1984 Day - Rally Against Surveillance | Hacker News Reader

1984 Day - Rally Against Surveillance

1984day.com

136 pointssinak26 comments

For all the naysayers, I'd like to mention that the rally is a much more effective political tool than say online petitions, precisely because it requires significant effort to attend. It's very easy to ignore a bunch of people who clicked links online, much harder when they abandon their Sunday plans and show up downtown to make a lot of noise.

However, the age of the rally is waning these days. It was all the rage during the French Revolution, but telephony and television have created much better influence tools; such as the phone-in campaign or the political ad buy. It would be good to at least upgrade to '50s style politics and organize people for either phoning in to Congress ("OK Bob you want to help? You can call congressman Goodlatte's office around 3pm this Friday, here are some possible talking points") or running Kickstarter-style ad buys ("Donate $5 for running this ad on prime time national TV and we'll post your name on our wall").

Of course, the Internet offers new possibilities for politics that have barely begun to be scratched. Everyone uses Google, and Google is a democracy of sorts allowing for tactics such as Google bombing. It's hard to quantify its effect on the presidential campaign of senator Santorum (Republican runner-up last year), but it was probably out of proportion with the small number of people involved. And I'm sure there are many other things possible, if only more smart people directed their attention towards such issues. Politics is important - it won't make you as much money as a successful app, but can change the world a lot more.

There are many possibilities; here is an extensive list of online political systems and related technology:

https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Related%20...

The main page links to mock-ups for a political system that aims to eliminate corruption within policy-making while espousing dissemination of information and knowledge:

https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Home

Comments and critiques of the idea are most welcome.

I'm currently working on a social network that helps groups of people make decisions and build consensus. In most organizations, decisions are made from the top down and then implemented by small groups within the organization. The goal will be to enable large groups to make decisions involving broad-based goals and provide a mechanism to form working groups to carryout the actions necessary to implement those goals. What does HN think?

It seems like every few months a democratic idealist looks around and realizes that nobody chooses democracy as a decision making method when they have the choice, and goes about making tools to try to fix this peculiar fact.

The reason why nations use democracy as a decision-making method is 1) it has populist appeal and 2) they have a lot of resources to waste on bad decisions. The intelligence of a decision goes down with the number of people involved, until we arrive at the ideal of universal suffrage.

That's why broad, not specific, goals would be decided by large groups. One broad goal might be to "end domestic NSA surveillance". Specific actions could be decided by teams of people in working groups which is similar to the way actionable decisions are made in many businesses.

I've always wondered how a system like that could work. If you do it right, it could be very useful.

It would be interesting if for example Hacker news discussion threads could something decide on collective actions to take.

I made a suggestion a while back on HN and decided to write a blog post about it: http://austingwalters.com/hacker-news-the-nsa-and-freedom/

I think it would be more effective to try what I mention in the post. I know I'm currently in Illinois and would not be able to attend any rallies (having no car).

Kudos on the website though.

is this tweets count random? i see 18 on my mobile and 27 from the office PC

Not random, set up a custom share buttons/counts and having problems with the cloudfront caching sitting in front of it...

Thanks to Thomas for a) being awesome and b) setting this up. The reason for cacheing is to prevent user's browsers from pinging Twitter/FB/Google with every visit, and hopefully helping protect their privacy. We'll try and release this as open source code soon.

might be worth having a DC presence.

I'm right next to DC this week. I was excited to attend the protest that I assumed would take place. The absence of such a protest is disappointing.

Sorry about that, DC have been a bit slow in organizing, but there is a Meetup page set up where you can sign up. I just added it to the site, and it's also here: http://www.meetup.com/Prince-William-Libertarians/events/132...

Honest question... what is he purpose of such a rally?

Raise awareness for starters.

"RSVP on Facebook!"

sigh

If you had a point to make, it wasn't articulated very effectively.

I suppose the idea was "we need some sort of social network that a) does not collaborate with the NSA, and b) offers real privacy". Networks like http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ seem like a good start to me.

Anyone know about any such rallies in the UK?

Slick site.

USA Only?

Sucks that the vast majority of Americans don't give a shit.

They're ignorant due to factors outside their control. But we're not all ignorant, and it's up to the informed to do something about it.

It is my experience that even when informed, most people cannot or will not do due diligence to understand the potential risks or long-term consequences of these things, nor will they make the connection to how it could affect them. When it affects them personally and individually, only then they will take notice.

I have a friend who works for a medical marijuana dispensary. It is legal in our state, but under federal law he is committing a serious crime multiple times a day. They organize their deliveries by gmail. I have warned him that they are listening, and his opinion is "they won't come for me." The fact that even today in California the federal government does in fact go after these people does not even register to him as a concern.

He will not care until he is sitting in a jail cell. Many, many people cannot be reached. This is a fact that has to be taken into consideration when trying to reach people, that _many_ people will simply _never_ be receptive.

Very true and I commend those who continue to inform others. It seems when I try to talk about it though, too many(all) won't listen, so I've given up. I'm sorry.

Europe, and Asia do. Why is it we see all those Germans rallying and we stateside do not?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com