Today is The Day We Fight Back against mass surveillance.
Here are several easy things you can do to participate today:
(1) Call or write to Congress. Urge them to support and strengthen the USA FREEDOM Act - a bi-partisan effort that will start to reign in the out of control surveillance state, including ending the bulk collection under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. Urge them to oppose the FISA Improvements Act - the Intelligence Community dream bill that would codify bulk collection.
(2) Add a warning and protest signature line to your e-mails:
This communication may be unlawfully collected and stored by the National Security Agency (NSA) in secret. The parties to this email do not consent to the retrieving or storing of this communication and any related metadata, as well as printing, copying, re-transmitting, disseminating, or otherwise using it. If you believe you have received this communication in error, please delete it immediately.
(3)
Check here for events happening all across the country and overseas.
(4) Share www.thedaywefightback.org on social media. On Twitter, use the hashtag #StoptheNSA
(5) If you have a website,add The Day We Fight Back banner. (Instructions are here).
If anyone needs a reminder of the extent of mass surveillance, which we know largely thanks to whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, The Day We Fight Back organizers have a list of facts:
The Facts
The NSA "has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world." — The New York Times
The NSA collected "almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks" in one month in 2013. — The Guardian
The NSA is collecting the content and metadata of emails, web activity, chats, social networks, and everything else as part of what it calls "upstream" collection.
— The Washington Post
The NSA "is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans."
— The Washington Post
The NSA "is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world." — The Washington Post
The NSA "is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country." — The New York Times
In 2002, National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblowers J. Kirk Wiebe, William Binney, Thomas Drake and former congressional staffer Diane Roark
objected to mass domestic surveillance. Binney resigned saying,
I couldn’t be an accessory to subverting the Constitution.
In 2013, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden risked his life (and lost his statehood when the US revoked his passport) to tell the American public that the mass surveillance that began secretly in the dark days after 9/11 continues today,
It has been over a decade, and today we should fight back against the surveillance state.