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The Day We Fight Back

thedaywefightback.org

31–40 of 192 posts

Re: The Day We Fight Back

#31
post #13

No, 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…

No. Why is achievement in our culture positioned to always be this 3-act epic like we have to slay the bad guy? try rethinking your approach here and accept that it is actually totally fine to walk home at the end of the day and celebrate a small victory.

There are indeed technology consultants that inform these govt policy: they're called lobbyists and their influence is often proportional to how much their self-interest will prosper. this is why the system doesn't work and Hacker's like Aaron need to step in. None of us believe we'll walk away from this having fixed anything, it is an ongoing process to keep the system in check. The point, however, is to simply concentrate our anger and focus over a month into, as a hacker, doing SOMETHING proactive against this.

Re: The Day We Fight Back

#32

Yay, slacktivism! ----- edit: I wrote the above because there was no clear "call to action" other than changing one's Facebook profile picture (seriously?) but, according to the "Open Letter" [0], I guess we're all supposed to call our legislators that day. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7037532

I thought so too, but the big banner has a way to find and call your political representative about the issue. I'm just worried that the American populace isn't sufficiently interested in the issue to do anything about it.

Now if the top 100 sites in the US shut down for a day in protest ...

Re: The Day We Fight Back

#33
post #21

Yeah, let's fight online surveillance through facebook, google and the other NSA-approved social media. How about instead we save some energy and invest it in better encryption and security?

You ask some computer-politicians to do real research and tech-work? NO WAY!

Re: The Day We Fight Back

#34
post #20

Am I the only one bothered by how many people are invoking Aaron's ghost? The intent might be pure, but it really bugs me when people speak for the dead. And let's not forget, Aaron didn't pass away, he committed suicide. Case related stressors may have caused this, but it's also not right to make him the poster child for every anti-government/anti NSA campaign on the Internet.

May God bless him! Amen.

Re: The Day We Fight Back

#35
post #15

I would "fight back" but I have a job. Who am I kidding? I would not fight back even if I did have the time. Even if this were not horseshit. I would be dicking around with golang and flagging banal questions on StackExchange.

I appreciate your candor, sir/madam.

Re: The Day We Fight Back

#36
post #5

If I got this right, we fight back by changing our avatars and putting banners on our blogs. Is that it?

Well, it's a start. However, I agree that it's far more of a branding exercise than an agenda, not dissimilar to professional activists organizing a crowd and then handing out a bunch of preprinted signs to the people that arrive. I don't blame the organizers for this; it's symptomatic of how internet culture works (bootstrap a meme, leverage resulting audience attention) and of the difficulties of organizing in a representative democracy context.

The ideal would be some model legislative proposals or some sort of nominally nonpartisan congressional committee with teeth along the lines of the Church committee in the 1970s (but even that ran into significant opposition at the time, being accused of treason and so on by the usual self-appointed superpatriots.

The basic problem is threefold.

1. The United States has a strong economic and strategic interest in preserving the international status quo or moving it in a more liberal direction (qua trade, promulgation of legal mutualism and so forth). Naturally, maintaining this position is going to involve extensive intelligence-gathering activities.

2. While this is often denigrated as a form of neo-colonialism, there's a fair degree of evidence that it results in better overall outcomes globally; were it to withdraw and leave a power vacuum, that space would be occupied by less scrupulous actors. Although the EU is second to the US in economic power (or even first by some measures) the EU is ineffective at projecting power and less able to provide security to its allies, both practically and politically (consider the rather milquetoast response to the protests in Ukraine, for example). For examples of the alternative, consider the autocratic and cynically populist governance of the Russian Federation or the relative opacity of Chinese jurisprudence.

3. Given the ever-lower barriers to collection and aggregation of data resulting from technology, private actors are able to accumulate and leverage huge pools of data, from Facebook to credit bureaux and consumer intelligence brokers such as Axciom. Until people are willing tolerate limits on private sector activity (and thus financial opportunity) similar to those resulting from EU data protection laws or the like, it's simply not realistic to expect that government should limit itself to technological capabilities that are less than the private sector or even abstain from aggregating publicly available data. This would just result in a a different kind of power vacuum. For all its faults, government is procedurally accountable to the citizenry, whereas private entities are accountable only to shareholders, and shareholdings are fungible in a way that citizenship is not.

As I've said a few times before, I think the US needs a movement for a privacy amendment to the constitution that spells out the scope and limitations of individual's control over their personal information, as opposed to the hand-wavey and contentious judicial interpretations we operate under at present. Putting this in place is a decade-long project, at minimum.

Re: The Day We Fight Back

#37
post #20

Am I the only one bothered by how many people are invoking Aaron's ghost? The intent might be pure, but it really bugs me when people speak for the dead. And let's not forget, Aaron didn't pass away, he committed suicide. Case related stressors may have caused this, but it's also not right to make him the poster child for every anti-government/anti NSA campaign on the Internet.

http://likerka.eu/eng/f/lah_che.jpg

Re: The Day We Fight Back

#38
post #30
post #13

No, 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…

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.

Re: The Day We Fight Back

#39
post #5

If I got this right, we fight back by changing our avatars and putting banners on our blogs. Is that it?

Yup. The whole point is a build up to a "day of protest", but no mention what this is.

I assume all the avatar and banner changing is leading to February 11, the day in which we change our avatars and banners.

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