This is Michigan Stadium, the largest football stadium by capacity in the United States. It fits 109,901 people.

Imagine two Michigan Stadiums, filled to capacity, with 219,802 people. Imagine that all those people are doing the same thing at the same time—contacting Congress and demanding an end to mass surveillance.

You'd still fall short of the nearly 250,000 people inside the US that called or emailed their legislators yesterday for The Day We Fight Back. And that's not even touching the more than 200,000 people around the world that organized actions and signed on to the Necessary and Proportionate principles.

At the peak, people were placing over 7,000 calls to Congress an hour. Legislators, companies, organizations, and many others showed their support in tweets, speeches at live events, and banners splashed across home pages.

As we said yesterday, and many times before, this is not a one-day effort. "Victory," unfortunately, is not as simple as beating back one piece of bad policy, or getting a few organizations (or even lawmakers) on board. We've worked against bulk NSA spying for the better part of a decade, and we're not going to stop now.

Still, hundreds of thousands of people speaking up is an amazing thing. We're proud to have taken part in it, and deeply grateful for the people—the many, many people—who participated.

Photo: Michigan Stadium 2011 by Andrew Horne. Released under Creative Commons BY-SA.