This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.
Tuesday was “The Day We Fight Back” against mass surveillance. It had the support of major companies like LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter. It had its own hashtag (#TheDayWeFightBack), a dedicated website and IRL protests. It even generated thousands of calls and emails demanding that Congress support the Freedom Act — a bill that, among other things, seeks to rein in the National Security Agency’s data collection activities.
I know what you’re thinking: “Wait, there was a huge online movement protesting the NSA, and I missed it?”
See also: Google on NSA: We Need Rules, Transparency and Oversight
I have to admit, I was unaware of the significance of the day until after the fact — surprising, since I’m usually pretty in tune with this stuff. I essentially live on Twitter, so I should have a least noticed people in my stream changing their Twitter profile photos to the logo for “TheDayWeFightBack." If you haven’t seen it, it’s a giant eye with a hand in front of it (see above).
I think you get the literal symbolism. I hadn't seen the logo before today, which means it appeared too infrequently in my Twitter stream to become a pattern.
The New York Times called Tuesday “The Day the Internet Didn’t Fight Back.” It's right; nothing about Tuesday felt like an uprising.
I asked a room full of more than a dozen Mashable interns, who were glued to the web all day Tuesday, to raise their hands if they knew how Shaun White preformed at the Olympics on Tuesday. Every single arm went into the air. Then I asked if they knew Tuesday was “The Day We Fight Back.” I saw not a single raised hand. Eventually, one half-heartedly lifted his arm, saying he may have read something about it on Reddit.
For all the activities and even websites created solely to support this idea, not one bit of it rose above the noise from the rest of the day’s news.
If the goal was to raise awareness, then certainly The Day We Fight Back was a flop, because it failed to live up to the “we” part. Those who did organize and fight back are the people who have already been doing so.
The list of supporters on TheDayWeFightBack.org is a who’s who of Internet activists and activism groups — the Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF), Demand Progress, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Greenpeace and Amnesty International.
Yet for all these activists' experience, they kind of stumbled at the finish line. The last post on the site's blog was on Feb. 6 — five days before the event. Why would you stop blogging as you get closer to that very important day? Shouldn't that be a time to ramp up activity? You want to whip people into a frenzy, energize the movement — not go silent.
Still, the involvement of major technology companies like Google and LinkedIn should have driven mass awareness through the roof. They even built a website calling for Global Government Surveillance Reform.
But it didn't help, mostly because no one knew it existed. It’s little more than a dimly lit beacon, feebly blinking out a message. Want people’s attention? Don’t build a new website. You want to take every existing lighthouse, already shining brightly in the night, and focus them on one focal point.
In other words, use the websites that people know. Didn’t we learn that lesson with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2012?
When Wikipedia replaced its own site with a SOPA protest message, essentially blacking out the service, millions of people noticed. In fact, traffic increased to the site during the protest.
Mashable and countless other sites wrote about it and many followed Wikipedia’s blackout lead. Eventually, Stop SOPA became a real and almost inescapable movement. To be fair, SOPA was a law that had to be stopped, and the NSA’s mass surveillance practices are ongoing. SOPA also had the potential to directly impact content and activities across the Internet. No one really knows how the NSA is using all the information about us.
Organizers are, by the way, counting the day as a success. When I asked EFF Activism Director Rainey Reitman if organizers also viewed the response as a little underwhelming, she wrote back in an email:
We generated over 87,000 phone calls to members of Congress during our day of action. I was floored. I haven't seen so many users take action on a single day since SOPA. Congressional phone lines were completely swamped. I think it was a huge turning point around NSA surveillance. The Internet community again demonstrated our strength in DC. I'm not surprised that Congress is still scrambling to figure how they are going to respond.

Fair. But in order for that “turning point” to materialize, congressmen must act, and they may only do so if they believe they have their constituents' interests at heart. That may be a hard sell if none of those constituents are even remotely aware of The Day We Fight Back.
Tuesday wasn't the beginning of a movement. It was just another day on the Internet.
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