The Day the Internet Didn’t Fight Back

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/the-day-the-internet-didnt-fight-back/

by petethomas • 12 years ago

386 192 12 years ago

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

xerophtye3• 12 years ago

So how many HNers actually did send an email or made a call to their representatives?

nmc5• 12 years ago

"how many HNers [...] made a call to their representatives"

I believe you mean "how many American HNers". On the website, you were asked for an American ZIP code anyway... maybe should have been called thedayamericafighstback.org?

VeejayRampay• 12 years ago

"What is this 'rest of the world' you keep referring to?"

xerophtye3• 12 years ago

Yep, thought of including that clause, then figured it was obvious.

PS: I ain't an American either

ElDiablo6662• 12 years ago

maybe should have been called thedayamericafighstback.org?

I believe you mean "It is my opinion and I do in fact have the perspective that it maybe should have been called thedayamericafightsback.org?"

d06• 12 years ago

What would be the point of sending mail to representatives that don't represent you any more?

At best it's a Monty-pythonesque nod to the system that got us here in the first place. "I'll write a stern letter" or "down with that sort of thing".

Internet activism is at a high level, universally total bullshit.

Breaking things until businesses suffer is the only way people will listen because there is a financial consequence.

ItendToDisagree5• 12 years ago

Perhaps we should attack the system with a... Banana! (Or a handful of Logan Berries)

TeMPOraL• 12 years ago

Internet activism is at a high level, universally total bullshit.

I think that not just Internet activism, but political solutions in general are, at high level, universally total bullshit. As you say, the only way people will listen because there is a financial consequence (people are extremely good at selling themselves out of their values). And a way to reliably inflict financial consequence is through business and technology (and occasional media shitstorms, but that doensn't seem to do much anymore), by redefining the optimization landscape people hillclimb right under their feet.

synctext• 12 years ago

Easy to do nothing, it's easy to be cynical (+get a headline).

IETF Internet guardians say "pervasive monitoring is an attack": https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-farrell-perpass-attac...

$52.6 Billion yearly budget is feeding the attacker: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-...

Seems a political reform force is needed or nothing will change. SOPA/PIPA gave us the taste of blood..

crassus2• 12 years ago

The only way to be effective is to make politicians lose their jobs. This means coalescing behind single-purpose organizations meant to win reelection for anyone supporting a minimalist tech/privacy platform, and defeat for anyone else.

Tech workers today are too caught up in mainstream political bullshit - "parental notification laws for abortion are basically rape" and etc. - to actually do this.

spenvo• 12 years ago

"By late Tuesday, some 70,000 calls had been placed to legislators and roughly 150,000 people had sent their representatives an email."

What was to be expected? The offices of my Senators and Representatives were swamped all day with phone calls.

The author keeps paying lip-service to the comparison of this effort to SOPA/PIPA --- which was entirely different. Those bills were a direct challenge to the internet as we knew it, and everyone (including the big players) moved in to participate. That protest was about two game-changing bills with votes on the floor (all other paths for success had failed - if you're Google,Wikipedia, etc); this protest was about the status quo.

Our elected officials heard us today - from seemingly nowhere, that the status quo isn't acceptable. The verbiage directly called the kettle black on the supposed "FISA Reform Bill," reminding politicians that the powder is dry if head too far off course. And that (IMHO) makes a big statement.

I felt the post was unjustifiably negative[/defeatist] with a link bait title and lame observations. It would be great to see Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. play a larger role and "see the bigger picture"-- especially given that companies like Microsoft have officially recognized dragnet surveillance as an "advanced persistent threat." [0] Again, it would be great, but it can't be necessary. We want their help, but we cannot need it.

PS - It's defeatist to say the following: "internet protests will never change anything in Washington."

"The Powerbroker," a Pulitzer-Prize winning biography praised by Aaron Swartz [1], conveys the following two lessons with regards to affecting change in government: 1.) the only thing which matters (from the perspective of a common man) is raising the political stakes in every manner possible, forcing the issue into the court of public opinion where politicians must pick sides in a very public affair. 2.) The other things which matter are in conversations which you are not a part of. . . ... dig in. This is a minor skirmish in a long war (of attrition) against the Est..

[0] http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/5/5177554/microsoft-plans-se... [1] - https://zolabooks.com/list/aaron-swartz-reading-list/1

ItendToDisagree5• 12 years ago

The fact that Google/Yahoo/Facebook/Wiki didn't promote or get involved with this REALLY hurt the cause...

To many (read: The Majority) of people the above companies are the internet. In the same way the people who think this way used to think AOL was The Internet (Capitals important). It really is sad that this seems to be true and that a couple companies have so much influence on what the internet is and does. But it really did make it easy to downplay the whole thing by saying "If it was so important why didn't Google get involved?"

chriswarbo2• 12 years ago

If you're going to complain about the meaning of words, you should at least try to use them properly yourself.

Lowercase "internet" refers to any network of networks, for example a router which lets machines connected via Ethernet talk to machines connected via WiFi.

Capitalised "Internet" is a proper noun referring to a particular network of networks which began life as the ARPANET.

"Wiki" refers to user-generated Web sites in the style of WikiWikiWeb; since you put it in a list of Web sites/companies, I'll presume you meant "Wikipedia", which is a particular Wiki.

So whilst AOL, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Wikipedia aren't "The Internet", at least your hypothetical "Majority" have enough respect for the Internet to refer to it by name.

f_salmon2• 12 years ago

"If it was so important why didn't Google get involved?"

Maybe because participating also means "telling people that they're constantly being monitored" (and further raising the perceived seriousness of the issue). And maybe the only solution to escape the madness is to simply drop big parts of the currently available technology.

Apple/Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/AOL/etc are after your money, they only protect your rights if it means "more money", not if it threatens to impact their profit.

So they have no ($$$) incentive to raise the issue. (Our culture is still immature, it favors money over ethical values.)

jebus9892• 12 years ago

So the press has picked up Wikipedia didn't get involved but what actually happened was:

* Jimmy Wales posted on his talk page inviting discussion on the issue [0]

* There was support for having articles on the main page all be related in some way to the topic of mass surveillance [0]

* A handful of editors then made a subpage and began plans for a request for comment (RfC)... [1]

Then said handful of people made a series of bungles and strange decisions (like naming the proposal "Surveillance awareness day" instead of associating with the protest) and ultimately didn't bring the RfC to the community for proper discussion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales/Archive_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Surveillance_awarene... (see history, talk page)

TL;DR Wikipedia didn't decide not to get involved in the protest, 2 or 3 editors dawdled and made bad decisions until we ran out of time to discuss it.

saalweachter• 12 years ago

I don't like it when corporations interject themselves into politics. This goes for companies that support my politics as well as companies which oppose them.

mempko• 12 years ago

The problem is those companies are involved in mass spying, so I suspect they knew which side their toast is buttered.

GrinningFool2• 12 years ago

That's OK - because now it's covered in the NYT blogs. People who were previously unaware now have a little more info. A minor subset of them have looked a little further into the issue.

Little steps.

pessimizer3• 12 years ago

PS - It's defeatist to say the following: "internet protests will never change anything in Washington."

You shouldn't characterize the dismissal of a single technique as ineffective to achieving a stated goal as some sort of a spiritual or moral failing (or whatever "defeatist" is supposed to mean other than 'a prediction of defeat.')

Would you say that the statement "your private prayers will never change anything about segregated schools" is defeatist?

Personally, I think that protests succeed through creating an intimidating public physical presence that actively prevents the behavior being protested against, or through the violent reaction of the powers being protested against to the protest causing outrage amongst passive supporters of those powers.

I don't see any way that banner ads fit into that.

That being said, it was a great effort to spread good and current information to people, and to remind Congress that we are a special interest group that needs to be catered to.

Our elected officials heard us today - from seemingly nowhere, that the status quo isn't acceptable.

They hear this from abortion, gun rights, and immigration protesters on both sides every day, except for those causes, people are willing to fight to the death. For this cause, there's a webapp to help people send email. For a politician, choosing either position on any of the former issues will completely obliterate any influence that the latter will have on the vote.

We're really going to have to get together in real life, and make plans to make life unpleasant for specific people who oppose our goals and convince other people to do the same. The problem with that is that when you start doing that, you're going to go on a list, there are going to be informants that you think are your friends, and all of your communications and movements are going to be scoured for opportunities for parallel construction in order to imprison you or to blackmail you into becoming an informant. You may lose your job, you may go to prison.

There are a number of people who have committed to this lifestyle over the NSA issue. The strength of any effective movement is going to be measured by the number of those people.

As a lot of people have said, I agree that the most important thing that we can do is create channels through which they (and hopefully we) can communicate without being monitored. I think that a very close second is to create channels for the average person to be able to donate funds to the imprisoned without ending up on a list.

crassus2• 12 years ago

This was a good start because it mobilized some passionate people.

The next step is building effective organizations for these people to get behind, organizations that promote a minimalist tech/privacy platform - leave off controversial issues like immigration, as much as it tempts you. The purpose of these organizations should be that anybody who supports it gets reelected, and anybody that doesn't loses their job. This is the same principle that powerful unions and interest groups work on.

All other bullshit issues of the day have to become secondary importance, or this organization will never gain clout.

Until Feinstein is enjoying 7-day vacations every week, the job is not done. If you're thinking "OMG, that might mean a moderate California Republican took her seat! Think of the childrenz!" then you're not up for the task.

0ca0• 12 years ago

PS - It's defeatist to say the following: "internet protests will never change anything in Washington."

Don't be an idiot. It's defeatist to say that we can never change anything to rid ourselves of oppression. It's perfectly valid to say that online petitions and online protests are relatively useless because usually it follows from that that there are more effective alternatives.

whatevsbro• 12 years ago

Our elected officials heard us today - from seemingly nowhere, that the status quo isn't acceptable

Do you really think they didn't already know that? Do you think they give a fuck? Do you think they might just be doing whatever the hell they damn well please, despite all of it being against the people's will?

This isn't about calling "your" (read: "Wall Street's" etc) representatives. It's not about pleading for less intrusive and oppressive "governance". You know, letters or phone calls don't actually compel politicians to do anything.

This is about a small group of people being in power, and everyone else subject to it. Do you think you need a bunch of rulers? Can't you make your own decisions? -Should someone be "legislating" your life?

Would you like to have a personal law just for you that mandated eating your veggies and exercising regularly? Would you want that law enforced through violence if necessary? -No? What if someone decided to force you to exercise anyway? Would that be alright? It's for your own good, after all! -No? But.. why? Why would that not be alright, if the government forcing you to pay taxes or buy insurance is alright?

sinak2• 12 years ago

I think David Segal's comment, which were added later to the article, sum things up pretty perfectly: “To mark all organizing a success or failure by measuring it against the single biggest online activist moment ever is ridiculous.”

But this was also just a case of really lazy journalism. Nicole Perlroth failed to contact any of the organizations or companies involved before publishing her article, and it contained a number of factual inaccuracies, only some of which have now been corrected:

- "Sites like Tumblr, Mozilla and DuckDuckGo, which were listed as organizers, did nothing to their homepages."

None of them were "listed as organizers." Their logos appeared on their site, but supporting/participating != organizing. This would have been easily corrected if she'd asked.

DuckDuckGo changed their homepage logo yesterday, and Mozilla added a link and logo on the browser start page, which is visible every time someone opens a new window.

- "[List of large tech co's] only participated Tuesday insofar as having a joint website flash the protest banner."

Facebook, Google and Twitter also released statements in support, and tweeted/shared on social media.

- "Most of those [calls and emails] were directed to Senator Dianne Feinstein."

I have no idea where she got this from. Feinstein did receive 2420 calls, but saying she received "most" of them is just nonsense.

- "But on privacy forums and Reddit, significant discussions failed to materialize."

Over 4,000 comments were posted to the reddit blog post that announced their participation and contained the banner. At least another 3,000 comments were made on other threads.

You can also see a diff of changes made to the post later in the day here: https://github.com/sinak/sinak.github.com/commit/d8050c45633...

sinak2• 12 years ago

We drove 80k calls and 500k+ emails to Congress without a specific vote pending. Even without any of the larger tech companies participating we generated about as fifth as many calls as SOPA (400k). We also lacked a call to action as defeating a pending bill that would jeopardize internet freedom.

Why didn't larger tech companies didn't take part? I think that's an interesting question worth a journalist investigating. As with SOPA, companies like Google left their decision until the last minute. But this time around they decided to support the protest, but not take part by adding content to their home pages. I'm not sure any one thing explains it. Larger tech has added a significant lobbying apparatus since 2011 and perhaps that's part of it. They're playing the inside political game much more so than they did a couple of years ago. If it turns out to be more effective that online activism, I'm not sure we can particularly criticize them for it.

They've also banded together on this issue under the "reformgovernmentsurveillance.com" banner. That makes participation a more complicated group decision-making process.

While we branded yesterday as "the day" (which I know some of you take issue with), this is by no means the end. It's one in a series of actions. The actual votes on bills like the USA Freedom Act and FISA Improvements Act are yet to come. We made a dent, but this is a process.

aaronem• 12 years ago

The verbiage directly called the kettle black on the supposed "FISA Reform Bill," reminding politicians that the powder is dry if head too far off course. And that (IMHO) makes a big statement.

An incomprehensible statement, more like. Would you mind replacing the cliché slaw with something more closely resembling what you are actually trying to say?

danshapiro• 12 years ago

This will go down as the day the New York Times considered the number of Reddit comments a more important indicator of impact than phone calls to members of Congress.

marshray4• 12 years ago

Do we know that there aren't members of Congress watching Reddit comments? I would at least expect political consultants to.

Suncho• 12 years ago

I honestly don't care about the NSA stuff. There are real issues in society that I actually get fired up about (poverty, education, intellectual property, and the like). Government surveillance isn't one of them. Privacy isn't really one of them. SOPA and ProtectIP really mattered to me. This didn't.

marshray4• 12 years ago

Surveillance is censorship.

ZenoArrow3• 12 years ago

Surveillance isn't censorship, but it is an effective tool to aid in censorship.

etiam2• 12 years ago

The initiative has been criticised for lack of a clear call to action many times, not least here on HN. If the response was really lukewarm (the contacts to legislators and political representatives looks pretty good?) maybe it's a consequence of that.

I personally have never really liked the framing of the campaign. "The Day We Fight Back"? As if anyone's going to solve this problem between breakfast and their evening snack? I realize it has a connotation of 'a day on which we start fighting back', which is clearly clumsier as a slogan, but I think building up the expectations on a single day is a bad move in this context. To me it seems that way the initiative gets more fragile than it needed have been.

My respect to the people arranging it though. It's great to see activism protesting these crimes. Keep it up!

Today Is A Day We Try To Take A Sliver Of Our Spare Time And Do Something About Mass Surveillance, and so is every tomorrow until success.

waterlesscloud2• 12 years ago

Oh please.

HN had a header.

What more do you want?

junto4• 12 years ago

Financial pain. We forget how powerful this is. We have shown that we collectively can protest by adding a bit of JavaScript to our webpages and some of you called you senators. Great start, noble, but I guarantee that nothing will change.

What really hurts is loss of revenue to global companies. We need to collectively boycott firms until THEY resolve the problem. It is their tax write-down lobbying donations that keep these jokers we call senators in power.

If we really want to protest against say, monitoring, then we should be building free tools for people to easily move their email away from GMail or building something better than email as an alternative.

If we want to discourage Concast from throttling Netflix, then we should all collectively dump Comcast and move to a company that promises they won't.

If we want to discourage the NSA then lobbying government as individuals isn't going to cut it. That horse has already bolted. That horse needs a bullet to the head. Corporations are the only entities powerful enough to stop government. We need to empower them to fix the problem.

We think that protesting within the confines of the system will work. It doesn't. We think that protesting in the street will work. It doesn't (Iraq War protests anyone?).

It works outside the western world because they aren't kept within what I call "the sheep bubble". Western governments know how to keep the people within a bubble that provides just enough comfort to keep the vast majority happy. Places where we have seen revolutions haven't maintained that bubble.

Since we don't have direct control over the bubble in the western world, we have few options for collective revolt.

I would like to see this (very cool) system that you have collectively put together for yesterday's protest, to be pivoted and used to actively boycott companies that we collectively see as damaging to the us sheep.

Then we become the wolves.

motters2• 12 years ago

I'm not sure that companies are the answer here, because companies suffer from The Levison Problem. Some goons show up with a gagging order and attach a "special box" to the server or implement some other kind of intercept in order to carry out "bulk collection". Or they simply demand copies of the private keys. This isn't a problem which a company can easily overcome.

There isn't a simple solution to mass surveillance but one mitigating strategy may be to encourage more people to run their own web services, a la freedombox/freedombone/arkOS, and encourage a "friends host friends" policy. If enough people went down that route then it could affect the bottom line of various companies, and hence apply some pressure for meaningful change.

atmosx5• 12 years ago

[...] but I guarantee that nothing will change.

No, that you can not guarantee. No one can predict the series of events of that this or any other form of protest might enable[1]. These social unrest situations initialize events that can only be approached by chaos theory since we can't even count the variables involved. In mathematics of chaos we have the notable butterfly effect. The 'Arab Spring' was initialized by a guy who set himself on fire on a small town after suffering what he considered to be a misjudgment (Mohamed Bouazizi[3]).

I know my examples are far-fetched by I'm trying to show the bigger picture here: When the police officer was harassing Bouazizi for the n-th time, even if he told that he will set himself on fire, I'm sure that she would not care less. She may even call some friends to enjoy the show... What she couldn't foresee is that a few months later Ben Ali would have to step down for something a corrupted, insignificant in the bigger picture police officer had initiated. We might argue that if it were not for Bouazizi something else would have happened to spin the wheels of the Tunisian revolution, but we don't know for sure and when you add to many 'if' you end up writing a romance.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxQX9fYf2aI

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Bouazizi

junto4• 12 years ago

These environments are notably different to western countries. The UK hasn't had a real revolution since 1642. 1688 doesn't count since it was more of an invasion.

The US is also extremely stable since the American Civil War.

The Arab spring was different because the vast majority of the people had nothing to do and their government's used brutal oppression rather than the sheep bubble I talked about above.

Idle hands and brutality are are poisonous mix.

d06• 12 years ago

Very manifesto-ish. It's almost like I'm reading the words of the wolf.

Don't build better. Make what is there unusable. Remember the enemy can use it too.

If we want to discourage Concast from throttling Netflix, then we should all collectively dump Comcast and move to a company that promises they won't.

Stop buying Netflix. Steal all the films you want and start distributing them on USB sticks.

Hang both the government and the corporations. Corporations and government are at one when there is as much inbreeding and crossover as there is.

We think that protesting within the confines of the system will work. It doesn't. We think that protesting in the street will work. It doesn't (Iraq War protests anyone?).

Very true but isn't that what you're promoting. Destroying infrastructure works well (Afghanistan war, not the US for example).

Make it uncomfortable for people. Take down their luxury items, their phone networks, their ability to pay for things.

Since we don't have direct control over the bubble in the western world, we have few options for collective revolt.

All we need to do is make it uncomfortable for people.

The only reason we as technology people don't do this is because we're comfortable as well. We're cowards. We're talkers, not do-ers.

There should be no wolves be it us or them.

Now I patiently await to be bagged and tagged.

junto4• 12 years ago

Make it uncomfortable for people. Take down their luxury items, their phone networks, their ability to pay for things.

I agree, but how do you do this?

I think that my point was hidden within my ramblings, so I'll try and condense it.

The singular power that every individual has, is to choose what they buy and what they consume. The whole system is built upon the premise that we consume.

Hence, I would like to see consumers work together as a powerful block, that can effectively combat the power of both government and corporations.

First we influence corporations to control the government. Once you've done that you can keep turning the screws on the corporations that don't fit to our ideal.

We are the populous. Collectively we have more power than any government and any corporation.

You just need to find a way to turn this picture upside down: http://i.imgur.com/yStRSPk.jpg

elorant• 12 years ago

Let’s get realistic here shall we? Building an alternative to Gmail? Nope. We can’t do that. We don’t have the resources. And if we were to charge people for a service like that in exchange of extra security the majority wouldn’t give a damn.

The thing is that NSA has the ability to attack the infrastructure. If for example they can go to carrier providers and monitor the pipe no matter what we’d do on top of that would be futile. Furthermore, they can backdoor cryptography algorithms-which to my opinion is the scariest from all the revelations regarding NSA. So even if we move everyone to SSL we wouldn’t know if that’s enough.

The financial pain you’re referring to cuts both ways. If you were to boycott commercial solutions then you’d have to go and find alternatives. Which could be relatively easy for tech-savvy individuals but what about companies? They wouldn’t do it. Simply as that. No one would go out of their way to install an alternative to Exchange Server in order to put pressure on Microsoft. It’s not realistic.

Basically what we need is a new Internet. We have to change everything. I don’t know if that’s even feasible but my guess is that even if it was it will take a lot of time.

blowski2• 12 years ago

I agree with most of what you say, but this is a bit pessimistic:

Building an alternative to Gmail? Nope. We can’t do that. We don’t have the resources.

When you think about it, most of the internet depends on open source software built by "us". Programming languages, databases, web servers, content management systems, statistical analysis, image manipulation, and yes, email clients/servers. Given all that, a self-hosted email application should be possible.

I suspect the reason we don't do it is not because we don't have the resources, but because... actually I don't know why we don't. Perhaps all the investment slush funds have made us lazy and selfish. Perhaps the social networks and mobile games have made us less creative. Perhaps some of the fanatical open source software wars have put us off doing the same thing.

vog• 12 years ago

Building an alternative to Gmail? Nope. We can’t do that. We don’t have the resources.

Agreed. We don't have the resources.

Basically what we need is a new Internet. We have to change everything.

But that would need even more resources!

ntaso2• 12 years ago

Let’s get realistic here shall we? Building an alternative to Gmail? Nope. We can’t do that.

The protocol is called IMAP and the client is called <insert-random-email-client-here>. Email is old and just about every email client does its job sufficiently good to achieve what it was made for: writing and sending emails.

With IMAP, everything is even synced across all devices. Gmail is actually the LEAST important thing to use in my opinion. If people are unwilling to sacrifice a relatively unnecessary software like Gmail, I don't see any chance in boycotting products/companies at all.

frabcus• 12 years ago

Of course we can!

It looked like Internet Explorer was a permanent browser monopoly just over a decade ago.

The Spread Firefox campaign - a crowd marketing campaign - fixed that. Combined, of course with a well made browser.

The result was that Apple and Google could later compete on another level with Microsoft (without Spread Firefox, websites wouldn't have worked on iPhones or Chrome).

Something similar can absolutely be done again.

dagw• 12 years ago

Basically what we need is a new Internet.

Anybody else remember the Internet2 push from the late 90's?

waterlesscloud2• 12 years ago

What does our primary electronic communication system look like in 10 years? A slightly improved gmail?

Yeah, probably not.

Still plenty of room for innovation out there.

Ronsenshi• 12 years ago

Basically what we need is a new Internet. We have to change everything. I don’t know if that’s even feasible but my guess is that even if it was it will take a lot of time.

Problem of creating new Internet lies in the infrastructure. We can't just build it upon current network to which NSA (and other agencies) already has an access. It maybe encrypted, but as you pointed yourself, encryption can be broken.

So, personally, i can see this new Internet only if there was a new way to send and receive data with less infrastructure overhead as there is now. And that might be possible in the future with stuff like quantum teleportation.

andyroid• 12 years ago

We think that protesting within the confines of the system will work. It doesn't. We think that protesting in the street will work. It doesn't (Iraq War protests anyone?).

None of those are mutually exclusive (and neither is boycott). It's perfectly fine to do all of them. In fact that's probably the most effective thing to do!

(And I'm pretty sure most people who protested the war in Iraq didn't actually believe that their protest would stop the war. Sometimes you want to show the world you care about something because it's the right thing to do)

junto4• 12 years ago

My problem with the democratic system is that it is a false dichotomy. Neither party (in the case of the US) offer a real alternative.

The people argue till they are blue in the face as to which one is right or wrong, but the differences between them are negligible. What's funny is that we waste unbelievable amounts of energy and time in making believe that there is a difference.

In the case of the US, politics is not too dissimilar to football or any team sport. You side with one or the other. Without both sides the game is boring. The US lowers the risk of dissent and instability by discouraging the possibility of more than two sides.

I have come to believe that none of the traditional routes are effective. They are merely a trap. They are simply a big brick wall to shout at.

ronaldx• 12 years ago

DuckDuckGo, which were listed as organizers, did nothing to their homepages.

This is factually incorrect - the Duck was (is still) being watched by a surveillance camera.

jjcm• 12 years ago

I was one of guys behind sopablackout.org, one of the larger players in the sopa movement a while back. I think that the main difference between the effects of this protest and the sopa protests, is that for sopa, sites quite literally blacked out their pages for the day. You couldn't ignore the message. This time, the popup/message was less in your face. On HN it was a small piece of text at the top of the page. I didn't even see it on reddit.

Yes a lot of call volume was made, but I think the general public didn't really know it was happening. With SOPA, sites went black. Content became unavailable. Users didn't get what they wanted, so they tried to figure out why.

70,000 calls are great, but the that makes up a minuscule portion of the elected officials' demographics.

I think the largest problem here was that the campaign's objective was contacting representatives, whereas the SOPA's objective was educating the public. One lasts a day, the other is sustainable.

this_user• 12 years ago

I think one big difference is that the SOPA campaign had a very clear-cut goal of stopping that legislation while this campaign is "against mass surveillance" which is much more nebulous. Most people on the Internet seem to agree that they are against mass surveillance, but there is a lack of clear goals and demands that everyone can get behind.

Ensorceled• 12 years ago

Worse, they all have different levels of acceptable surveillance. Many Americans think that the current spying is ok, many more think spying on all non-Americans is ok, many other Americans thing ANY spying is bad.

The vast majority of Americans could recognize that SOPA was just plain bad: bad for business, bad for users, bad for everybody.

oceanstone• 12 years ago

85 thousand calls is pretty awesome, actually.

seanccox• 12 years ago

It doesn't surprise me that major internet brokers weren't involved; Google, Yahoo, and others are alleged to have had established relationships with the intelligence community – relationships that likely profited them. So, those firms shouldn't be relied upon to take a stand.

To make a company an effective advocate for any change, you need to threaten their revenue stream. That's really the only factor a corporation can be relied upon to respond to, and it was a motivating factor behind much of the corporate defiance to SOPA. SOPA included provisions that would have barred advertising and imposed costly bureaucracy, and it was thus valuable to protest it.

By comparison, any current relationships between such companies and government agencies, regarding their data, only makes them a party to pissing on the constitution and assisting in assassinations through the provision of metadata.

That doesn't cost a thing.

higherpurpose3• 12 years ago

The whole settlement they made with the NSA/DoJ recently for "transparency" was a big farce, too. Even Twitter knows that.

https://blog.twitter.com/2014/fighting-for-more-transparency

VMG• 12 years ago

The only reliable solution is secure end-to-end cryptography. It's painful, but it more effective than this kind of slacktivism.

etiam2• 12 years ago

I'm all for secure end-to-end cryptography, but there are plenty of problems that doesn't solve (social graph building by traffic analysis being one important example). Most importantly, encrypting does little, if anything, to solve the deeper problem that the spy organizations blatantly ignore the law and try to deceive the public and the public's representatives to get away with it. You sound cynical about the likely effectiveness of the political campaign, I know I am, but the really big problem with this whole issue is about abuse of power and how we arrange society. In my opinion, any 'solution' that doesn't address the political side is not really a solution at all.

staticelf2• 12 years ago

From a european perspective, this protest was unfortunately way to directed to the American public. When it comes down to protests like this, I feel like there is too much focus on the US government even if they are the most hardcore when it comes to world wide surveiliance.

But when Europe came together on stopping ACTA (I helped organize an IRL protest) it felt like the world was much more united on the issue. Yesterday I did nothing mainly because I felt left out because my little country did not matter.

The demonstrations were covered in the media in my country pretty heavily and I think a bunch of people screaming on the streets, giving out flyers and so on gives a much better impression on the general public than some websites having a banner or some telephone calls.

Seriously, America should get together on the streets AND swamp their telephone lines.

motters2• 12 years ago

Agree. Although a lot of the news is about NSA, and very American-centric, this is really a global problem. Not many people pay attention to blacked out web sites unless it's Google or Facebook.

kefka• 12 years ago

Protesting on the streets in the US doesn't work.

Unlike much of Europe, where the streets are used for walking and small cars, we have these big roads and big cars. These roads are for driving. Even the town squares in all the cities I've lived in were optimized for vehicles.

Now, we can take this to the streets. But all that does is piss off every man and woman trying to live their life and work and get groceries.

pessimizer3• 12 years ago

Unlike much of Europe, where the streets are used for walking and small cars, we have these big roads and big cars.

Tiny streets like these? http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/16/french-protests...

all that does is piss off every man and woman trying to live their life and work and get groceries.

That's the same thing it does everywhere else. The reason you have street protests is to disrupt what people are doing and have them focus on what you are saying.

The reason street protests "don't work" in the US is because of a combination of the precariousness and conservatism of the middle class. It's too big a risk for middle-class people to participate in a protest, and the majority of them are racist law-and-order voters who have voted to eliminate most of the rights of the accused and to militarize their police forces out of their fear of black and hispanic people. Now that we're afraid of the Middle East, we've eliminated most of the rights of the unaccused.

Europeans have a different history, and the development of civil rights there wasn't entirely born out of race-based fear, so their situation is different.

Here, only poor people and students protest, and they are completely ignored by a monolithic media except to be taunted, confronted by police at a ratio of 10 cops to a protester, and carted off to jail if their permits aren't current or if they step off the sidewalk.

kyboren2• 12 years ago

I felt left out because my little country did not matter.

The truth is that you really don't matter to American politicians, and American politicians are (ostensibly) the only ones who wield power over the NSA. Our politicians don't even care about their constituents; why in the world would they care about you?

The general American psyche holds the rights of US citizens in high regard while ignoring or outright disparaging the rights of non-citizens. We have to be realistic. Our message is much more powerful when we focus on the crimes against the American people.

staticelf2• 12 years ago

Our message is much more powerful when we focus on the crimes against the American people.

And that's why I think I feel left out, even by the group I would be supporting. I think the better way would be to describe the crime against the worlds population including the American one.

There is also mass surveilance going on in my country and they are basically forwarding all data to the NSA which of course is illegal. But I can't really join a fight which I am not a part of and probably never will be. I can't call American politicians, but I can call the representives in my country.

But it feels rather silly to call and complain and it will not matter if I am the only one who does it. I want the EU to take action against the US gov for their crimes, I also want the EU to take action against my government for their crimes. I want all mass surveiliance shut down. No matter where it is located. It's a bit like to try and take action on international crime in just one country.

varjag• 12 years ago

Well this is 2014. Make likes, not war.

Cthulhu_• 12 years ago

I put it up on my community site as well, and to be fair... the response was underwhelming. A few people found the site ending up being unusable (on mobile), others found it annoying, and others thought their computer or the website had been hacked / infected with malware.

So yeah, on the one side, the big players didn't participate; on the other, the banner was ineffective or confusing for a lot of people, and finally, a lot of people simply either didn't get the message or simply didn't care.

You know what happens when people do care? Open revolt, violent protesting, revolution. See also: middle-east. Whose people are a lot more emotional / angry than western countries are, and more inclined to take affirmative action for what they stand for.

In the case of the US, this should be the gross violations of the constitution's amendments, and the lack of action from the higher legal courts to stop it in its tracks. That's when the amendment of the right to bear arms kicks in, allowing the people to overthrow their own government. In theory, anyway.

davidw6• 12 years ago

You know what happens when people do care? Open revolt, violent protesting, revolution.

Like Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi?

pessimizer3• 12 years ago

Yes. Like Martin Luther King and Gandhi. If you don't see what they did as open revolt, I don't know what you're seeing. If you don't see their protests as violent (even though the violence was done to them), I don't know what you were looking at.

These people risked their lives every day for their causes, and lost them. That is not comparable to banner ads.

higherpurpose3• 12 years ago

Ah, of course his is coming from NYT. They've never been too supportive of the whole "anti-NSA" movement, and in fact lately they've started defending NSA quite a bit more than initially, with all the "leaks" they get from NSA now to make them look good.

Shouldn't those leakers be prosecuted, too? Shouldn't someone call for the assassination of those leakers?! Funny how nobody says anything bad about the leakers when the leaks make the NSA look good, isn't it?

johnpowell• 12 years ago

Honestly. This was a joke. And the NSA doesn't care about money. They simply don't care. Their money isn't impacted.

I didn't even notice what Reddit did. There was a blog post floating around the top all day. If that was all, great job.

INTPenis• 12 years ago

Being involved in a hacker space in a very developed European country and leading workshops that try to educate the general public on online security this is my view on the belated public reaction of all these past years of leaks.

There are two main camps visible to me, the indifferent and the frightened. I'm sure there are plenty of people in the spectrum between those two but I find observing these two camps rather interesting. Because one camp seems to be overwhelmed by all the revelations, usually this camp is not involved in IT at a professional or hobby level.

The indifferent camp seems to either believe it's a problem but that they can't do anything about it, or believe that this is status quo and they need to go on with their lives.

The other camp, the frightened, are usually IT enthusiasts. Even if they're not very skilled, they're now working on that. They're looking up information on Tor, GPG and PKI.

They seem to be bunkering down to defend their privacy from their own government.

Those are just my observations.

bowlofpetunias• 12 years ago

I didn't like the protest.

It was way too US-centric politically motivated anti-governement. The people behind claimed to believe in "privacy is a human right", but only addressed the privacy violations of the "Big Bad Gubernment".

I'm all for a pro-privacy protest, not for a libertarian anti-government protest disguised as one.

The SOPA/PIPA protests were about standing up to the copyright mafia as well as the authorities, something that was mirrored by the European ACTA protests.

This protest was totally one-sided, ignoring 50% of the privacy issue, especially as it is perceived outside the US, where Google, Facebook e.a. stand shoulder to shoulder with the US government in their efforts to tear down privacy rights.

hajderr• 12 years ago

Don't worry. We'll be fighting back and reclaim the freedom online. It is time for people to wake up from their slumber!

lurkinggrue• 12 years ago

Sorry I was looking at cat videos.

insertnickname• 12 years ago

I'm glad this thing is over. Those popups everywhere were really annoying.

RamiK• 12 years ago

It didn't help having it coincide with Safer Internet Day ( www.saferinternetday.org ) which did make it to my local media.

I only heard about the Day We Fight Back thing a day or two in advance so when I saw the evening news and they talked about that Safer Internet Day I wasn't sure if there was some mix up or just bad reporting...

officemonkey• 12 years ago

The reason the big companies didn't mount much of a fight is because they benefit from the surveillance state.

Facebook and Google hoover more private data out of my life than the NSA ever will. They may have less sinister motives (I don't think Amazon intends to kill anyone with their drones,) but whipping up public ire about on-line surveillance will blow back on them.

So they go the Captain Renard route ("I'm shocked, shocked to see mass surveillance going on here!"): they put up token resistance, but they don't want to be too effective.

mpyne• 12 years ago

Indeed, Google is the one who came up with the idea that surveillance-by-computer was somehow more innocuous than surveillance-by-person. With GMail they tell you straight to your face that they will store all this personal data about you (i.e. your email, login history, etc.) but that it's OK, "a human never looks at it". Well, great.

johncoltrane• 12 years ago

The day a few citizens of the Internet pretended to fight back against a vastly more powerful thing that doesn't give a flying fuck about them with ridiculous weapons.

bhauer• 12 years ago

Financial pain is a proven way to affect companies, and in turn affect the government. But causing financial pain to organizations that are compromised by NSA action may not be feasible without a serious cost to ourselves of lost time and productivity.

Although I have not been pushing the concept much, I would invite you to consider the model of my side project [1], wherein we use donations to charity to illustrate the importance of action. The donations can either be made immediately or pending completion of the task.

This gives a bit of financial weight to the activism, if not direct and acute. It also benefits charities and in some cases gets the charities involved in providing pressure from another angle.

To date, it's only been modestly effective with local tasks, but I've not been able to build the momentum behind the model to test it with something larger scope.

[1] https://usa.brianstaskforce.com/task/386/stop-unwarranted-su...

BrownBuffalo• 12 years ago

It's all about location, location, location. Good message or bad - you have to advertise. Ask the FB poster from this week about engagement. :)

ArtDev• 12 years ago

Whose idea was to call the Feb 11th event "the day we fight back"? Signing a petition or calling your congress-person is not really "fighting back". I don't think we can really "fight back" against the NSA in a way that is legal.

We CAN pressure our representatives. Our representatives certainly can fight back.

Next time there is an online protest on the NSA there should be a better name for it.

There is a lot of lazy apathy out there on the interwebs. I think that this needs to be framed not around "our privacy" (while most of us are thinking we have nothing to hide anyhow) but around the "privacy of journalists, activists and people in important positions".

What if you knew that every news article was written by a journalist who was afraid for their family from the NSA? In the age of the internet we are all journalists and activists of one sort or another.

gesman• 12 years ago

Emails, banners and "click here to occupy" is a yawn.

But 70,000 annoying calls to legislators that cannot be ignored and/or attributed to telemarketing spam is probably the most significant result that might actually been noticed.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

Fight back? How? Sending email? Making a call. Tell me you had to even put such effort as standing up to do so.

As in, its a meaningless gesture.

The only way to get something done is to upset the apple cart. Meaning finding candidates who will pledge to fix it, this can mean funding people for the "other" party, something I know some will find any excuse not to. This can also mean creating a faction within both, the Republicans are already being whacked by the Tea Party its high time the Democrats had something similar, something not fake funded and orchestrated like OWS - a real movement within that strikes fear at sitting Democrats like the Tea Party did to Repubilicans

Send an email, gee whats next, we fight back by flipping them off or talking around the water cooler?

Kiro• 12 years ago

The truth is that most people don't care about NSA anymore.

michaelochurch• 12 years ago

Personally, I don't worry much about PRISM. Abstractly, yes, these are very important issues. I don't want to downplay that. However, since at least 1925 the US has always been in more danger from private entities than from its government, and this is even more true of individuals within the US. Private health insurance is a lot scarier than our government. Given the ease with which private entities can and do destroy an individual's reputation, often over petty slights, PRISM is low on my concern list compared to that.

I know people who've been blacklisted by venture capitalists. I don't know anyone who's been personally affected by PRISM. I'm sure that some people have been; I just think it's rarer.

Top software executives are pissed about PRISM not because of the legality or the ethics of the program. They're embarrassed that, although they make gigantic salaries and are darlings at the Silicon Valley ball, they got pwned by nerds in Maryland making government salaries.

Don't get me wrong. There are principled civil libertarians who are raising these issues because they genuinely care about what is happening, and it's worth listening to them. But the indignation of the software execs and venture capitalists is just petty embarrassment and nothing more.

mladenkovacevic2• 12 years ago

Just a little marketing/human nature insight that someone will hopefully find useful:

"Fighting back" works as a slogan in countries where people are fed up or believe they have been abused long enough.

Americans are very placated and have an over-inflated sense of privilege. Calls to "fight back" sound like hard work that someone who already enjoys a comfortable life shouldn't have to do. I believe a better slogan might be something like "The day we reclaim our privacy" or "the day we renew our dignity" ... or something along those lines as long as the implication is that we are simply taking back what's rightfully ours.

chc• 12 years ago

I agree that "fight back" was unfortunate terminology, but I thought so for a different reason: It sounds like juvenile blustering. We weren't actually fighting anything — we were just making a few phone calls. Those who aren't interested in violence will be turned off by the hostile name and those who are interested in violence will be turned off by the fact that it's just phone calls.

mladenkovacevic2• 12 years ago

Regardless, I think the result was very positive. 70,000 phone calls is amazing especially for a first go at it. The Canadian openmedia.ca also had a campaign which is how I participated, so I'm sure the numbers are even higher globally. Experiment, analyze, tweak, repeat.

coltr• 12 years ago

DuckDuckGo did make changes to their page. Their logo had been changed to look like it was being recorded and then linked to thedaywefightback website.

pirateking• 12 years ago

These campaigns need to be more creative and fun.

The majority of youth today (a demographic with the most free time and incentive to participate) do not like making calls or writing emails. Also, the emotion created by most of these campaigns is doom and gloom. Dark colors, threatening symbols, scary acronyms, powerful shadowy figures, walls of text. Raising awareness or gathering support through fear based campaigns is not going to work. The media has run that cart into the ground long ago.

The majority of people I know will be turned away or further made apathetic by these campaigns. Those of us who aren't, live in an awareness bubble.

Here is an idea I came up with just now (so don't take it too seriously) - organize a huge public BBQ at the park nearest your local representative's office. People only vaguely interested in the cause would show up for good food and fun, and may contribute to the perception of success of the event, while possibly learning more about the cause in a non-threatening environment. The representative's office is right down the street should they wish to support the cause in person. If these BBQs, were every Friday at lunch or something, I would be there for sure every time. Now I am hungry. Errr... hungry to end mass surveillance... right.

Maybe that idea is ridiculous, but the basic idea is that if you want people to spend time for a cause, it's easier if you let them have a good time while doing so.

For passive participation, I believe selling t-shirts specifically designed for different audiences is one the best options, way better than changing an avatar or creating an online meme. Donate the proceeds to the EFF and open source crypto and networking projects, and it is a solid campaign. The messaging should be simple and direct, but not overbearing. The key is for the design to stand on its own regardless of the message it carries. 99% of people don't care about the message, they want a sick shirt. If anyone here is interested in making a shirt related to this cause, you can email me about your idea and I will do a quick concept design for you for free.

The Day the Internet Didn’t Fight Back

Related Stories