The Day We Fight Back

Purpose

The Day We Fight Back was intended as a day of "worldwide solidarity" in protest against NSA surveillance. It was at once an action against censorship and surveillance, and a commemoration of late "open-Internet activist" Aaron Swartz. In the US, a main goal of the protest was to encourage passage of the USA Freedom Act, a bill that seeks to reign in telephone data collection. Additionally, the banner urged people to call Congress and voice opposition to the FISA Improvements Act, which the ACLU called "a dream come true for the NSA" that would "codify the NSA's unconstitutional call-records program and allow bulk collection of location data from mobile phone users."

Outside the US, the goal was similar. A Guardian op-ed described the activists' objective globally as "to push authorities toward policies favoring liberty and privacy".

Organizers posted to their website: "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." Rainey Reitman, director of activism at the EFF, said, "The idea is to really harness the outrage of the Internet community in speaking out in one big voice on Feb. 11." The protest comes a month after President Obama made a surveillance reform speech introducing his proposed changes to the collection of US citizens' data. Critics said the reformations wouldn't be "nearly enough".g

Organizers compared the February protest with the SOPA protest two years prior, saying, "Today we face a different threat, one that undermines the Internet and the notion that any of us live in a genuinely free society". The threats were 'International counterparts like Five Eyes and Tempora, mass surveillance, and programs such as PRISM, Canada's CSEC airport monitoring activities'.

Promotion

The Day We Fight Back was promoted in a trailer for an upcoming documentary about Aaron Swartz, currently titled The Internet's Own Boy. In the clip, the late activist comments on mass surveillance: "It is shocking to think that the accountability is so lax that they don't even have sort of basic statistics about how big the spying programme is. If the answer is, 'Oh, we're spying on so many people we can't possibly even count them,' then that's an awful lot of people." Five months after Swartz's death, the scale of a vast global surveillance program would be revealed in great detail through the release of top-secret NSA documents by Edward Snowden.

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! promoted The Day We Fight Back in an opinion article in the Athens News, noting Swartz's role in the digital rights movement calling for "another fight for the freedom of the Internet" without him.

Reddit "Ask Me Anything"

Comparing the opposition to surveillance with the previous defeat of SOPA, in which Demand Progress and Aaron Swartz had been deeply involved, the organizers took to Reddit and called for a month of activities culminating in the February 11 "day of action" In an "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) discussion held on January 10, several organizers announced the action and fielded user questions, saying their purpose was to answer questions "about Aaron and a protest we're organizing on 02/11 in his honor". Those participating were Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing; Brian Knappenberger, who made the films The Internet's Own Boy, a documentary about Aaron Swartz, and We Are Legion, a film about the hacker group "Anonymous"; David Segal, co-founder of Demand Progress; Peter Eckersley of EFF; and Sina Khanifar, website developer for "The Day We Fight Back" and several other activist projects. Doctorow and Eckersley indicated they had been close friends of Swartz.

On February 11, organizers again held an AMA and issued the following statement:

Two years ago, reddit and its users joined in fighting back against dangerous Internet censorship legislation during the SOPA protests. You blacked out your websites and started hundreds of creative campaigns to defeat a piece of legislation that threatened freedom on the Internet. In the last 6 months we've seen that government agencies, namely the NSA and GCHQ and others, have broken laws and twisted legal interpretations to create an infrastructure of mass surveillance of all of us online. This creates a dark form of censorship as people become afraid to speak freely -- and it's one that undermines our security and our right to privacy as well. As users of the Internet, we have a responsibility to defend its freedom.

Inspiration from Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz was an American activist who founded the online group Demand Progress, known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Swartz, a fellow at Harvard, was arrested by MIT police after systematically downloading academic journal articles from JSTOR.

The US Department of Justice charged Aaron Swartz with multiple felonies. He faced a potential penalty of 35 years confinement in a federal penitentiary. On January 11, 2013, two days after the prosecution denied his lawyer's second offer of a plea bargain, Swartz was found dead, having hanged himself. Many commentators viewed the prosecution, which would have imposed a devastating prison term for accessing information in bulk rather than one article at a time, as 'bullying' that ultimately lead to Swartz's death.

February 11, 2014, the planned day of protest, falls one month after the first year anniversary of the death of Aaron Swartz.

Swartz's brother, Noah Swartz, is "actively organizing" The Day We Fight Back.

David Segal said in a statement,

Today the greatest threat to a free Internet, and broader free society, is the National Security Agency's mass spying regime. If Aaron were alive he'd be on the front lines, fighting back against these practices that undermine our ability to engage with each other as genuinely free human beings.

In the clip, Swartz comments on mass surveillance,

It is shocking to think that the accountability is so lax that they don't even have sort of basic statistics about how big the spying programme is. If the answer is, 'Oh, we're spying on so many people we can't possibly even count them,' then that's an awful lot of people." Five months after Swartz's death, the scale of a vast global surveillance program would be revealed in great detail through the release of top-secret NSA documents by Edward Snowden. The film follows director Brian Knappenberger's recent op-ed documentary for The New York Times titled "Why Care About the NSA?"

Related events

Related demonstrations were scheduled in 15 countries. Activities to support the protest took place "from Argentina to Uganda, from Colombia to the Philippines". Events included:

Bitbureauet, a Denmark-based think-tank, announced plans for a protest outside the US embassy in Copenhagen, using the slogan "tag internettet tilbage" ('take back the internet').

Restore the Fourth, an American organization, planned a protest outside the AT&T Building in San Francisco that houses Room 641A, the facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency. According to the organization, the protest will feature a speech by Mark Klein, the AT&T technician who publicly exposed the facility in 2006. The EFF has announced plans for an event in Bluffdale, Utah, near the Utah Data Center. The Rhode Island Coalition to Defend Human and Civil Rights and Rhode Island MoveOn.org announced a protest outside federal courthouse in Providence.

The Pirate Party of Sweden will hold a demonstration in Stockholm with speeches by party founder Rick Falkvinge and party leader Anna Troberg. Cryptoparty-Austria has announced plans for a rally in Forum Stadtpark in Graz. The Software Freedom Law Center announced plans to host an event in New Delhi.

KBOO, an Oregon-based listener-funded radio station, scheduled a day of special programming related to Internet activism.

In Manila, protestors rallied outside the Supreme Court against the surveillance-related "Philippines 2012 Cybercrime Prevention Act".

A UK-based coalition called "Don't Spy on Us" organized its own protest. The coalition included the Open Rights Group, English Pen, Liberty, Privacy International, Big Brother Watch and Article 19.

Supporters

Supporting the digital protest was a "broad coalition of activist groups, companies, and online platforms". The Guardian observed that supporters included unlikely bedfellows, citing backing from both American Civil Liberties Union and the "very conservative" FreedomWorks. Political parties supporting the protest included the US National Libertarian Party, the Australian Greens, the Pirate Party of Sweden, and Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty. Congressman Ted Poe (R-TX) has also endorsed the protest.

The "most prominent addition" to the protest was the "Reform Government Surveillance" coalition, which includes AOL, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Yahoo. It was not initially clear how the sites would participate. The group sent a letter to President Obama on November 11 and "urged changes that would include a government agreement not to collect bulk data from Internet communications." On the same day, Google announced its support for the USA Freedom Act, saying "Google recognizes the very real threats that the U.S. and other countries face, but we strongly believe that government surveillance programs should operate under a legal framework that is rule-bound, narrowly tailored, transparent, and subject to oversight." Matt Simons, director of social and economic justice at ThoughtWorks, nevertheless said the coalition's support of The Day We Fight Back "rings a little hollow" because of the late date of its announcement and its member's past disclosure of their customers' data to the NSA.

Groups supporting The Day We Fight Back include the EFF, the ACLU, Freedomworks, Greenpeace, Demand Progress, Human Rights Watch, the Government Accountability Project, Restore the Fourth, the Free Software Foundation, and Amnesty International. Websites supporting the protest included Reddit, Tumblr, Wikia, Mozilla, Facebook, and Google.

By February 11, more than 6,000 websites and organizations had signed up to show support by featuring The Day We a Fight Back banner for 24 hours. The Huffington Post released images of various memes meant to be posted to sites like Facebook and Twitter as part of the event. Tens of thousands of individuals pledged to make calls and Internet posts supporting surveillance reform.

Reaction

By mid-day, organizers said supporters had sent 104,000 emails and made nearly 50,000 calls to Congress.

On Twitter, the hashtag "StopTheNSA" became a 'trending' topic. Joining tech companies and public figures, lawmakers voiced support using the online platform, including Tom Udall, Jerry Nadler, Rick Larsen, Ron Wyden, Raul M. Grijalva, Mike Honda, Mark Pocan, Alan Grayson, and Rand Paul.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) posted:

"What I worry about is kids growing up in a society where they say 'if I send this email or if I visit this website, then somebody may think I'm a terrorist. I'm not going to talk about this issue, I'm not going to read this book, I'm not going to explore this idea.' I don't want anyone thinking about that. It upsets me very much and is not the kind of free society I think we should be living in."

As February 11 drew to a close, The New York Times posted a blog titled "The Day the Internet Didn't Fight Back," reporting that "the protest on Tuesday barely registered. Wikipedia did not participate. Reddit ... added an inconspicuous banner to its homepage. Sites like Tumblr, Mozilla and DuckDuckGo, which were listed as organizers, did not include the banner on their homepages. The eight major technology companies—Google, Microsoft, Facebook, AOL, Apple, Twitter, Yahoo and LinkedIn ... only participated Tuesday insofar as having a joint website flash the protest banner."