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There you go.
Much better,
although a lot of it is designed for
talk of English harden and overcome
the knock off Deutsche, if you can all
kind of a so thanks for having
me.
My German, is there certain words
I still do not know as well, but as
mentioned, my name is Elizabeth Stark and
I am an open internet advocate.
I was one of many
people involved in the movement against
SOPA in the US.
And I want to tell you guys today about
some lessons that we learned in the
process and a bit about the story
of what happened.
So it all began in October
of 2011, when I got a phone call
from some of my friends who are internet
activists.
They told me about a bill that had just
been released by a guy
named Lamar Smith in Texas, in the House,
in the US, called the Stop Online Piracy
Act. No one had heard of it at the
time, but basically, after reading
up on the bill, we realized that this was
the worst bill we had seen
in over a decade of being involved
in internet advocacy.
So we called up our friends over at
Mozilla, including the general counsel
and one of the founders in the chair, and
we said that we needed to do something.
So we and a group of individuals
ranging from lawyers to
entrepreneurs to venture capitalists to
advocates and a lot of folks in between,
organized a meeting in early November
2011 at Mozilla's
headquarters in Mountain View, and we had
people on the phone from New York, D.C.
and ever in between.
And we had somebody there who was a
staffer for one of the congresspeople.
Zoe Lofgren is her name.
And we were told that this bill
was going to pass.
In fact, there were so many supporters,
including the firefighters union.
We were like, Why do the firefighters
care about this?
That if we didn't do something huge
and really huge, it would pass.
So we were given a tall task
and what we did was we decided at that
meeting to
organize. On November 16th
of 2011,
National Censorship Day, a day of protest
against SOPA
Fight for the Future, which is a group,
was quite involved in this and Tumblr.
Some of you guys may have heard of it
actually surprised us all by
creating this anti censorship
tool on their website, which ultimately
resulted in.
And here's the tool that they actually
ended up using to engage their users
in calling Congress in the end.
Over 80000 people on that day called
Congress, and we thought this was
amazing. The phone's ringing off the
hook. People are now understanding why
this bill was so dangerous and what was
wrong with it.
So then along comes December of
2011, when there was a hearing in
Congress. The markup hearing
and 200000 people turned
in tuned in to this
online, which frankly, I never watched a
congressional hearing. Lots of my friends
hadn't either. And yet on Twitter,
everyone I knew it seemed was watching
this hearing. And what was fundamentally
obvious to everybody that was tuned
in was that Congress did not
understand the internet.
In fact, it was so blatantly obvious
that the internet community finally woke
up to the fact that the people that were
regulating the internet in the US
did not understand really
any kind of technical aspects of it.
And we realized that it was no longer
OK for Congress not
to understand the internet.
That said, it also wasn't necessarily OK
for people on the internet side of things
and not at all understand how Congress in
the US works.
So during this hearing, a guy named Jared
Polis, he's out of Boulder, Colorado,
a representative. He's one of the few
people in Congress that does understand
the internet.
He's also a former entrepreneur
decided to troll Congress, really?
And the folks on the committee and what
he did was he decided that he was
going to propose an amendment because the
point of the hearing was to propose
amendments to the bill.
That said that, well, if we're so
concerned about piracy and so is
going to be used to censor the internet,
we shouldn't allow it to be used for
porn. Because really, do we want to use
government resources to help
pornographers?
So he actually, in the hearing
included the lyrics of
this song, which some of you may know
from Avenue Q
Finally, I get to teach a
whole lesson all by myself,
and I'm
going to teach something relevant,
something modern.
The internet.
The internet is really,
really great for porn.
So I don't have to.
For poor, there's always
some site or porn eyebrows
all day and night for porn.
It's like I'm surfing at the speed
of light.
Oh boy.
So he actually entered those words into
the congressional record.
People were concerned that the lyrics
might not be appropriate.
And then said that SOPA
would be a pornographers wet dream, and I
believe that was in the record.
So moving on to January,
in particular the Reddit
community, how many Redditors were in the
room, by the way? Raise your hands,
Redditors.
It's really not that many.
So they got together and decided
that they were going to organize a
protest, and what they were going to do
was to block out the Reddit site.
And for those Redditors that are in the
room, you know, the Reddit, it's
basically like crack.
So if you are not
able to access right of her day, that's
really giving up a lot.
And they came together and decided that
on January 18th, which is a day that a
hearing was scheduled, they were
going to organize a blackout.
By the way, later on, there were reports
that Reddit had not yet hired
any lobbyists for internet policy.
And I was like two people in the media
understand that Reddit is a bunch of
people and effectively a forum, and that
there's no way that Reddit is going to
hire lobbyists.
But anyway, so they came together and did
that as a community than the Wikipedia
community came together.
And again, as a community, not
merely some top down approach decided
that they were also going to block out
and organize a protest.
So on January 18th,
as you guys, a lot of you probably saw
and we had this massive internet blackout
and many teenagers
then ended up complaining that they
were not able to finish their
homework.
Little, little did they know,
by the way, you could actually access
Wikipedia from their mobile site or
disable it via JavaScript.
It really wasn't all that hard,
but the teenagers were mad and just
goes to show how useful Wikipedia is.
In all, on January 18th, we had
over 10 million people signed petitions.
Over eight million calls attempted.
Not all necessarily went through, but it
was clearly the largest protest in online
history, and people
in D.C. were really taken aback.
You can see here on January 18th,
there were quite a lot of people in
support of SOPA, and then as
that day progressed, they were dropping
like flies every few minutes.
We get a new email on these SOPA
email list of the people organizing the
protests as to who dropped
out. And by the end,
many more were not in support of it than
were.
In fact, on January 18th, we even had
people protesting in the streets.
And if you had told me a year beforehand
that people would be protesting a
copyright law and I'd been involved in
the copyright movement for nearly a
decade, I would never have believed you.
And yet it actually did happen.
And then moving on to Europe, as
a lot of folks here, I'm sure, know the
momentum spread to Acta
and this bill that I used to teach about
to my students at Yale, which was really
quite obscure. They might have read about
it merely because I made them became
mainstream and people knew about it and
people in Poland were protesting in
the streets.
Even the Polish parliament,
by the way, I wish the Congress in the
U.S. would do something nearly this cool,
but I think it's quite unlikely decided
to protest with Guy Fawkes masks.
So what were the lessons coming out of
this really unprecedented uprising
with SOPA?
Well, the first was that it's really
useful to have a rallying point,
something that people can wrap their
heads around.
For years, we in the open internet
movement had been trying to explain to
the world why things like this mattered.
But until we had a bill that threatened
the very nature of the open internet that
threatened to censor, that could pose all
sorts of technological issues with the
DNS system, we weren't
able to engage people and rally them.
So having this kind of rallying point and
a deadline of sorts, specifically when
there was a bill that was going to be
passed that we had to stop was incredibly
useful. We even on November 16th,
chose a somewhat arbitrary day.
There was going to be hearing, I think
that was then canceled to set up
this kind of protest online
and that also having this kind of
deadline. Think about a Kickstarter
campaign when the campaign is going to
run out. Well, we did something similar
with this open event.
The second is about means.
So evolutionary
biologist Richard Dawkins is
the originator actually of the term meme.
He used it to be
the cultural equivalent of a gene,
a cultural idea that mutates
in a way.
And I'm sure many of you are familiar
with, you know, the whole LOLCat thing.
I don't need to tell this crowd about
that. But what we saw with SOPA was that
it became a mean.
People took it and made it their own,
and they created all sorts of memes out
of SOPA that then spread.
So here's one example.
A long, long time
ago on the world's largest
network of interconnected computers,
those long cats used to make
me laugh,
and I knew I could make a joke
and not be sued by any
nasty folk on the
RIAA is
speedy half.
Then along came SOPA PIPA,
the internet's very own grim reaper.
Users could not edit
Ars Technica and Reddit,
Tumblr, Gawker, Hacker
News and something awful,
saying the Blues and every
log in was refused.
The day?
The LOL cats
died
while I had lots of
thing you can buy.
They got paid off, should be laid off
re election tonight
are web means more than lawyers,
lobbies
and lies to speak up before
the internet dies.
Speak up before the internet
I.
You write a
decent lot, you care
about copyright
at all.
Just win back your seat.
Johnson will be
keen to add your watch
the slow death of a Web,
and you'll be left with nothing
more to tweet.
Well, I know it's looking
pretty grim because they'll say
our culture limb from limb.
Much damn supports.
Well, this
law we must
support, but we
can't let lobbyists run amok
with our series of
tools and that big dump truck.
And I know some folks who want to give
the the day
the law casts.
I say, you know, why,
why philosophy you can buy big
up here now should be laid out free
election did not.
I that means more
than lawyers, lobbies and lies, so
speak up for the answer.
And I.
Why, why was it?
All right, I think you guys get the
picture, but
yeah, that that video got millions of
views and really
helped to spread the message.
So this is a T-shirt that a friend of
mine, Fred Benenson over a Kickstarter
made the blank, blank, SOPA
blank, blank, blank, stupid T-shirt.
I own one of these.
These super sunglasses,
another man that came out of it and my
favorite The Apprentice
never built on toilet paper.
This was like.
You know, this is a Kickstarter campaign,
and it didn't even get funded.
I should have funded it, but I think I
found out too late.
So the third lesson learned is one of
chaos. So the internet is decentralized
and distributed. I mean, the internet
that I want, although unfortunately,
we've seen it had in somewhat of a
different direction and it is chaotic.
And much like that, the movement against
SOPA was one of chaos.
We often didn't have our shit together.
People, you know, we're up all night.
Nobody knew what was going on.
But actually, in the end, that chaos
ended up helping us.
You know, the internet as a series of
tubes, kind of.
But that element
actually enabled us to have a
bottom up approach as opposed to on the
other side.
You know, the people have been lobbying
for over a century in the US
and around the world to get these types
of laws passed did not have
that strength in that base and
that ability to have these bottom
up movements.
The media after the super
protest love to say that it was Google
or that it was Silicon Valley executives
who organized it.
And frankly, you know, I was one of the
main folks behind it.
There were a core group of us, but
we were not that.
And of course, the media loves to create
a very convenient story that it was just
one big corporation.
And it's not just about corporations
sitting at a table and negotiating.
And until the internet users have a say
in the policy that will govern the very
internet, we will not
accept anything less.
So that's that's one thing that
the media more generally needs to learn
about the internet. And another thing was
that we as a movement had a big tent.
We had everyone from Republicans or
Democrats to libertarians to
the Tea Party, to the lefties,
everyone in between.
We had DFA of Mozilla,
Wikipedia, Tumblr, demand progress.
We had VC startups.
This was also the first time that say an
organization like Mozilla
with hundreds of millions of users for
their Firefox browser took a stance on
a policy issue.
We really saw that tech companies that
had felt strongly about these
issues and beforehand but didn't
necessarily do anything about it finally
took a step up and took action.
So that was incredibly beneficial.
And then another major lesson
was you can have all the money in the
world or not, really, but lots on the
other side. But the ability for people to
take action to do things like eight
million calls to Congress and
10 million people, signed petitions and
sent emails and whatnot really did
make a difference.
And while the other side, for example,
spent nearly an order of magnitude
almost 300 million over
two years to lobby for
these bills, and the tech companies spent
about, you know, 30,
the ability to engage people really
did make a difference
and matter.
So here we can see a variety of people
that ended up stopping SOPA
and what funding we did
after all of this was.
So Lamar Smith, the guy who was behind
SOPA and fought to the very end for it
was from Texas.
And you guys may know this famous poster
well. A few of us got together to create
a billboard that was actually in
Lamar Smith's district to send the
message to him and all sorts of people
that he should not mess with the internet
because he will be sorry.
So this brings us to the movement
against surveillance and the revelations
with the NSA, in particular, the group
stop watching us in which I'm involved.
So I don't need to tell you guys you all
know that.
Earlier this year in June, a guy
named Edward Snowden leaked some
documents starting with
PRISM and then many others.
And as a result,
a group of us, many of whom were involved
in the anti-doping movement, formed a
coalition called Stop Watching US,
Stop Watching US.
We have over
500 signatures,
500000 sorry signatures for
our 501 B, the money for a petition,
and we have groups ranging from again,
demand programs to fight for the future.
If I thought it works, read it and
many in between.
And we see here what came out of it.
This is the awesome protest organized
by folks when Obama visited Berlin
earlier this year, where they posed
as NSA surveillance and agents.
And we also have a group called Restore
the Forth, which came out
of the US in the wake
of the Snowden revelations.
They're specifically geared
toward restoring the ForcÃ©ment Fourth
Amendment in the U.S., and
they've held protests in over 70
cities across the US.
They had over 10000 people on July
4th and then thousands other
thousands more on August 4th,
and they've been involved in
the kind of grassroots movement to
protest NSA surveillance.
So earlier this summer, in July, a
guy named Justin Amash
out of Michigan, I'd never heard of him.
He's a young, a libertarian and
Republican congressperson decided
he was fed up with the kind of
surveillance that was going on and wanted
to make a splash.
So he proposed an amendment
called the Amash Amendment, although
there was also a guy named John Conyers
co-sponsoring it that would defund
the NSA's mass
surveillance of at least U.S.
citizens in the metadata collection
operating under Section 215.
So some of us involved and stop watching
us find out about this and we decided we
were going to organize naturally a
movement to support the amendment.
So basically, within twenty four hours,
we were able to throw aside a guy named
Antifa, put up an amazing site called
Defund the NSA,
and we were able to engage 15000
people and calling Congress
within 24 hours with this
kind of movement again. In many ways, it
was a mini SOPA of sorts.
And really, knowing that people can
make a difference that one call could
actually sway somebody on this issue
is essential for people to take action.
As you can see in this tweet, I tweeted
here. And in the end,
although it only failed by
seven votes, we were incredibly close
and we saw things like the Obama
administration issued a statement
against the amendment, which is very rare
because this was not even a bill that was
just an amendment to a bill,
which meant that they were really
worried. And the NSA actually set
up lobbying sessions to one for the
Democrats and one for the Republicans to
lobby against the amendment.
So basically, Washington woke up and
realized that they were in danger and
that we were going to get something
passed. So even though it failed by a
mere seven votes, it was actually
a victory as far as we were concerned.
And with the movement against
surveillance we've also seen means
much like with SOPA.
So here's the NSA coloring
book we're hey kids, you can fill
out your information and send it directly
to the NSA,
or you can see where
all of your data is and all your friends
are.
We also have a line that our fight for
the future send up. If you want to call
to stop the NSA directly.
Here's a phone line.
And then on October
26th of this past year, the 12th
anniversary of the Patriot Act, the
Stop Watching US Coalition organized
a protest against surveillance, a rally
against surveillance where we had people
like Bruce Schneier, Rep.
Justin Amash, Dennis Kucinich
was also a rubber representative, folks
from the EFL, from ACLU and
many others.
Speak up. We also had a statement from
Edward Snowden, and this
was that garnered thousands of people
and was considered a significant success
for those in you and Germany.
You had the
freedom, not fear rally in September,
which I understand had some 10000
odd people.
20000.
OK, yeah, it depends on the
on the account, but had tens of thousands
of people protesting in the street
against surveillance.
And now in the US, we
have actually a bill by the author
of the Patriot Act, Jim Sensenbrenner
called the USA Freedom Act
after the Snowden revelations.
We actually have had 30 some odd bills
proposed in Congress, and
this is the one that a lot of people
have gotten behind, particularly in our
community, because it has fairly
sweeping changes.
And we now in January,
in fact, to commemorate the
anniversary of the movement against SOPA
and the passing of our dear friend Aaron
Swartz.
We are organizing a major movement in
support of this bill.
So the bill would do things like end mass
surveillance, require transparency on
the part of the FISA court, on the part
of the companies that are getting
surveillance requests on the part of the
government to
announce how many people that they're
actually surveilling.
It would require that
a court order be used for
US citizen surveillance
from foreign courts in a variety
of other things now.
One thing that we as a movement in the US
do you realize is a lot of this is really
on the basis of U.S.
domestic citizens, and we need to do more
and we'll do more on behalf of the
international issues.
In fact, just in the past
few weeks, there was a commission
appointed by President Obama
to overhaul
the NSA surveillance process.
And frankly, this commission had five
people on the.
And they were basically considered to be
Obama's friends and buddies, and, you
know, no one thought they were going to
do anything radical, in fact.
One of the members had written so much as
wouldn't it be great if we could surveil
people's minds and knew what their
thoughts were? Well, that would be really
useful and knowing who had, you know,
possibly commit a terrorist attack.
But apparently, Obama was shocked
by the contents of this report because
it has over 300 pages, and he's bringing
it with him to Hawaii to read over the
holiday break and
contained recommendations along the lines
of again appointing a public advocate
to the FISA court to give
foreign citizens rights under the
US Privacy Act of 1974
and then changing the way that metadata
is collected, they would like it to be in
the hands of private
organizations. We as a movement wouldn't
accept that we want it to stop
full stop.
It also includes recommendations
along the lines of
engaging sorry.
It also includes recommendations
for people to
with regard to encryption and
zero days and whatnot to actually
not allow the government to keep those
without notifying corporations
and actually compromise the security of
a variety of individuals.
So in the end, I don't need to tell you
guys this, but Lawrence Lessig, the
famous legal academic, has
stated that code is law.
And really, even if there's law on the
books,
it's really code in the technology.
What's possible with technology can
supersede what's possible in the law, and
we've seen this with a lot of the
revelations around, for example, loveand
if any people heard about that where
people in the NSA were were actually
using the surveillance capabilities to
find out, you know what the people they
have a crush on are doing right because
that's the kind of thing we should allow.
So we, as a community need to step
up. And last night, with the year in
crypto, we heard this, you know, over and
over again, crypto needs to be usable.
So one thing that I feel very strongly
about and we as a movement do is that
we need to be able to engage
in communication without being
surveilled, and there are technological
means that can enable us to do that.
So I invite you and all
of us as a community to design tools
that you know, my mom and your
grandparents and everyone can actually
use and whereby they will
not be surveilled.
And ultimately, what this comes down to
is a broader question of the freedom
versus the control of information.
And we've seen within this movement
people like the RIAA, the MPAA and with,
for example, the
surveillance movement.
We are up against something even broader,
even bigger.
It's a huge governmental complex.
You know, they have billions upon
billions of dollars. They had political
support. You know, they have a massive
data center in Utah, whereas
we we have, you know, the internet, some
technologists and a whole lot of people.
But in the end, I strongly believe that
we as a community will win out
and it is our imperative and prerogative
as a group to ensure that this happens.
This fight is not one that
is going to come easily to
us. But I do think with the combination
of building better technology, enabling
people to communicate more securely
in an encrypted manner and engaging not
only in the US, but around the world
on these policy issues and political
issues. By protesting, by contacting
people in parliament,
by really letting people know that this
matters and that we care, that ultimately
we, the people that are supporting the
freedom of information, will win out.
And that is it. Thank you very much.
Questions.
We are having the session tomorrow
about stop octopus import.
Yeah.
OK.
And even though we're
kind of at the end of the time, I
don't know some question, I
definitely left time for questions.
Yes, I definitely will
allow questions.
And by the way, check out Stop Watching
US and demand progress at Orig, an
organization that I am on the board of
that has been very active on these
issues.
We've got four microphones in the room
and we've got a signal angel
who takes questions from the internet.
Yes, the first question, please.
OK.
I have a question about the role
of ALEC in
designing the laws that then
the lobbying on the corporate side
surround the American Legislative
Exchange Council.
Because from what
I understand, there are politicians
and corporate lobbyists getting together
a building prototype laws.
And I've recently found
out that even a number of members of
the European Parliament
are organized in ALEC
to push these things on both
sides of the Atlantic.
And what we're very concerned about is
that this is going to be used in
the free trade negotiations
between the US.
That a lot of the things that we
accomplished as citizens because
we have a somewhat functioning democracy
still in Europe are going to
be undermined in these free
trade things.
I think we need to share.
So I don't know that much about ALEC, but
more generally you make a very good
point. Right now, there's a law in the
US. While more internationally called the
Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade
agreement that was
for many years
not made public at all was completely
nontransparent, which, by the way, we as
citizens do not accept
the fact that our governments are
negotiating internationally on these
issues on behalf of us and not making any
of it transparent and then letting
corporations, you know, view
what the law is going to be and what the
agreements are going to be, but not the
citizens and the very people that will be
regulated. It's still shocking to me
how people and specifically the U.S.
government is getting away with this kind
of thing. But go on. Yeah, yeah.
Well, if you're not familiar with ALEC,
maybe offline, I can tell you a little
bit about it.
There is actually an organization in the
U.S. that is of publishing internal
documents.
And for several of
these things that we are concerned of as
citizens, they have published the
prototype legislation that
then is being introduced
in the states.
So this is something that's widespread in
the U.S., and I know that it happens
internationally as well.
But effectively what you have and this
also happened with SOPA is that there are
lobbying groups funded, not surprisingly,
by big corporations that want to see
these laws passed that effectively hand
the laws over to Congress people.
Lawrence Lessig, again, if you guys are
familiar with his work, has now shifted
to addressing this issue of corruption in
Congress.
And and then people will
introduce the law that was written by the
lobbyists that had zero input from,
say, the internet community whatsoever
into law. So this is a widespread problem
that it sounds like ALEC is involved
with.
Yeah. And in Europe and the European
Parliament, we need to watch it there,
too.
Thank you.
Do we have another question?
Questions from the internet?
We have two questions from the internet.
The first one is do you have like
an abstract formula for
winning the next battles?
That would be awesome, but I mean,
effectively, those five points, right,
that I mentioned in my talk.
So giving people something to wrap their
heads around is incredibly important.
For example, with SOPA for years, we had
said we need to protect the open
internet. But until there was a bill that
threatened that, it was harder, I think,
for people to organize and come together
and take action. Similarly, with
surveillance for years, people in the
movement knew that we were being
surveilled and they banned as they knew
everything. But it wasn't until Snowden
leaked his documents that people really
had something more tangible that they
could address. So that's certainly
important than having a kind of deadline
having a rallying cry,
something where people can anticipate
the deadline and get involved, and then
also enabling people to know that their
action can make a difference, which
I think what SOPA?
We saw that millions of people called
Congress and then we actually stopped it,
which was effective. So in January,
our hope is that we can use this formula
and model again to make a big difference
in getting a law passed, which, by the
way, something that people criticized
us or mentioned.
And I agree with this and the SOPA
movement is it's easy to say no, you
can always say no to something, but what
about engaging a more proactive
effort? So in this case, we're trying to
say yes to a bill and get it passed
and have significant reform
in that capacity.
Next question for the next one.
Yes.
So the next one is on the NSA
and the support from the
American or U.S.
American community.
So if you get behind the ball from the
father of the Patriot Act, that only
protects U.S.
citizens once you lose the majority
of supporters as it is good enough
for the U.S.
and like, does the typical U.S.
citizen care enough about spying
on the rest of the world?
So that's a great question, and that's a
debate that we've certainly had within
our community because all of us care
about this not only from the domestic
standpoint, but clearly on an
international standpoint.
And if we could only get reform where
U.S. citizens are not surveilled but the
rest of the world still is, then
we won't have really accomplished
all that much. That said,
there's a debate as to whether we should
go for an approach where we will stop
surveillance wholesale throughout the
entire world or whether it's better to
stop surveillance domestically first.
And I am of the mind and I think a
variety of us in the movement that
getting a bill like this passed, which by
the way, the USA Freedom Act now has over
100 co-sponsors, would have been
completely unthinkable prior
to Snowden's revelations
would actually be a huge step because it
would show Congress that we are not
willing to accept this kind of
surveillance.
There are other people in the community
that want something that's even broader.
But we we've chosen to take a pragmatic
approach and one where this
is a stepping stone to the kind of reform
that we want to see.
And by the way, the fact that the
presidential commission even said that
non-U.S. citizens should be given privacy
protections is huge because Americans
apparently don't seem to care very much
about people outside of the US and the
rest of the world.
So we certainly want to see
that kind of reform passed.
But we acknowledge that we need to
have certain steps before making
it a broader.
So any other questions?
Wow, that's.
One last, one more.
I think that's the fundamental difference
between the SOPA PIPA protests and the
post-Snowden protests
because SOPA people was about stopping
something from breaking the internet, so
to speak.
So there was a sense of urgency.
If we don't act by that day,
we will lose everything we had.
The Snowden situation is completely
different.
It's been going on for years.
That's OK.
That's this Sensenbrenner stuff
and another image and so on.
But this, in a way, no
clear deadline.
There's no sense of urgency for people
to. That's exactly
what state we will lose everything
because we've already lost everything.
We have to get it back.
So that's one.
Just a remark.
My question is whether on the role
of private companies and
so far, people, as far as I understand,
Google, for example, played quite a big
role and also
providing resources and so on for the
phone call stuff and whatever.
No, OK, that's what I thought.
Maybe you can put up on these
companies involved in the.
That's a good comment as a activities
at the moment
to her comments, the reason why we're
organizing this big day of action in
January for the USA Freedom Act
is exactly that. It's to create this kind
of urgency.
And even though we don't even know
when the bill will go into committee and
get passed, so we're aware of that,
that's a great question about the role of
private companies with SOPA.
We did have Google on board.
We had a lot of technology companies,
even Mark Zuckerberg tweeted,
you know, in support of the protests.
So against SOPA itself.
We haven't necessarily had the same
actually in the movement against
surveillance. And my theory is because
this doesn't as directly
impact a lot of the technology
companies, although we have seen
recently. A few weeks ago there was a
letter from Facebook, Google,
Microsoft and a variety of other major
tech companies stating that this
could hurt their business, and there were
reports that U.S.
Cloud and other tech companies could lose
over thirty five billion in sales
in the next two years.
But we haven't actually seen as much
of involvement would
say, but there are lots of VCs and
investors involved, and we haven't
had that here, but we can do it without
them and hopefully they'll get involved
as well. But you're right that there
there has not been this kind of
involvement on their behalf.
That said, we do have read it and thought
works and other great companies involved
and stop watching us.
Oh, well, thank you very much.
Thank you.
We've run out of time.