14 DAY TRIAL // February 11 is an important day for the fight against mass surveillance. A broad coalition of activist groups, companies and online platforms have joined forces to protest the NSA “mass spying regime.”
Dubbed “The Day We Fight Back,” the events of the day were announced a month ago, on the eve of the anniversary of the passing of activist and technologist Aaron Swartz.
The protests will focus on opposing mass spying, but they will also honor Swartz and celebrate the SOPA blackout anniversary of 2012.
The list of participants includes the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Free Press, Reddit, Mozilla, Tumblr and many more.
So far, over 5,200 sites have signed up for the protests that will start tomorrow. The sites will display a special banner that will urge visitors to contact their Congress members in order to ask them to oppose the FISA Improvements Act and to support the USA Freedom Act, as well as to enact protection for non-Americans, something that has been a big issue over the past several months since the NSA scandal began.
"Since the first revelations last summer, hundreds of thousands of Internet users have come together online and offline to protest the NSA’s unconstitutional surveillance programs. These programs attack our basic rights to connect and communicate in private, and strike at the foundations of democracy itself. Only a broad movement of activists, organizations and companies can convince Washington to restore these rights,” said Josh Levy of Free Press.
The coalition and the activists will make calls and send emails to US lawmakers, urging them to take the right actions instead of continuing to protect the NSA’s efforts of violating users’ privacy all the time.
Recently, US officials have announced that the media is wrong about how much phone call information the NSA gathers, claiming that on a normal day, the agency only collects about 30 percent of all data, as if that were supposed to make anything better.