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An Open Letter to HN from EFF, Demand Progress, and Cory Doctorow
71–80 of 106 posts
Re: An Open Letter to HN from EFF, Demand Progress, and Cory Doctorow
#72Ever since the NSA business leaked, I've been thinking about this problem. It took me a few months to wrap my head around all the crazy stuff that's been going on but I've started building some systems that I think might have a chance of helping out. "Call Congress Now"- using Twilio, you can call Congress folk from your browser (for free). http://www.callcongressnow.org/ Here are some Congress people who are doing s…
Maybe we need to take the shawshank redemption approach "Still, I'd like to try, with your permission. I'll send a letter a week. They can't ignore me forever." Let's build automated tools allowing people to send out letters, signed petitions, emails, faxes, pre-recorded voicemail etc. That would would potentially eliminate procrastination. Just a thought.
A friend worked at a congress person's office a while back. When I told her about automating calls, she was not pleased. Very high noise to signal ratio. I think that effort would be better invested in informing the public and giving them better tools than mindlessly spamming their offices.
Re: An Open Letter to HN from EFF, Demand Progress, and Cory Doctorow
#73A general comment on the nature of activism and the political process: one of the goals of activism in the political area is to move both public sentiment (awareness / consciousness raising) and public policy. Now, one of the things to realize here is that this is a never-ending back and forth process, and sometimes the same battles are fought in different forms over time - and this can be incredibly frustrating unle…
I would like to add that there is another goal of activism, IMHO: solidarity among activists. Demonstrations don't just demonstrate to the outside world, they also demonstrate to the participants. When things look bleak this is very important. In the 60s, people would do sit-ins and sing together - maybe not because that was the most effective way to bring about change, but simply because it was a good additional thing to do. Every bit helps, nothing is wasted.
Re: An Open Letter to HN from EFF, Demand Progress, and Cory Doctorow
#74I personally think of this as pg's site and us all as honored guests here. I'm not opposed to the idea of an open letter on principle, but I do have a little bit of an issue with a letter addressed to HN in general.
I also personally take issue with Aaron Swartz as a poster child for SOPA related activism. There are many of us who did what we could to prevent SOPA and who are opposed to illegal aspects of mass surveillance who nonetheless believe in a proper place for intellectual property.
Re: An Open Letter to HN from EFF, Demand Progress, and Cory Doctorow
#75I agree with the message and the goal but why is this an open letter rather than just an email to PG? Rather, the subject seems confused. It could be they're trying to reach all the HN users, but when they write "You blacked out your websites, lobbied your employers to do the same, and started creative campaigns to defeat a threat to freedom on the Internet" that seems directed at the people who run HN.
I think they're talking about the readers of HN, many of whom are workers in tech and represent many more websites than just HN. HN blacking out would do relatively little to affect public opinion, all of the websites represented by HN users would do much more.
Re: An Open Letter to HN from EFF, Demand Progress, and Cory Doctorow
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just like the online action against SOPA/PIPA was a waste of time and didn't do anything?
You mean how shutting the a site down for a day actually showed people what would happen if SOPA passed? Wikipedia participated in the SOPA protest, wikipedias users did not, they were impacted by Wikipedia's participation. That seems EXACTLY like changing your avatar and spamming Facebook. How does spamming Facebook or changing your avatar show the effects of the NSA's spying? That is how it is useless. It does noth…
Part of the issue with mass surveillance is that a lot of people don't know about it / don't understand how it affects them. Anything that helps more people to start understanding and caring about this issue will push lawmakers toward doing the right thing and curtailing it.
Re: An Open Letter to HN from EFF, Demand Progress, and Cory Doctorow
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As long as people are willing to pretend that the problem is only the US and not the entire West colluding then the easier it is for these governments to continue. This may be true to some extent. But let me provide an anti-thesis to the statement. For nearly a century (or more) everyone has looked at the US to lead in reforms and at times reversing reforms. What happens in the US is often used as a model by world…
> For nearly a century (or more) everyone has looked at the US to lead in reforms and at times reversing reforms. What happens in the US is often used as a model by world governments as a blueprint. In what respects? I can think of far more cases over the last century of the US lagging behind in reforms than taking the lead. In European politics, the US is more often channelled as the big regressive bogeyman (e.g. "w…
You're defining the "last century" pretty narrowly. There have been a number of times when Europe has looked to the U.S. The U.S. rendered aid and assistance during its post-WWII reconstruction. It served as the sword and shield of NATO against the Soviet Union. U.S. economic liberalization and deregulation in the 1970's and 1980's was a model that Europe followed in the 1980's and 1990's.
Re: An Open Letter to HN from EFF, Demand Progress, and Cory Doctorow
#78We had to cut down Aaron's quote to hit the HN 2k character limit, but the full quote we originally intended to use was: "[We defeated SOPA] because everyone made themselves the hero of their own story. Everyone took it as their job to save this crucial freedom. They threw themselves into it. They did whatever they could think of to do." Very much hoping the community will rally around and join us in this. In particu…
Those larger tech companies you mention are on the other side of the fence when it comes to surveillance and privacy. And I'm not even talking about the accusations of complicity (or have we forgotten that was the opening salvo in the NSA revelations, followed by a boilerplate non-denial and an eery silence?), but the fact that these companies regularly violate privacy laws (at least outside the US) and lobby against…
Put yourself in the shoes of a hypothetical progressive tech company. You receive a letter from the government asking you to copy all your network traffic to the NSA for analysis. Threatening serious jail time if you resist or reveal the existence of the letter.
Your lawyers say all that appears to be legal and legitimate, and informal discussions with other tech executives reveal that everybody in your industry does it and it's no big deal.
It takes a lot of courage to resist.
Now that the scope of the surveillance has been revealed, and it's become clear that most of the technology culture, and a big chunk of the general public, is on your side. And the risk of consequences like jail time is much less if you're no longer talking about the government's specific activities in your case, but things that have been published in major newspapers.
It suddenly becomes a lot easier to make a strong statement.
> Elsevier getting involved with supporting Open Access
That's not a fair comparison at all. Open access to scientific research would totally kill Elsevier's main revenue source. The main revenue source for e.g. Google or Verizon is customers, not the NSA. Surveillance reform wouldn't kill their primary business models.
Re: An Open Letter to HN from EFF, Demand Progress, and Cory Doctorow
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe we need to take the shawshank redemption approach "Still, I'd like to try, with your permission. I'll send a letter a week. They can't ignore me forever." Let's build automated tools allowing people to send out letters, signed petitions, emails, faxes, pre-recorded voicemail etc. That would would potentially eliminate procrastination. Just a thought.
A friend worked at a congress person's office a while back. When I told her about automating calls, she was not pleased. Very high noise to signal ratio. I think that effort would be better invested in informing the public and giving them better tools than mindlessly spamming their offices. https://github.com/zmaril/callcongressnow/issues/1
This is an excellent idea, thanks for making this.
Along with calling, it might be helpful to have a wiki that outlined the issues and talking points. People often care, but then feel like they don't have enough depth of knowledge to take action.
At very least it would be nice to point to one.