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NSA Spying Has Turned Silicon Valley Into a Political Machine

It’s a rare political moment for the nation’s tech capital, as the techno-libertarian fantasy of keeping government at arm’s length crashes into the hard realities of the government’s dragnet data collections.
Photo Credit: slworking2/Flickr

Public outrage over the federal government’s surveillance programs reached a fever pitch last week, with revelations that the National Security Administration illegally collected tens of thousands of non-terrorism-related emails from U.S. citizens, in clear violation of the U.S. Constitution. With no end to the NSA bombshells in sight, at least some members of Congress appear to have grudgingly accepted that they are going to have to do something about the government’s expansive spying programs.

At the center of this political struggle is Silicon Valley, where programmers, hackers, engineers, and startup founders are leading the vanguard of opposition to NSA surveillance. It’s a rare political moment for the nation’s tech capital, as the techno-libertarian fantasy of keeping government at arm’s length comes crashing into the hard realities of the government’s dragnet data collections.

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“A lot of us are kind of coalescing and realizing that yes, we do need to do something about this,” said Jonathan Nelson, the creator of Hackers and Founders, a startup network based in Silicon Valley. “There are 900,000 open-source developers around the globe, and we are all talking to each other. So there is a lot of discussion now about how we should stop just complaining to each other online, and actually talk to DC in a way that ensures they hear us.”

With 10,000 members in California’s Bay Area and 56,000 in 36 chapters worldwide, Hackers and Founders is primarily focused on helping tech entrepreneurs obtain funding and make connections with other companies and investors. But increasingly, Nelson says, the organization is devoting its resources to advocacy, filling a leadership void on political issues that affect the tech community, like immigration reform, patent reform, and online privacy.

Revelations about the NSA’s surveillance programs — and particularly the PRISM system, whereby major tech companies like Google, Yahoo, and Facebook hand over user data to the federal government — have driven home the realization that the interests of the tech community are not always aligned. As reports roll out about the extent of the NSA’s Internet spying programs, Nelson and other tech activists are now mobilizing to their own networks to lobby Congress to rein in mass surveillance and demand more transparency for the government’s data collection systems.

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“What’s happening now is one of our worst nightmares,” Nelson told me. “The entire Internet economy is based on trusted communications and data storage. We spent all of the ‘90s trying to build up trust for the Internet. Now the Internet is trustworthy, sure, but the government gets access to all of it.”

In many ways, Silicon Valley techies are the logical leaders of the push to curb Internet surveillance. More than the average American (or member of Congress, for that matter), hackers, programmers, and tech entrepreneurs understand the flaws of the NSA’s data collection programs. As software wunderkind Patrick Collison points out in this blog post, industry insiders know that data is never truly anonymous, that there is rarely a distinction between data and metadata, and that data is almost never used “only for its originally intended purpose.”

“The response has been a collective technical headshake,” said Craig Montouri, founder of the Silicon Valley lobbying startup PolitiHacks. “Either the systems — or the people — aren't working as well as they could be, or the justifications for the program that the NSA and the Obama administration have given us aren't completely true.”

Since the 2011 SOPA protests, it’s been an open question whether “The Internet” could become a political interest group in its own right. Past attempts to mobilize—around issues like net neutrality or cell phone unlocking—have failed to attract much interest outside of the tech world. In contrast, the NSA has marked a milestone in the political maturation of the Valley, giving techies the time and national platform they need to develop grassroots organizing tools that can actually move Washington, and make them a force to be reckoned with in politics.

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“What we’re seeing now is that, particularly with developers, things like the NSA spying issue are really starting to hit home,” said Sina Khanifar, a tech entrepreneur and the creator of Taskforce.is, a grassroots network of programmers and digital rights advocates. “In the last few months, there has been way more interest in politics, and specifically NSA surveillance, than ever before.”

In the two months since Edward Snowden’s initial leaks, Khanifar’s organization has spearheaded a range of online activism around the NSA surveillance issue, including websites like StopWatching.us and DefundTheNSA.com. Khanifar is now calling on programmers in his network to build an Internet Rapid Response Team that will use their tech-savvy to create sign-up pages, tools to mail and call representatives, mobile apps, and live-updating capabilities.

“Ninety-five percent of our programmers have never been politically active before,” Khanifar said. “We want to use the skills that they have to help make online activism a lot easier, and make it so that people who are running a campaign online are more successful and involved.”

On the NSA issue, Khanifar and other technologists have banded together with private companies like Mozilla and organizations from across the political spectrum, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, civil liberties advocates, progressive groups like Free Press and Demand Progress, and right-leaning activists from organizations like Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty and Freedom Works. While these groups have worked together on other internet freedom issues, activists say that the Stop Watching Us coalition has been more organized and unified, as organizations share ideas, technology, and traditional grassroots political tactics they can use to mobilize the public against government spying.

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“There is finally a sense that we can win this one,” said Montouri. “And nobody wants to be the one who screws that up.”

The movement got its first taste of victory last month with the narrow defeat of Michigan Republican Rep. Justin Amash’s amendment to defund the NSA’s bulk collection of phone metadata. The Stop Watching Us coalition mobilized to lobby representatives, launching the DefundTheNSA site and ultimately sending thousands of emails and petitions to congressional offices in the 48 hours leading up to the vote. While the amendment failed, it also garnered more votes than anyone expected, and activists say they expect similar legislation will pass when Congress resumes this fall.

“We heard about the Amash amendment less than 48 hours before it came up for a vote, and we still got more votes in favor of that amendment than for any other proposal to rein in surveillance from the Patriot Act,” said Rainey Reitman, activism director for EFF.  “That was a real game-changing moment. If we had two weeks to go out to our list and get them to call their representatives, we would have won. With enough organizing time, we can really rein this in in a substantial way.”

Tech advocates know that they are in for a long haul. But unlike with SOPA, where Congress caught the tech world off-guard, this time, they have now built up networks and tools that will allow them to keep pushing Congress, beyond any one piece of legislation.

“This is the start of a long process that will continue over many decades,” Khanifar said. “Government attempts to control the internet aren't going away anytime soon, so it’s going to be up to technologists to really come together around this issue.”