Like many awkward teenagers in the mid-90s, I was obsessed with the television drama My So-Called Life. But while some peers dyed their hair red and wore their fathers’ flannels and others picked up sheet music to learn “Blister in the Sun” and “I Wanna Be Sedated” on their violins and oboes—or whatever they played in orchestra, I simply yearned for Angela’s privacy.

I sat agog when she had her friends Rickie and Rayanne over and closed her bedroom door to stew in their hormone-drenched problems. At our house we had a strict open-door policy. And it changed our behavior: we didn’t practice our curse words until they were second nature or loudly obsess over puberty or rail against our parents’ rules. We behaved differently; we edited ourselves.
Perhaps my adolescent obsession with My So-Called Life explains why it struck a chord when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper referred to the “so-called domestic surveillance programs” last month and when President Obama mentioned “sifting through the so-called metadata” last year. I learned from Angela years ago that the words “so-called” often cast judgment on whoever believes the whole sentence. I could see her eyes roll in the title and sense the whiff of pronominal doubt that hangs on the word “life.” It would be lazy to think that the president and Director Clapper were unaware of the connotation and were merely trying to explain or set off concepts in which the media and the American public were already steeped. Downplaying has been the name of the government’s surveillance game. In reality metadata is breathtakingly revealing, and its mass compilation, which allows the government to contextualize our most private secrets, is a surveillance program—no qualifier needed.
Here are some other examples of the government downplaying in recent times:
Downplay: On June 7, 2013, President Obama called the collection of phone and Internet metadata “modest encroachments on privacy.”
Reality: The Verizon order published in The Guardian two days before the president’s downplay required Verizon to provide the National Security Agency with every single call record “on an ongoing daily basis.” As ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer noted, “It is as if the government had seized every American’s address book—with annotations detailing which contacts she spoke to, when she spoke with them, for how long, and (possibly) from which locations.” This is not a modest encroachment but the most invasive and widespread American domestic spying program in our history.
Downplay: “That’s a very small number of times,” Senator Dianne Feinstein said on June 17, 2013, in response to an intelligence statement that “less than 300 unique identifiers […] were queried” in 2012.
Reality:  Sure, 300 sounds like a small number of times, but we know from John Inglis’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee last year that the NSA can see the call records of those within three hops of the person targeted. As this infographic shows, if you have only 40 contacts, three hops could include the phone numbers of 2.5 million people. Now, multiply that by the 300 queries and you have 750 million.  Now, multiply that again by the seven years the program has been in place...you get the picture.
Downplay: In his speech on NSA reform in January, President Obama let us know that we frustrate him when we worry about being constantly misled. “And I'll admit,” he said, “the readiness of some to assume the worst motives by our government can be frustrating.”
Reality: President Obama is a constitutional law scholar and a runner on the platform of hope and change (ostensibly from the Bush administration, which instated the warrantless wiretapping program that the FISA Amendments Act ratified). We don’t exactly know why he thinks the current spying programs need only minimal reforms, but he wants us to trust him on this. So tuck away any discomfort you might feel when you realize you don’t know whether the government is collecting information on you or what the information is. Keep it to yourself when you fret about your information in the hands of the next Joe McCarthy or J. Edgar Hoover or Ashcroft or Nixon. Chill out if you think the separation of powers melts away when the executive branch knows everything about members of the other two branches. You don’t want to frustrate the president.
The current surveillance state is not okay, and it should not be downplayed. Our government is not supposed to treat us like children with our doors open. President Obama’s so-called reforms are not enough and neither are Director Clapper’s so-called assurances. We need real reform and real assurance that the surveillance state can be rolled back. Good news: the USA FREEDOM Act does just that.
As of today, “The Day We Fight Back”, the following 22 California representatives are not co-sponsoring the USA FREEDOM Act. Is your rep on this list? Take back your privacy now and urge your members of Congress to sponsor the USA FREEDOM Act. Then when it passes you can feel like this.

District	Representative
5	Mike Thompson
8	Paul Cook
9	Jerry McNerney
10	Jeff Denham
11	George Miller
12	Nancy Pelosi
16	Jim Costa
21	David Valadao
22	Devin Nunes
23	Kevin McCarthy
25	Buck McKeon
28	Adam Schiff
29	Tony Cárdenas
31	Gary Miller
32	Grace Napolitano
33	Henry Waxman
34	Xavier Becerra
35	Gloria Negrete McLeod
36	Raul Ruiz
38	Linda Sanchez
39	Ed Royce
40	Lucille Roybal-Allard
41	Mark Takano
42	Ken Calvert
43	Maxine Waters
44	Janice Hahn
45	John Campbell
46	Loretta Sanchez
51	Juan Vargas
52	Scott Peters
53	Susan Davis

Jessica Farris is community engagement and policy and advocacy counsel at the ACLU of Southern California. Follow her on Twitter.

Today’s order from the three-judge panel overseeing the standing federal court order to reduce the state’s prison population to 137.5 percent of capacity gives the state an additional two-year extension to comply, and plaintiffs’ attorneys’ are justifiably concerned about ongoing constitutional violations inside the prisons due to the continued overcrowding. But today’s order is based upon important concessions by the state, including immediate changes to good-time credit and parole rules, a promise not to ship any additional prisoners out of state, an agreement not to seek further appellate review and an express commitment to front-end sentencing reform. It also contains significant new enforcement provisions, including mandatory benchmarks and the appointment of a compliance monitor with power to order prisoners released if the benchmark deadlines aren’t met. This all adds up to create the most specific, structured and enforceable inducement for the state to come up with sustainable population reductions since this litigation was initiated more than a decade ago.
In the two-plus years since the California legislature passed the California Prison Realignment Act – which shifted responsibility for people who commit low level, non-violent, non-serious crimes from the state prison system to county jails – the ACLU of California has consistently said that much more needs to be done. We have said repeatedly that comprehensive criminal justice reform must be part of any sustainable plan to achieve a lasting reduction in the number of people who are kept behind bars for far too long who don’t need to be locked up to keep the public safe.
Finally, the Brown administration is on record agreeing, with a federal court watching closely. Now, it’s time for our political leaders in Sacramento to roll up their sleeves and get to work.  The long history of the law enforcement lobby killing even incremental attempts to reduce sentences (like Mark Leno’s bill seeking to make personal possession of drugs a misdemeanor) must come to an end. If a sentencing commission is appointed, it cannot be dominated and controlled by the same interests that have blocked reform efforts for decades. It also must have “teeth” – a sentencing commission relegated to merely “advisory” status can be worse than no commission at all, because all other proposals for changing sentencing laws will be put on hold for the months or years the commission operates and the ultimate outcome may be no sentencing reform. Just ask Professor Gerald Uelman, who directed the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, created by the State Senate in 2004 to “study and review the administration of criminal justice in California, to determine the extent to which that process has failed in the past” and to examine safeguards and improvements. After four years of exhaustive research and multiple public hearings, the Commission issued a comprehensive final report containing specific recommendations, and supported numerous pieces of legislation introduced in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. Of all of these bills, only two were passed by the legislature but both were vetoed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Twice. Ultimately, of all the commission’s recommendations, a single bill became law, modifying the way in which capital defense attorneys are compensated.
A similarly fruitless sentencing commission is unacceptable. One idea worth considering is to set up any sentencing commission so that its recommendations become law unless a two-thirds vote of the legislature and government overturn them.
Today’s order is a significant step in the right direction. Now, it’s time to put politics and law enforcement obstruction aside and get to work.
Allen Hopper is criminal justice and drug policy reform director of ACLU of California. Follow him on Twitter.