 Since 9-11, beginning with the Patriot Act, there's been what I would call a catastrophic assault on our civil liberties. And the most recent assault has been this NDAA indefinite detention provision. Back around December or so, I contacted the Bill of Rights Defense Committee to see if they might be able to have somebody come up. Michael Figuera will be here in a little while representing, as he's the official title, his legal fellow with the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. The Bill of Rights Defense Committee is a non-profit organization that works with grassroots organizers, activists and organizations around the country who are seeking to defend the Bill of Rights and work on civil liberties issues. We're going to talk about a number of things today and we're going to talk about the NDAA, which is the National Defense Authorization Act and specifically the indefinite detention provisions of the NDAA, which allow for the deployment of the military on the United States soil to indefinitely detain people that the government accuses of terrorism. This rider, which basically allows the government to imprison people indefinitely, just like Guantanamo, no trial, no evidence, no witnesses, no judge, no jury, just would decide that you're needing to be kept here for our security for whatever reasons we might conjure up. That's something a lot of people around the country are outraged by. They think it's un-democratic and should be overturned. So we'll talk about how people here in Maine and elsewhere can do that. There's already a bill in the state legislature that seeks to express opposition to that. The purpose of this program is mainly to bring awareness to the audience about what I have referred to as this catastrophic assault on our civil liberties, the blatant disregard of the bill of rights, the Constitution, and everything that they're in that pertains. So within indefinite detention, what's going on now is that across the country there's been a lot of jurisdictions where people have stood up and said, this is unconstitutional, it's undemocratic, it's un-American, and they've gone to their state legislature or their local legislature and gotten a bill passed that says we oppose this and we call on our federal representatives to stop it. The last couple of years, the attempts to stop it have just mostly been at the federal level and that hasn't been successful, it's still law. So what we're hoping is that this year with the groundswell of support that's happening across the country that we can be more effective in getting it stripped out and that the administration will no longer be able to use military indefinite detention on domestic soil, which is something that's been prohibited by law since the late 1800s or something called the Posse Comitatis Act that says you can't deploy the military domestically because it's just undemocratic. It's essentially authoritarian method of governing to use the military for law enforcement. So from 1875 or something until two years ago, that was illegal until Obama signed this law. So that's one thing we're working on and I know in Maine there's a bill in the Senate that seeks to do exactly that to declare opposition and I think there might be a portion that provides for some sort of penalty actually with cooperating with enforcing indefinite detention. One of the other things we work on is drones and we recently released a model legislation that either allows the community to ban the use of drones in their city or state or to regulate the use of drones. So I think there's a lot of reasons that people would want to ban the use of drones completely because they're unsafe, because they could be used to spy on you. But there's also good reasons why people might want to allow them to be used for some purposes, you know, for forest fire control or search and rescue missions or something like that, but strictly limited so that if law enforcement wanted to use drones, they would need to go get a warrant, they would need to show probable cause, all of these things. And I understand that the bill that the ACLU has been working on requires that, so I'm sure you can share more about it. And the other thing generally that we do is we work with communities and organizers to place limits on local law enforcement to make sure that they comply with the Constitution. And that looks different ways for some people who are really concerned about their local law enforcement agency enforcing immigration law, because that's a problem in a lot of places, I don't know, to the extent that it happens here, but communities can demand that their local law enforcement stop doing that. They don't comply with federal attempts to essentially co-opt local law enforcement into harassing and detaining immigrants. One thing that you can do with having control over your local law enforcement is you can prevent them from acquiring drones, you can prevent them from acquiring military-type weaponry. So in Berkeley we worked with a community who wanted to stop their police from acquiring tanks, military-grade weaponry, drones, that type of thing, which is really something that a lot of law enforcement is shocking, sort of the small-town or mid-sized city law enforcement that tries to acquire these type of things. And what they were successful in doing there and can really be replicated across the country is that when if the Berkeley Police Department wants to acquire that type of thing, they have to go before the city council and they have to ask for it, and the city council and the SOSENS by default can veto that and say, I don't want you to have tanks in our town to enforce the law, that's crazy, that's a militarization of our homes and we don't want you to do it. So those are some of the type of things that you can do if you band together and work broadly across party lines and communities and build support for that. I'm Rachel Hewley from the ACLU of Maine. Probably a lot of you are fairly familiar with the work of the ACLU of Maine. We are the main affiliates of the National American Civil Liberties Union. Some of the things that were brought up are things that we're working on pretty closely here in Maine. The bill that was mentioned having to do with limiting the use of surveillance drones here in Maine is very much happening. We are one of more than 20 states who have introduced similar legislation already. Some of the states are successfully passing moratoriums on the use of the drones while they can be studied a little bit more. Some of them are aiming at completely stopping the use of drones. The bill here in Maine aims to put really important limits on the use of surveillance drones by law enforcement while still leaving room for search and rescue missions and things of that nature, but essentially would require the police to get a warrant before using a drone to spy on us. So we know once these unmanned drones hovering over their backyards and watching their every movement, drones are really powerful. The technology is really very powerful. They can be equipped with infrared sensors and listening devices and high-resolution video cameras. Also, they're startlingly easy to acquire. On the most basic scale, there are what amounts to basically a toy drone that costs a couple hundred dollars. We were first going to the legislature to talk about this a couple of months ago and thought it'd be kind of fun to bring one with us. So we made a couple of phone calls and were able to acquire two within a couple of hours because we actually know people who have them, which is pretty startling. And we also know that the Maine State Police did something very similar because they were curious. So they bought a drone in January. As far as we know, they're not using it yet and it's also sort of a toy, but there are definitely more powerful drones out there available. We know that law enforcement agencies around the country are acquiring them. And at this point, there's really little regulation on their use. Well, except for the fact that the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration, has put some limits on the use of drones in U.S. airspace, but they have been ordered to make more room for drones in U.S. airspace by 2015 and by some accounts within five years after that. I'm sure that there will be as many as 10 to 20,000 drones in the air at any given time. So needless to say, we are really anxious to get some meaningful limits in place. And actually, I'll just put a plug in right now. Our bill is running into a little bit of trouble with law enforcement. So if anybody is in agreement that we need these limits, it's certainly worth a phone call to your legislature or to encourage them to support this legislation. And you can learn more about that on our website. And then the other thing that was brought up was the idea of the militarization of police and the fact that police law enforcement agencies around the country are acquiring these really scary militarized tools. And so the ACLU of Maine, along with several other ACLU affiliates around the country, filed a freedom of access request, and usually called freedom of information request in other places in, I believe it was 35 states, more than 30 states to sort of find out the level of militarization so far, which agencies are acquiring these tools, where they're getting the funding, how much funding is coming in from military sources, what they're using it on, and what sort of laws they are operating under in deploying those sorts of tools. So again, we don't know a lot yet, but we're hoping to find out more and put some reasonable limits in place.