StopWatching.Us: Mozilla launches massive campaign on digital surveillance

Recently, the media reported that the US government is asking for vast amounts of data from Internet and phone companies via top-secret surveillance programs. In response, Mozilla launched StopWatching.Us — a campaign sponsored by a broad coalition of organizations calling on citizens and organizations from around the world to demand a full accounting of the extent to which our online data, communications and interactions are being monitored.

Last week, media reports emerged that the US government is requiring vast amounts of data from Internet and phone companies via top secret surveillance programs. The revelations, which confirm many of our worst fears, raise serious questions about individual privacy protections, checks on government power and court orders impacting some of the most popular Web services.

Today Mozilla is launching StopWatching.Us — a campaign sponsored by a broad coalition of organizations from across the political and technical spectrum calling on citizens and organizations from around the world to demand a full accounting of the extent to which our online data, communications and interactions are being monitored.

What’s at stake

Whenever we share information online, there’s an intuitive risk of exposure that someone we didn’t intend to share with might access it. That’s part of using an open, highly distributed, worldwide communications medium.

But there are various levels of exposure.

• There’s using a service where you interact with friends, look for new employment opportunities or just play a game, where these activities are logged by the service.
• There’s enabling geolocation on a mobile app so it can personalize your experience, thereby providing the app with data on your movements.
• There’s the unintended consequence of over-sharing on a social network.
• Then, there are more serious levels of exposure — like governments, law enforcement or intelligence agencies gaining access to our private data stored in the cloud, logs created by our Internet service providers and other companies who track things about us.

The first three are pretty well understood and users are able to take some steps to learn about these data practices through their experience using them or by referring to privacy policies and terms of service. Technology has also been getting better at providing additional controls and transparency. Mozilla, for instance, provides tools like Do Not Track, Persona and the Collusion Add-on for Firefox, among others.

However, exposures resulting from government-sponsored online surveillance are entirely separate from whether we choose to share information and what those sites say they will or will not do with our data. That’s because, at least in the US, these companies are required to respect a court order to share our information with the government, whether they like it or not. Mozilla hasn’t received any such order to date, but it could happen to us as we build new server-based services in the future.

There are a number of problems with this kind of electronic surveillance. First, the Internet is making it much easier to use these powers. There’s a lot more data to be had. The legal authority to conduct electronic surveillance has grown over the past few years, because the laws are written broadly. And, as users, we don’t have good ways of knowing whether the current system is being abused, because it’s all happening behind closed doors.

Get involved

When we look back at the public response to SOPA/PIPA, two Congressional anti-piracy bills, where Mozilla and other organizations asked the public to get involved, we were blown away by the response. Hundreds of thousands of people contacted their representatives with concerns over the potential impact to the Web. We saw the same thing with ACTA in the EU. We need to rekindle that energy more than ever so our elected officials take the necessary actions to illuminate how current surveillance policies are being implemented.

Mozilla believes in an Internet where we do not have to fear that everything we do is being tracked, monitored and logged by either companies or governments. And we believe in a   government whose actions are visible, transparent and accountable.

What’s unique for Mozilla is that our only commitment is to Internet users who rely on an open Web where content, imagination, trust and innovation can thrive.

https://optin.stopwatching.us/

June 18, 2013 | 17:45

By Jonathon Burch and Humeyra Pamuk

ISTANBUL/ANKARA | Sun Jun 2, 2013 7:13pm EDT

(Reuters) – Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Turkey’s four biggest cities on Sunday and clashed with riot police firing tear gas on the third day of the fiercest anti-government demonstrations in years.

The din of car horns and residents banging pots and pans from balconies in support of the protests resonated across neighborhoods in Istanbul and Ankara late into the night, as hundreds of demonstrators skirmished with riot police.

Roads around Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s office in Istanbul were sealed off as police fired tear gas to push back protesters, and police raided a shopping complex in the centre of the capital Ankara where they believed demonstrators were sheltering, detaining several hundred.

Erdogan blamed the main secular opposition party for inciting the crowds, whom he called “a few looters”, and said the protests were aimed at depriving his ruling AK Party of votes as elections begin next year.

Interior Minister Muammer Guler said there had been more than 200 demonstrations in 67 cities around the country, according to the Hurriyet newspaper.

The unrest erupted on Friday when trees were torn down at a park in Istanbul’s main Taksim Square under government plans to redevelop the area, but widened into a broad show of defiance against the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Erdogan said the plans to remake the square, long an iconic rallying point for mass demonstrations, would go ahead, including the construction of a new mosque and the rebuilding of a replica Ottoman-era barracks.

He said the protests had nothing to do with the plans.

“It’s entirely ideological,” he said in an interview broadcast on Turkish television.

“The main opposition party which is making resistance calls on every street is provoking these protests … This is about my ruling party, myself and the looming municipal elections in Istanbul and efforts to make the AK Party lose votes here.”

Turkey is due to hold local and presidential elections next year in which Erdogan is expected to stand, followed by parliamentary polls in 2015.

The main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) denied orchestrating the unrest, blaming Erdogan’s policies.

“Today the people on the street across Turkey are not exclusively from the CHP, but from all ideologies and from all parties,” senior party member Mehmet Akif Hamzacebi said.

“What Erdogan has to do is not to blame CHP but draw the necessary lessons from what happened,” he told Reuters.

WIDE SPECTRUM

The protests, started by a small group of environmental campaigners, mushroomed when police used force to eject them from the park on Taksim Square.

As word spread online, the demonstrations drew in a wide range of people of all ages from across the political and social spectrum.

The ferocity of the police response in Istanbul has shocked Turks, as well as tourists caught up in the unrest in one of the world’s most visited destinations.

Helicopters have fired tear gas canisters into residential neighborhoods and police have used tear gas to try to smoke people out of buildings. Footage on YouTube showed one protester being hit by an armored police truck as it charged a barricade.

The handling of the protests has drawn rebukes from the United States, European Union and international rights groups.

On Friday, the U.S. State Department said it was concerned about the number of injuries and on Sunday, Laura Lucas, a spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, reiterated the importance of respect for freedom of expression, assembly and association.

“Peaceful public demonstrations are a part of democratic expression, and we expect that security forces will exercise restraint and that all parties will continue to work to calm the situation,” she said.

For much of Sunday, the atmosphere in Taksim Square was festive, with some people chanting for Erdogan to resign and others dancing. There was little obvious police presence.

But in the nearby Besiktas neighborhood, riot police fired tear gas and water cannons to keep crowds away from Erdogan’s office in Dolmabahce Palace, a former Ottoman residence on the shores of the Bosphorus.

There were similar scenes in Ankara’s main Kizilar square.

Erdogan is due to fly to Morocco on Monday as part of an official visit that also covers Algeria and Tunisia. Sources in his office said his trip would go ahead.

Erdogan has overseen a transformation in Turkey during his decade in power, turning its once crisis-prone economy into the fastest-growing in Europe.

He remains by far Turkey’s most popular politician, but critics point to what they see as his authoritarianism and religiously conservative meddling in private lives in the secular republic.

Tighter restrictions on alcohol sales and warnings against public displays of affection in recent weeks have also provoked protests. Concern that government policy is allowing Turkey to be dragged into the conflict in neighboring Syria by the West has also led to peaceful demonstrations.

On Sunday, Erdogan appeared on television for the fourth time in less than 36 hours, and justified the restrictions on alcohol as for the good of people’s health.

“I want them to know that I want these (restrictions) for the sake of their health … Whoever drinks alcohol is an alcoholic,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Can Sezer in Istanbul, Umit Bektas, Orhan Coskun and Parisa Hafezi in Ankara, and Roberta Rampton in Washington; Writing by Nick Tattersall and Humeyra Pamuk; Editing by Mike Collett-White and David Brunnstrom)