NY Times Unimpressed With Any Online Protest That Doesn't Rattle The Earth's Very Core
from the you're-not-helping dept
As we recently announced and participated in, a group of websites, companies, consumer advocacy groups and digital rights organizations all joined forces for a day of action last Tuesday against mass surveillance. That protest, dedicated to the memory of Aaron Swartz, involved participants and websites running banners that urged visitors to head over to the protest website and contact their representatives. An underlying goal was to harness some of the outrage against SOPA/PIPA and direct it toward the NSA's ongoing surveillance abuses, since online protest have been proven to help move the needle, even if they can't all be on the scale of SOPA.Not everybody was impressed. Because the NSA and friends didn't immediately admit fault and declare an end to all surveillance before crying a lot, launching balloons and committing coordinated seppuku on the steps of the Capitol building, Nicole Perlroth at the NY Times took to penning a slightly-snotty article strongly suggesting the effort was a waste of time and "barely registered":
"...the protest on Tuesday barely registered. Wikipedia did not participate. Reddit — which went offline for 12 hours during the protests two years ago — added an inconspicuous banner to its homepage. Sites like Tumblr, Mozilla and DuckDuckGo, which were listed as organizers, did not include the banner on their homepages. The most vocal protesters were the usual suspects: activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International and Greenpeace."Apparently because the "usual suspects" like the EFF are always saying lot of weird stuff, there wasn't much point in paying attention to them (or something). Perlroth also implies that if large companies like Google and Wikipedia aren't going to loudly participate in your online protests, you might as well go home and cry in your pudding, because as we've seen all throughout history, it's impossible to enact meaningful social change without the help of a large corporate donor.
Some of the folks more closely associated with the protest didn't agree, like Sina Khanifar, who helped coordinate the campaign. Khanifar points out in a blog post that Perlroth's definition of "barely registering" could use some fine tuning:
"I'm not sure how 80k calls and over 500k emails counts as "barely registering." That's not to mention over 400k shares on Facebook, and another 100k on Twitter and Google Plus. And over 200 million page views of the banner. Compare Tuesday with the lead-up to the vote on Rep. Amash’s bill to defund NSA’s call records program. In two days about 15,000 calls were made through DefundTheNSA.com. Staffers reported that their phones rang heavily in support of the bill."Khanifar rather amusingly picks apart numerous other problems with Perlroth's article, like the claim there was no substantive discussion on Reddit (there were roughly 7,000 comments, and Redditors are busy organizing the next wave) and the argument that participants Tumblr, Mozilla and DuckDuckGo did nothing to their websites (they did), while noting that this was one small part of a much broader effort towards NSA reform. He also quite correctly points out that if you're going to compare every online protest to the single largest and most successful protest in the history of the Internet, you're probably going to spend a lot of time disappointed. To make Perlroth happy though, perhaps next time we get the urge to protest, we'll pre-emptively realize the futility of the effort and stay home to watch reality TV instead. That'll learn 'em.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: day we fight back, eff, nsa, pipa, protest, sopa
Companies: new york times
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
If a single voice rises it'll be a voice that will be heard by some people. Among these people a few will stop and think about it and realize that lone voice is right turning into more voices that will repeat and spread the word. And so on. Any effort, as small as it may be, will have some sort of impact - for the good or the evil (think extremist groups). And honestly, more than half a million people participating is hardly small at all. Put half a million people on the streets protesting and you will have chaos.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
What would teach them would be to never visit the NY Times website (again) nor discuss any of their stories in case they got shared elsewhere.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
They *routinely* ignore marches--with actual human beings--that number in the *hundreds of thousands* if they don't agree with the reason behind the march, and you think it's news if they ignore a digital one???
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
When I found out about the action, I was initially excited - "yeah! this is the day we fight back! ok what's the plan?"
Sign a petition. Put a banner. WTF? Not worthy of the word 'fight'.
Doing _something_ might be better than doing nothing at all, but what this is is controllable dissent, which democratic governments need to assert legitimacy.
The day we fight back should mean everyone setting up encryption for all the mailboxes of your friends, teaching people about Tor and VPN. Activism. Not signing a lousy petition. We need radical change.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
You missed the part about contacting representatives in the US government:
"80k calls and over 500k emails"
Not exactly doing nothing.
"The day we fight back should mean everyone setting up encryption for all the mailboxes of your friends, teaching people about Tor and VPN."
But, without support from people in the government, the reaction would be to outlaw the use of such technology and/or force ISPs to throttle traffic so that they become unusable. It's good to encourage people to use encryption, but it's an idea that won't work on its own.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
http://codev2.cc/download+remix/Lessig-Codev2.pdf
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
The particular is-ism that I begin with here is the claim that cyberspace can�t be regulated. As this, and the following chapters argue, that view is wrong. Whether cyberspace can be regulated depends upon its architecture.
The original architecture of the Internet made regulation extremely difficult. But that original architecture can change. And there is all the evidence in the world that it is changing. Indeed, under the architecture that I believe will emerge, cyberspace will be the most regulable space humans have ever known. The �nature� of the Net might once have been its unregulability; that �nature� is about to flip.
(page 32)
If you don't believe me just look at government established broadcast and cableco monopolies. Look at cable. When broadcasting spectra was first used it was a communication form, kinda like the Internet is now. Then the FCC started slowly eroding the natural right of the public to use it with the alleged promise that they will ensure a minimal amount of competition and regulate it in the public interest. Before you know it they started breaking those promises until you have what we have now, the public natural right to the use of broadcasting spectra stolen from us and exclusive privileges being granted to a hand full of self interested corporate entities that bombard us with commercials and propaganda and keep us ignorant of many issues when it suits their interests.
It is not enough for us to merely be reactive against the government proposing new bad laws. We must be proactive in having existing bad laws repealed. This includes government established broadcasting and cableco monopolies being granted to private interests for commercial use. This won't be popular among self interested regulators and the cartels that hold these monopoly privileges, cartels with a huge influence over media distribution. But we the public must force the government to know that regulations should be intent on serving the public interest and if they aren't we will force those laws to go away.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Remember too, population of the US versus number of phone calls made. The numbers are horribly low.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
It also mentioned "page views", which is distinct from "unique visitors", meaning that many people were counted multiple times.
Do those numbers still seem low?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
As far as I'm concerned, and I've believed this since SOPA, these big sites only protested because SOPA would have affected their business directly. They were acting in self-interest.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Which part's "easy"? The day of fielding complaints from users unable to use the services - a large portion of whom cannot take part in the protest since they're not in the US (far from a day off!)? The lost business to competitors? The huge loss of revenue in many cases, including the costs of taking the site down (it's not free for a large site, no matter how much you kid yourself otherwise)?
"Why didn't these huge sites take our side this time?"
Other than the above, the real reason is that this particular issue is complex, without a specific time limit for action and has no direct business implications.
SOPA would have endangered many of these businesses and the protest was timed close to the date that the decision on SOPA was being made for maximum effect. This protest was timed as a memorial against an ongoing issue with many factors involved.
To be honest, the companies that didn't participate are better off lobbying or fighting against the surveillance requests they are receiving than they are endangering their own existence by shutting down over every issue, even if they agree about the vast importance of the issue itself.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
The blather emitting from PR campaigns and marketing strategies can be very convincing, this accompanied with Mission Statements and being "members of the community" have made believers of many. Rarely do any of their philanthropic endeavors materialize, some even do more damage than if they did not exist.
You seriously think these corporations are going to lobby in your best interest? .. Hahahahahaha
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Which kinda supports the NYT article's point, sorry.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
This is the best criticism you've got? Your skills are slipping.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
Which kinda disproves the NYT article's point, sorry.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
Paul's point is that one data point out of however many billion internet users there were that day does not support any position at all.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
Yes they can ignore you, but that's why they get nervous when significant chunks of their constituency gets upset with them. If 10-15% of their constituents are angry with them, and they were elected with a 60-40 vote split, they have worry about loosing their nice cushy job. Sure they could still ignore that, but they'd have no one but themselves to blame when the 10-15% turned out to be part of the 60% that voted for them, not the 40% that voted against them, and they get thrown out on their ass next election.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Wouldn't it be easier to just implement direct democracy and have us vote for every law directly?
"If 10-15% of their constituents are angry with them, and they were elected with a 60-40 vote split, they have worry about loosing their nice cushy job. Sure they could still ignore that, but they'd have no one but themselves to blame when the 10-15% turned out to be part of the 60% that voted for them, not the 40% that voted against them, and they get thrown out on their ass next election."
and then they will get a nice job with the industry they passed bills for and the next guy who gets elected will be a crook.
and one of the problems is they appoint regulators that pass laws, like the head of the FCC. Those regulators can do whatever they want and the elected politicians don't get blamed when the regulators pass bad laws. Furthermore those regulators may have been elected by the last elected official who is no longer in office (ie: the last president) or in the case of the president it might be his last term. So the regulator acts poorly and the blame is on the last politician in office.
Also first pass the post yields very bad results and often has people voting against the person they disagree with the most instead of voting for someone they agree with. We end up with less representative politicians.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The same drivel
Of course they're going to be snotty. Ordinary people protesting against something the Times is in favor of is not exactly going to make them quake in their boots. Anything less than the earth opening up and swallowing the NSA buildings is not going to merit any attention from them.
Remember, the Times is the government's mouthpiece, along with the Washington Post, even if they do run the Snowden information.
It's in the form of a patronizing attitude, and they're good at that.
"Well, that was a nice little 'protest', kids..now run along home to Mommy and Daddy to tell them how you changed the world today!" snicker, snicker
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: The same drivel
Explain this one then...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/opinion/edward-snowden-whistle-blower.html?_r=0
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: The same drivel
Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.
Come home. Face reduced punishment (1,000 years reduced to 200 years. 80% off, what a great deal).
The Government will not break its promise.
If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you at a significant discount.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: The same drivel
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: The same drivel
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: The same drivel
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
A few sites have a closeable footer about this is far from serious. Noone cares about it. If wikipedia and google went offline for 12 hours, then people would pay attention, but a small popup will not change anything.
Also this NSA thing deserves at least a small rioting. If your own people dont care about it, then what did you expect?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
NYT isn't about news in this. It's about the fact that they are not leading the story.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Government Mouthpieces
Four of their leading editorial columnists not only repeated the blatantly false WMD arguments but became cheerleaders for the war.
Source:
http://mediamatters.org/research/2013/03/19/where-are-the-medias-iraq-war-boosters-10-yea rs/193117
With friends like these, who the hell needs enemies. That war did not have to happen, but if the Times says so, so be it.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Government Mouthpieces
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Ignore them!
- NYT
[ link to this | view in chronology ]