In the wake of revelations about the National Security Agency indiscriminately collecting data related to U.S. citizens' phone calls, as well as information about the Internet activity of foreign citizens, a consortium of tech companies and privacy watchdog groups is calling on Congress to put a stop to the programs.
The group, called Stop Watching Us, includes Mozilla, Reddit and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, all based in the Bay Area. It says that the "revelations, if true, represent a stunning abuse of our basic rights."
The group is calling for citizens to sign a letter to Congress asking it "to take immediate action to halt this surveillance and provide a full public accounting of the NSA's and the FBI's data collection programs." It's also calling for the Patriot Act and other national security statutes to be reformed so that they cannot be interpreted to allow this type of blanket monitoring.
Meanwhile, Web giants Google, Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft have asked the government for permission to reveal more about the classified requests for user data sanctioned under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
KQED's Stephanie Martin spoke Tuesday with Alex Fowler, who helped spearhead the Stop Watching Us initiative. Fowler is the chief privacy officer of Mozilla, a nonprofit organization that created the popular Firefox Web browser. Here's an edited transcript of the interview: