http://www.wired.com/2014/05/reset-the-net/
[video (1 minute 47 seconds) and links in on-line article]
New Movement Aims to ‘Reset the Net’ Against Mass Surveillance
By Kim Zetter 05.06.14 | 6:30 am
A coalition of nearly two-dozen tech companies and civil liberties
groups is launching a new fight against mass internet surveillance,
hoping to battle the NSA in much the same way online campaigners pushed
back on bad piracy legislation in 2012.
The new coalition, organized by Fight for the Future, is planning a
Reset the Net day of action on June 5, the anniversary of the date the
first Edward Snowden story broke detailing the government’s PRISM
program, based on documents leaked by the former NSA contractor.
“Government spies have a weakness: they can hack anybody, but they can’t
hack everybody,” the organizers behind the Reset the Net movement say in
their video (above). “Folks like the NSA depend on collecting insecure
data from tapped fiber. They depend on our mistakes, mistakes we can fix.”
To that end, the groups are calling on developers to add at least one
NSA resistant feature to mobile apps, and on websites to add security
features like SSL (Secure Socket Layer), HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport
Security), and Perfect Forward Secrecy to better secure the
communication of users and thwart government man-in-the-middle attacks.
They also want mobile apps and websites to post a Reset the Net splash
screen on June 5 and are distributing a privacy packet for users that
contains a bundle of various free software tools, like Adium and Pidgin
(for encrypted chat), Textsecure, and Redphone (encrypted phone calls
and text messaging) and GPG (for encrypted email).
Members of the coalition so far include Reddit, Imgur, DuckDuckGo, the
Free Software Foundation, and CREDO Mobile, along with a number of civil
liberties groups. CREDO Mobile is believed to be the anonymous telecom
behind a constitutional battle over the government’s use of National
Security Letters to obtain data from telecoms and other companies.
“A year after Snowden’s shocking revelations, the NSA is still spying on
innocent Americans without a warrant,” Michael Kieschnick, CEO of CREDO
Mobile, said in a statement about the Reset the Net campaign. “CREDO
will continue to demand Congress and the president take action to stop
unconstitutional mass warrantless surveillance, and until we win real
reform, we will encourage users to adopt encryption tools to protect
their personal communications from government abuse of the 1st and 4th
amendment.”
The call to action recalls a similar grassroots movement that swept the
internet in 2012 to protest two federal bills — the Senate’s Protect IP
Act and the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. In that case,
thousands of websites went dark or partially dark to halt the
legislation. That successful campaign, however, was backed by powerhouse
tech firms like Google and Twitter.
So far, none of these companies has joined the coalition.
“We are speaking to different people at a lot of these larger
platforms,” says Tiffiniy Cheng, co director of Fight for the Future,
which launched the Reset the Net movement. “We’re not sure where we are
in those conversation but the conversations are going well.” She notes
that the fight against mass surveillance is much more complex than the
anti-SOPA campaign, and large companies may take different approaches
this time around.
“A lot of companies have either made some public statement or have taken
on security practices that would move us towards making mass
surveillance very difficult to conduct, so they’re headed in the right
direction,” she says. “We expect that they will come out and support the
greater movement to make mass surveillance extremely hard to do….
Because the surveillance is done in so many different ways … there are
different ways that you can push back on mass surveillance.”
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