Anti-surveillance movement calls ‘Reset the Net’ day of action
More than 30 civil liberties groups and tech companies have formed a coalition against internet surveillance and NSA spying, with a ‘Reset the Net’ day of action planned for June 5 to mark a year since Edward Snowden’s leaks.
“Don't ask for your privacy. Take it back,” the website urges.
The site offers the opportunity for its visitors to sign a
pledge: “On June 5, I will take strong steps to protect my
freedom from government mass surveillance. I expect the services
I use to do the same.”
The coalition has been organized by “Fight for the Future.” Among
its members are Reddit, Imgur, DuckDuckGo, CREDO Mobile, and the
Free Software Foundation, who are enforced by the civil liberties
groups and others, as Boing Boing and Greenpeace.
The collective is calling on software developers to assimilate
anti-NSA features into their products, such as mobile apps, or
perhaps adding security features such as SSL (Secure Socket
Layer), HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security), and Perfect
Forward Secrecy which are data encoding features intended to
prevent the government being a go-between for communication
interceptions.
“The call is simple – find some territory of the internet you can protect from prying eyes,” the ‘Reset the Net’ video states.
“Government spies have a weakness: they can hack anybody, but they can’t hack everybody,” the organizers behind the Reset the Net movement say in a video released. “Folks like the NSA depend on collecting insecure data from tapped fiber. They depend on our mistakes; mistakes we can fix.”
June 5 marks the day that Edward Snowden first broke news of
en-masse surveillance programs implemented by the NSA and PRISM
became a household word. The groups are dispersing a privacy
package for participants to use which contain free software tools
for encrypting chat logs, email, phone calls and text messaging.
CREDO Mobile is thought to be the anonymous telecom which is
currently engaged in a constitutional battle regarding
governmental utilization of National Security Letters to obtain
user data.
“A year after Snowden’s shocking revelations, the NSA is
still spying on innocent Americans without a warrant,”
Michael Kieschnick, CEO of CREDO Mobile, told Wired magazine on
Tuesday.
“CREDO will continue to demand Congress and the president
take action to stop unconstitutional mass warrantless
surveillance, and until we win real reform, we will encourage
users to adopt encryption tools to protect their personal
communications from government abuse of the 1st and 4th
amendment,” he added.
The mass action is reminiscent of a similar online mass action in
2012 against two federal anti-piracy bills – the Senate’s Protect
IP Act (PIPA) and the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
Thousands of websites, with the support of massive firms such as
Google and Twitter - went into blackout or partial blackout in
order to put a stop to the legislation.
“We can't stop targeted attacks, but we ‘can’ stop mass
surveillance by building proven security into the everyday
Internet,” the collective states.
