sinak

On the US side it's primarily about creating an opportunity for pro-privacy legislators. Specifically, the legislative goal is to push through the passage of the USA Freedom Act with amendments to prevent the NSA from undermining encryption standards and to protect the rights of non-Americans.

Raising awareness is definitely part of it too, but it's not the main objective.

Fixed. Thanks :).

That's a really valid criticism, we're just pushing some changes that we hope address those concerns (will be up in about 10 minutes).

Edit: Changes are up. It's not perfect, but hopefully it addresses some of your concerns.

All of the people who built the site and the banner are volunteers who met on HN across various threads, and not members of any of the advocacy orgs or companies listed on the site. We're really interested in getting feedback on how future campaigns can be better, and happy to discuss some of the decisions we made. The non-profits involved did all the legal and organization lifting, and this is a great opportunity to donate to the EFF and Demand Progress if you haven't recently.

Likely the most impactful thing you can do right now is to add the banner to your own site and ask the companies you work for to do the same. We've tried to make it as easy as possible to add the banner; you can find all the options (including a Cloudflare app and Wordpress plugins) here: https://github.com/tfrce/thedaywefightback.js

Pushing for technical solutions to the surveillance is also really important. Friends at Fight for the Future are launching a campaign along those lines as soon as this one wraps up, and there are a lot of open source projects (e.g. the great work done by [Whisper Systems](https://whispersystems.org)) that deserve attention.

But legislation and technology need to work hand in hand for things to change in the long run. Even if we have decent technical solutions, legal measures can easily limit the scope of their success (see Lavabit).

I really, really don't think anyone is trying to say that this is the /only/ thing you should do.

Many of the people organizing this campaign worked on any number of different campaigns over the last 6 months (Stop Watching Us, Restore the Fourth rallies, a rally in DC, Defund The NSA), so we'd be the last to say that this is the only day you should take action.

Rather, this is a single day for all of us who care about the isuee to rally round and do something to reach a critical mass of action that gets noticed on capitol hill. And also to help educate people who've tuned out of NSA stories by reiterating all the things the NSA is doing to erode privacy.

Glad it made it easier :). The awesome folk at Cloudflare actually did all the hard work to get the app built.

I really wish we had time to add something like that in. Hopefully down the line.

So that license was suggested by someone at FSF and I ran with it because I don't know enough about licensing.

Can someone who does make a suggestion and I'll change it? We do use snippets in the code from other GPL/Apache licensed code in main.js for example, but we specify the sources and licenses for each snippet in the code.

My original thought was to use http://unlicense.org/. Would that work? Do I need any other language in there to clarify that the licenses of the snippets we use stand?

(Feel free to submit a pull-request with fixes)

Edit: Made an issue for this -> https://github.com/tfrce/thedaywefightback.js/issues/31

There is a callOnly flag for the widget that I really recommend people use. In brief there was a lot of debate over whether emails should be included at all, and the flag was the compromise. Some orgs, for example the EFF, will be promoting the call-only flag when they distribute the code.

So the Internet Defense League [1] do this already, and we'll be distributing the widget through their code as well.

The reason for not doing this natively through the IDL codebase [2] is that we are doing a load of custom stuff that they don't generally support. At some point we'll abstract it all out and add it to IDL though ... generally our Taskforce.is group builds something for a campaign and then reuses the code as much as we can. For example, this project recycles a bunch of code from Project Megaphone [3].

[1] http://www.internetdefenseleague.org/

[2] https://github.com/fightforthefuture/idl-members

[3] https://github.com/tfrce/project-megaphone

Yeah that'd be great. I've been wanting to do something like that for a campaign for a while. Feel free to send me an email (it's in my profile).

Hey HN,

Thomas and I (with help from a few others) have been working pretty solid for the last 10 days or so to get this banner ready, and wanted to get it out with plenty of time before 02/11. We realize there are a few cross-browser quirks and some of our code is messy, but it works, and any issues will be ironed out between now and February 11th. You can embed the code starting now without worry.

In the meanwhile, if anyone wants to submit pull requests to fix any issues they see, that'd be wonderful. We'll clean up the code and fix any outstanding issues in the meanwhile.

In case you missed it, this is a follow up to The Day We Fight Back campaign [1]. The site itself will also be updated on the day.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7037532

Edit: If you work at a medium or large tech company and care about this issue, please take a moment to start a conversation internally about joining the day of action on the 11th. It can be adding the banner, or something else entirely. It's likely you'll find quite a bit of support amongst other employees. While we've reached out to the policy arms of some larger companies, we're pretty constrained on resources, and many of them are interested but hesitant. Engineers often have a lot of say in what actually happens; if you care, speak up.

Looks like Twilio rate-limits you to one SMS per second per phone number, so you'd need to buy a lot of phone lines to make this possible.

Anyone have the ability to write a quick Twilio app to notify people via SMS when it goes back up?

Would save us all a massive amount of time continually refreshing the page. I realize a browser extension could do this too, but SMS would be much better.

Read the Presidential Policy Directive PPD-28 on Signals Intelligence activities with details on the reforms here: http://sina.is/2014sigint.mem_.ppd_.rel_.pdf

This is very clearly collection of the contents of messages, and not simply metadata. The fact that US messages may later be "minimized" from the database is vaguely helpful, but not much of a reassurance. That data should never be collected in the first place, and bulk collection of international data is also an unnecessary practice.

If this helps motivate you, we need all the help we can get with https://thedaywefightback.org. If you're a designer, developer (including frontend, backend, devops, mobile app), get in touch by emailing contact@thedaywefightback.org and we'll write back and let you know when we need your skillset the most.

Any suggestions on 2? We'd love to change the page to help improve that aspect of it if we can. In particular on the day of action itself.

I generally agree with this. I'm not sure what exactly this adds to the overall conversation. Does anyone have thoughts on why the NYT would choose to publish it, perhaps beyond pageviews?

I tend to think that leaks like this one may weaken the overall view towards the Snowden leaks. As far as I can tell from reading the article it's a tool that's used in specific cases, and likely has value in that capacity.

At multiple points during the planning calls for this campaign, we significantly changed our plans, the language, and our tact to make sure that our call was viewed as being considerate of international concerns. This letter originally had language to that effect, calling out GCHQ as a major part of the problem, and that surveillance does not only effect US citizens. For evidence of this, take a look at the "And Everyone Else Too" in one of the Facebook share graphics, which I added early this morning in response to concerns that that particular graphic was too US-centric.

When the banner goes live, we'll likely do IP-geolocation and offer users who are like outside the US a link to necessaryandproportionate.org, a petition to be delivered to international lawmakers.

However, given that many of the organizations behind the movement are US-based, it definitely still leans US-focussed. In some ways that's for the best: many of our organizations don't know how to be effective in changing laws in other countries. For example, during our planning it was suggested that we set up dial-in numbers for each country. After some research, we found that in many countries legislator's offices view calls as a nuisance and do not respond positively to them.

So, what I'm trying to say is: we're definitely trying to address this. And if privacy groups in other countries join us in setting up similar actions (as with the German rallies in solidarity with StopWatchingUs), we'll happily send international visitors their way.

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 groups, bar the EFF, are almost completely known in silicon valley and the tech community. There are likely many reasons for that, but two that often get called out are the distance between San Francisco and DC (culturally and physically), and a libertarian bent amongst many technology.

The goal of this is campaign is to drive calls to Congress on 02/11, making clever memes is simply the vector by which we spread word of the campaign. Calls do very much have an effect on how representatives vote. For evidence of this I highly recommend reading the Communicating with Congress series of studies by the Congressional Management Foundation [1]. Alternatively, ask who has worked as a staffer: calls make a big difference.

It's so very, very easy to be cynical about this kind of thing, but it's a trap. It's weird to quote Plato, but he sums it up pretty well: "The chief penalty [of good people who refuse to lead] is to be governed by someone worse."

[1] http://www.congressfoundation.org/projects/communicating-wit...

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.

We 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 particular, startups and larger tech companies (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, etc.) don't get involved with this kind of activism easily. If you care about this issue and work at a tech company, you're the only ones who can exert pressure from within.

That makes sense, though given the result I don't think it was a bad decision. Congrats on open sourcing today in any case!

I'm just going to hazard a guess that that Nick, George and Scott made a very clever decision to set up a script to alert them when HN went up (and perhaps even to submit this post as soon as it happened). This was the first post after the site went up. They might just be lucky, but somehow I doubt it.

Way to hack HN. You win my upvote.

Edit: Also, more specifically to the news of them open sourcing: It'll be particularly awesome if people eventually graduate from learning to code on Codecombat to working on its codebase. Since the backend is all node, it's not inconceivable. A virtuous loop for sure.

A bit surprised by some of the errors on the site.

- Tweet button doesn't have a link

- G+ share button isn't working

- Opengraph tags point to a missing image-url, so Facebook shares don't have an image associated.

I think maybe this hit HN before they were quite ready for launch - I'm guessing these'll be fixed pretty quickly.

Excellent move by the companies involved though. A lot of advocacy organizations have been pushing these companies to come out publicly meaningful surveillance law reform, and this is a great start.

You should probably update the "Copyright 2011" note in the footer ...

Just want to point out that patent reform is being voted on in the house judiciary right now.

Worth watching: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/hclive02

Yep, very true. Things were moving down very quickly (down 30% in 30 mins) when I posted this.

Read about the purpose here: http://fixyt.com/about

Dynamics have had the tech offered by Coin for a really long time, but for whatever reason, they switched from offering a credit card to a rewards card:

https://www.dynamicsinc.com/

I'm guessing the reason is mostly PCI compliance. They also hold a number of patents on reprogrammable cards which makes me wonder if Coin have licensed them or not.