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Welcome to The Red Couch, the web show about internet freedom and security.
Up today: anew global campaign has begun
to combat the illegal spying activities of National Security Agency
The Day We Fight Back campaign managers to unite
actors as diverse as anonymous and LinkedIn
to petition against government spying. Even Vladimir Putin
has asked the US government to limit the appetite
of the spy agency, the NSA. The movement has the support
of Tumblr, Reddit, Upworthy, Facebook
LinkedIn,Yahoo, Google and Microsoft,
but it did not even make the front page of the
NSA bating newspaper, the Guardian.
We want this to work, it still can work, but here are five reasons why it might not yet be working.
1. The story is the problem. No one is getting hurt.
From the revelations of Edward Snowden, it was clear that if you're right wing,
Edward Snowden is the villain, if you are left-wing or libertarian
Edward Snowden is the hero.
But where is the victim? there is no geeky
teenager manhandled by the FBI for pressing Send, Send
on a few emails to evil corporation.
There's no Aron Schwartz student suicide by aggressive prosecution for
making public a few boring academic books.
No one is attacking you, downloading
Downtown Abby through Pirate Bay and no one is submitting your access to Wikipedia.
No one is punching you in the face, stealing your money or
crashing the home screen. The victim here is
The 4th amendment. This may be one of the foundation stones
of the American Constitution but it's still just a few
words scribbled on a piece of paper. Number two.
It's too techie. The reform movement wants citizens to support
act to reform the NSA's meta-data database.
And impose a bill which allows the database program
to be enshrined in law.
It's tough to get the public excited about two actions which include the word
"database".
Number three. The public are not engaged. The campaign needs millions
to make a difference but so far I only has 400,000 shares on Facebook
and 25,000 shares on Google+.
Now this figure is quite interesting because it's double
the number of the actual Google+ users.
However, this number eclipses the total number of people
who have signed the petition which is 250,000.
This shows that the public are more willing to show
solidarity then demonstrate their solidarity.
Four. Where is the fight?
The day we fight back. But the organizers
are asking you to sign a petition
or lobby the congress.
Now, did Chuck Norris ever signed a petition,
did stone-cold Steve Austin ever sended an email to his congressman?
It's not the day we fight back, it's
the day we write back!
This is the dilemma engaging too many actors from corporate world
and from the activists world into a movement.
You can only change government-backed crime
through social unrest and you cannot have social unrest sponsored
by corporations.
Number five. internet activism is growing up
but it is also growing old. Internet community
is asking citizens to lobby not to launch
a distributed denial-of-service on the government.
The problem is lobbying is boring
and breaking down government websites is not.
No one is enjoying this protest even though Reddit,
Tumblr and Facebook are all invloved,
none of them managed to launch a viral video which has captured the imagination
of the public about this campaign.
So what can we do? Well if the Internet companies are serious about the issues
which they're raising, they should protest.
They should shut themselves down for a day
to show that they can protect our privacy.
This way they draine the lake from which the
NSA can fish. The big internet names should denies us the right to use their services,
until they can ensure they're safe from intrusion.
Maybe you have some better ideas than us, we would like to hear them, we would love
to hear them!
so please email us at how fight back at yahoo dot com
or tell us in that comments below on YouTube.
Thank you very much!
The Red Couch is brought to you by CyberGhost5,
a virtual private network that gives you anonymity online and allows you to surf the web securely.