editor Tool.

Politicians have told us directly that local newspapers are of vital importance, and always seen by staff, and members of Congress themselves —  this is one of the top ways they keep track of their own constituencies.

We’ve got to send these politicians the crucial message to stop the current data-mining chaos at the border — passage across has now become a worrisome experience, with many innocent people, including U.S. citizens, waiting for hours, their electronics confiscated and searched. For many travellers, the risk of being put on an unknowable list and of such an intense invasion of privacy, is enough to dissuade them from traveling to the U.S. in the first place, harming cross-border business and tourism.

With our Letter to the Editor tool, we’re calling on our community to send a clear message: these unjustified privacy invasions at the border cannot continue! Politicians need to know exactly what ordinary people are concerned about when it comes to their privacy at the border. We need to show them exactly what Americans think of these invasive border searches, and we want every Member of Congress to take note.

With this felt urgency regarding these unprecedented phone searches, we’re working hard to meet politicians where they are at, by taking the conversation into the places where they are already checking up on community-fuelled developments.

Will you consider sending your thoughts to your local paper by using our Letter to the Editor tool?If enough people speak up, we can prompt elected representatives to take a good, long pause over their morning coffee — and to realize just how unpopular border searches really are. And that, in turn, will help rally the support we need for legislation to put a stop to warrantless border searches once and for all.

We invite you to take our action today -- let’s stop this egregious breach of privacy at the border, and let’s do it in a way politicians simply cannot ignore. Speak up right now!