on July the 4th, Defend the Fourth.
Mass protests planned over web NSA spying revelations
The NSA's actions were revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden
Some of the web's biggest names have backed mass protests over internet surveillance carried out by the US National Security Agency (NSA).
The Restore the Fourth movement - referring to the US constitution's fourth amendment - said it wants to end "unconstitutional surveillance".
Reddit, Mozilla and Wordpress are among the big web names backing the action, due to take place on Thursday.
Almost 100 events have been planned across the US.
An interactive map detailing their locations has been published.
The site quotes a line from the fourth amendment which pledges "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures".
As well as the "real-world" protests, many influential websites plan to display messages of protest on their homepages on Thursday, co-ordinated by a group called the Internet Defence League (IDL).
Petition
The action has taken inspiration from similar efforts that took place last year.
Wikipedia, Google and others went "dark", or put black boxes over parts of their pages, to show their disagreement with proposed anti-piracy measures being discussed by US lawmakers.
In reaction to the revelations made by whistleblower Edward Snowden, Mozilla, maker of the widely used Firefox browser, launched stopwatching.us - a petition calling for full disclosure of the US's "spying" programmes.
At the time of writing, the site had amassed 536,559 signatures. Dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is listed as being among the petition's backers.
The demand comes at a time when one top US intelligence official was forced to apologise for telling Congress in March that the NSA did not have a policy of gathering data on millions of Americans.
National intelligence director James Clapper said in a letter to the Senate intelligence committee that his answer had been "clearly erroneous".
Jefferson Weeping
by Andrew P. Napolitano, July 04, 2013
Do you have more personal liberty today than on the Fourth of July 2012?
When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he used language that has become iconic. He wrote that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, and among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Not only did he write those words, but the first Congress adopted them unanimously, and they are still the law of the land today. By acknowledging that our rights are inalienable, Jefferson’s words and the first federal statute recognize that our rights come from our humanity – from within us – and not from the government.
The government the Framers gave us was not one that had the power and ability to decide how much freedom each of us should have, but rather one in which we individually and then collectively decided how much power the government should have. That, of course, is also recognized in the Declaration, wherein Jefferson wrote that the government derives its powers from the consent of the governed.
To what governmental powers may the governed morally consent in a free society? We can consent to the powers necessary to protect us from force and fraud, and to the means of revenue to pay for a government to exercise those powers. But no one can consent to the diminution of anyone else’s natural rights, because, as Jefferson wrote and the Congress enacted, they are inalienable.
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In the past year, the same Supreme Court has ruled that not only can you be punished for silence, but you can literally be forced to open your mouth. The court held that upon arrest – not conviction, but arrest – the police can force you to open your mouth so they can swab the inside of it and gather DNA material from you.
Put aside the legal truism that an arrest is evidence of nothing and can and does come about for flimsy reasons; DNA is the gateway to personal data about us all. Its involuntary extraction has been insulated by the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of relevance and probable cause of crime. No longer. Today, if you cross the street outside of a crosswalk, get ready to open your mouth for the police.
The litany of the loss of freedom is sad and unconstitutional and irreversible. The government does whatever it can to retain its power, and it continues so long as it can get away with it. It can listen to your phone calls, read your emails, seize your DNA and challenge your silence, all in violation of the Constitution. Bitterly and ironically, the government Jefferson wrought is proving the accuracy of Jefferson’s prediction that in the long march of history, government grows and liberty shrinks. Somewhere Jefferson is weeping.
posted by Satish Sharma at
13:44
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