Bill of Rights Defense Committee
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The Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) is a national grassroots organization that educates and mobilizes people from all walks of life to defend the Constitution in their local communities all across the country. Under the Bush administration, BORDC played a vital role in resistance to the USA PATRIOT Act by coordinating local resolutions opposing its adoption in over 400 towns and cities across America. Today, BORDC continues to defend constitutional rights threatened by the so-called "war on terror" by promoting (a) democratic transparency as a solution to executive secrecy; (b) executive accountability for torture and other violations of the rule of law; (c) robust protections against profiling according to political speech or religion, race or ethnicity; (d) restoration of constitutional freedoms in response to warrantless—-and increasingly pervasive—-surveillance; and (e) debate and creative action addressing threats to privacy, the presumption of innocence, and other civil liberties.
BORDC was founded by Nancy Talanian in 2001 after the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. In 2009, Shahid Buttar joined the organization as executive director. Chip Pitts chairs BORDC’s board of directors. BORDC’s advisory board includes David Cole, Bruce Fein, David A. Harris, Benjamin Jealous, Lawrence Lessig, Marc Rotenberg, and Chris Townsend.
In 2008, BORDC launched the People's Campaign for the Constitution (PCC). The goal of the PCC is to build a broad, national, nonpartisan, grassroots movement to restore constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties and protections by holding congressional representatives and elected officials accountable to their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution.
[edit] Mission statement
The Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) is a national non-profit grassroots organization. We defend the rule of law and rights and liberties challenged by overbroad national security and counter-terrorism policies. We support an ideologically, ethnically, geographically, and generationally diverse grassroots movement to protect and restore these principles by encouraging widespread civic participation; educating people about the significance of our rights; and cultivating grassroots networks to convert concern, outrage, and fear into debate and action.
