On Sunday, Fourth Amendment advocates staged rallies in 20 cities protesting what they say is the ongoing, unwarranted surveillance by the U.S. government. The events received less publicity than the organizers first event — Restore the Fourth on the Fourth of July — and seemed to attract smaller crowds.
Dubbed “1984 Day” after George Orwell’s book, which told the story of a futuristic surveillance state, the rallies are largely being organized by Restore the Fourth, the same grassroots privacy-rights organization that is working to end “unconstitutional surveillance of digital communications.”
“Recent revelations about the NSA’s surveillance infrastructure provide concrete evidence that phone and email records of U.S. and foreign nationals are being collected and stored by the government,” the group writes. “We demand that our government protect our right to privacy with respect to data from our digital communications devices. This includes metadata, as well as our communications.
“By rallying this Sunday, we are sending a very loud message to our Representatives that to earn our trust they must restore the Fourth Amendment, and support the passage of legislation to revoke the [National Security Agency’s] authorization to conduct mass surveillance of U.S. and foreign citizens,” the group wrote on its website.
On Friday rallies were planned throughout the day in 17 cities, according to the group’s website. By Sunday three more cities had added 1984 day activities.
The largest gathering was in San Francisco, and that event had almost 400 people RSVP. Speakers at the San Francisco event included notables such as Daniel Ellsberg, the former U.S. military analyst who is known for leaking the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971. Another speaker was Mark Klein, the AT&T/NSA whistleblower who in 2006 revealed that AT&T was secretly cooperating with the NSA to divert communications to the intelligence agency.
Unlike the Restore the Fourth protests, which consisted of several cities across the nation hosting the same protest, the group said they wanted to experiment in this second set of protests with different types of events to get more citizens involved.
While the San Francisco rally has speakers lined up, rallies in other cities used other tactics such as street theater, protesters in Austin had a film screening, while those in Boston rallied with a march. Plans for each rally were left to local committees to decide.
Like some of the July Fourth Restore the Fourth rallies that occurred this year, 1984 Day organizers stress that, “The more of us there are, the stronger our message.” Their goal is to move to lawmakers to “revoke the NSA’s authorization to conduct mass surveillance of U.S. and foreign citizens.”
The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects the American public from unlawful search and seizure of “their persons, houses, papers, and effects” without probable cause.
The group says they chose to name the rallies after Orwell’s novel to “remind policymakers that ‘1984’ is a warning, not an instruction manual, and to warn Americans what might happen if they let themselves believe national security requires disregarding privacy, individual rights and the rule of law.”
The group adds that the only reason we do not live in a society like Orwell described is “because of the vigilance we have shown in preventing it, and now that vigilance is needed as much as ever.”
But according to a July 17–21 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center — six weeks after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked information about the U.S. government’s massive spying program on citizens — 50 percent approve of the government’s telephone and Internet data collection in order to thwart terrorist attacks.
Comparing this most recent Pew poll to one in June, support for the government to monitor the public’s email and telephone records has actually increased about 5 percent in the last month.