Our goal is to provide information about the mass surveillance of populations by governments, especially digital surveillance. Surveillance has serious implications for the human rights and civil liberties of individuals and groups across the globe. We have started a long-term conversation with other bloggers about it.
Every alliance member who sets up a permanent page will approach it in his or her own way. The purpose of this page is threefold:
- to compile useful information about the issue,
- to highlight opportunities to take action for reform, and
- to provide a dedicated thread for bloggers who write about this to share their work.
Things You Want to Read
Scary, weird things we know the NSA can do.
PR Newswire covers a federal class action lawsuit against the U.S. Government.
Chris Fearnly reports on a lawsuit against the UK government that has been fast-tracked by the European Court of Human Rights.
ProPublica’s lawsuit tracker lists surveillance-related court cases going all the way back to 2006 with information on who filed them and their current status. It’s a great resource.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a page with lots of useful information on the history of this issue and their ongoing anti-surveillance projects.
Just for Fun: NSA Haiku Generator. Creates haiku using known NSA search keywords and allows you to tweet or post them to Facebook.
Online Activism
The Day We Fight Back is organizing a day of online protest for Feb. 11, sponsored by a lot of well-known organizations. They even have legislative goals for anyone in the U.S. who would like to call their representatives, and they are requesting information on who to contact in other countries:
If you’re in the US: Thousands of websites will host banners urging people to call/email Congress. Plans may change, but we intend to ask legislators to oppose the FISA Improvements Act, support the USA Freedom Act, and enact protections for non-Americans.
If you’re not in the US: Visitors will be asked to urge appropriate targets to institute privacy protections.
How You Can Participate in our Alliance
Stop by and share your thoughts. If you find something you think we’ll like, feel free to drop us a link. If like this idea, share it.
Let us know when you write about it. We care about this. If you link to your work in a comment thread on this page or The Leather Library’s alliance page, we’ll read it and consider sharing. This is not just about the U.S. or the NSA. We want to know what’s happening in other countries, and our media will not tell us. If we find a news on your blog and use as a source, we’ll credit you for the find.
You’re welcome you to put a page dedicated to this issue on your blog and link it to our alliance pages. If you link directly to this page, it will display a pingback so others can find it and I will add you to the “Allies” list.
You can consider joining us in re-blogging when we find things that are important enough to warrant that level of coordination. We aren’t going to re-blog one another every time we write about this. What and when to reblog is always up to the individual blogger, and we like it that way. We will send out requests to our allies to share things from time to time, but they will always be requests.
Copy permission for this page is granted. If you want to do something entirely different, feel free. The only required element is the links to the other alliance pages. We need those so we can browse quickly and see what’s new on one another’s threads.
Allies
The Leather Library’s Alliance Page
Not in Our Name: The Criminality of Governments
images: Meme from Sen. Sanders’ Facebook page. Other images from thedaywefightback.org. Permission granted to copy and paste this page in part or in full.
Sourcerer 
Here is my link to me dedicated page regarding our alliance/coalition on this topic. http://theleatherlibraryblog.com/the-alliance/
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That’s great. The language is perfect and I love the art. Glad you listed me as a collaborator by name instead of the blog. Can you adjust the URL in the “allies” section so that it goes to my “Surveillance Project” page instead of my front page? It’s important to have a two-way link between them. LInking to you now.
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Ill do that.
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ok I linked it to that page. With regards to the writing it is good lol, especially since you wrote it lol. It seems generic enough that anyone who wishes to join can copy it and spread the word through simplicity. I am sure that we will eventually get some traction on this.
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Yeah, the idea was to not be too specific or put any requirements on people, and plus I wrote it in a hurry. That part of it will improve once I have a few days to think about it. I have a nice teaser to post, so I am glad you go the page up. You can do the announcement at your own convenience.
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Sounds great! I will do an announcement probably tomorrow some time. Ill make sure to link our pages in post.
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Ok, yes, be sure to link specifically to those pages. I’ll see the pingback when you post.
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ok great
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hehe, just so you know, I was in such a hurry I didn’t realize it was word for word.
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Yes lol thats why I said it.
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Brilliant idea. Love it. The image lured ME in straight away – and I suspect I won’t be the only one. Best of luck with this. Ali
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Thanks for the feedback – that’s good to know.
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I’ve been cataloging surveillance-related links by sharing them from my personal FB account to Sourcerer’s fan page for weeks. It’s mostly NSA-related. I’ll post them somewhere here soon.
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I’m down for this, but I think we need to edit the pages to share at least some of these links we’re dropping at the bottom of pages.
And maybe it’s just me, but I’m not a fan of that image we’re using right now. 😉
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We can find a better image. It’s just the one I had.
Not sure I understand editing the pages to share links we’re dropping – are you talking about links to the post I wrote on Friday?
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The links you’re telling people to drop in your comments section when they do/if they have written about this. Right now the page feels empty because there’s no one talking-just a list of instructions that read kind-of like a blog award.
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Ok. The idea is people can share a link here, and that lets me know to take it and either use it in a post or reblog it, or whatever. It will be a snap to create an index for these links, if we can actually get a few people to start sharing them. The page is just at the starting-point phase right now. I set it up in 20 minutes time so we could go ahead and have two linked pages and get this rolling. It will get better as we get more feedback to help me understand what it needs. 😉
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😛 Indeed. It needs some stuff to click on and interact with.
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So, do I go ahead and register as an official supporter for that day of action as Sourcerer? I’ve looked into it enough to be on board personally. Don’t want to have a detailed discussion of pros/cons here, so either give me the thumbs up, or let’s discuss it offline.
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Thumbs up. I’m in.
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Once I do that, I can change the art and add links to some of the things the sponsors are doing. Will take care of that later today so the page can be critiqued/fined tuned and we can post about it this week.
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I know i need to cut this a bit. I need to know: How’s the art? and How’s the section ordering? Permission to copy and paste in full is granted to anyone who wants to share it that way.
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THANK YOU!!! this is such a great idea. I’ve a;ready posted a few times about this issue and also on my facebook and twitter accounts. I’d be happy to join in here and help out. I don’t have many followers yet, but I think this is such an important issue. I hope I can get something done quick enough (before Feb 11). I haven’t had much time and just doing the Zero to Hero challenge has been all I’ve been able to do with my blog lately. I’m on day 25 today and was just going through my reader to see if anybody had anything inspirational. THIS is inspirational! 🙂
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Oh, thank you so much. Whatever you can do, we will appreciate. I’ve done my best to set this up so that everyone can contribute whatever they have. Just commenting counts as a contribution. I’ve given up the everyday Zero to Hero thing, but I am trying to keep posting about it every few days, because it’s really helped us out, and most of the people I know on WordPress are people I met through Z2H. We’re committed to talking about this long-term, that’s why we decided to set up permanent pages. “Inspirational” is just about the highest compliment I can think of to receive from another blogger. We have fan pages of facebook, so we can connect there if you like 😉
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I have now created a page for ‘the alliance’ on my blog. Consider me on board.
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Hi Chris, welcome 🙂 I will add you to the list sometime today.
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I’m so glad you’re doing this. This is an issue I have sadly not educated myself about, I have just skimmed the issue. It’s one of those things I avoided looking deeper into because I knew it would get me fired up and pissed off. I made a decision when I started my blog to keep in non-political, which is hard for me. I may change my mind in the future or even set up a different blog for political causes and issues. Until then I look forward to finally digging a little deeper and seeing just how angry this issue does make me… I appreciate you doing this.
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I’ve done research on less advanced surveillance programs, and I have a basic understanding of the Constitutional issues, so that’s helpful. I haven’t been following it closely recently, but I’ve been keeping close enough tabs for the last few months to have all those links piled up and waiting. I swore I wasn’t going to be political, too, at least not very often, but I think I’ve figured out a way to do this without affecting Sourcerer’s character very much. We make jokes about some of this stuff, but it makes our skin crawl. The reason I decided to go ahead and do this is because I found two other bloggers who were willing to put the pages up, and another who covers government abuse all the time (he’s joined us too, now). I thought that was enough to justify the effort.
Thanks so much for the comment and support. I’ll have another post soon that explains how I personally plan to proceed with this.
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I’ve added my page here: http://parttimemonster.wordpress.com/the-alliance-against-mass-surveillance/.
The wording is the same as this, though the memes are different. I almost changed the wording, but I think it’s important to have a fairly consistent message, and you said it so well anyway. I’ll be keeping a check on this page and others to add more folks to my Allies list as we gain some traction.
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Ok, good deal. I’ll add you to the list as I have time. I have to go and check in on other folks and say thanks for some reblogs and other support, but I will have another post soon that explains how I plan to proceed. My basic thought is that the alliance page is the only thing we can really ask anyone to do. Placing a themed page on your blog that direct people to other blogs is a big deal. From here, we just have to keep talking about this when we see the opportunity to do it constructively, and trust people who care about this to talk back.(edit – assuming my power doesn’t go out, the snow day could not have come at a better time.)
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Yes. I’ll be working something up to post on the Monster about this soon, too. We just need to keep talking about it, I think.
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Yes!! That is the important thing. Just keep talking about it, but also maintain our other content. A statement from you would be good. I just left Chris a comment. It’s important to communicate “keep doing your own thing,” but talk about this and when you see something we can use, let us know about it. Bloggers have to do their own things, but think about how it feels when you get a comment. Comments feel like that for everyone until they start getting so many they can’t keep up. People who want to talk about this will talk about it.
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Ok, touched all the bases now. Since I came back here to look at that timestamp so I could see how long it took, i thought I would leave this. Going to draft a statement now. Depending on how long it takes, will run either immediately or tomorrow morning as the first thing. I haven’t had a chance to really look at your page, but the art looks good. Don’t know how you handled the links, but I linked my directly to the alliance pages, because when I am doing this work, that is where I want to land first. It is for my convenience as much as anyone else’s. I told Chris your page was up – you might want to touch base with him at some point. If you haven’t already, look at what he’s chosen to devote that blog to.
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I basically just used what you had, really, with different images from Google.
I can’t get Chris’s WP page to pull up. It keeps sending me to something that’s empty. =/
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I haven’t had the time to make a specific page about this, but here’s a link to a post I wrote about it tonight (and I mentioned you in it).
I also have some other links to freedom oriented websites at the bottom of my home page and plenty more of my rants about politics and our loss of liberty in my ‘politics in the land of the once free” category. For people who aren’t just interested in the surveillance state, but all issues of freedom/lack of it.
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Hi Capt. Jill, I just noticed this. I must have missed the notification. (That’s why I check my pages at the end of every week.) I’ll take a look at it, it’s almost time for a surveillance news post. Thanks for sharing it here, and for the mention, of course 😉
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Hi Gene’O,
No problem. I only follow a few by email. I’ve already got over 1000 emails (behind) right now) 😦
I try to keep up with it and answer everyone but I fall behind a LOT.
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I almost never follow by email. I use feeds. Twitter feeds, facebook feeds, all kinds of feeds. Email following is for people who I want to know the minute they post. And I try to answer everyone, too, but that is hard, Even with a small number of readers, it is hard.
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yeah, at first I didn’t know about the feeds so I have a few I follow by email. I try to read them all since I think they’re all very interesting, but I just get so far behind on everything!
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