What the Mainstream Media Doesn't Understand About the Road to a Society without Mass Surveillance

[Commentary] Stopping and reversing mass surveillance requires a massive public response, with leaders within government, within the leading nonprofits, and at the top of industry taking part. Whether or not the anti-National Security Agency organizing will succeed remains an open question, but it can't happen overnight. All online organizing is now, understandably, frequently compared to the effort to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act. Yet sparse media coverage of the anti-SOPA cause means people remember the protests against that bill as a one-day affair -- a blackout by major web platforms -- even though the blackout was the end of two years of organizing, privately and publicly.