NSA Reform: Take Action Now

I hope that you will join me in today's protest to demand that the USA government reform the National Security Agency (NSA) programs that spy on everyone. Why take action? The Center For Internet And Society (CIS) at Stanford law School explained the situation well:

"With unfettered information about everyone, we can be singled out, targeted, marginalized, investigated, discredited, or jailed for pushing for peaceful change... So we join The Day We Fight Back to help end mass surveillance, and we hope you will join us, too... Last summer, the world learned that the United States’ intelligence agencies are conducting mass surveillance of millions of innocent people--Americans and citizens of other nations. We don’t know the whole story. Surveillance practices are secret, targets are secret, and even some of the laws under which the agencies operate are secret. The government has many techniques for masking the full scope of its information collection. Nevertheless, newspapers report that the National Security Agency obtained 70 million French telephone calls and 60 million Spanish ones in a single 30-day period. In a single day, the agency sucked in 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers. The NSA also collects daily contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts. It collects approximately 250 million communications and “communications transactions” a year from inside the United States, a collection that includes Americans’ messages and calls with people overseas, as well as improperly collected purely domestic communications the NSA nevertheless keeps. The agency also obtains hundreds of thousands of peoples’ calling records under a law whose primary sponsor says was never conceived of for bulk collection purposes. Perhaps worse, the United States government actively undermines Internet security by subverting the process for adopting encryption standards and forcing companies to install surveillance back doors."

Action by Congress is long overdue. Unfamiliar with the issues? Read the Surveillance section of this blog, and follow any of the above links. Then, take action. You can contact your elected officials using the banner that overlays all posts on this blog, here, or here.