The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Demand Progress, Reddit and Mozilla are among the companies and digital rights organizations that have designated February 21 as a day of reaction to the mass logging of online data by the NSA and other secret services.
The campaign is called "The Day We Fight Back" and is dedicated to Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide on January 11, 2013. The 35-year-old activist was indicted on charges that he had retrieved and freely distributed over 4 million scientific articles from the MIT and JSTOR online libraries.
Although he did not have any financial benefit from repossession of the repositories, the sentences he was facing were devastating. Thus, the possibility of being sentenced to imprisonment of up to 30 years and a fine of 4 million dollars, according to his environment, played a crucial role in deciding to end his life.
Organizers are inviting webmasters around the world to post the campaign banner on their sites, while on that day Americans can flood Congress with e-mails and phone calls. They are also asking users around the world to redistribute any material that has emerged in connection with Edward Snowden's revelations online, and to change their profile to social media, thereby declaring that they are against surveillance.
At the same time, the initiators recall that two years have passed since the withdrawal of the SOPA and PIPA, following similar campaigns. With the declared aim of protecting intellectual property being trafficked on the Internet, the two bills have prompted strong protests. This was because they included provisions that promoted censorship on the Internet, since they allowed the blocking of websites and services with a simple complaint and without trial.
Today, they say, mass surveillance is the biggest threat to the free internet and, more generally, to free societies. "If Aaron were alive he would be on the front lines against these practices that undermine our right to communicate as free human beings," notes David Segal of the company Demand Progress, whose cofounder was the 35-year-old activist.
