sinak

Yeah, I should make that more clear. We built it for the Techcrunch Disrupt hackathon (and won a free trip to Paris as a result). It's on Heroku and I pay about $40/mo to keep the site up and running for people to use for free. SMS is currently disabled to keep costs low.

We did something similar (to help with memory retention) and using spaced repetition a while ago: http://memstash.co

I'll reach out in the morning to people/orgs in touch with him and see if taskforce.is can set up some way of getting money to him without a big legal risk.

We at https://taskforce.is (mostly HNers) can help set something up,. I'll reach out to ACLU and his lawyers in the morning.

From my conversations with friends and family, I think many people think that the NSA's sole purpose is to fight terrorism. That thinking has been reinforced by the NSA and the administration repeatedly claiming that NSA surveillance is justified because it prevents terrorist attacks. If not the "sole" purpose, in the least they think it's the NSA's "main" purpose.

But the main point of the article is that the Obama administration justifies surveillance by saying it's critical to preventing terrorism, but that surveillance is being used for many many purposes beyond just counterterrorism, making it a poor case.

This totally doesn't help answer your question, but I'd much rather see a system that used randomized voter selection than proxy voting.

I think it's pretty clear that we need both technical and legislative fixes to NSA surveillance. Just one of the two isn't enough: to get be even vaguely confident that surveillance ends, we need both. The technical fixes I can't speak to, but the legislative ones I've been thinking about for a while. In the last week, there have been two prominent bills announced to deal with surveillance:

- Bill 1: The FISA Improvements Act, from Feinstein and the Senate Intelligence Committee. In short it legalizes most of what the NSA has been done.

- Bill 2: The USA FREEDOM ACT, from Sensenbrenner and Leahy, currently being considered by the House/Senate Judiciary committees. It amends §215 of FISA to end bulk phone metadata collection and fixes some of the problems with §702 of the FISA Amendments Act (under which PRISM is run). But it doesn't fix §702 fully, does nothing to end BULLRUN (undermining encryption) nor the surveillance that happens outside FISA (MUSCULAR, for example, and god knows what else).

Obviously the Feinstein bill can't be allowed to pass. But some really big names (ACLU, CDT) have thrown strong support behind the Freedom Act. I'm wondering what we as the Taskforce(.is) should do. It's clear to me that it doesn't go nearly far enough. And there's some chance that if it passes, Congress will view this whole thing as "dealt with" and not revisit the issue for years to come. But unfortunately the Freedom Act barely has the votes to get out of the judiciary committee, and getting it to pass through both houses requires a lot of momentum.

We've been working on a campaign asking folks to call and oppose Feinstein, and potentially to support the Freedom Act. But I'm not sure if that's a right move. Unfortunately, the public doesn't understand why privacy is important, and Americans aren't nearly angry enough for Congress to do anything more substantial than the Freedom Act. We might be able to push for amendments, but it's a long shot.

tl;dr - We've got two bills in Congress. One is terrible, one is mediocre. But we don't have the political momentum to do anything better than the mediocre bill. What do we do? Tech advocate conundrum.

We don't have an official estimate yet, but our guesses are between 2,500 on the low side and 4,000 on the high.

Better quality livestream on C-SPAN: http://www.c-span.org/Events/Group-Holds-Rally-Against-Mass-...

Really proud to be a part of this.

Also, a group of HN users (taskforce.is) built the StopWatching website. Big shoutout to Thomas Davis and Beau Gunderson for a load of hard work on the site.

A note to say that the Stop Watching Us coalition rally is now just two days away. If you're on the east coast, it's not too late to attend. If you're interested, you can find out more here:

https://rally.stopwatching.us/

Privacy is one of the hardest things to get folks riled up about. It erodes slowly, and for "good" reasons, like defending the country against terrorism. But privacy is critical to a meaningful democracy. Strangely, many of the members of Congress fail to understand how important it is, and that compromising our privacy for security is a huge mistake. Particularly since those compromises are not necessary.

The fact that the NSA is monitoring the calls of world leaders is also worrying. But it's more of a foreign policy issue, damaging international relations and making it more difficult for countries to trust the US. I think it's foolish, and needs to stop, but it doesn't threaten our freedom directly.

Looks like for some reason this got flagged off the homepage. Not exactly sure why, but anyway: I really like it. I agree with Caligula though, I had to watch the video to get the key piece of information that I was interested in, which was how users identify themselves (phone number).

Weirdly, I now notice that it's written right below the video. But I'd maybe shorten that sentence, or change the "simple and easy signup" headline to something like "All it takes is a phone number."

It's not just a rally, we're also arranging a citizen lobby day for constituents to meet with their representatives and talk to them about why this is important: https://rally.stopwatching.us/lobbyday.html

That being said, I can totally understand why you might not want to add third party code to your site.

In that case, I think the best route is to take the html and add it to your site yourself. You can actually even host the js locally if you want. The call to our geoip server just returns json, so shouldn't be a threat: http://geoip.taskforce.is/

But if you want to host that part as well, it's open source too: https://github.com/tfrce/node-geoip-web

Same applies anytime you use external javascript, no? Or in fact, anytime you use AWS to host your site?

And the site uses https://github.com/tfrce/share-server so no user information/IP address/browser headers are shared with any third parties unless you click the buttons.

It's geoip, so you don't need to have location services enabled to take part. And it's disabled on mobile.

We've just launched a project asking anyone with a website to help spread the word on the rally:

https://github.com/tfrce/project-megaphone

Hey folks, just a quick plug: If this stuff pisses you off, help make the rally that EFF, Mozilla and dozens of other public advocacy groups are planning in DC a success.

Sign up to attend, share, donate, whatever floats your boat:

[1] https://rally.stopwatching.us/

[2] http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/stop-watching-us-a-rally-a...

You can test it live by calling (415) 413-4137 or by adding your phone number to the end of this URL:

http://162.242.163.35/create?campaignId=default&userPhone=

Yeah, I should have been a bit clearer on what I mean: VCs typically offer a lot more than just money. Things like their networks, advice, and positions on company boards for example. There could be quite a bit of value to companies that simply fill those roles, as an organization, similar to what individuals to as advisors.

I think that in many cases that might look quite similar to existing accelerators, except that accelerators generally target very early stage companies.

Sam discusses drops in the idea at the bottom of his post:

  The best VCs are great, and they will probably continue to 
  do well.  In fact, they’re so good that they could probably 
  get away with only selling advice—they understand how to 
  build big companies in a way that few other people in the 
  world do.

Is there room for an advisory-only VC that's not beholden to LPs? And if so, what would that look like?

Submitted Google News link to bypass paywall.

We built something really similar at the Techcrunch Disrupt hackathon recently: http://www.shopornot.co/

I know the other two team members are pretty interested in continuing work on it if you want to reach out :).

What do you mean by "journalism startups"? Does MuckRack count?

Not sure how many other companies do this, but it seems really bad for user privacy.

Any time you email the support system of a company that uses Freshdesk to manage tickets, your information gets stored in their system permanently, with no way to delete.

And circumventing the "technological protection measure" is illegal under §1201 of the DMCA.

It did get traction (15 upvotes in about 30 minutes), but it was flagged down to the 10th page. Which just happened again.

They're a little hard to find in the list of perks, but these two are particularly awesome:

- Signed copies of the first PRISM story by Glenn Greenwald.

- Signed copies of the cover of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg.

If you're going to flag this, please let me know why.