Dear MAG-Net Community,
Have you been concerned about how you and your community can stand up to egregious invasions of our privacy — on our cell phones, internet services, and other vital tools we use to communicate? Read below and join a huge coalition organizing a powerful response to fight back.
Recent reports revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been acquiring and tracking the communications of everyone in the United States, this includes cell phone records, emails, and text messages. The NSA’s overreaching surveillance is undermining the fabric of the internet, eroding any right to privacy–and it’s doing so with no meaningful oversight.
Historically in times of overzealous government surveillance it is the dissenting voices: the labor organizers, civil rights leaders, immigrant rights groups, peace activists that have been the targets of surveillance aimed at disrupting and destabilizing movements for justice. That’s why we need to be a part of the efforts to change it.
Media Action Grassroots Network (MAG-Net) groups from across the Northeast are participating in many ways, for reasons that hit very close to home. When running big stimulus-funding technology training programs, Philadelphia’s Media Mobilizing Project saw hundreds of poor and working people — many of them touching a computer for the first time — express big fears about their data might be collected and used against them.
May First/People Link believes the Internet's purpose is to foster open communication and information sharing among all the world's people. Using the Internet for surveillance and other divisive and subversive goals is an obscene contradiction to its essence and purpose. May First works with organizers and activists to think politically about how we engage with technology, how we think about the software we use and how we protect and preserve our ability to communicate openly and freely without intrusive and repressive surveillance.
At a time when poor people need online access to apply to work a fast food counter, and when public benefits are mostly available online, access and privacy matter in huge ways to the communities where we live and work.
On Saturday October 26th, on the 12th anniversary of the signing of the Patriot Act, thousands of people from across the country and political spectrum are coming together in Washington D.C. to deliver a message to Congress: Stop Watching Us.
A petition signed by over 200 organizations, including members of MAG-Net and with over 500,000 individual signatures will be delivered to members of Congress. Whether you join us in Washington D.C. or take part from your own community SIGN UP for more information.
