By Jeremy Raff
More than 100 people protested what they called “suspicionless surveillance” at AT&T’s downtown San Francisco office Tuesday night.
The event was part of “The Day We Fight Back”, organized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on a day of worldwide protest and online lobbying modeled on the fight against Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) and the Protect I.P. Act (PIPA) in 2012.
But the effort did not have the same immediate impact as the successful effort against SOPA and PIPA, when Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and Reddit effectively blocked the anti-piracy legislation. This year’s protests were aimed instead at AT&T's entrenched global surveillance program.
Mark Klein, the whistleblower who exposed AT&T's sharing of phone call data with the NSA in 2006, addressed the crowd over rush-hour traffic. He condemned the Dianne Feinstein-sponsored FISA Improvement Act, which would legalize the NSA’s current surveillance practices, and offered conditional support for the USA Freedom Act, which would rein in the NSA -- although in Klein's opinion it doesn’t go far enough.