By Jacob Appelbaum from San Francisco [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

In honor of Aaron Swartz and the billions of us who want to use the Internet for the pursuit of knowledge and not a weapon of surveillance, control and war, thousands of websites on Tuesday, Feb. 11, are asking visitors to call their representatives and demand legislative action against the National Security Agency of the United States.

It’s actually not so simple as all that, but it becomes clearer if you go to this website, where they will tell you what legislation they like, what they don’t and what you can do about it.

Swartz, who is the subject of the new documentary (preview below), “The Internet’s Own Boy,” took his life after the U.S. government hounded him over downloading journal articles. Swartz was a genius who helped create Reddit and RSS, and as an activist he sought to make the world and the Internet better and freer for all of us. This day is in his honor.

— Posted by Peter Z. Scheer

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