This article about The Day We Fight Back and brings up the SOPA issue our country faced in 2012. SOPA was a bill proposed that was designed to stop copyright infringement from spreading throughout the internet. It was a head-turning bill that made many web users uneasy about the future of the internet. (For more on the SOPA bill, here is The Verge’s timeline of events: http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/16/2641391/the-stop-online-piracy-act-the-sopa-story-so-far)
The February 11th protest for The Day We Fight Back was in dedication to a anti-SOPA organizer by the name of Aaron Swartz. (A brief description of Aaron and his contributions to the internet and protesting of the SOPA bill - Democracy Now: http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/1/23/aaron_swartz_the_life_we_lost)
The main goal of The Day We Fight Back was to get people to contact the representatives of their state and tell them to stop the NSA’s widespread surveillance. Many websites contributed to the cause by displaying banners on their front page that would inform visitors of the issue and allow them to participate. As stated in the article, it is a wishful thought to convince Congress to pass legislation on this issue. Many Americans don’t have a full understanding of the issue and it would be right to think that this would be true of many in Congress.
During the protest against SOPA, many large internet companies joined in fear that the legislation would have a negative effect on their businesses. With the newly public issue of surveillance, many of the big companies were slow to join because this issue didn’t pose a direct threat to their online work flow. Though, eventually many big companies did join the protest once enough recognition was gained.
It’s very important that this article describes the issue of surveillance as ‘abstract.’ A lot of the danger that underlies this issue isn’t very clear from the surface. It’s very hard to know if there are other incentives for the NSA spying on America’s citizens and any information they can acquire on foreign countries as well. This article also touches on different companies reactions when the public was notified about data collections by the NSA. Many of them came out and said that they were not willing giving information to the NSA to spy on American citizens. Other companies wouldn’t comment until they felt safe enough that customers wouldn’t blame them for the loss of privacy.
In my opinion this issue should be of more importance to the average citizen. It should be of great concern to people that their entire online life is being monitored by a very opaque organization. This blog is going to be an adaptive look at different articles and opinions on the subject of NSA surveillance and how it affects online users. There is not a lot of information on this subject seeing as the happenings of the NSA are kept behind closed doors. Therefore the majority of my research will be on the effect surveillance has on large groups of people and also journalists, and then using the information I find to make theories on how this could trickle down to the average internet user.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/10/5398638/the-day-we-fight-back-asks-the-internet-to-fight-surveillance