The Day We Fight Back


The Day We Fight Back was a one-day global protest against mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency,
the UK GCHQ, and the other Five Eyes partners involved in global surveillance. The "digital protest" took place on February 11, 2014 with more than 6,000 participating websites, which primarily took the form of webpage banner-advertisements that read, "Dear Internet, we're sick of complaining about the NSA. We want new laws that curtail online surveillance. Today we fight back." Organizers hoped lawmakers would be made aware "that there's going to be ongoing public pressure until these reforms are instituted."
The protest was announced on January 10, 2014, by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Other early organizers included digital rights groups such as Fight for the Future, and Free Press, as well as social media website Reddit, Firefox producer Mozilla, collaborative blogging website Boing Boing, and populist advocacy group '"The Other 98%".
According to the official website, the protest asked U.S. "legislators to oppose the FISA Improvements Act, support the USA Freedom Act, and enact protections for non-Americans." Protest organizers said roughly 96,000 calls were placed to members of Congress and 555,000 "pro-privacy emails" were sent via the website.

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."
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'.

Background

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" 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:

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. 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 could 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 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,
In the clip, Swartz comments on mass surveillance,

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:
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 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 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."

Notable participants