The NSA has been quite the topic of controversy lately. Thousands of blogs, forums, and news sites around the world have been discussing the dangers, advantages, and overall invasion of privacy the National Security Agency has been accused of in the past year. On February 11th, 2014, a large variety of mass media organizations will participate in a day of protest online. Mozilla, the founders of the famous internet browser Firefox, along with several other companies including the Electronic Freedom Foundation, the internet news site Reddit, Free Press, along with multiple other organizations are going to persistently advocate the contacting of lawmakers to put pressure on them to assist in the decease of the NSA’s information collecting scheme.
The specific date of February 11th is to honor the death of internet activist Aaron Swartz. Swartz, a partner of the creation of Reddit, and a member of multiple organizations for the freedom of the internet. Swartz committed suicide at the age of 26 in New York City due to facing a mass amount of charges in a Massachusetts federal court for the allegations of stealing millions of scholarly articles and documents from an MIT subscription based service. Swartz was also the co-founder of the activist group Demand Progress, who state that the NSA’s spying is inimical to a free society.
For me, the internet should be as open source and free as possible for the most amount of information and creative ideas to be spread across the world to evolve at the fastest rate possible. The intrusions of the NSA on our privacy is something that is a threat to the privacy of every individual in the United States. The online protest will do nothing more than inform the internet users of the world about the threats that are being poured upon us, and that is the most powerful thing we can do at the moment. This movement is reminiscent of the entire SOPA blackout on the internet which managed to bring a lot of momentum to the movement that successfully allowed this terrible bill to not be passed.
If anyone would like to participate in the online protest and protect our privacy from the government you can visit thedaywefightback.org and be a little more informed!