Google, Reddit Protest NSA Surveillance
Exactly one year ago Thursday, the first story on the NSA's surveillance programs was published based on former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's leaks. Google, Reddit, Mozilla and other major Internet companies are marking the day with the ' Reset The Net' protest campaign. Visitors to the website will come to a landing page like the one seen up top. There, they can download tools to protect and encrypt their data, keeping it hidden from the NSA, or really anyone else who wants to look.
The protest was organized by Internet freedom nonprofit Fight for the Future and includes dozens of civil liberties and tech organizations. The obvious parallels to the Internet blackout protests against the Protect IP Act and Stop Online Piracy Act, better known as PIPA and SOPA, are deliberate according to the campaign.
Much like that effort, this one takes its appeal to the people. Along with encouraging everyday Internet users to protect their data, the protest will also push people to ask for reform of the NSA's surveillance. The promotional video for the event also asks developers to to promise to add a feature to resist the NSA.
'Government spies have a weakness: they can hack anybody, but they can't hack everybody,' the video explains. 'Folks like the NSA depend on collecting insecure data from tapped fiber. They depend on our mistakes, mistakes we can fix.'
Google's involvement is huge, and not only because of the sheer scale of the company's influence on the Internet. Google has been in trouble fairly recently for spying on Gmail users and is always under suspicion for how it exploits user data for advertising and other purposes. It's making a big effort for data encryption this week though, releasing its encryption tools to the public and even publishing transparency reports to show users who is encrypting their data. This of course has the added bonus of publicly shaming companies that don't do encryption and encourages them to get on that.
'The important thing is that both sides of an email exchange need to support encryption for it to work; Gmail can't do it alone,' wrote Brandon Long, the tech lead for the Gmail delivery team in a blog post. '[C]heck out Reset the Net, a broad coalition of organizations, companies and individuals coming together this week to promote stronger security practices on the web; we're happy to be a participant in that effort.'
Visitors to the sites who see the splash page are asked to promise to do what they can to protect their own data and to demand data protection from the services they use.
'On June 5, the one year anniversary of the Snowden leaks, I will take strong steps to protect my freedom from mass surveillance,' the pledge on the website states. 'I expect the services I use to do the same.'
Check out the video about the protest below.
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