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Comment by terabytest | Hacker News Reader

To me this looks pretty much like Don Quixote's fight against windmills. Pointless, and won't really accomplish anything. Do you think the NSA, or whoever else for that matter, would actually care about people changing their profile picture or blacking out their website for a day? I believe protest doesn't accomplish much, specifically if done in a frivolous way. This is extremely frivolous.

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> Do you think the NSA, or whoever else for that matter, would actually care

What made you think that's the point of this? This isn't about convincing the NSA of anything.

This sentence from the page pretty much hints at that:

> Today we face a different threat, one that undermines the Internet, and the notion that any of us live in a genuinely free society: mass surveillance.

Let's not forget that the NSA revelations are at the base of the mass surveillance outrage.

Clearly part of addressing mass surveillance would be to get changes at the NSA, but they are not the ones we need to make listen. Politicians are. US politicians who support and fund the NSA or doesn't voice their opposition. Politicians all over the world who allow their own surveillance organizations to be complicit, or who are not putting enough pressure on the US government to make it a foreign policy problem instead of merely a small nuisance.

And the large parts of the public who are not yet aware, or not aware enough to care.

The NSA is at the very end of a very long list of targets, each one of which may help put pressure on and/or have some power over the next target on the list.

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