Ask HN: What's the most effective way to protest in the wake of the NSA leaks? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the most effective way to protest in the wake of the NSA leaks?

Some articles on HN have outlined ways that individuals can increase their own online privacy using various services and tools. But none of those things really "stick it" to the politicians or government officials who sanctioned and ran all of this.

There has to be a better way to protest and say "this isn't okay" rather than simply hiding yourself from the current, known methods of surveillance.

Ideas?

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Its pretty obvious we stuck it to ourselves by voting in self important bureaucrats time and time again, so changing that would be a good start.

Protests probably won't do much, hitting the sponsors of politicians would be good though. You'll note that MoveOn/etc haven't really made much noise about this so might be good to call them out as the sockpuppet that they are. I'd say protest against the taxes that pay for this kind of thing, but that seems antithetical to a lot of people...

Protests are good because they 1) keep the story alive, 2) make it more obvious to ordinary people out in public, and 3) indicate to others that this time we're really angry and possibly get more people to join in as well when they realize it's not just going to fade away after a day or two like always has before.

This story has not and will not die in the tech community, but wilful ignorance has kept people from paying attention to it for the last decade.

It's not guaranteed to not die—revelation after revelation has been coming out for nearly the past decade, if not longer, and people always forgot and moved on, or stopped caring—even in the tech community. It's only now, with so much information at once, and putting it all together, that it's gained enough momentum to stay in the spotlight for longer, hopefully.

① Don't be so lazy about your own privacy. You are the source of most of their data from where you ate last night to what movie you're watching tomorrow. So stop doing that.

② Populate the surveillance database with junk data by being unpredictable each and every day. Make it more difficult and expensive to build a profile about you.

③ Use TOR for your web browsing.

④ Make everybody aware of the issues and why they are important and get them to spread the message further.

Aren't 1 and 2 exactly contradictory?

What would MLK or Ghandi do?

Find out what really happened before hyperventilating?

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