

Today is The Day We Fight Back, which is an international internet protest against the sweeping, unparalleled, digital surveillance being conducted by the US National Security Agency and its private-sector contractors.

The action comes mainly in response to the revelations that followed the Edward Snowden information leaks, which detailed the way the NSA has used an unaccountable court, supercomputers, legal threats and back-room arm-twisting to undermine basic communications privacy for internet and phone users everywhere. The agency has gathered the phone records of hundreds of millions of people suspected of no illegal activity. It has swept up the metadata of millions of innocent people’s online activity.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is one of the main organizers behind today’s protest. The foundation has been fighting NSA encroachments for years; it filed its first lawsuit against the agency in 2006, raising constitutional questions that continue today to haunt the government, even as its top officials have tried to ignore and suppress them.

The foundation took its cue for today’s protest from the successful online protest against the 2012 SOPA/PIPA anti-copyright piracy bills that would have granted corporations wide power to effectively block or censor the web. Websites all around the world blacked themselves out to show solidarity in the fight against the bills. It has come to be referred to as “The Day We Saved the Internet.”

Here’s a letter posted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation introducing today’s campaign.

[blockquote]DEAR USERS OF THE INTERNET,

In January 2012 we defeated the SOPA and PIPA censorship legislation with the largest Internet protest in history. Today we face another critical threat, one that again undermines the Internet and the notion that any of us live in a genuinely free society: mass surveillance.

Together we will push back against powers that seek to observe, collect, and analyze our every digital action. Together, we will make it clear that such behavior is not compatible with democratic governance. Together, if we persist, we will win this fight…

Thousands of websites will host banners urging people to call/email Congress. We’ll ask legislators to oppose the FISA Improvements Act, support the USA Freedom Act, and enact protections for non-Americans. [/blockquote]

It’s happening now. Click on the image below.