The Day We Fight Back

https://thedaywefightback.org

by sinak • 13 years ago

460 184 13 years ago

thedaywefightback.org

sethbannon• 13 years ago

It's long past time that we channel our outrage into political action on this issue.

melling• 13 years ago

Excellent. What's the definition of insanity? Here's the Reddit discussion. Have at it!

http://www.reddit.com/r/thedaywefightback/

waterlesscloud• 13 years ago

Everyone will just re-elect the same congressmen and senators who got us here. Because theirs is different, of course.

mcherm2• 13 years ago

If it is your intention to assume that nothing can get any better so we should just sit back and do nothing, then would you do me a favor? Would you please start doing nothing BEFORE posting the "it's all hopeless" comment. From your point of view it won't make any difference, but from the point of view of those of us who think that one can (on the whole) make (slow) progress by speaking up and taking action it will make a difference.

pekk• 13 years ago

I am probably the only person who is bothered that this sounds like a deniable call to violent action. "BE CREATIVE"

edit: to be clearer - the issue is that we have left violent action open as an option and it isn't hard for a few people to take that option. Is this what we want politics to be?

gtirloni3• 13 years ago

Probably.

Edit since parent updated: "Be creative" is just too broad and if you want to imply the authors are saying "be violent if you want" then it's what YOU are implying, not them. Besides, I have yet to see a Internet protest that turned out violent because of the protesters. Not in a large scale at least.

So reading "be violent" where it says "be creative" is a long stretch (thus my initial response).

Now, if the authors should be liable if anything violent happens because they did not add "please don't be violent", then this a whole different (and larger) discussion about all the crazy things happening in the judicial system (that would allow someone to be sued). At the end, people are liable for their own acts.

Let's leave this discussion for when/if they actually are explicit about using violence, instead of trying to read between the lines so early (and with so little information to base it on).

aaronem3• 13 years ago

You're probably the only person who is bothered, because you are probably the only person who can see anything remotely resembling a "call to violent action" in something as milquetoast as the nonsense we're discussing.

rhizome• 13 years ago

I see what the GP is talking about though, and would probably explain it as "fight" being used as a malapropism, not as a rallying ethic. That is, calling something "fighting" which is pretty much the furthest thing from it, rather than exhorting people to fight in whatever way they deem fit.

gtirloni3• 13 years ago

If I got this right, we fight back by changing our avatars and putting banners on our blogs. Is that it?

aaronem3• 13 years ago

Well, when socially networked narcissism is the order of the day in general, why expect anything else? I'm not particularly concerned about the Black Chamber doing what the Black Chamber does, but if I were, I'd certainly hope to see those who shared that concern aiming a little higher than merely to say "I'm agin' it!"

dijit• 13 years ago

yeah!

the arm chair politics of Kony 2012 and all those missing children on facebook.

in reality we need to make people sick to their stomachs and use fear tactics the same way US politics does.

Documentaries, advertising, real life examples, sense of urgency.

I mean, we can just follow the doctrines of propoganda set before us daily :D

it's the masses that have power, not the community of hacker news.

anigbrowl2• 13 years ago

Well, it's a start. However, I agree that it's far more of a branding exercise than an agenda, not dissimilar to professional activists organizing a crowd and then handing out a bunch of preprinted signs to the people that arrive. I don't blame the organizers for this; it's symptomatic of how internet culture works (bootstrap a meme, leverage resulting audience attention) and of the difficulties of organizing in a representative democracy context.

The ideal would be some model legislative proposals or some sort of nominally nonpartisan congressional committee with teeth along the lines of the Church committee in the 1970s (but even that ran into significant opposition at the time, being accused of treason and so on by the usual self-appointed superpatriots.

The basic problem is threefold.

1. The United States has a strong economic and strategic interest in preserving the international status quo or moving it in a more liberal direction (qua trade, promulgation of legal mutualism and so forth). Naturally, maintaining this position is going to involve extensive intelligence-gathering activities.

2. While this is often denigrated as a form of neo-colonialism, there's a fair degree of evidence that it results in better overall outcomes globally; were it to withdraw and leave a power vacuum, that space would be occupied by less scrupulous actors. Although the EU is second to the US in economic power (or even first by some measures) the EU is ineffective at projecting power and less able to provide security to its allies, both practically and politically (consider the rather milquetoast response to the protests in Ukraine, for example). For examples of the alternative, consider the autocratic and cynically populist governance of the Russian Federation or the relative opacity of Chinese jurisprudence.

3. Given the ever-lower barriers to collection and aggregation of data resulting from technology, private actors are able to accumulate and leverage huge pools of data, from Facebook to credit bureaux and consumer intelligence brokers such as Axciom. Until people are willing tolerate limits on private sector activity (and thus financial opportunity) similar to those resulting from EU data protection laws or the like, it's simply not realistic to expect that government should limit itself to technological capabilities that are less than the private sector or even abstain from aggregating publicly available data. This would just result in a a different kind of power vacuum. For all its faults, government is procedurally accountable to the citizenry, whereas private entities are accountable only to shareholders, and shareholdings are fungible in a way that citizenship is not.

As I've said a few times before, I think the US needs a movement for a privacy amendment to the constitution that spells out the scope and limitations of individual's control over their personal information, as opposed to the hand-wavey and contentious judicial interpretations we operate under at present. Putting this in place is a decade-long project, at minimum.

jere• 13 years ago

Yup. The whole point is a build up to a "day of protest", but no mention what this is.

I assume all the avatar and banner changing is leading to February 11, the day in which we change our avatars and banners.

mcb3k• 13 years ago

The banners appear to be able to let you put in your zip code and then help you contact your relevant representatives in congress. If enough high-traffic sites participate, like what happened with the SOPA blackout, I could see this actually having an affect on policy.

However, there probably needs to some kind of bill to support or other action to be urging representatives to do, other than contacting them saying that "spying is bad". The Open Letter to HN from EFF, Demand Progress, and Cory Doctorow [1] mentions some of these, but the campaign site here doesn't seem to contain any mention of them.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7037532

whatevsbro8• 13 years ago

If enough high-traffic sites participate, like what happened with the SOPA blackout, I could see this actually having an affect on policy.

The policy didn't change with SOPA or CISPA or whatever name they've snuck some of the same shit in by now. The policy is: more surveillance, more police state, less liberty.

ironchief• 13 years ago

What are the specific goals and modes of action for this protest? (e.g. laws to pass, laws to vote against, people to fire etc.)

donotsurveil2• 13 years ago

Apparently it's post a banner on a website, register on facebook, google+ and twitter to post there that you are against surveillance.

A nice attempt at sorting out people through self-selection who are to be put on a special surveillance list.

flurpitude• 13 years ago

Well, if you're politically opposed to the NSA's surveillance they probably already know, so it won't make much difference whether you've revealed support for this campaign. The bigger problem is that the campaign seems entirely vacuous. What exactly are we doing to fight back? Complaining a little bit online? The NSA must be running scared.

redthrowaway• 13 years ago

Feb 11th is after the SOTU, where Obama will announce what will in effect be the only changes we're likely to see. Any attempt to influence policy should come before that.

sinak2• 13 years ago

We did consider this very, very carefully. Our conclusion was that any reforms that Obama announces are very unlikely to result in meaningful change, and that legislation will still be necessary. Had we set the date before the SOTU, our activism would have concluded with no way to respond to his proposals.

fuqua• 13 years ago

So, what's your plan re: pushing legislation? Have you identified who in Congress will serve as a champion for your cause? Are there any lists of specific demands that any good legislation would address? Changing your avatar on Facebook, Twitter, or G+ won't sway anyone.

dragonwriter4• 13 years ago

If your activism is planned to conclude on a date certain, whether before or after the SOTU, its not going to do anything.

What you really want is to create an ongoing movement both with a visible effect early enough to influence others reaction to what is announced in the SOTU, and which continues so as to itself respond to whatever is proposed in the SOTU.

jheriko• 13 years ago

Hmmm this is all well and good, but what do we expect NSA and GCHQ to do instead?

I don't especially like them or what they do, but we need them... I'm also surprised at the massive backlash and the revelatory nature of the Snowden leaks... I was expecting that NSA and GCHQ would engage in precisely these kinds of activities - its exactly what they are there for - I am surprised that anyone ever had any different expectations, but clearly a large majority did.

Are we suggesting that society has come far enough that we can do without espionage altogether?

Nursie• 13 years ago

We don't expect, need or want them to go anywhere near as far as they do. This was not done with our mandate and in a democratic society it damn well needs it.

They are there to keep an eye on suspected bad guys, not to watch us all constantly.

What they can do is fire 75% of their staff and stick to the rules.

sp332• 13 years ago

More-specific investigations to uncover actual threats, real court oversight, and making sure that protections written into law are enforced during data collection.

gaius6• 13 years ago

If GCHQ and the NSA were actually dedicated to securing our networks that would be a start, e.g. helping businesses and individuals migrate to SELinux or something.

gaius6• 13 years ago

It's a valid question: DO we still need things left over from the Cold War? BAOR no longer exists for example. Pretty soon we'll have no tank regiments.

And in the US, as posted on here the other day, the FBI is responsible for national security now.

niuzeta5• 13 years ago

No, it's not fighting back. Making clever memes online to earn a chuckle or two might help spreading awareness, but in reality changing an online avatar and posting memes online won't affect much in real life.

What I find strange is that(Please correct me on this one) there just doesn't seem to be a political group of technologist who lobby(the original meaning) against politicians. In truth, technology-related policies should be consulted and heard by people who use and develop the said technologies.

What's worse about this retaliation is that anyone participating it would have an illusion of having done something without actually having done anything(i.e., impact). At the end of the day, you might walk home feeling good about yourself for having fought for a cause, but some harsh reality check needs to be done.

Addendum:

As per the second paragraph, refer to one of the replies on this comment(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7038058):

An abbreviated list of groups who do that: EFF, Public Knowledge, Demand Progress, Engine Advocacy, CDT, OTI, Free Press. Many of these have multiple registered lobbyists walking the halls of Congress and taking meetings.

I stand corrected.

salient2• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure EFF, DemandProgress and the like are doing exactly that.

Or are you saying they should form a Super PAC? But in that case, it won't exactly be "traditional lobbying", would it? It would be just paying politicians to do what they're asking them. I don't know whether that would be good or bad given the current corrupt lobbying system that the government has gotten accustomed to, but at least we should call it what it is before we dive in.

niuzeta5• 13 years ago

What I find strange is that (Please correct me on this one) there just doesn't seem to be a political group of technologist who lobby(the original meaning) against politicians.

Thank you. As I've stated I am rather ignorant of such groups. I stand corrected.

sinak2• 13 years ago

You're wrong about the lack of groups who lobby. An abbreviated list of groups who do that: EFF, Public Knowledge, Demand Progress, Engine Advocacy, CDT, OTI, Free Press. Many of these have multiple registered lobbyists walking the halls of Congress and taking meetings. I've actually done this myself too, on my pet issue of cell phone unlocking, with the help of a lobbyist from D.C. Unfortunately, most of these groups, bar the EFF, are almost completely known in silicon valley and the tech community. There are likely many reasons for that, but two that often get called out are the distance between San Francisco and DC (culturally and physically), and a libertarian bent amongst many technology.

The goal of this is campaign is to drive calls to Congress on 02/11, making clever memes is simply the vector by which we spread word of the campaign. Calls do very much have an effect on how representatives vote. For evidence of this I highly recommend reading the Communicating with Congress series of studies by the Congressional Management Foundation [1]. Alternatively, ask who has worked as a staffer: calls make a big difference.

It's so very, very easy to be cynical about this kind of thing, but it's a trap. It's weird to quote Plato, but he sums it up pretty well: "The chief penalty [of good people who refuse to lead] is to be governed by someone worse."

[1] http://www.congressfoundation.org/projects/communicating-wit...

ilaksh2• 13 years ago

I would really like to believe that calls to Congress make a difference.

niuzeta5• 13 years ago

> What I find strange is that (Please correct me on this one) there just doesn't seem to be a political group of technologist who lobby(the original meaning) against politicians.

As I've stated I am rather ignorant of such groups. I stand corrected. Now, awareness of those groups should be more spread, wouldn't you agree?

l33tbro4• 13 years ago

No. Why is achievement in our culture positioned to always be this 3-act epic like we have to slay the bad guy? try rethinking your approach here and accept that it is actually totally fine to walk home at the end of the day and celebrate a small victory.

There are indeed technology consultants that inform these govt policy: they're called lobbyists and their influence is often proportional to how much their self-interest will prosper. this is why the system doesn't work and Hacker's like Aaron need to step in. None of us believe we'll walk away from this having fixed anything, it is an ongoing process to keep the system in check. The point, however, is to simply concentrate our anger and focus over a month into, as a hacker, doing SOMETHING proactive against this.

ctdonath• 13 years ago

Small victory

What victory? Keep what in check?

Opinions without objective consequences don't matter.

niuzeta5• 13 years ago

it is actually totally fine to walk home at the end of the day and celebrate a small victory.

It is fine to walk home and celebrate a small victory.

It may not be fine to walk home and celebrate a victory, however small, when that victory is nothing but an illusion. Exactly what kind of victory will this movement achieve? From what I can tell it's another let's-feel-good-about-ourselves-by-shouting-at-same-time.

It makes you feel great, sure, but in the end what have you achieved? Two child comments from my comment have corrected me of groups who are fighting back. Perhaps a donation? Spreading awareness of the groups?

A political motion needs to happen continuously. A day's worth party may be fun, but in the end it's a party. People walk home and do not follow.

tunap• 13 years ago

Not just mere lobbyists, they are 'insiders' who make the right people boatloads of money. They become "Board members" and/or consultants &/or get appointed to seats of power away from the cameras. Hell, they draft the laws that the puppet/script-readers introduce & vote on with much pomp & flourish... or surreptitiously, whatever suits their interests best.

I don't know any but one name on this list, but a quick check leads me to believe we're screwed. DHS Data Privacy Board Members list from '09: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:b2EYh7...

Chairman Howard Beals has no conflict of interest, I suppose: http://www.itif.org/publications/stricter-privacy-regulation...

D. Reed Freeman, ex-CPO of Gator Networks will fight for YOUR right to privacy, I'm sure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claria_Corporation

I'm also pretty sure a majority of people here @ HN will defend THEIR practices of collecting metrics, too. What's the difference? USGuv was tasked to protect & they took it too far, IMO. The Corps, privates & independents with knowledge, coding skills & processing power are tracking for profit... and have taken it too far, IMO.

nubbee• 13 years ago

I agree. The biggest threat to our rights is neither politics nor three letter agencies it's our own passivity. We would benefit more from a movement rather than an event.

steauengeglase• 13 years ago

Awareness is good for stopping bad things that are coming down the pipe, but it pretty worthless for getting rid of bad things that are already in place.

To change the entrenched you need big industry players behind you and a willingness as a customer to lose something in the exchange for their new benefit.

boyaka2• 13 years ago

Yeah, did you even click on the link and try to understand before you made your original post? Aaron Swartz, the face being used for this movement who fought back, was behind the creation of reddit. He is much more involved with these technology-related policies than 99% of those Google, Verizon, etc. policy makers.

niuzeta5• 13 years ago

Please tell me again how this call to action has to do with Aaron Swartz other than the fact that the front page has his picture of him.

anigbrowl2• 13 years ago

a political group of technologist who lobby(the original meaning) against politicians

Excuse my pedantry, but I think the need is not so much to lobby against politicians (which is to implicitly reject the concept of a polity and go for an everyone-for-themselves model instead), but to lobby against competing interests. In short, technologists need to lobby for their interests more effectively, which will mean doing a better job of articulating what our interests are, and why others should accept some crimping of their interests for the greater good. One recent and good example of this is the observation that compromising privacy limits our ability to export hardware and software and thus comes at an economic cost to taxpayers.

wanda• 13 years ago

I would "fight back" but I have a job.

Who am I kidding? I would not fight back even if I did have the time. Even if this were not horseshit. I would be dicking around with golang and flagging banal questions on StackExchange.

angersock• 13 years ago

I appreciate your candor, sir/madam.

jlgaddis• 13 years ago

Yay, slacktivism!

-----

edit: I wrote the above because there was no clear "call to action" other than changing one's Facebook profile picture (seriously?) but, according to the "Open Letter" [0], I guess we're all supposed to call our legislators that day.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7037532

trustfundbaby• 13 years ago

I thought so too, but the big banner has a way to find and call your political representative about the issue. I'm just worried that the American populace isn't sufficiently interested in the issue to do anything about it.

Now if the top 100 sites in the US shut down for a day in protest ...

gtirloni3• 13 years ago

To be honest, I had to go back to the website and read it again so I would notice the suggestion to call the legislators. I think my brain has been trained (based on hard evidence) to ignore that option as ineffective (unfortunately).

marcosdumay10• 13 years ago

Now if the top 100 sites in the US shut down for a day in protest ...

... we'd call them hypocritical.

jcfrei• 13 years ago

My first thought was that it is a prank by 4chan to collect email addresses.

herbig• 13 years ago

"If Aaron were alive, he'd be on the front lines, fighting against a world in which governments observe, collect, and analyze our every digital action."

While government surveillance and open access are both information issues, we definitely should not be construing what he would or wouldn't believe about revelations that were made after his death.

If we're taking a literal interpretation of his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, he may well be on the front lines fighting for a world with zero privacy from anyone.

coldpie• 13 years ago

I think the emphasis on Aaron is really a mistake. I follow this news relatively closely, reading HN every day, and I don't really see how Aaron's abusive prosecutors tie in to the NSA stuff.

The spying scandals are bad enough on their own. Adding Aaron's death into the mix just muddles the message and confuses people who are less informed.

gaius6• 13 years ago

Indeed, it muddies the issue. I am anti-NSA-spying but I am also anti-stealing-IP...

I should point out that I don't think Aaron should have been hounded to his death (tho' equally if he were mentally ill, anything could have pushed him over the edge). But that doesn't make what he did right. It has for 20 years baffled me that people can demand respect for the GPL et al but be happy to ride roughshod over anyone else's licenses.

stiff• 13 years ago

In January 2012 we defeated the SOPA and PIPA censorship legislation with the largest Internet protest in history. A year ago this month _one of that movement's leaders_, Aaron Swartz, tragically passed away.

roc• 13 years ago

It muddies the issue, but people acted against SOPA, which is surely what they're trying to tap into.

I doubt they'll miss a few people who don't appreciate the issues being conflated, if doing so gains them some of the anti-SOPA folks who are willing to act.

Even when it came to fighting SOPA, much of the motivated base was under-informed and dealing in half-truths, exaggerations, fallacious arguments, etc.

But it worked.

bguthrie• 13 years ago

Aaron was an intensely private person. I am fairly certain that "zero privacy" was not a goal that he valued.

jellicle• 13 years ago

Whuh? I don't think there's any sort of logical contradiction between:

"Information, such as research papers, that has been written for the purpose of being disseminated and paid for with tax money, should not be locked up"

and

"The government ought not spy on people."

What does the first one have to do with privacy at all?

aaronem3• 13 years ago

Not related in particular, and maybe a little selfish, but as someone who is also named Aaron, I sure would like it if people would, when referring to Aaron Swartz without honorific or qualifier, do so by last name, as is done with pretty much everyone else on the planet.

Not only would it be more specific to do so, it would be more respectful as well. Referring to someone by his first name, who has not given you that name himself, arrogates an degree of familiarity which I strongly suspect never existed between Swartz and most of those who, in the last year, have been talking about "Aaron" this and "Aaron" that like they were the best of friends. It's just rude, and jarringly so, given the apparently ubiquitious degree of respect extended to Swartz, especially in the wake of his regrettable suicide.

nhangen2• 13 years ago

Am I the only one bothered by how many people are invoking Aaron's ghost? The intent might be pure, but it really bugs me when people speak for the dead.

And let's not forget, Aaron didn't pass away, he committed suicide. Case related stressors may have caused this, but it's also not right to make him the poster child for every anti-government/anti NSA campaign on the Internet.

wbsun2• 13 years ago

May God bless him! Amen.

Joeboy3• 13 years ago

http://likerka.eu/eng/f/lah_che.jpg

l33tbro4• 13 years ago

Aaron was a pretty beautiful dude who had a clarity and pureness of intent to ensuring that information be as free as possible. That Aaron suffered mental illness, and the assumption that his legacy carry less value because he took his own life is kind of gross and disrespectful. Mental illness is stigmatized enough in our communities, and given a lot of the talk of HN users own depression issues, I'm surprised to see statements like this here.

Movements like this are part of Aaron's legacy. We know not the will of the dead. We can, however, celebrate the value and contribution of their lives. His was extraordinary (though all too short). What is so wrong with continuing the work he was so passionate about?

nhangen2• 13 years ago

I don't believe his legacy should carry less value at all. If anything, I'm trying to defend his legacy so organizations like this will stop putting words and actions in his mouth/body.

I find this campaign to be in bad taste and on the brink of classlessness, despite the fact that I believe in the cause.

j_baker2• 13 years ago

Meh. I see where you're coming from on this, but we as a society do this kind of thing all the time. Do you think Martin Luther King Jr would have approved of every anti-racism campaign that's used his name? Do you think he would have approved of having his birthday used to celebrate anti-racism? Who knows? Either way, as long as his image is being used to do something good, it's kind of a moot point. My issue with this is that his image isn't being used to do something good. It's being used as a means of getting people to post messages so they can feel like they're doing something good rather than actually doing something good.

return02• 13 years ago

Yeah, let's fight online surveillance through facebook, google and the other NSA-approved social media.

How about instead we save some energy and invest it in better encryption and security?

wbsun2• 13 years ago

You ask some computer-politicians to do real research and tech-work? NO WAY!

l33tbro4• 13 years ago

Or do both!

systematical• 13 years ago

So facebook and google are now "NSA-approved" how can I get my products and services NSA approved?

return02• 13 years ago

You can't. It's an invite-only elite club.

pinaceae• 13 years ago

as a non-US citizen this won't change anything for me.

"free society" here should be really re-worded to "free US society".

as long as there is a intelligence apparatus in the US at all, spying on the rest of the world will continue. by definition.

the NSA is monitoring all internet traffic as it would be really hard to know beforehand if it only pertains to US citizens. not sure what exactly you're trying to achieve here. the NSA either monitors facebook or it doesn't.

adiEFF• 13 years ago

This is a broader movement. We're pushing for principles that extend beyond the US border, as best outlined here: https://en.necessaryandproportionate.org/text

rmc2• 13 years ago

The US Constitual protection for privacy only applies to US citizens. Would US citizens be willing to amend it to make it apply to everyone.

PavlovsCat3• 13 years ago

Some things in the constitution apply only to citizens, most don't. When it says person, it means person, not citizen. Educating people that this prevalent view is false would already go a long way.

DonGateley2• 13 years ago

What protection is that? Search and seizure is not about privacy; it's about physical intrusion into personal space. Had they meant to address intrusion into abstract privacy they would have.

whatevsbro8• 13 years ago

Oh don't worry, they'll keep spying on Americans exactly like before.

betterunix5• 13 years ago

Maybe your government should be working to promote the security of its citizens. The US is not alone here, despite being a bad actor -- did your government work to promote widespread use of good cryptography, or did your country's law enforcement agencies whine about how hard it would be to wiretap people? Should I, as a US citizen, feel more comfortable with my personal data being stored in your country than you feel about yours being stored in mine?

elchief• 13 years ago

How about companies pledge to never hire NSA staff? Close the accounts of and ban surveillance supporters and their families?

wnevets• 13 years ago

If I join this wont they go out of their way to spy on me?

Joeboy3• 13 years ago

I sincerely doubt they give a shit.

marcosdumay10• 13 years ago

Yes.

And if you don't join it, they'll also go out of their way to spy on you.

carlosdp• 13 years ago

You lost me at "(and [spying on] everyone else too)". Spying on other countries is what the NSA is built to do, and it's for good reason. Every country does it, that's how geopolitics work. The issue people have here is spying on US Citizens, which is not what they're supposed to be doing.

l33tbro4• 13 years ago

Poppycock. Give me some "good reasons" why spying on the private lives of citizens of ally countries is not an act of terrorism?

dragonwriter4• 13 years ago

Give me some "good reasons" why spying on the private lives of citizens of ally countries is not an act of terrorism?

Because terrorism is the use of violence or threat of violence directed at civilian populations or otherwise outside the generally accepted norms of warfare to effect political change, and spying, while it may support the use or threat of violence, is, in and of itself, neither the use nor threat of violence.

pdfcollect• 13 years ago

Hopefully someday we can use this to help: http://bit.ly/blibonline

jsumrall• 13 years ago

You lost me by leading with a big picture of Aaron.

terabytest2• 13 years ago

To me this looks pretty much like Don Quixote's fight against windmills. Pointless, and won't really accomplish anything. Do you think the NSA, or whoever else for that matter, would actually care about people changing their profile picture or blacking out their website for a day? I believe protest doesn't accomplish much, specifically if done in a frivolous way. This is extremely frivolous.

themodelplumber• 13 years ago

Do you think the NSA, or whoever else for that matter, would actually care

What made you think that's the point of this? This isn't about convincing the NSA of anything.

terabytest2• 13 years ago

This sentence from the page pretty much hints at that:

Today we face a different threat, one that undermines the Internet, and the notion that any of us live in a genuinely free society: mass surveillance.

Let's not forget that the NSA revelations are at the base of the mass surveillance outrage.

j_baker2• 13 years ago

It's nice to see that important national issues have been reduced to social media campaigns. It's going to take more than Twitter messages and Reddit comments to take down the NSA though.

Something tells me that Aaron would be pissed that they're using his name this way. Aaron got arrested for actually fighting for openness, not tweeting about how he supports openness. If you want to fight the NSA, write your member of Congress. Join a protest. Leak info about what the government is doing. But please don't just post messages to your Facebook so you can feel like you're doing something.

ilaksh2• 13 years ago

To me its obvious that the current paradigm with a central government that has a monopoly on force and businesses competing against each other with a mandate to increase profits is outdated. I think we need to experiment with rethinking fundamental societal structures in a way that incorporates our current science and technology.

riffraff• 13 years ago

I'm on a shitty airport connection and I tried to load the page 3 times before I was able to read content. Just saying.

donotsurveil2• 13 years ago

Calling upon what a dead person would have done if not dead is something I have a hard time getting behind. But using facebook, google + and twitter to fight back against surveillance made it clear that this whole initiative is a joke and a bad poorly executed one.

I wish those guys luck in trying to push against government surveillance towards private for profit transnational corporations' surveillance, but there is no way I would support this kind of initiative.

Either you fight against surveillance or you don't, but fighting some form of surveillance and promoting another is not fight against surveillance.

callcongressnow2• 13 years ago

[reposting this from another comment for visibility]

Ever since the NSA business leaked, I've been thinking about this problem. It took me a few months to wrap my head around all the crazy stuff that's been going on but I've started building some systems that I think might have a chance of helping out.

"Call Congress Now"- using Twilio, you can call Congress folk from your browser (for free).

http://www.callcongressnow.org/

Here are some Congress people who some consider are doing some shady stuff: http://www.callcongressnow.org/profile/F000062 http://www.callcongressnow.org/profile/L000174

But it's pretty hard to get the word out about websites like that. In a sense, nobody passively cares enough to call Congress. Only when the Congress folks do something that brings about outrage do people care enough to really pick up the phone (or click the twilio button, as it were). So I built the /u/CongressionalHound, a bot on reddit that hunts for mentions of current sitting members of Congress in submitted articles and displays information about them in the comments:

http://www.reddit.com/user/CongressionalHound/comments/

If you are a mod and want me to run the bot on your subreddit, PM the bot and I'll have it saunter on over and get to work. Slowly putting the bot on subreddits that give me permission or invite me to. My hope is that when articles about the NSA, or Obamacare, or the shutdown, or or or any big political issue comes up, that the bot will channel people towards getting in touch with their representatives and senators and effectively voicing their opinions.

Both of these are prototypes and there are major known bugs in both, but I think they can serve as examples of systems that could help citizens better impact their government through the power of the internet.

bendoernberg• 13 years ago

That bot is amazing!

callcongressnow2• 13 years ago

Thank you! It's actually really dumb. Like, it's piping out to Readability and then just searching for capitalized pairs of words and then pounding a hash-map for look ups of Congress folks. MVP or something right?

https://github.com/zmaril/CongressionalHound

tmsh• 13 years ago

You need a law or a bill. And then the protest (and ensuing momentum if companies are incentivized to blackout their sites because it's strongly in their interests) pushes the lever for lawmakers.

Zarathust• 13 years ago

I'm so angry I put a banner on my website. While I greatly support the cause, I doubt the effects this "online protest" will have.

whatevsbro8• 13 years ago

So, something like this:

  People: "Stop spying on us!"
     NSA: "Well, we kind of want to, but if you insist.."
  People: "Alright then, cool."
    (NSA calmly continues doing whatever they damn well please)

Here's an alternative version:

  People: "Stop spying on us!"
     NSA: "Fuck you, peasants."
  People: "No, fuck you! We'll write to some thoroughly
           corrupt sociopaths and they'll stop your spying
           because they care about our well-being!!"
     NSA: "Good luck with that."
    (NSA calmly continues doing whatever they damn well please)

The actual problem is the existence of the NSA and governments in the first place. They're not accountable to us for anything they do, until there's a revolution, and then the cycle just starts over. The real solution is to stop believing that anyone has the right to rule anyone else.

tstactplsignore• 13 years ago

The actual problem is the existence of the NSA
and governments

That escalated quickly.

whatevsbro8• 13 years ago

Sure, but it's true.

Think about it for a moment. They operate in complete secrecy behind the scenes. You have no power over them, but they have massive power over you. Clearly, neither the NSA nor the government are accountable to you or people in general because you simply have no recourse against any injustice they commit against you. If the government imprisons you without due process, for example, you're effectively supposed to complain about it to the very same government, which will then.. punish itself?

In what alternate universe is this a good arrangement?

botolo• 13 years ago

I wonder whether they obtained proper license to use a frame from "The Big Lebowski" for their internet meme

mcgwiz• 13 years ago

Ironically, at the moment the link to their own Privacy Policy page is broken. (I notified them by email.)

https://thedaywefightback.org/privacy.html

Joeboy3• 13 years ago

Let's try to be positive about this.

Presumably the NSA's capacities are limited by its budget. Presumably its budget is limited by political considerations. Presumably a popular social networking campaign, however lame, will be impact on politicians' willingness to lavish funds upon it.

I'd rather everybody involved set up and promoted GPG instead, but that probably isn't going to happen.

shocks• 13 years ago

Great idea, but does it have to be so American? We're getting spied on over here in the UK too.

pron• 13 years ago

This is a worthy cause, but I find it ironic that the page has so many links to social networks that engage in spying on a scale comparable to that of the NSA. And while the NSA was probably just collecting the information we know that Google and Facebook actually use it.

Saying that those services give you a choice not to use them is throwing sand in our face. We know that Facebook and maybe Google, too, collect information about people not using their services. They also track their users' behavior when they're not expecting it. Worst of all is the fact that most people don't fully grasp the deal those companies offer: they give you free services in exchange for your private information.

This reminds me of that recent South Park episode where Cartman goes to investigate the NSA while tweeting his every thought[1]. This kind of fight requires serious thinking about privacy in this day and age. Sure, it's bad that a government spies on people, but it isn't any better that some of the world's most powerful corporations trick people into being spied on and into becoming unknowing informants on their friends. This is a very serious and very broad issue. Let's not make it just about the NSA.

[1] http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s17e01-let-go-...

ripaaron• 13 years ago

"The Day We Fight Back" and there's facebook like-button on the page. The hypocrisy is overwhelming.

pistle• 13 years ago

KonyLives2014.org

psi_rockin• 13 years ago

I'd prefer to see "The Day We Fight Back" be used to promote mass adoption of stronger security measures and encryption.

marcosdumay10• 13 years ago

And some alternative to centralized social networks.

noonespecial• 13 years ago

You know what would be better than putting a banner on a site and tweeting your "outrage"? Giving a buck to the EFF. Or two. Do that other stuff if it makes you feel better, but if you want to make a difference, call a congressman, and give a pittance to people who specialize in doing the same.

vinhboy• 13 years ago

People always ask, why can't the progressives make their own Tea Party -- If you read through the responses on this page you'll have your answer. So much doubt and skepticism about everything...

It's funny all these people putting down "social networking", when most of us here work for companies who pay a shit ton of money to advertise and gain traction on "social networks". Then, on top of that, there are many of us here working to build more and improve social networking.

You bitch about how the media is corrupting the public's mind, yet you scoff at organizations that tries to use the media to rally for support of meaningful causes....

Every. Single. Time. Someone wants to do something positive, you guys just come and shit all over it.

I think the true slacktivism is people who bitch about slacktivism and offers no other solutions.

guelo• 13 years ago

this isn't a "progressive" issue, it cuts across partisan lines.

betterunix5• 13 years ago

Not really. This is a left-versus-right issue. Unfortunately, most major party politicians are on the right wing of the spectrum.

ivanca• 13 years ago

Yeah, it's way easier to stand together when the members of a group just don't use their brain that much and don't doubt even the most stupid beliefs (e.g. Jesus was a white man) but here we doubt everything, and skepticism is good on an individual level but it's the worst social glue for a group.

calroc• 13 years ago

It bothers me that otherwise intelligent people are taking so long to realize that ubiquitous surveillance is never going away.

I would have exterminated humanity in the 80's if it hadn't been for ubiquitous surveillance.

D9u• 13 years ago

We can't forget the corporate culpability in this matter...

bambax2• 13 years ago

The often mentioned quote from B. Franklin (reproduced in the linked site) about "any society" giving up a little liberty for a little security and deserving neither is I think quite funny, because giving up liberty in exchange for security is the very definition of society.

Society is not about liberty; it's about control, surveillance, obedience, in exchange from keeping aliens at bay.

If everyone's my brother I don't need "society", because there are no aliens.

On the other hand, if every brother is a potential or covert alien, then I need a very intense system of control.

I'm not sure it's possible to have society without surveillance; they are sides of the same coin.

knapp• 13 years ago

I think it's quite funny because like so many quotation-on-image internet memes, it's not what Franklin actually wrote.

This is the actual line:

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

http://franklinpapers.org/franklin/framedVolumes.jsp?vol=6&p...

Some other misattributed variations are here:

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin#Misattribute...

marcosdumay10• 13 years ago

Society is a bunch of people gathering togheter because they are happier that way. If everybody is your brother, you won't be any better living alone in a field.

Yeah, other people always come with some kind of surveilance and disagreement, but that's a consequence, not the goal.

bambax2• 13 years ago

Society is a bunch of people gathering together because they are happier that way.

How is that? You're born in a given society (country) and usually you never change societies, so there's no choice involved.

znowi• 13 years ago

Unsurprisingly, none of the PRISM gang companies support this initiative.

BrandonMarc• 13 years ago

In January 2012 we defeated the SOPA and PIPA censorship legislation with the largest Internet protest in history.

Funny ... no mention of CISPA, which interestingly was not heavily protested like SOPA and PIPA were, is reputed to be worse, and while initially passed in November 2011 was passed again in April 2013 after SOPA and PIPA were defeated.

Thankfully, it never passed the Senate ... but I wouldn't call that a "win" compared to the victory over SOPA / PIPA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_Intelligence_Sharing_and_...

Create• 13 years ago

We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world.

This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.

http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html

http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ciscosystemsrouteratcern....

Why would dead links help?

cdoxsey• 13 years ago

Meh. I wasn't all that surprised by the NSA revelations. I think Snowden is a traitor and the US government (like any government) has legitimate reasons to spy on people.

The problem with this "movement" is that it fails to make an argument for its beliefs. It's just pure group-think.

Today we face a different threat, one that undermines the Internet, and the notion that any of us live in a genuinely free society: mass surveillance.

An NSA data mining robot reading my facebook wall is no more a threat to my freedom than Google reading my gmail. The threat comes from the abuse of that information: that some politician (or Google employee) has it out for me and blackmails me (or something like that). Maybe I'll get upset when we have evidence of that happening a bunch.

And though many people don't believe it anymore, there is in fact a real threat on the other side of this: there are actual terrorists in the world who want to kill Americans.

Now here's something I can't figure out: the very people up in arms about the NSA spying on us think that it's a great idea for the government to know all the most intimate details of my life via a government-run single-payer healthcare system.

Uncle Sam reading my latest tweet seems a whole lot less intrusive on my freedom than him telling me I must go to the doctor, get insurance, quit smoking, lose some weight, not eat or drink certain kinds of foods...

nathanb• 13 years ago

How in the world is this "fighting back"?

Did I just skim over a paragraph somewhere on the site? All I see are banners, social media buttons, and a mask to put over your profile picture.

Raising awareness is fine and good, but thanks to Ed Snowden (who fought back in a much more effective way than by changing his gravatar), we already know that the NSA are spying on everyone, everywhere.

They stuck a Ben Franklin quote on there. It's a good quote. But where are the public officials running on a pro-surveillance platform? Whose door should we beat down while carrying our torches and pitchforks? That battle is lost several times a second when we voluntarily step into the body scanner at the airport that both the TSA and the terrorists know doesn't catch everything.

I'm not ready to start a revolution. And I just don't feel like anything less than a revolution will do, at this point. The only thing I can do is leave -- and hope that my new home isn't doing the same thing or worse without having been caught yet.

But this sucks. I hate feeling powerless. So I guess I'm off to post some witty anti-NSA propaganda to my Facebook page!

stefan_kendall• 13 years ago

Modifying websites is not "fighting back". Your time is wasted and meaningless and will not evoke change.

The Day We Fight Back

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