Mad At NSA? How to Fight Back, For Real
No matter who you are, the NSA has spied on you. But now, you can start fighting back. It’s easy, it’s free, and it’s totally legal.
The NSA depends on an idea called information asymmetry . That means they know everything about you, and you don’t know anything about them. Asymmetry gives them power over you.
We can fight the asymmetry by turning the tables, and collecting information on them . This may sound hard, but it doesn’t require breaking any laws or fleeing to Russia. There’s a ton of information about the NSA which isn’t secret, but it might as well be, because no one knows about it. Fighting the NSA means digging into that information, and putting it out in the spotlight for everyone to see. There are two main ways to do that, one very easy and one slightly harder.
Strategy #1: Use Wikipedia to document the NSA When you call your Congressman, you get a 1x multiplier on the effort you put in. The secretary gets out his notebook, opens it to “NSA”, and puts down one little checkmark. One citizen opposed.
Wikipedia, on the other hand, is something everyone uses. Even a short, obscure Wikipedia article is read by thousands of people. A longer, more popular article is read by millions . That’s a much larger multiplier. Write once, read thousands or millions of times.
When a new story on the NSA comes out, whether it’s the Washington Post or a small-town newspaper, the information in that story should be documented in Wikipedia. Everyone reads Wikipedia. Putting everything in Wikipedia lets anyone know exactly who the NSA is, and exactly what they’re up to.
Have newspapers revealed a new spying program? Wikipedia should have an article on it. Are they talking about how a Congressman supports the NSA? That should be on his Wikipedia page. Is a big new court ruling in the news today? There should be an article on the decision, and if the people and programs affected by the decision have articles, it should be mentioned in those too. Just go to r/nsaleaks , or start searching for NSA stories, and find something which hasn’t been covered yet. Remember to include citations for anything you write about.
Some caveats. Most importantly, don’t start writing anti-NSA opinion pieces, like “this shows the NSA is terrible!” or “the NSA has no respect for American privacy!”. This violates Wikipedia policy, and it will quickly get deleted. Instead, just document the facts of what happened, in a dispassionate, neutral tone. Let the facts speak for themselves. Don’t editorialize. Remember: the NSA hates it when any information on them is in the public eye. Just putting it out there is more than enough; talking about how they’re evil on top of that just hurts your credibility.
Remember that any information you use must be from secondary sources , like newspapers, magazines, books, news websites, and so on. Primary sources — court documents, Snowden material, etc. — don’t count (we’ll get to those in strategy #2). Most of your citations should always be to secondary sources.
Lastly, if information on a topic is very sparse — if, for example, it’s only mentioned in one paragraph of one newspaper article — don’t create a separate Wikipedia article for it. Instead, just add it to an article on something else. (Conversely, try to split up an article if it’s overly long.)
Always follow Wikipedia policy , which you should take a little time to become familiar with. Maintain a neutral point of view , and make sure anything you write is backed up by a reliable source . The goal is to expose the facts , not to write political arguments (which will just draw angry counter-arguments). Remain focused on the goal.
Strategy #2: Write stories about the NSA If you have a little more time to dedicate, this technique is even more powerful. If you write pretty well, you can start writing news stories about the NSA and what it’s doing, effectively becoming a part-time journalist. This is much easier to do than you might think.
News sites — there are thousands of them, but let’s pick Huffington Post as an example — desperately want good content. The more content they have, the more visitors they get. And the more visitors they get, the more ad dollars go into their pocket. If you approach a news site with good, relevant content, and offer it to them for free, it won’t be that hard to get a “yes”. (Be sure to pick a real news organization with editorial oversight, not just some guy’s blog; blogs by random individuals have much less credibility.)
When you write about the NSA, you get triple the benefits. People will read your article. Then, other writers will incorporate your facts into their articles, and people read those too. And third, your article (a secondary source) will get used in places like Wikipedia (tertiary sources).
What should you write about? Again, most importantly, do not just start typing up angry opinion pieces. No one will read them, unless they already agree with you. To be a real secondary source, a serious journalist who keeps the NSA up at night, you must talk about new facts , facts which haven’t already been discussed in the major newspapers. This means looking at primary source material. There’s tens of thousands of pages of this stuff, from raw Snowden documents to court filings to speeches by politicians to FOIA requests and on and on and on. (Some secondary sources are good too, if they’re years old and everyone’s forgotten about them.) Just jump right in, pick something that interests you, and start reading up.
Even “boring” information can be of immense value in fighting the NSA. Some examples: What employee benefits does the NSA offer? What are the working conditions like? This is “boring”, but it’s one of the most important things someone will look for when deciding whether to apply there. A strong NSA requires very skilled employees.
What’s the NSA’s org chart? Who’s in charge? How are leaders selected? This is “boring”, but it’s key to understanding how the NSA operates and why it does what it does. The NSA didn’t just throw darts at a board, and say “hey, let’s start tapping everyone’s calls today”. Some person made that decision. Who might he have been? How did he get that job?
Legal documents are “boring”, but they’re of vital importance in figuring out how the NSA gets away with what it does. Most of the NSA’s legal reasoning for its surveillance is based on one 1979 case, Smith v. Maryland . This ruling is freely available online. Yet almost no one (me included!) has actually read it. What are its arguments, and how do they compare to arguments SCOTUS has either upheld or overturned in other cases?
An enormous pile of older, declassified documents becomes available for public inspection every year. This is “boring”, but these documents contain key arguments for reining in NSA abuses. What programs did the NSA have in 1990? ( Most documents are automatically declassified after 25 years.) How did they affect average Americans? How did the NSA abuse its authority? What lies were told back then, which we can expose now?
Expose everything, from the parking at NSA headquarters, to the construction firms that make NSA buildings; from what computers the NSA buys, to what programming languages they use; from how they hire and fire employees, to how they select contracting firms. Every new piece of data lessens the information asymmetry, and gives the NSA less power over us.
Other general advice: Remember to keep your own computers secure. Security expert Bruce Schneier has some excellent advice in How to Remain Secure Against the NSA .
Vote in the primary election. In the general election, you’ll probably have to choose between Bob who likes the NSA, and Joe who loves the NSA. The primary gives citizens much more influence.
If you signed the Aaron Swartz petition , or other White House petitions, explore filing class-action suit after the White House doesn’t respond. IANAL, but the WH’s own terms of service state that “the White House will respond to petitions…” which meet the stated, clearly defined criteria. Their failure to do so, in some cases even years afterward, seems like a clear breach of contract.