As government intelligence agencies follow our conversations and e-mails knowing everything about our personal lives, we can pretty much say that the privacy of Internet users is long time gone.
Edward Snowden came out last year exposing the mass surveillance conducted on every citizen by NSA and intelligence agencies from other countries.
NSA gathered hundreds of millions of Metadata from social networks, emails, chats, web activity and pretty much everything that can be monitored. The US Government made this possible by dedicating a large share of its “Black Budget” to secret surveillance programs and the agency labelled the ways to to this as ‘legal’.
After the revelations different organizations started campaigns to fight and disarm the massive surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency, boosted by the fact that Internet users concentrated more on their privacy rights.
RESET YOUR INTERNET PRIVACY RIGHTS
Over 30 Internet companies, environmental and political organizations united their efforts against the NSA and other intelligence agencies around the world. Their initiative is called “Reset the Net”, a program that wants to defeat government and corporate surveillance on the Internet.
This campaign is somewhat similar to The Black-Out Daythat implied shutting down thousands of websitesall over the world to stop the Government’s mass surveillance. This is the largest online protest ever conducted, being initiated by Google, Wikipedia and WordPressto protest against two federal bills, the Senate’s Protect IP Act and the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
After that, US Government modified its Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in a way that it’s now legal for them to monitor daily billions of calls and tracking millions of devices.
This new campaign is conducted by Fight for the Future, want to “Reset the Net” on June 5 by providing new privacy tools and enhanced security measures. This day is chosen to mark exactly 1 year since the first revelations former NSA contractor Edward Snowden made about the NSA’s PRISM program.
The coalition formed includes web sites such as Reddit,Imgur,Boing Boing, DuckDuckGo, the Free Software Foundation, CREDO Mobile, together with a number of organizations like the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Demand Progress, the Open Technology Institute or the Libertarian Party.
“The NSA is exploiting weak links in Internet security to spy on the entire world, twisting the Internet we love into something it was never meant to be: a panopticon,” they say. “We can’t stop targeted attacks, but we *can* stop mass surveillance, by building proven security into the everyday Internet.”
HOW TO JOIN
Developers are urged to add at least one NSA resistant security feature on their mobile applications, while Internet users should use more privacy oriented tools such as HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) instead of HTTP, HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) – a Web security policy tool – and PFS (Perfect Forward Secrecy) which is a public key cryptography tool. This means are necessary to have better security of our communications and keep details of our lives more private.
“HTTPS, HSTS, and PFS are powerful tools that make mass spying much more difficult,” the groups state. “Until websites use them, we’re sunk: agencies like the NSA can spy on everything. Once they’re ubiquitous, mass surveillance is much harder and more precarious – even if you’re the NSA”
The NSA along with the Government had always protected the mass surveillance program by categorizing it as ‘legal’ and justifyingits necessity in order to target terrorists and assuring “security of the nation”. The users must understand the difference between “security of the nation” and “security of our privacy” and also we must not let them sacrifice our privacy for any means.
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