Mystery of NSA billboards solved: BitTorrent 'fesses up

The mystery of Silicon Valley's National Security Agency billboard was solved when San Francisco-based BitTorrent, a decentralized file-sharing service that swaps bits of pieces of files between users' computers, revealed that it was behind the campaign.

The billboard along US 101 read: "Your data should belong to the NSA." The company also placed a billboard in New York City that read: "The Internet should be regulated." In a blog post, the company said it wanted to make a point about people's casual acceptance of the trade-offs between privacy and security. "We put these billboards up last week in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco," wrote Matt Mason, BitTorrent's vice president of marketing, "because we wanted to remind the world what’s at stake on the world wide web." The company's bottom line was clear: BitTorrent lets users and artists maintain control over their information rather than big corporations and the government. "This is the generation that will decide whether the Internet is a tool for control, or a platform for innovation and freedom," Mason wrote. “A free, open Internet is a force for change, creativity; the backbone of a society where citizens are stakeholders, not data sets.”