Along with online campaigns, more than 75 cities across the U.S.
will hold live protests against the NSA spying program.
Thousands of websites are planning to take part in a July 4 protest against U.S. National Security Agency spying program while live protests will be held across the nation on the Independence Day.
Reddit, Wordpress, 4chan, and Mozilla are among the websites that have decided to participate in “Restore the Fourth” campaign, which aims at restoring the fundamentals of the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights. The amendment protects citizens against unlawful searches and seizures, according to RT.
Participants will carry banners reading “This 4th of July, we stand by the 4th Amendment and against the U.S. government’s surveillance of internet users.”
The rally is mostly organized by nonprofit advocacy group Fight for the Future, and supported by freedom advocacy organizations like Mozilla, Free Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and ColorOfChange.org.
“The NSA programs that have been exposed are blatantly unconstitutional, and have a detrimental effect on free speech and freedom of press worldwide," said Tiffiniy Cheng, Fight for the Future’s co-founder, in a statement.
This is going to be Fight for the Future’s largest online mobilization since its actions aimed to fight Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
Live protests will also be held in more than 75 cities in the United States including New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, and Atlanta. A member of Restore the Fourth’s national board predicts between 10,000 to 20,000 to show up for the protests across the country, according to the Huffington Post .
Internet Defense League is another major organizer of Restore the Fourth. The group has 30,000 Internet activist members.
StopWatching.us has collected more than 540,000 signatures from people demanding Congress to fully disclose the details of NSA’s surveillance programs.
Edward Snowden’s release of classified NSA spying documents on Internet and telephone communication surveillance has angered American people.
Meanwhile, a petition demanding the Obama administration pardon Snowden has mustered over 126,000 digital signatures, way above the threshold where the White House should issue a response, as the whistleblower is stuck in a transit area in Moscow after his passport was annulled by Washington.
AN/DT