I wonder whether they obtained proper license to use a frame from "The Big Lebowski" for their internet meme
The Day We Fight Back
91–100 of 192 posts
Re: The Day We Fight Back
#92Ironically, at the moment the link to their own Privacy Policy page is broken. (I notified them by email.)
Re: The Day We Fight Back
#93What are the specific goals and modes of action for this protest? (e.g. laws to pass, laws to vote against, people to fire etc.)
Apparently it's post a banner on a website, register on facebook, google+ and twitter to post there that you are against surveillance. A nice attempt at sorting out people through self-selection who are to be put on a special surveillance list.
Well, if you're politically opposed to the NSA's surveillance they probably already know, so it won't make much difference whether you've revealed support for this campaign. The bigger problem is that the campaign seems entirely vacuous. What exactly are we doing to fight back? Complaining a little bit online? The NSA must be running scared.
Re: The Day We Fight Back
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're wrong about the lack of groups who lobby. An abbreviated list of groups who do that: EFF, Public Knowledge, Demand Progress, Engine Advocacy, CDT, OTI, Free Press. Many of these have multiple registered lobbyists walking the halls of Congress and taking meetings. I've actually done this myself too, on my pet issue of cell phone unlocking, with the help of a lobbyist from D.C. Unfortunately, most of these group…
I would really like to believe that calls to Congress make a difference.
They did with SOPA. Because there were millions of them. But how do millions of phones calls get sent? By having each and everyone of us calling.
Re: The Day We Fight Back
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the emphasis on Aaron is really a mistake. I follow this news relatively closely, reading HN every day, and I don't really see how Aaron's abusive prosecutors tie in to the NSA stuff. The spying scandals are bad enough on their own. Adding Aaron's death into the mix just muddles the message and confuses people who are less informed.
Indeed, it muddies the issue. I am anti-NSA-spying but I am also anti-stealing-IP... I should point out that I don't think Aaron should have been hounded to his death (tho' equally if he were mentally ill, anything could have pushed him over the edge). But that doesn't make what he did right. It has for 20 years baffled me that people can demand respect for the GPL et al but be happy to ride roughshod over anyone els…
Aaron's gripe was not having access to publicly funded research, which should be a slam dunk. Trying to tack him on to another cause, however well intentioned, is a disservice. There was an argument during the suffrage debates that they should include blacks as well, and justifiably, but if they had progress would likely have been delayed.
Re: The Day We Fight Back
#96Let's try to be positive about this.
Presumably the NSA's capacities are limited by its budget. Presumably its budget is limited by political considerations. Presumably a popular social networking campaign, however lame, will be impact on politicians' willingness to lavish funds upon it.
I'd rather everybody involved set up and promoted GPG instead, but that probably isn't going to happen.
Re: The Day We Fight Back
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the emphasis on Aaron is really a mistake. I follow this news relatively closely, reading HN every day, and I don't really see how Aaron's abusive prosecutors tie in to the NSA stuff. The spying scandals are bad enough on their own. Adding Aaron's death into the mix just muddles the message and confuses people who are less informed.
Indeed, it muddies the issue. I am anti-NSA-spying but I am also anti-stealing-IP... I should point out that I don't think Aaron should have been hounded to his death (tho' equally if he were mentally ill, anything could have pushed him over the edge). But that doesn't make what he did right. It has for 20 years baffled me that people can demand respect for the GPL et al but be happy to ride roughshod over anyone els…
The reason Aaron gets so much sympathy (EDIT: for what he did as well as for how he was treated) is that 1) a substantial portion of the JSTOR data is public domain, 2) a substantial portion of the rest is work funded with public money where it is controversial that it is only available under copyright.
But even disregarding that, I don't get why you are baffled: The GPL is a hack intended to spread freedoms. Many who support the GPL do not support it out of some desire to respect IP laws, but as a means of reducing the use of more restrictive licenses. E.g. to maximise access to knowledge or maximise the ability to modify and use data.
Wanting the data in JSTOR freed up, possibly regardless of copyright status, is entirely consistent with supporting the GPL in those cases.
For some this is a moral or ethical issue - it is perfectly possible to consider the current state of copyright an immoral restriction of personal freedoms.
Re: The Day We Fight Back
#98No, it's not fighting back. Making clever memes online to earn a chuckle or two might help spreading awareness , but in reality changing an online avatar and posting memes online won't affect much in real life. What I find strange is that(Please correct me on this one) there just doesn't seem to be a political group of technologist who lobby(the original meaning) against politicians. In truth, technology-related poli…
a political group of technologist who lobby(the original meaning) against politicians
Excuse my pedantry, but I think the need is not so much to lobby against politicians (which is to implicitly reject the concept of a polity and go for an everyone-for-themselves model instead), but to lobby against competing interests. In short, technologists need to lobby for their interests more effectively, which will mean doing a better job of articulating what our interests are, and why others should accept some crimping of their interests for the greater good. One recent and good example of this is the observation that compromising privacy limits our ability to export hardware and software and thus comes at an economic cost to taxpayers.
Re: The Day We Fight Back
#99Great idea, but does it have to be so American? We're getting spied on over here in the UK too.
Re: The Day We Fight Back
#100Feb 11th is after the SOTU, where Obama will announce what will in effect be the only changes we're likely to see. Any attempt to influence policy should come before that.
We did consider this very, very carefully. Our conclusion was that any reforms that Obama announces are very unlikely to result in meaningful change, and that legislation will still be necessary. Had we set the date before the SOTU, our activism would have concluded with no way to respond to his proposals.
If your activism is planned to conclude on a date certain, whether before or after the SOTU, its not going to do anything.
What you really want is to create an ongoing movement both with a visible effect early enough to influence others reaction to what is announced in the SOTU, and which continues so as to itself respond to whatever is proposed in the SOTU.