Internet-Supported Protest With a Low Threshold

The most common types of Internet-supported protest with a low threshold that we find in the privacy movement are asking for donations and organizing legal protest demonstrations.

The Internet has given an impuls to donations: whereas in the analogue age the costs to coordinate such actions would outweigh the benefits, in the digital age collecting money has become much easier and accessible. The Courage FoundationThe Courage Foundation is an international organization that supports whistleblowers., for instance, collects donations for the legal defense of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and Lauri Love. And WikiLeaks asks its supporters to donate in order to be able to continue to share news. In addition, many other European organizations similarly offer their members and supporters the opportunity to make donations. However, it is worth noting that specifically in the case of the privacy movement, the threshold for donating money is higher than usual, as whistleblowing is a politically sensitive subject and community members have a heightened knowledge of privacy concerns associated with online payments.Read more about the "banking blockade" WikiLeaks faced when, at the end of 2010, Bank of America, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and Western Union decided to stop transferring money to WikiLeaks. It is not surprising that donating via the anonymous digital currency Bitcoin is an option many organizations offer.

When it comes to demonstrations, the Internet has also been an enhancing factor, as it has made the spreading and exchanging of information about the goal and practical details of a demonstration much easier. This also proves to be the case for demonstrations organized by the privacy movement. A fitting example of how the Internet can help rapidly spread information and the effect that has on protest is the Netzpolitik demonstration held in Berlin on August 1, 2015. The announcement made by NetzpolitikIn the summer of 2015, Netzpolitik announced that Andre Meister and Markus Beckedahl were suspected of treason., a German organization concerned with digital rights and culture, that two of their reporters and one source had been charged with treason, kicked up a storm among privacy activists. The announcement was made on 30 July, 2015, and soon the first tweets about a demonstration started to appear. No more than two days later, on August 1, 2015, thousands of people gathered in the streets of Berlin to protest for the freedom of the press. Within a matter of days a number of leading privacy activists had showed their support for Netzpolitik, including tweets by Glenn Greenwald and the Courage foundation, and a guest blog for Netzpolitik by Appelbaum about the “Landesverrat”.

Here, too, it is worth considering how low the threshold for demonstrating actually is for activists within the privacy movement. In the analogue age it was difficult for governments to get a clear image of who exactly took part in a demonstration. Modern technology, however, has changed and continues to change the game. In Data and Goliath. The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your WorldBruce Schneier's Data and Goliath is a must-read if you are interested in (digital) surveillance., Bruce Schneier explains how after participating in a protest, protesters in the Ukraine received a text message from their government that stated, “Dear Subscriber, you have been registered as a participant in a mass disturbance”. Something similar happened in Michigan, U.S.A., in 2010. After a labor protest the local police asked for information about every cellphone that had been near the protest. Thus, the height of the risk that is involved in these sorts of protest is definitely worth reconsidering, especially when reflecting on a movement with so much awareness of (digital) surveillance.