
1984 Day - Rally Against Surveillance - sinak
http://1984Day.com/
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zeteo
For all the naysayers, I'd like to mention that the rally is a _much_ more
effective political tool than say online petitions, precisely _because_ it
requires significant effort to attend. It's very easy to ignore a bunch of
people who clicked links online, much harder when they abandon their Sunday
plans and show up downtown to make a lot of noise.

However, the age of the rally is waning these days. It was all the rage during
the French Revolution, but telephony and television have created much better
influence tools; such as the phone-in campaign or the political ad buy. It
would be good to at least upgrade to '50s style politics and organize people
for either phoning in to Congress ("OK Bob you want to help? You can call
congressman Goodlatte's office around 3pm this Friday, here are some possible
talking points") or running Kickstarter-style ad buys ("Donate $5 for running
this ad on prime time national TV and we'll post your name on our wall").

Of course, the Internet offers new possibilities for politics that have barely
begun to be scratched. Everyone uses Google, and Google is a democracy of
sorts allowing for tactics such as Google bombing. It's hard to quantify its
effect on the presidential campaign of senator Santorum (Republican runner-up
last year), but it was probably out of proportion with the small number of
people involved. And I'm sure there are many other things possible, if only
more smart people directed their attention towards such issues. Politics is
important - it won't make you as much money as a successful app, but can
change the world a lot more.

~~~
00rion
I'm currently working on a social network that helps groups of people make
decisions and build consensus. In most organizations, decisions are made from
the top down and then implemented by small groups within the organization. The
goal will be to enable large groups to make decisions involving broad-based
goals and provide a mechanism to form working groups to carryout the actions
necessary to implement those goals. What does HN think?

~~~
newnewnew
It seems like every few months a democratic idealist looks around and realizes
that nobody chooses democracy as a decision making method when they have the
choice, and goes about making tools to try to fix this peculiar fact.

The reason why nations use democracy as a decision-making method is 1) it has
populist appeal and 2) they have a lot of resources to waste on bad decisions.
The intelligence of a decision goes down with the number of people involved,
until we arrive at the ideal of universal suffrage.

~~~
00rion
That's why broad, not specific, goals would be decided by large groups. One
broad goal might be to "end domestic NSA surveillance". Specific actions could
be decided by teams of people in working groups which is similar to the way
actionable decisions are made in many businesses.

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lettergram
I made a suggestion a while back on HN and decided to write a blog post about
it: [http://austingwalters.com/hacker-news-the-nsa-and-
freedom/](http://austingwalters.com/hacker-news-the-nsa-and-freedom/)

I think it would be more effective to try what I mention in the post. I know
I'm currently in Illinois and would not be able to attend any rallies (having
no car).

Kudos on the website though.

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miriam_lockhart
is this tweets count random? i see 18 on my mobile and 27 from the office PC

~~~
thomasfromcdnjs
Not random, set up a custom share buttons/counts and having problems with the
cloudfront caching sitting in front of it...

~~~
sinak
Thanks to Thomas for a) being awesome and b) setting this up. The reason for
cacheing is to prevent user's browsers from pinging Twitter/FB/Google with
every visit, and hopefully helping protect their privacy. We'll try and
release this as open source code soon.

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zackliscio
might be worth having a DC presence.

~~~
presidentender
I'm right next to DC this week. I was excited to attend the protest that I
assumed would take place. The absence of such a protest is disappointing.

~~~
sinak
Sorry about that, DC have been a bit slow in organizing, but there is a Meetup
page set up where you can sign up. I just added it to the site, and it's also
here: [http://www.meetup.com/Prince-William-
Libertarians/events/132...](http://www.meetup.com/Prince-William-
Libertarians/events/132071442/)

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skylan_q
Honest question... what is he purpose of such a rally?

~~~
selter01
Raise awareness for starters.

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nfoz
"RSVP on Facebook!"

 _sigh_

~~~
smokeyj
If you had a point to make, it wasn't articulated very effectively.

~~~
northwest
I suppose the idea was "we need some sort of social network that a) does not
collaborate with the NSA, and b) offers real privacy". Networks like
[http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/](http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/) seem
like a good start to me.

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tome
Anyone know about any such rallies in the UK?

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Hario
Slick site.

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sschueller
USA Only?

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mumbi
Sucks that the vast majority of Americans don't give a shit.

~~~
smokeyj
They're ignorant due to factors outside their control. But we're not all
ignorant, and it's up to the informed to do something about it.

~~~
Torgo
It is my experience that even when informed, most people cannot or will not do
due diligence to understand the potential risks or long-term consequences of
these things, nor will they make the connection to how it could affect them.
When it affects them personally and individually, only then they will take
notice.

I have a friend who works for a medical marijuana dispensary. It is legal in
our state, but under federal law he is committing a serious crime multiple
times a day. They organize their deliveries by gmail. I have warned him that
they are listening, and his opinion is "they won't come for me." The fact that
even today in California the federal government does in fact go after these
people does not even register to him as a concern.

He will not care until he is sitting in a jail cell. Many, many people cannot
be reached. This is a fact that has to be taken into consideration when trying
to reach people, that _many_ people will simply _never_ be receptive.

