Over 5,000 websites have now signed up to join in a previously announced online protest against mass spying operations such as the ones that have been conducted by the National Security Agency. The effort is called "The Day We Fight Back" and will begin on Tuesday, February 11th.
DuckDuckGo, Imgur and the Yahoo-owned Tumblr are among the major sites that have joined this effort, working with previously announced sites like Mozilla and Reddit and groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union. All of these companies will post banners on their pages Tuesday, urging people to call or email their members of the U.S. Congress and ask them to support laws that curtail online surveillance by government agencies.
This new protest is being made in the spirit of the ones that were launched in January 2012, when many websites, including Wikipedia, went "dark" for one day. The effort was designed to convince U.S. lawmakers to not pass the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) into law. The web site blackouts were successful and both SOPA and PIPA died without coming to a vote in the U.S. Congress.
Tuesday"s protest against mass online spying won"t have quite the same effect as the ones held over two years ago. One of the reasons is that some sites that joined in the SOPA blackout, like Wikipedia and Google, are apparently sitting out in this new effort. However, new leaks about how groups like the NSA conduct their operations continue to come out in the open and the debate over their use of phone, data and other records will continue for a long time to come.
Source: The Day We Fight Back | Image via The Day We Fight Back