A Thank You, Feminist Friday Plan, and two more things you want to read. With music.

Happy International Workers’ Day, and long may we endure. All of us.

Old School Harlequin nominated me for a Dragon’s Loyalty Award more than a week ago, and I have yet to say thanks. I’ve been busy. So, I’m saying thanks now, and congrats, OSHarley, on getting Liebstered again. Best of luck with your Facebook page, which will soon be added to the feed I use to track blogs with fan pages. I will never not say thank you for an award.

The Day We Fight Back

Tuesday is the day the Internet protests against mass surveillance.

I’m not mucking about with our page code to display the automated banner, and I’m not doing lengthy polemic. Here’s the information you need if you want to join in.

Here’s the web page that’s being used to coordinate this effort. You can find info and cool things there to add to your blog or social media profiles.

The Day We Fight Back also has a blog. If you want more info, or you’re in the U.S. and you’re inclined to contact you Senator or Congressman, this would be a good place to start.

If you just want to talk about it with some WordPress friends, or help us keep tabs on this issue by dropping us links when you run across them, the Alliance Against Mass Surveillance has four blogs with project pages that you can comment on.  The pages are similar, but each has its own set of links, and they will still be here once this day of action is over. You can also find The Surveillance Index on our sidebar. This is personal page I just created so that I can list everything we write about surveillance on one place. I’ll update it with new information as we receive it.

Note: This was supposed to post at midnight, but I was in a big hurry and hit the Publish button without thinking. I can’t pull it back because links were posted to all my Publicize channels, so, enjoy! 🙂

image: The Day We Fight Back

Surveillance News

I don’t blog news very often, but I’m trying to keep tabs on surveillance-related developments, so I’ll be doing one of these posts every week or so.

The Globe and Mail reported yesterday that a group of hackers and human rights activists are filing a suit in Germany alleging that the Merkel government assisted the NSA and the Britain’s GCHQ in spying on German citizens.

Fresno Bee columnist Rory Appleton has a few things to say about surveillance enabled by mobile apps, and about the state of privacy in general.

The Leather Library has video of former NSA technical director Bill Binney discussing why he decided to blow the whistle.

The Day We Fight Back’s campaign for a day of protest online on Feb. 11 is up to more than 3600 websites.

I’ll have an index page for surveillance-related posts up sometime this week.

Why I Agreed to The Alliance

I suppose I should explain how I went from saying:

“yeah, we can talk about government surveillance here even though I think that battle is lost and it’s mostly an exercise in educating younger people about how it happened”

to saying:

 “let’s see how many people we can get to add pages to their blogs devoted to keeping tabs on this and keeping in touch with one another.”

I have no illusions about the number of people paying enough attention to what I’m doing here to wonder about that, but there must be a few. Most are people I knew before I started this blog. So here is what changed my mind.