Read

User menu

Search form

Taking the Fight for Electronic Privacy to the Streets

Taking the Fight for Electronic Privacy to the Streets
Fri, 10/18/2013 - by Josh Levy
This article originally appeared on Other Words

It’s been four months since Edward Snowden exposed the NSA’s spying regime. Since then, we’ve discovered that the agency tracks our phone calls, our emails, our browsing history, and our contacts. It also tracks our contacts’ contacts…and their contacts.

We’ve also learned that the NSA has compromised the technical standards that are supposed to keep us secure online — including working with corporate partners to create “back doors” into their customers’ accounts, compromising encryption codes. It’s also targeting the TOR network, a global system that helps millions of activists, journalists, and other people around the world work anonymously and evade repressive regimes.

Meanwhile, journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the news via his reporting in the Guardian, promises there are more revelations to come.

For thousands of civil liberties activists in the United States, this news confirmed what they already knew: The NSA’s unconstitutional surveillance programs target millions of innocent people. But many Americans are confronting our government’s betrayal of the Fourth Amendment for the first time.

People are outraged. A recent poll showed that “a majority of Americans oppose mass surveillance of people’s Internet usage for future investigations.”

In the aftermath of these revelations, more than 570,000 people signed the StopWatching.Us petition. They’re demanding that Congress probe the NSA’s spying programs and reform the laws — the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act — that got us here. On July 4, thousands gathered in New York City, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere to push Congress to protect our constitutional rights to privacy.

And in this era of intense political polarization, members on both sides of the aisle in Congress oppose the NSA spying. In July, an amendment that would have defunded the NSA’s phone-metadata gathering came within seven votes of passing.

Now the bipartisan coalition of organizations behind StopWatching.Us — including the ACLU, Access, Demand Progress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Free Press, the Libertarian Party, and many others — is taking this fight to the streets: We’re gathering in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 26 to stage the nation’s biggest protest yet against mass surveillance.

On that day, thousands of people will march to Capitol Hill and advocate for our rights to connect and communicate in private. We’ll talk about how our privacy rights are essential to other movements to protect our civil rights and fight for social justice. We’ll explain how mass surveillance can destroy the lives of individuals and communities. And we’ll demonstrate that this issue is perhaps the only thing bringing together a Washington so divided that our government has shut down for the first time in 17 years.

Reining in overreach by the NSA, the most secretive and opaque federal agency around, may prove tough. But one thing is clear: The road to recovering our privacy rights runs straight through Congress. It’s time our elected officials heard from us.

Josh Levy is the Internet campaign director at Free Press.

Originally published by Other Words

3 WAYS TO SHOW YOUR SUPPORT

ONE-TIME DONATION

Just use the simple form below to make a single direct donation.

DONATE NOW

MONTHLY DONATION

Be a sustaining sponsor. Give a reacurring monthly donation at any level.

GET SOME MERCH!

Now you can wear your support too! From T-Shirts to tote bags.

SHOP TODAY

Sign Up

Article Tabs

What remains unknown is whether post-truth Republicans will succeed in 2024 as the Nazis did in 1933.

Based on details that have emerged about Trump’s presidential agenda, the far-right Heritage Foundation plans for the next GOP president to have all the tools necessary to demolish multicultural democracy and establish a white, Christian ethnostate that imposes a gender apartheid not unlike the Taliban’s Afghanistan.

Donald Trump, Hitler

Like Hitler, Trump has a unique command of propaganda, a captivating public presence, and he knows how to drive home narratives beneficial to him and harmful to his enemies.

Trump’s brand of hyper-nationalism combined with the intense consolidation of executive power follows the same playbook as fascistic leaders in other countries like India,Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Egypt, Italy and Argentina, among others.

The Florida governor’s humiliating loss has a dark undertone: Most Republicans, and many independents, apparently have a craving for the unchecked lawless vengeance that Trump has promised if he wins a second term.

What remains unknown is whether post-truth Republicans will succeed in 2024 as the Nazis did in 1933.

Based on details that have emerged about Trump’s presidential agenda, the far-right Heritage Foundation plans for the next GOP president to have all the tools necessary to demolish multicultural democracy and establish a white, Christian ethnostate that imposes a gender apartheid not unlike the Taliban’s Afghanistan.

Donald Trump, Hitler

Like Hitler, Trump has a unique command of propaganda, a captivating public presence, and he knows how to drive home narratives beneficial to him and harmful to his enemies.

Trump’s brand of hyper-nationalism combined with the intense consolidation of executive power follows the same playbook as fascistic leaders in other countries like India,Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Egypt, Italy and Argentina, among others.

The Florida governor’s humiliating loss has a dark undertone: Most Republicans, and many independents, apparently have a craving for the unchecked lawless vengeance that Trump has promised if he wins a second term.

Based on details that have emerged about Trump’s presidential agenda, the far-right Heritage Foundation plans for the next GOP president to have all the tools necessary to demolish multicultural democracy and establish a white, Christian ethnostate that imposes a gender apartheid not unlike the Taliban’s Afghanistan.

Posted 3 weeks 3 days ago

Trump’s brand of hyper-nationalism combined with the intense consolidation of executive power follows the same playbook as fascistic leaders in other countries like India,Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Egypt, Italy and Argentina, among others.

Posted 1 month 3 weeks ago
Donald Trump, Hitler

Like Hitler, Trump has a unique command of propaganda, a captivating public presence, and he knows how to drive home narratives beneficial to him and harmful to his enemies.

Posted 1 month 1 week ago

What remains unknown is whether post-truth Republicans will succeed in 2024 as the Nazis did in 1933.

Posted 1 week 2 days ago

Based on details that have emerged about Trump’s presidential agenda, the far-right Heritage Foundation plans for the next GOP president to have all the tools necessary to demolish multicultural democracy and establish a white, Christian ethnostate that imposes a gender apartheid not unlike the Taliban’s Afghanistan.