7 ms·

The Day We Fought Back: By The Numbers

155 points by sinak 13y ago

throwaway5eyes 13y ago
Nothing will change. This campaign was a complete waste of everyones time. You would be better off spending the money on developing new encryption solutions, antiforensic tools, anonymity networks and legal defenses for those caught in their snares. The five eyes will never stop their global surveillance of planet Earth. Learn to work around it, not complaining to government to make things change. Technology never regresses. You poor bastards ain't seen nothing yet.
- GhotiFish 13y ago
  Lots of technology is ready to go, people just arn't using it. So it's more a fight for a will than for a way.
dpweb 13y ago
Could you devote 100% of the effort focused on only one goal - pressuring Google or Facebook to put up the banner. Then, in 1 day, a billion people see the banner. The email, phone support is then invariably much higher.
suprgeek 13y ago
The NY times article got a very basic point wrong. Q: How do you judge the success of the campaign to raise awareness by calling congress people? A: By the number of calls/contacts made. Instead they compared it to the SOPA protest that "stopped" the bills and hence declared it a failure. The goal of raising awareness was most certainly achieved (because the frikkin NYT wrote a whole article about it) This is just the first salvo in a long war - no need to declare victors & losers already.
- blottsie 13y ago
  The reason the NYTimes author (and others) compared 'The Day We Fight Back" to the SOPA protests is likely because 'The Day We Fight Back' used the success against SOPA as its primary example of what online protests can do. The campaign set SOPA as the benchmark, not The New York Times. Its website, before the current updated version, repeatedly evoked the defeat of SOPA as the measuring stick. It did so in the text on the site and the promotional video. Even the name "The Day We Fight Back" implies that this is a fight that can be won in a day. Supporters later pointed out that this is a long war, not a fight for a day. But the initial promotion of this campaign did little to encourage people to take this fight and make it part of their lives for the foreseeable future. And the fact that supporters are justifying the legitimacy and effectiveness of this campaign by citing one-day numbers only furthers the notion that a single day can make a difference in what will inevitably be an ongoing battle for the rest of our lives.
  - sinak 13y ago
    Setting a specific date for the action was wrong. In reality it was critical to getting any participation at all. If we'd have themed this as "Fight Back For The Foreseeable Future," I assure you we'd have gotten very little participation. Any large movement is made up of a series of smaller actions. For example, in the buildup to SOPA we had Internet Censorship Day in November, the Godaddy boycott in December, and then the blackout in January. To see this on a larger scale, simply skim the timeline of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 [1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2011_Egyptian_revolution_under_Hosni_Mubarak%27s_rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2011_Egyptian_r...
- hammerzeit 13y ago
  The reason so many campaigns use "raising awareness" as a goal is because it is trivially, almost tautologically achievable. Let's say the numbers were 10% of what they are. Hey, raised awareness, success! Let's say they were 10x what they are. Hey, awareness! Furthermore, to be more brutal about this, I think "getting an article in the NYT" can no longer be a success outcome for awareness in a world with such fast attention cycles. There's an adage in politics that an issue has to be in the press for something like 5 consecutive days for it to have real electoral impact. Seems like that is more akin to the target here. Yes, it means we can't automatically declare victory, but it also defines a victory that's earned.
  - VBprogrammer 13y ago
    I'd be willing to bet that the article was written on the 11th or even before that. The campaign started with a nearly impossible goal, unless Obama himself had come out to declare surrender, they were always going to be able to print that.
__david__ 13y ago
So, as a person who decided to put the banner up on a couple of the sites that I run/co-run, I'm curious if I actually made an impact, and which sites have more politically actionable users. Did you collect analytics about calls and which domains they came from? I would be curious to see what sites generated the most calls/emails or the best call/email ratio or the best action/view ratio. Is that possible, or would that be too… privacy violate-y?
codex 13y ago
In other words, this campaign had the viewership of about one moderately popular YouTube video.
- bendoernberg 13y ago
  You think a video with 37,000,000 views is moderately popular? Looks like the most popular YouTube videos of the past 2 days all have under 6m views, so you're not even remotely accurate. https://www.youtube.com/channel/HCuSJLMmGCP94/videos?sort=p&view=4&flow=list&live_view=500 https://www.youtube.com/channel/HCuSJLMmGCP94/videos?sort=p&...
  - codex 13y ago
    A banner impression is not the same thing as watching a video; not at all. A banner impression has very little value. It's more accurate to look at page views.
  - stevewilhelm 13y ago
    A banner impression is a vanity metric.
rdl 13y ago
I had kind of low expectations for this (because it's creating artificial time pressure on a long-term issue, which is necessary, but very difficult), and was amazed by how well it went. Congratulations. It was kind of awesome calling a rep and being told "oh, she is an original co-sponsor of the legislation you're calling about...". It's pretty clear this is going to be a sustained battle through the press, in the courts, through the legislature (especially in 2014 and 2016 elections), and in technology development. Thanks for this step!
tool 13y ago
Every time I see anything related to this bullshit campaign it ruins my entire day. Such a bunch of fucking hypocrites. People with no understanding of internet and/or privacy, pretending to care about privacy.
- bendoernberg 13y ago
  Very apt username you have there
sinak 13y ago
I wrote my thoughts on the New York Times's "The Day The Internet Didn't Fight Back" article here: http://sina.is/thoughts-about-tdwfb/ http://sina.is/thoughts-about-tdwfb/ tl;dr The NYT post was inaccurate in lots of ways. It's true that Tuesday was much smaller than SOPA. But judging campaign success by the most important online activist moment in history sets an almost impossibly high bar. Also, SOPA didn't just happen, it was built up to. American Censorship Day happened 2 months before and was much smaller.
- jonnathanson 13y ago
  "Also, SOPA didn't just happen, it was built up to." That's one of the biggest points missed by the NYT piece, in my opinion. To play devil's advocate, I do think it raised a good point: namely, that this particular fight is more abstract in the public eye. But in the set of all possible points to be made about TDWFB, that was a relatively minor one. SOPA and PIPA had much higher general awareness before the blackouts, and the blackouts were built up to for weeks on end. (Maybe even months, judging from a quick look back at my own HN history from the time.)
seizethecheese 13y ago
Raw numbers are meaningless to people. Do I really have a good sense of the difference between 25 million views and 50 million? Why not show us what percentage of internet users saw a banner that day? What percentage of those seeing a banner called their congressman?
- rkuykendall-com 13y ago
  The problem is that only a certain of percentage of Americans can legally vote, only a percentage of those (50%-60%) will actually vote, and a much smaller percentage of those will ever vote outside their party line (swing voters). So the percentage of Americans is small, but the impact may be much larger. Or it might be much smaller. Who knows.
  - IgorPartola 13y ago
    Aside: I would vote outside of party lines. However, I am forced to choose a very slightly smaller evil at every turn. Democrats gave me a president that started doing smart things for the economy and rights of minorities, yet brought about drone strikes, codified the Wild West that arose from the Bush era and allowed the NSA to blossom further. The Republicans gave me a non functioning Congress and a presidential candidate unable to pull his head out of his ass. No other party matters unless you live in a specific district where an old time independent is an incumbent.
    - bzbarsky 13y ago
      As far as I can tell, Obama has been basically ignoring the economy as much as he can get away with. Especially the parts of it he directly controls, like who's on the Fed's Board of Governors (where it took him a year to get around to even nominating anyone for the two positions that were empty at the start of his first term). As a result, during the most critical part of the recession the FOMC was made up of 5 regional bank presidents and 5 appointed governors, instead of the 7 appointed governors it should have had, and therefore Fed policy was much more strongly biased towards the bank presidents than it should have been. The rest of your analysis is about right, though. > No other party matters And both of the incumbent parties write legislation to make sure it stays that way...
ChrisAntaki 13y ago
Keep in mind, for many people, the scariest thing about this whole mass surveillance issue is the potential to blackmail elected officials. It takes courage for them to stand up to something like the NSA. We need to show our reps we have their backs. 89,000 calls is pretty impressive.
- dmix 13y ago
  Anyone who doesn't believe this needs to watch Client 9 [1] about Eliot Spitzer. It's very convincing that someone powerful targetted him for his anti-wallstreet policies and sought to catch him with a high paid prostitute. The weird part starts happening when they interview the madam and brothel hustlers who she hired, and find out tons of famous politicians and Wall st execs uses them... but noone else got brought down despite all the private investigations, wiretaps, and FBI investigations, except the one guy pissing off people in power. Now in 2014 we're back down to nearly zero reputable prominent people in office calling out Wall st or political corruption. Except maybe the crazy fringe types like Rand Paul. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1638362/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1638362/
  - nrao123 13y ago
    It is not only the fringe. It's almost a rite of passage for ambitious prosecutors/attorney generals to take on Wall Street and/or corruption. Guiliani, Spitzer & now Bharara (he took the lead on Galleon, SAC, etc)
  - logicchains 13y ago
    It's hardly productive to call crazy one of the very few senators who has consistently and without compromise opposed the kind of things the fightback in question was referring to. It's no wonder America's in the state it is, when someone is called crazy for opposing war, but the presidents who readily kill children and innocents by proxy (drones) are seen as perfectly sane.
  - f_salmon 13y ago
    That movie was a real eye opener. M: 10/10
algorias 13y ago
Seeing the numbers like that does make me realize what a huge deal this was. I hope this will be the start of a movement truly bringing positive change. I wish there was something meaningful for me to do, as a non-american, to help this campaign. It's only sane to assume that surveillance efforts similar to those of the US exist in most other countries, but it's hard to act when no concrete information is available.
- tripzilch 13y ago
  Sign the thing at https://necessaryandproportionate.net/ https://necessaryandproportionate.net/ and check out which of the international sponsoring organisations are near you, visit their websites and see how you can help and/or donate. For instance, for me that is Bits of Freedom in NL. They do good things and provide tangible local things to do, help with, or raise awareness about.
winslow 13y ago
I think this was very important for them to publish. With the articles yesterday coining the term "The Day The Internet Didn't Fight Back" and even personally feeling like we failed a bit after seeing the initial numbers. This changes my perception that we had a bigger impact than I initially thought. Definitely a strong step forward.
ufo 13y ago
The website looks depressing if you have Javascript disabled: 0 people saw the banner; 0 emails sent; 0 signatures ...
- brubaker 13y ago
  Luckily most people avoid making the modern web entirely useless by disabling javascript.
- sammularczyk 13y ago
  My bad. Should've picked that up, all fixed now
- crystaln 13y ago
  Fortunately anyone with Javascript disabled needs no convincing.
slg 13y ago
Does anyone know if any politicians have publicly stated a change of opinion after the protest? In the wake of the SOPA/PIPA protest, there were a lot of politicians who came out against those bills who were either supporting it or neutral before the protests. Isn't that, not something like raw number of tweets, the true watermark for success or failure?
k0 13y ago
Truth, I must be an ostrich...I had not heard of this campaign nor was it on my radar or in my inbox. SOPA was something I heard about, was on my radar, and was in my inbox. I fail at knowing what the NYT thinks I should know (but I was all about Stop SOPA (but please use soap)).
rblatz 13y ago
America has a population of 317+ million. Somewhere between .33% to .66% of America's population even bothered to click through to the day we fight back site. And we all know that is generous, a large portion of those visits were most likely from people outside of the US. Even if they were all from citizens of the US it's still a super tiny minority of people who even were aware of this. I wish it was better, but frankly it was the day that we didn't care.
dbroockman 13y ago
We know from randomized trials on legislators that calls do work in changing their positions. http://themonkeycage.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/bergancole.pdf http://themonkeycage.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/berganco... 89k is actually a very large number.

155 points by sinak 13y ago

Nothing will change. This campaign was a complete waste of everyones time. You would be better off spending the money on developing new encryption solutions, antiforensic tools, anonymity networks and legal defenses for those caught in their snares. The five eyes will never stop their global surveillance of planet Earth. Learn to work around it, not complaining to government to make things change. Technology never regresses. You poor bastards ain't seen nothing yet.

GhotiFish 13y ago
Lots of technology is ready to go, people just arn't using it. So it's more a fight for a will than for a way.

dpweb 13y ago

Could you devote 100% of the effort focused on only one goal - pressuring Google or Facebook to put up the banner. Then, in 1 day, a billion people see the banner. The email, phone support is then invariably much higher.

suprgeek 13y ago

The NY times article got a very basic point wrong. Q: How do you judge the success of the campaign to raise awareness by calling congress people? A: By the number of calls/contacts made. Instead they compared it to the SOPA protest that "stopped" the bills and hence declared it a failure. The goal of raising awareness was most certainly achieved (because the frikkin NYT wrote a whole article about it) This is just the first salvo in a long war - no need to declare victors & losers already.

blottsie 13y ago
The reason the NYTimes author (and others) compared 'The Day We Fight Back" to the SOPA protests is likely because 'The Day We Fight Back' used the success against SOPA as its primary example of what online protests can do. The campaign set SOPA as the benchmark, not The New York Times. Its website, before the current updated version, repeatedly evoked the defeat of SOPA as the measuring stick. It did so in the text on the site and the promotional video. Even the name "The Day We Fight Back" implies that this is a fight that can be won in a day. Supporters later pointed out that this is a long war, not a fight for a day. But the initial promotion of this campaign did little to encourage people to take this fight and make it part of their lives for the foreseeable future. And the fact that supporters are justifying the legitimacy and effectiveness of this campaign by citing one-day numbers only furthers the notion that a single day can make a difference in what will inevitably be an ongoing battle for the rest of our lives.
- sinak 13y ago
  Setting a specific date for the action was wrong. In reality it was critical to getting any participation at all. If we'd have themed this as "Fight Back For The Foreseeable Future," I assure you we'd have gotten very little participation. Any large movement is made up of a series of smaller actions. For example, in the buildup to SOPA we had Internet Censorship Day in November, the Godaddy boycott in December, and then the blackout in January. To see this on a larger scale, simply skim the timeline of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 [1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2011_Egyptian_revolution_under_Hosni_Mubarak%27s_rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2011_Egyptian_r...
hammerzeit 13y ago
The reason so many campaigns use "raising awareness" as a goal is because it is trivially, almost tautologically achievable. Let's say the numbers were 10% of what they are. Hey, raised awareness, success! Let's say they were 10x what they are. Hey, awareness! Furthermore, to be more brutal about this, I think "getting an article in the NYT" can no longer be a success outcome for awareness in a world with such fast attention cycles. There's an adage in politics that an issue has to be in the press for something like 5 consecutive days for it to have real electoral impact. Seems like that is more akin to the target here. Yes, it means we can't automatically declare victory, but it also defines a victory that's earned.
- VBprogrammer 13y ago
  I'd be willing to bet that the article was written on the 11th or even before that. The campaign started with a nearly impossible goal, unless Obama himself had come out to declare surrender, they were always going to be able to print that.

__david__ 13y ago

So, as a person who decided to put the banner up on a couple of the sites that I run/co-run, I'm curious if I actually made an impact, and which sites have more politically actionable users. Did you collect analytics about calls and which domains they came from? I would be curious to see what sites generated the most calls/emails or the best call/email ratio or the best action/view ratio. Is that possible, or would that be too… privacy violate-y?

codex 13y ago

In other words, this campaign had the viewership of about one moderately popular YouTube video.

bendoernberg 13y ago
You think a video with 37,000,000 views is moderately popular? Looks like the most popular YouTube videos of the past 2 days all have under 6m views, so you're not even remotely accurate. https://www.youtube.com/channel/HCuSJLMmGCP94/videos?sort=p&view=4&flow=list&live_view=500 https://www.youtube.com/channel/HCuSJLMmGCP94/videos?sort=p&...
- codex 13y ago
  A banner impression is not the same thing as watching a video; not at all. A banner impression has very little value. It's more accurate to look at page views.
- stevewilhelm 13y ago
  A banner impression is a vanity metric.

rdl 13y ago

I had kind of low expectations for this (because it's creating artificial time pressure on a long-term issue, which is necessary, but very difficult), and was amazed by how well it went. Congratulations. It was kind of awesome calling a rep and being told "oh, she is an original co-sponsor of the legislation you're calling about...". It's pretty clear this is going to be a sustained battle through the press, in the courts, through the legislature (especially in 2014 and 2016 elections), and in technology development. Thanks for this step!

tool 13y ago

Every time I see anything related to this bullshit campaign it ruins my entire day. Such a bunch of fucking hypocrites. People with no understanding of internet and/or privacy, pretending to care about privacy.

bendoernberg 13y ago
Very apt username you have there

sinak 13y ago

I wrote my thoughts on the New York Times's "The Day The Internet Didn't Fight Back" article here: http://sina.is/thoughts-about-tdwfb/ http://sina.is/thoughts-about-tdwfb/ tl;dr The NYT post was inaccurate in lots of ways. It's true that Tuesday was much smaller than SOPA. But judging campaign success by the most important online activist moment in history sets an almost impossibly high bar. Also, SOPA didn't just happen, it was built up to. American Censorship Day happened 2 months before and was much smaller.

jonnathanson 13y ago
"Also, SOPA didn't just happen, it was built up to." That's one of the biggest points missed by the NYT piece, in my opinion. To play devil's advocate, I do think it raised a good point: namely, that this particular fight is more abstract in the public eye. But in the set of all possible points to be made about TDWFB, that was a relatively minor one. SOPA and PIPA had much higher general awareness before the blackouts, and the blackouts were built up to for weeks on end. (Maybe even months, judging from a quick look back at my own HN history from the time.)

seizethecheese 13y ago

Raw numbers are meaningless to people. Do I really have a good sense of the difference between 25 million views and 50 million? Why not show us what percentage of internet users saw a banner that day? What percentage of those seeing a banner called their congressman?

rkuykendall-com 13y ago
The problem is that only a certain of percentage of Americans can legally vote, only a percentage of those (50%-60%) will actually vote, and a much smaller percentage of those will ever vote outside their party line (swing voters). So the percentage of Americans is small, but the impact may be much larger. Or it might be much smaller. Who knows.
- IgorPartola 13y ago
  Aside: I would vote outside of party lines. However, I am forced to choose a very slightly smaller evil at every turn. Democrats gave me a president that started doing smart things for the economy and rights of minorities, yet brought about drone strikes, codified the Wild West that arose from the Bush era and allowed the NSA to blossom further. The Republicans gave me a non functioning Congress and a presidential candidate unable to pull his head out of his ass. No other party matters unless you live in a specific district where an old time independent is an incumbent.
  - bzbarsky 13y ago
    As far as I can tell, Obama has been basically ignoring the economy as much as he can get away with. Especially the parts of it he directly controls, like who's on the Fed's Board of Governors (where it took him a year to get around to even nominating anyone for the two positions that were empty at the start of his first term). As a result, during the most critical part of the recession the FOMC was made up of 5 regional bank presidents and 5 appointed governors, instead of the 7 appointed governors it should have had, and therefore Fed policy was much more strongly biased towards the bank presidents than it should have been. The rest of your analysis is about right, though. > No other party matters And both of the incumbent parties write legislation to make sure it stays that way...

ChrisAntaki 13y ago

Keep in mind, for many people, the scariest thing about this whole mass surveillance issue is the potential to blackmail elected officials. It takes courage for them to stand up to something like the NSA. We need to show our reps we have their backs. 89,000 calls is pretty impressive.

dmix 13y ago
Anyone who doesn't believe this needs to watch Client 9 [1] about Eliot Spitzer. It's very convincing that someone powerful targetted him for his anti-wallstreet policies and sought to catch him with a high paid prostitute. The weird part starts happening when they interview the madam and brothel hustlers who she hired, and find out tons of famous politicians and Wall st execs uses them... but noone else got brought down despite all the private investigations, wiretaps, and FBI investigations, except the one guy pissing off people in power. Now in 2014 we're back down to nearly zero reputable prominent people in office calling out Wall st or political corruption. Except maybe the crazy fringe types like Rand Paul. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1638362/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1638362/
- nrao123 13y ago
  It is not only the fringe. It's almost a rite of passage for ambitious prosecutors/attorney generals to take on Wall Street and/or corruption. Guiliani, Spitzer & now Bharara (he took the lead on Galleon, SAC, etc)
- logicchains 13y ago
  It's hardly productive to call crazy one of the very few senators who has consistently and without compromise opposed the kind of things the fightback in question was referring to. It's no wonder America's in the state it is, when someone is called crazy for opposing war, but the presidents who readily kill children and innocents by proxy (drones) are seen as perfectly sane.
- f_salmon 13y ago
  That movie was a real eye opener. M: 10/10

algorias 13y ago

Seeing the numbers like that does make me realize what a huge deal this was. I hope this will be the start of a movement truly bringing positive change. I wish there was something meaningful for me to do, as a non-american, to help this campaign. It's only sane to assume that surveillance efforts similar to those of the US exist in most other countries, but it's hard to act when no concrete information is available.

tripzilch 13y ago
Sign the thing at https://necessaryandproportionate.net/ https://necessaryandproportionate.net/ and check out which of the international sponsoring organisations are near you, visit their websites and see how you can help and/or donate. For instance, for me that is Bits of Freedom in NL. They do good things and provide tangible local things to do, help with, or raise awareness about.

winslow 13y ago

I think this was very important for them to publish. With the articles yesterday coining the term "The Day The Internet Didn't Fight Back" and even personally feeling like we failed a bit after seeing the initial numbers. This changes my perception that we had a bigger impact than I initially thought. Definitely a strong step forward.

ufo 13y ago

The website looks depressing if you have Javascript disabled: 0 people saw the banner; 0 emails sent; 0 signatures ...

brubaker 13y ago
Luckily most people avoid making the modern web entirely useless by disabling javascript.
sammularczyk 13y ago
My bad. Should've picked that up, all fixed now
crystaln 13y ago
Fortunately anyone with Javascript disabled needs no convincing.

slg 13y ago

Does anyone know if any politicians have publicly stated a change of opinion after the protest? In the wake of the SOPA/PIPA protest, there were a lot of politicians who came out against those bills who were either supporting it or neutral before the protests. Isn't that, not something like raw number of tweets, the true watermark for success or failure?

k0 13y ago

Truth, I must be an ostrich...I had not heard of this campaign nor was it on my radar or in my inbox. SOPA was something I heard about, was on my radar, and was in my inbox. I fail at knowing what the NYT thinks I should know (but I was all about Stop SOPA (but please use soap)).

rblatz 13y ago

America has a population of 317+ million. Somewhere between .33% to .66% of America's population even bothered to click through to the day we fight back site. And we all know that is generous, a large portion of those visits were most likely from people outside of the US. Even if they were all from citizens of the US it's still a super tiny minority of people who even were aware of this. I wish it was better, but frankly it was the day that we didn't care.

dbroockman 13y ago

We know from randomized trials on legislators that calls do work in changing their positions. http://themonkeycage.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/bergancole.pdf http://themonkeycage.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/berganco... 89k is actually a very large number.