{The Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellows applications are now open. To shed light on the fellowship, we will be featuring posts from the 2015 Host Organizations. Today’s post comes from Kade Crockford, the Director of the Technology for Liberty program at the ACLU of Massachusetts. We are so excited to have the ACLU as a host organization. It has a rich history of defending civil liberties, and has been on the forefront of defending Edward Snowden following his revelations of the NSA surveillance activities. The Ford-Mozilla Open Web fellow at the ACLU of Massachusetts will have a big impact in protecting Internet freedom.}
Spotlight on the ACLU: A Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellow Host
By Kade Crockford, Director of Technology for Liberty, ACLU of Massachusetts
Intellectual freedom, the right to criticize the government, and freedom of association are fundamental characteristics of a democratic society. Dragnet surveillance threatens them all. Today, the technologies that provide us access to the world’s knowledge are mostly built to enable a kind of omnipotent tracking human history has never before seen. The law mostly works in favor of the spies and data-hoarders, instead of the people. We are at a critical moment as the digital age unfolds: Will we rebuild and protect an open and free Internet to ensure the possibility of democracy for future generations?
We need your help at the ACLU of Massachusetts to make sure we, as a society, answer that question in the affirmative.
The ACLU is the oldest civil rights and civil liberties organization in the U.S. It was founded in 1920 in the wake of the imprisonment of anti-World War I activists for distributing anti-war literature, and in the midst of widespread government censorship of materials deemed obscene, radical or insufficiently patriotic. In 1917, the U.S. Congress had passed the Espionage Act, making it a crime to interfere with military recruitment. A blatantly unconstitutional “Sedition Act” followed in 1918, making illegal the printing or utterance of anything “disloyal…scurrilous, or abusive” about the United States government. People like Rose Pastor Stokes were subsequently imprisoned for long terms for innocuous activity such as writing letters to the editor critical of US policy. In 1923, muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair was arrested simply for reading the text of the First Amendment at a union rally. Today, thanks to almost one hundred years of effective activism and impact litigation, people would be shocked if police arrested dissidents for writing antiwar letters to the editor.
But now we face an even greater threat: our primary means of communication, organization, and media—the Internet—is threatened by pervasive, dragnet surveillance. The Internet has opened up the world’s knowledge to anyone with a connection, but it has also put us under the microscope like never before. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
That’s why the ACLU—well versed in the Bill of Rights, constitutional precedent, community organizing, advocacy, and public education—needs your help. If we want to live in an open society, we must roll back corporate and government electronic tracking and monitoring, and pass on a free Internet to our children and theirs. We can’t do it without committed technologists who understand systems and code. Democracy requires participation and agitation; today, it also requires freedom fighters with computer science degrees.
Apply to become a Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellow at the ACLU of Massachusetts if you want to put your technical skills to work on a nationally-networked team made up of the best lawyers, advocates, and educators. Join us as we work to build a free future. There’s much to be done, and we can’t wait for you to get involved.
After all, Internet freedom can’t protect itself.
Apply to be a 2015 Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellow. Visit www.mozilla.org/advocacy.