Massive protests mark ‘Day We Fight Back’ against NSA spying

Even as governments across the world appear to condone it, the general public is fighting back against the massive global surveillance programmes of the US National Security Agency.

Massive protests were staged online on Tuesday along with physical protests in some cities.

The 11th of February has been designated as 'The Day We Fight Back' by a broad coalition of activist groups, companies, and online platforms fighting the NSA's vast spying network.

Old activist Mark Klein took a 'walk down memory lane' before a large audience in San Francisco. Klein, a retired AT&T technician, spoke out yet again about the secret sharing of data between the top US communications company and the government.

Klein leaked several internal AT&T documents in 2006 that showed that the NSA was collecting data from AT&T through a restricted room, 641A.

Organisers of The Day We Fight Back are hoping to replicate the response they received for the 2012 Internet "blackout" that targeted the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), which resulted in lawmakers withdrawing both bills. (See: Website protests work as US shelves anti-piracy bills)

The effort is also intended to remember activist Aaron Swartz, who took his own life in January 2013. In 2011, Swartz was arrested for downloading 4.8 million articles from JSTOR, a non-profit archive of academic journals, after tapping into the site from a computer wiring closet at MIT. He was charged with four separate felonies that could have landed him in jail for years.

Standing outside of the AT&T building that he said houses 641A, Klein told the crowd, "I was wiring the Big Brother machine, which pissed me off.''

Throughout Tuesday, internet activists placed nearly 80,000 calls and sent nearly 160,000 e-mails to their representatives in Congress to protest the NSA's tactics.

As protesters chanted and sang along to an Every Breath You Take video projected onto the side of the AT&T building, a handful of police watched from the edges of the building's entrance. But the crowd was quiet as Klein spoke, though there were some boos when Senator. Dianne Feinstein's name or the NSA bill she is sponsoring was mentioned.

Klein called Feinstien's bill "just an insult". He said, "I'll tell you what will be real reform. Rip out those secret rooms. Rip out the rooms throughout the country."

Only NSA-approved workers were allowed in the room, Klein said, but he had the AT&T schematics that proved there were splitters installed inside the room that allowed data from AT&T's lines to be copied for the NSA.

"I should take those documents with me," he said he thought when he retired in 2004. "Maybe I can show them to someone."

In 2006, he gave them to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which then used the documents in a suit alleging that AT&T violated federal wiretapping laws by cooperating with the NSA.

While Klein's story may sound similar to how NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked documents about the NSA's spying practices, Klein said his actions didn't cause as much of a stir since his documents were AT&T documents and not the government's.

The matter eventually disappeared in the news cycle.

"This quieted down a couple of years and then along came Ed Snowden...Ed Snowden had NSA documents and they couldn't ignore them," he said.

Last year, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released a trove of classified documents to journalists to shed light on what he said was the NSA's illegal activity.

The NSA has defended its actions, arguing that it is sanctioned by Congress and necessary to protect the US from terrorists. But President Obama admitted recently that changes are necessary, at least when it comes to the collection of phone metadata.

Yet things aren't changing fast enough for Internet activists, who hope "The Day We Fight Back" will help spur Congress into real action.