On July 4th 2013, tens of thousands of you from over 50 cities across the United States came out to protest unconstitutional surveillance. What began as online discussions between anonymous strangers over the Internet became in less than a month a coordinated nationwide movement that turned the heads of the American people and their government alike.
But while a great number of people have called these protests a success, they are correct only if we use these protests as a launching pad for further action. Unconstitutional surveillance methods like the NSA’s PRISM are still operating after the protests, as we knew they would be. We took a successful first step towards ending them, but now we must take the next one, which starts with studying the results of our work on the 4th so that we can capitalize on its successes and learn from its shortcomings.
On Turnout
We were pleased to find that approximately 20 000 protesters participated nationally and many cities (e.g. Boston, D.C., New York, San Francisco) reached close to 1000 – NYC, for instace, estimated 930-960. City-to-city, turnout varied from great to moderate to small. And it all made for some great photography.
The numbers might have and should have been larger, but any cynicism about the results would be misplaced. Most attempted protest movements fail to ever get tens of thousands of people, and most protest movements don’t start out as large as they eventually become. And so we will make this one larger, and staging our first set of protests on Thursday helped us do that.
Saying “Mission Accomplished” and moving onto other things would be silly and naive, because PRISM and other unconstitutional surveillance programs still exist. What we accomplished was bringing a significant amount of extra attention to this scandal and to our cause, and put together a great amount of experience, resources, and contacts for future work so that we can bring even more attention to unconstitutional surveillance and eventually end it. Even the smallest protests brought local media attention to this issue.
Media Impact
Your protests this week brought major local, national, and international media attention to our movement and, more importantly, to the issue of the Fourth Amendment and the unconstitutional surveillance that violates it.
According to analytics ordered for us by reddit GM Erik Martin, Restore the Fourth was referenced eight times Thurdsay on major national TV and radio stations (Bloomberg Radio, The Call, CNBC World, CNN, CNN International, and Fox News; and NPR twice) and 259 times on local TV and radio stations.
The print and online publications that ran one or more articles on us inlude BBC, The Boston Globe, CBC, CBS, Cnet, CNN, Fox News, The Gazette, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, International Business Times, LA Times, Mashable, Politico, Reuters, Time, The Times of India, RT, SF Gate, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Yahoo News, and Wikinews.
Other advocacy organizations that supported us with assistance or promotion or both include EFF, Fight for the Future, Internet Defense League, various Occupy Wall Street organizations (like these folks), PANDA, and stopwatching.us. (Surely I forgot some, so please email me to add you if I did). Politicians and celebrities that spoke out in suport include Rand Paul, Gary Johnson, Thomas Drake, and John Cusack. Support came from the left as well as the right as well as from every other direction and that is exactly what we wanted. Even the NSA itself found it suitable to take some notice and gave some support… for our first amendment rights. It’s a start?
According to Google Trends, by late June news and search traffic for “Fourth Amendment” had declined to less than 20% of what it had been when the NSA/PRISM scandal first broke, but shot up to more than 80% on the 4th, most likely largely because of our protests.
What all this means is that we succeded, at least temporarily, in preventing the media cycle and the attention of the American people from moving away from the Fourth Amendment and the violations of it that were revealed a month ago. This is a critical first step, because the country’s citizens can’t take action to stop a scandal they’ve forgotten about, and we have established our movement with a cultural presence and larger base of support that we can build off of. We’ve made real progress, and that’s something all of our participants should be really excited about, and proud of. But now we have to capitalize on that progress.
What comes next?
Restore the Fourth is a grassroots movement, and how we move forward is largely to be determined by what the various independent local organizers that conducted these protests want to do. So long as their work remains non-partisan, non-violent, and focused on ending unconstitutional surveillance, we will make it our job to provide them with the promotion and resources they need. Some are already beginning to plan their next event. Here are some of the interesting ideas for future projects that have been brought up by ourselves, local organizers, or the community:
– Planning, coordinating, and promoting future nationwide protests like those on July 4th.
– Planning, coordinating, and promoting a massive one-city protest in Washington D.C.
– Phone call, petitioning, and letter-writing campaigns directed towards both Congress and state governments.
– Exploring more local spheres of influence such as town hall meetings.
– Political lobbying in defense of the 4th Amendment.
– Legal action in defense of the 4th Amendment.
And here is some of what the Restore the Fourth national organization is spending the weekend doing:
– Working on bringing local organizers the level of direct involvement they should have had with the national organization a long time ago, and communicating with them about what we did right, what we did wrong, and what we should do next.
– Preparing additional information about who we are and how we function, for the benefit of both the public and our local organizers; much of this will be put on the website in stages in the coming days.
– Following up on all the talented people that offered to help us over the last week whom we didn’t have time to give the attention they deserved.
– Keeping up contact with with social media communities in order to receive additional ideas and feedback on how to move forward.
– Preparing a press release to be issued Monday morning.
– Researching how we can become – and raising funds to become – a permanent, ongoing organization dedicated to defending the 4th amendment and America from unconstitutional surveillance.
Becoming such an organization is going to require at least a modest level of funding, which we’re more than half way finished raising. So if you want to see such an organization be formed, please check out the indiegogo and consider helping out. I think the campaign lays out a pretty good case that we will use the funding effectively. Tell us what you think.
More information on the projects to be pursued throughout the summer will be made available over the upcoming week as we conference with local organizers. If you’re interested in volunteering either locally or nationally or both, please email organizing@restorethefourth.net with the relevant info and we will set you up.
Thank you so much to everyone who contributed to our efforts so far. Please keep in touch and keep involved, because this isn’t over.