Michael Moore, the gadfly documentarian who has made a career out of fighting against conservative issues, has called for US citizens to stand up to President Barack Obama and back a court case he says is fighting a dangerous erosion of civil liberties.

The case has been brought against a little known piece of legislation called the National Defence Authorization Act (NDAA), which critics say has been changed to grant Obama the power to indefinitely detain American citizens without charge.

A group of activists, including Daniel Ellsberg – the official who leaked the Pentagon papers about the Vietnam war – and former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges have gone to court to get the language of the NDAA changed. On Wednesday an appeals court in New York heard arguments in the case and is set to render a judgment in the coming months.

Now Moore has come out swinging against the NDAA, too, saying that the White House is embarking on a plan to scrap vital civil rights that should concern every American citizen – despite a relative lack of publicity about the case. "At the moment a lot of people think the NDAA does not look scary. But this sort of thing never looks scary at the start. But the American people will rue the day if they do not stop this," he told the Guardian in an interview.
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