Your July 4 essentials: BBQ, fireworks, and the Fourth Amendment

Look up in the sky — it’s not faster than a speeding bullet. It’s not Anonymous giving us all the virtual finger. It’s the cat signal from the Internet Defense League, beckoning all would-be Web superheroes to protest the evisceration of our civil rights.

Tomorrow is not merely Independence Day, it’s also Restore the Fourth Day. This movement started on (where else?) Reddit as a response to the continuing leaks coming out of the NSA, but quickly blossomed into a thing of its own, spawning a website (Stopwatching.us) and a petition with more than 500,000 signees. The idea is to take back the Fourth Amendment rights that have been whittled away by the likes of the Patriot Act, our rubber-stamping courts, Congress, and of course, the NSA.

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While you may be spending tomorrow burning meat, guzzling beer, and trying not to blow off your appendages while celebrating our nation’s birth, a few thousand of your countrymen and women will be taking to the streets and to the Web.

The list of signatories reads like a high-tech who’s who; aside from all the usual three- and four-letter civil rights orgs, you’ll find well-known names like Jacob Appelbaum (father of the Tor privacy tool), John Gilmore, Tim Berners-Lee, Cory Doctorow, Daniel Ellsburg, and Wil Wheaton. When Ensign Wesley Crusher is on your side, how can you lose?

Yesterday I took part in a conference call with representatives from Mozilla, Free Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Color of Change, RestoreTheFourth, and actor John Cusack, who’s been quite vocal on Twitter and elsewhere about his objections to NSA spying. (I got the feeling they asked Cusack to join so that reporters like me would agree to call in.)

Most of what they had to say was fairly predictable: NSA spying undermines the nature of the open Internet. This not about right and left, it’s about right and wrong. Our government used similar techniques and rationales to undermine the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. And so on.

Anna Wilmesher from the Restore the Fourth predicted more than 100,000 people would take to the streets in New York and Washington, D.C., two of roughly 100 actions planned around the nation.

Cusack’s main point was more along the lines of a question: Why has the conversation shifted from what the NSA is doing to the privacy of innocent Americans, to Where in the World Is Edward Snowden and Is Glenn Greenwald a journalist, a terrorist, or both? Per Cusack:

Why are the red and blue elites of state power and the establishment press so afraid of an informed public? Why do they keep changing the subject?…. I think the questions raised by the NSA scandal are not going away. How long can we expect rational people to accept using terrorism as an excuse for an endless extension of state power?

Then it came time for the Q&A. What I really wanted to ask Cusack: “Why don’t you make more great movies like ‘Grosse Point Blank’ and ‘High Fidelity’ instead of all this Hollywood pap you’ve been churning out lately?” Instead, I asked a more general question: What’s the point of this protest? What practical benefit do they hope to get out of it?

EFF Activism Director Rainey Reitman provided a more down-to-earth answer. What they’d really like to see happen is for the Patriot Act to be reformed — specifically Section 215, which gives the government carte blanche to request business records from anyone about any American, no probable cause required. Reitman says there’s some political momentum behind that idea. She also said the EFF would like to see changes to the FISA Amendments Act, which loosened the rules on whom the NSA could legally spy on and where they could do it. So far, there’s not a lot of enthusiasm for that on Capitol Hill, she admits.

Hey, protest is patriotic. It’s the first and best exercise of the first and best amendment to the Constitution. If you think the NSA should stop spying on innocent Americans, you should by all means make your voice heard. (If you disagree with that last statement, you should make your voice heard as well.)

But when your only recourse is to hope that the parties who rubber-stamped these laws in the first place suddenly grow a conscience, let’s just say it’s going to be an uphill battle. Remember, these are the folks who shrugged their shoulders and told the NSA “do what you must, just please don’t call me ‘soft on terrorism’.”

I’m deadly curious to see what happens tomorrow and in the weeks ahead. Maybe it will turn the conversation back in the right direction. Maybe our Congress will grow some cojones and step up to protect our basic rights instead of eviscerating them.

Because you know what’s worse than being soft on terrorism? Being soft on patriotism.

Where do you stand? Post your thoughts below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com. And have a happy and explosive Fourth.

This article, “Your July 4 essentials: BBQ, fireworks, and the Fourth Amendment,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.