14 DAY TRIAL // The first anniversary of Edward Snowden’s leaks is approaching fast and the world continues to protest against the NSA’s mass surveillance practices as lawmakers stand by and watch, letting the spy agency continue to do whatever it wants.
More than 30 civil liberties groups and tech companies have united forces against the NSA’s spying and have planned “Reset the Net,” a day full of actions planned for June 5.
The site is urging visitors to stop asking for their privacy and to take it back instead. “On June 5, I will take strong steps to protect my freedom from government mass surveillance. I expect the services I use to do the same,” reads a pledge that visitors are invited to sign.
The coalition has been organized by “Fight for the Future” and among its members, you can find Reddit, DuckDuckGo, FreePress, Imgur, as well as Boing Boing and Greenpeace.
They are all urging software developers to start offering protection for users and to assimilate anti-NSA features in their products, be those mobile apps or web tools. Security features such as SSL (Secure Socket Layer), HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) and Perfect Forward Secrecy can, in theory, protect people from government spying, or, at the very least, make it harder for the intelligence agencies to crack open the communications.
The campaign even comes with a video in which the organizers urge viewers to “find some territory of the internet you can protect from prying eyes.”
Furthermore, it seems that the one weakness that government spies have is that they can’t hack everybody, even if the can invade anyone’s privacy. “Folks like the NSA depend on collecting insecure data from tapper fiber. They depend on our mistakes; mistakes we can fix.”
The event is organized on June 5, the day that the first reports based on Edward Snowden’s files ended up in the media. The first reports regarded PRISM and the telephony metadata collection programs, which put the NSA on the front page of the world’s newspapers, turning an agency that had managed to stay under the radar for years into a “star.”
The worst part about the revelations is that basically nothing has been done thus far by the American government to put a stop to these violations of privacy. While empty promises have been made by politicians and state leaders, we’re all still basically in the same spot we were a year ago – being spied on by the NSA and its allies.
