Here’s who spent their Fourth of July protesting the NSA

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/05/heres-who-spent-their-fourth-of-july-protesting-the-nsa/

by sethbannon • 13 years ago

76 9 13 years ago

jdp23• 13 years ago

As somebody who's done a lot of civil liberties activism, I'm pleasantly surprised by how much press the protests got -- including CNN, CBS, NBC, Reuters, the Guardian and more at the national level, as well as dozens of local TV and newspapers.

There's a roundup on the Restore the Fourth reddit at http://www.reddit.com/r/restorethefourth/comments/1hor8p/rou... and I've also got a bunch of links on the Get FISA Right blog at https://getfisaright.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/restorethe4th-...

jpdoctor• 13 years ago

including CNN, CBS, NBC, Reuters, the Guardian

I hope the chief editors there have realized that their own phone calls and emails are being scanned. You would guess that it is in their best interests to give this issue a helluva lot of attention in their media.

subsystem• 13 years ago

"Inside Story Americas, with presenter Shihab Rattansi, is joined by: Nathan White, the national spokesperson for the Restore the Fourth Rally; Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the CATO institute who focuses on technology, privacy and politics; and Thomas Drake, a former NSA senior executive and a whistleblower."

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryamericas/2013...

Helpful_Bunny• 13 years ago

It's called Manufactured Dissent.

You got the air-play because the NSA etc needs to show it's all fluffy bunny and won't stifle white people's aggro. That's it. That's why the NSA read this forum, and posted on their homepage that they were "cool with legal protest". Jesus wept, if you're not getting paid to be this naive, you ain't gonna make it. If you're "surprised" you're either a fool or a tool.

We know who you are, and we can see the ties. Seriously: if this is your best game, you're doomed. You have little or no idea what you're playing with, and it's cringe worthy.

This is worse than the Koch brothers "Tea Party" take over, because at least they spent ~$50,000,000 on it and employed professionals. That's what made them players. Oh, and a small tip: $50 million is pocket change.

This is really pitiful stuff chaps. Ghandi, MLK and so on are spinning in their graves at this. Hint: the fact you have totally ignored the entire decimation of the African-American community is a telling one[1]. There's a reason that "Illuminati" symbolism is so prevalent in modern African-American music[2]: it's not about a secret society, it's about them <REDACTED: COINTELPRO>[3] and being engineered for the last 50 years, deliberately.

Wise the fuck up.

Ever wonder why MLK became Ghetto? $ and politics, and CIA running crack-cocaine.

Welcome to the Black Experience, it's Coming Soon[TM]

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PaoLy7PHwk

[2]http://thefeministwire.com/2013/05/the-rise-of-beyonce-the-f...

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

tokenadult• 13 years ago

I was part of the lightly attended Restore the Fourth protest in Minneapolis yesterday. I was also part of a much larger protest in DC that marched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Chinese embassy (which had a total participation of about 3,000 marchers) on 1 October 1989. Most of those marchers, of course, had no reasonable recourse in the political system of China, and at that time were not United States citizens. It is a long, hard slog to solve some problems. China still has neither a free press nor free and fair elections. China has pervasive surveillance of the domestic population of a kind that would appall any American. It's good that people in the United States are standing up for freedom here. It will be good for all of us to stand up for freedom everywhere.

A successful movement for greater freedom requires great courage, and a degree of social trust among the movement participants that is not easy to find. Allow me to repeat advice I have shared here on Hacker News before. If you really want to be an idealistic but hard-headed freedom-fighter, mobilizing an effective popular movement for more freedom wherever you live, I suggest you read deeply in the free, downloadable publications of the Albert Einstein Institution,

http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html

remembering that the transition from dictatorship to democracy described in those publications is an actual historical process with recent examples around the world that we can all learn from. You can find publications in Arabic, Azeri, Belarusian, Burmese, Burma (Chin), Burma (Jing-paw), Burma (Karen), Burma (Mon), Chinese (Mandarin), Dutch, English, Estonian, Farsi, French, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kyrgyz, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Thai, Tibetan, and Ukrainian there to share with your friends around the world.

P.S. Hat tip to the Reddit subreddit that linked to TV news coverage

http://kstp.com/article/12303/?vid=4128742&v=1

of the Minneapolis protest. (I'm visible way off in the distance in a few of the TV shots.)

zhemao• 13 years ago

Oh, it's a bunch of Gene Sharp books. I've heard about "Dictatorship to Democracy" before. I suppose now is a good time to actually start reading it. I wonder how applicable his advice would be for "Democracy to Better Democracy", though.

contingencies2• 13 years ago

It's not a long book. Take a look. Download the PDF (~600KB) at http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations/org/FDTD.pdf

contingencies2• 13 years ago

Err, so I found myself asking what exactly is this Albert Einstein institute, that goes around translating things to such languages as Kachin (that's the Burma (Jing-paw) mentioned)?

The most translated item is From Dictatorship to Democracy, a book by Gene Sharp. Who is Gene Sharp? On the face of it, someone who following their youth as a conscientious objector made a career out of the academic study of nonviolence, with some strong help getting started when Albert Einstein agreed to write the forward to his first book (way back in 1960), a 316 page book with a paucity of visible reviews entitled Gandhi wields the weapon of moral power; three case histories. After that a career in academia, lots of writing, and - well - the founding of the Albert Einstein Institute (whose primary author appears to be himself, and whose primary output appears to be From Dictatorship to Democracy, the book translated in to most of the aforementioned languages). An interesting situation.

I looked at the book but found it pretty dubious as a sort of distant, light touch, waffling approach to someone else's vigilance, hard work, and disciplined struggle, often at great cost... strung in to a simple, bite-size, easily digestible, ten-part recipe. Its main references are other works by the same author. Sorry, not convinced.

itistoday2• 13 years ago

Interesting coincidence, I just posted a related blog post about why our company isn't joining Fight for the Future's "Internet Defense League".

Fight for the Future attempted to organize online protests similar to the SOPA blackouts, but ended up doing this in a rather deceptive way (which is what the post discusses).

It's floating in https://news.ycombinator.com/newest right now: Why we are not joining Fight for the Future’s "Internet Defense League"

The blog post itself is here: http://www.taoeffect.com/blog/2013/07/integrity-internet-def...

Here’s who spent their Fourth of July protesting the NSA

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