How We Fight for the Future in 2021

We had a major victory this year when we led a coalition of groups that successfully pressured Zoom to offer end-to-end encryption to all 200 million daily users, after the company initially said it would only offer it to paid accounts and corporate clients. It was perhaps one of the biggest wins for encryption and privacy rights since the FBI backed down in its spat with Apple.

This year we worked with Senators Markey and Merkley and Representatives Pressley and Jayapal to introduce a federal ban on government and law enforcement use of facial recognition. We’ve directed tens of thousands of comments to members of Congress in support of this ban, and in 2021 we will ramp up this effort to ensure the legislation is passed by getting more legislators to co-sponsor the bill. We also supported local efforts to ban the use of facial recognition in Portland, OR, Portland, ME, and Boston. Our work has made facial recognition such a PR nightmare for any company selling it that several of the largest companies—including Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM—put a moratorium on it in an attempt to buy public goodwill.

With Students for Sensible Drug Policy, we organized a campaign to stop the use of facial recognition technology on college campuses. This included holding a day of action and launching a scorecard to keep track of how 100+ colleges stand on the issue and a way to contact those using the technology or considering it. More than 60 colleges agreed to the ban, including UCLA, which had been planning to implement the software as part of its security system. Along with 20+ human rights organizations, we called on University of Miami to ban facial recognition after students were told it had been used to identify peaceful student protesters. And we began a campaign to ban invasive exam proctoring surveillance apps that an increasing number of schools are using as part of remote education.

At many points throughout the year, it looked like Senator Graham might push through his EARN IT Act, which would destroy essential online encryption services, putting us all at risk of surveillance, censorship, human rights abuses, and other serious threats. But time and again we thwarted these attempts and have kept it from moving forward, protecting encryption and protecting free speech. We engaged new audiences of young people and activists fighting racist policing this summer, and more than 600,000 people signed a petition to Congress against the EARN IT Act. Later in the fall we partnered with Sex Worker advocates to organize in-person protest event in Oakland demanding Kamala Harris end her support for EARN IT.

The importance of a free and open Internet became even more important this year, as our school, work, socialization, and doctors appointments moved online as part of a global response to COVID-19. In response to the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality, a federal court ordered the agency to open a comment period to assess how the repeal impacted public safety. We drove over 13,000 comments calling for the reinstatement of net neutrality. Though Ajit Pai ignored the massive response and maintained his repeal, this public outcry shows that people still want net neutrality back. Then, when the Senate pushed forward Trump’s unqualified, pro-censorship FCC nominee, we mobilized hundreds of calls to key senate offices and generated press attention to highlight opposition and rally the call for an FCC Chair who will reinstate net neutrality.

In early 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic quickly spread and many states and communities went into lockdown, we jumped into action. As part of a broad coalition of human rights groups, we helped deliver more than 100,000 petitions to Congress demanding they include funding to get the millions of people without Internet access online in COVID-19 stimulus packages. We also launched TakeThisSeriously.org to protect peoples’ civil rights when considering safety measures. And we organized Stay At Home Fest as a rapid-response hub in the early days of the pandemic lockdowns to collect online events for people to enjoy and to support artists.

Amazon has doubled down on its monopolistic, surveillance-based business model, so we redoubled our efforts to hold the tech giant accountable and launched a series of multi-pronged attacks. We targeted Amazon’s surveillance monopoly by mobilizing more than 50,000 to demand a full Congressional investigation into Amazon’s surveillance-based business model and renewing our call for local governments to end the Amazon-police partnership to protect protesters after George Floyd’s murder. We made headlines with an open letter sent by 15+ organizations to Jeff Bezos about the security of Amazon's election software, and called out Amazon’s policy of not allowing libraries to purchase or lend e- and audio- books. As an active member of the Athena coalition, we helped build the national Anti-Black Amazon campaign, which called out Amazon for its 1,600+ surveillance partnerships with police departments, firing of Black warehouse workers who speak out about unsafe working conditions in the wake of COVID-19, and ongoing ties with ICE.

We launched new efforts to stop Amazon’s attacks on workers, including a campaign calling for Amazon and other corporations to end worker surveillance, demanding U.S. Governors investigate Amazon warehouses that are putting workers' health by not complying with COVID-19 guidelines and providing PPE, and building and co-coordinating the Stop Silencing Workers campaign calling on Congress to pass legislation to protect frontline workers from employer retaliation when they blow the whistle on health and safety issues in the workplace. We also worked with NBC News to surface a story about workers at an Amazon call center in the Philippines where workers were forced to endure dangerous conditions throughout the pandemic.

Using our new website, StopFinancialSurveillance.org, more than 3,000 people submitted comments to FinCEN and the Federal Reserve opposing a new rule that would allow significantly more warrantless financial surveillance and make it more difficult and expensive to use cryptocurrencies. We also recently launched a campaign to stop the US Treasury from banning anonymous self-hosted wallets, a critical component of any decentralized cryptocurrency network. We believe that cryptonetworks and cryptocurrencies have the potential to create alternatives to Big Tech and Big Banks, and we’ll keep working to make sure these new technologies have the opportunity to grow and succeed.

Working with a massive coalition of nonprofits and activists, we rallied against the sale of the .org domain to a private equity firm. Had the sale gone through, it would have put the security of more than 10 million organizations websites in question. We worked in coalition to gather thousands of petitions, held a rally, and ultimately stopped the sale, protecting the part of the Internet reserved for the public good, and not corporate profits.

When Verizon announced plans for a new rone testing facility in Portland, OR, we supported local activists by directing hundreds of emails to the Port of Portland and inviting locals to attend a socially-desitanced flotilla action. In the end, the Port of Portland listened to the public, turning an “inevitable” drone testing facility into a cancelled project.

For years, Fight for the Future has pushed Congress to rein in Big Tech companies that routinely abuse our privacy, sell our sensitive personal data, and leave us all vulnerable to hacking and surveillance. And now, lawmakers and government officials are starting to listen. The Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings for Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Twitter back in June, and now Facebook and Google are facing federal lawsuits for violating antitrust laws. The FTC announced a landmark investigation to determine just what companies like Reddit, Snapchat, WhatsApp and TikTok actually do with our data. None of this would be possible without constant pressure from the public: in 2020 alone, our followers took more than one million actions, including 32,000 phone calls to lawmakers and 35,000 comment submissions to the FCC.

As the group behind the largest online protests in history, Fight for the Future had the opportunity to support other groups' work this year as many events moved online in light of COVID-19. We helped organize Earth Day Live, a three day online event with artists, speakers, and activists calling for urgent action to address climate change. We also partnered with the Poor Peoples’ Campaign for the Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington: A Digital Justice Gathering, and helped bring more than 2.5 million people together online, and generated hundreds of thousands of actions from people calling on the government to address a wide range of issues, including health care, homelessness, systemic racism, and income inequality.

We may be small but we make a lot of noise. Fight for the Future’s hard-hitting campaigns went viral on social media, trended on Reddit, and received high profile coverage from nearly every major news outlet including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Washington Post, Fox News, Politico, The Hill, CNET, the BBC, Vice, NBC, Rolling Stone, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Ars Technica, Kotaku, ESPN, Financial Times, Reuters, the Associated Press, and Bloomberg. And we published op-eds in NBC News, Buzzfeed News, and Wired. FFTF’s deputy director Evan Greer was a regular guest on radio and TV and a featured speaker at the Toronto International Festival of Authors, Trinity College of Dublin’s debate society, NYT school of journalism, and other high profile virtual events.

Even with Biden in office, we’ve still got a huge fight on our hands to win back net neutrality (the rules that prevent companies like Comcast and Verizon from dictating what you can see and do on the Internet). In an unprecedented move, the Senate confirmed Trump’s FCC nominee Nathan Simington in the lame-duck session. Now the agency is deadlocked at 2-2 and will remain that way until the Senate confirms a new chair, something Mitch McConnell will delay at all costs. So we’re getting the net neutrality band back together to push Biden to do whatever it takes to get a champion at the FCC who will not only reinstate net neutrality but do even more to expand Broadband and ensure everyone has affordable access to the Internet—and fast, as millions of people are still without access in the midst of a pandemic. Meanwhile, we’ll need to be ready to fight telecom monopolies who will try to exploit the deadlock at the FCC to ram through weak legislation that will undermine net neutrality.

We can’t let some Comcast or Verizon executive call the shots on net neutrality, which means we’re going to have to make sure everyone who cares about this issue fights with us again. You can start by taking action at battleforthenet.com

One of the toughest fights we have ahead of us will be defending the 26 words that created the Internet: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This foundational law that allows web platforms to host user generated content like memes, videos, selfies, jokes, and opinions has increasingly come under attack from both Democrats and Republicans. Some of these attacks are misguided––based on a misunderstanding of how the law works––others, like the bipartisan EARN IT Act are utterly disingenuous. But one thing is for sure: this fight is not going away.

While Trump and many GOP lawmakers frequently railed against Section 230 over claims of bias, Joe Biden has also called for the law to be “revoked,” Nancy Pelosi says it needs to be “revised,” and Kamala Harris was a lead sponsor of SESTA/FOSTA, the last piece of legislation that punched a hole in Section 230, which has been widely condemned by experts as a disaster that harmed the very people it claimed to protect. Now there are nearly a dozen bad Section 230 bills floating around in Congress.

There’s no question that Big Tech companies have amassed tremendous power to limit expression, spread dangerous misinformation, silence dissent, and manipulate public opinion. These are serious problems and it’s long past time the government took action to address this dangerous behavior by enacting strong legislation to prevent corporate data harvesting, banning abusive practices like microtargeted advertising, and taking on Silicon Valley’s monopolistic business practices at their root. But none of these misguided attacks on Section 230 will do that.

Punching a hole in Section 230 will allow any president to decide what speech is allowed on the Internet and shut down websites that post content they don’t like. That might seem like a good idea when someone you support is in the White House, but political power changes quickly. No matter what your political beliefs are, we should all be able to agree that letting governments and corporations restrict the free flow of information is a bad idea.

There is an urgent need for education and grassroots mobilization around Section 230. We’re building a big-tent coalition of small and medium sized web platforms and civil society groups from across the political spectrum. Learn more and take action at SaveOnlineFreeSpeech.org

Big Tech companies have built their massive online empires on a data harvesting business model that is fundamentally incompatible with human rights and democracy. But many of the proposed solutions to this problem would do more harm than good. Fight for the Future is working hard to focus public anger and attention on the actual root of the problem: surveillance capitalism and Big Tech’s monopoly power.

We’re taking on harmful monopolistic businesses that optimize for engagement at all costs with microtargeting and non-transparent algorithmic amplification. We see major opportunities in antitrust actions, challenging Apple’s app store monopoly, pushing creative ideas like adversarial interoperability, and state and federal legislative fights on issues like data collection & privacy.

New technologies are emerging that give users real power and more control. Specifically, cryptonetworks and cryptocurrencies could provide an alternative to the monopoly power and data harvesting practices of Big Tech.

Every day we are finding new use cases with the potential to give the public more control over banking, telecommunications, healthcare, education … the possibilities are endless. Yes, there are bad actors driven by greed, but many leading open crypto projects are democratically governed by consensus and run by volunteers or non-profit foundations with a public interest mission.

We’ve seen time and again that when politicians try to regulate technology that they don’t understand, ordinary people get screwed. Hastily passed regulations could benefit the incumbents and chill innovation. In 2021, we will fight to ensure that these new technologies are not crushed before they have an opportunity to be an antidote to Big Tech.

2021 will be a critical year in our fight to ban facial recognition: it will either become pervasive or we’ll build enough momentum to stop it. We have a serious challenge in front of us, as police continue to use this technology to target protesters and falsely arrest Black men, and unscrupulous companies are trying to exploit the pandemic to get their products into schools, airports, restaurants, and more.

But we made progress in 2020 when we got Congress to introduce a bill to ban government and law enforcement use of facial recognition, and in 2021 we’ll ramp up support for this legislation. We’ll also push the Biden administration to do all they can to stop facial recognition—including directing the Department of Education to issue a guidance about its use in schools, telling Housing and Urban Development to ban it from being installed in public housing, and banning government contracts with Clearview AI. And we’ll continue to win local bans on the technology in places like California, Detroit, New York, and fight against this technology from spreading to schools, retail, and arenas.

The battle over encryption technology continues. Attacks on this technology, which is essential for preserving human rights and cybersecurity globally, are likely to be bipartisan. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) winning reelection raises concerns. He is a lead sponsor of both the EARN IT Act, a roundabout attack on encryption (as well as Section 230), and the even more orwellian Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act, a full blown attack demanding government backdoors in all communications services. And we can’t rely on the oval office to be in our corner: during his time as a US Senator, Joe Biden sponsored several pieces of legislation that attacked end-to-end encryption.

Fight for the Future believes that widespread access to strong encryption is one of the most important human rights and free expression fights of our generation. We won’t let up.

Surveillance devices like Amazon Ring, Alexa, and Google Nest subvert our basic civil liberties, threaten our privacy, make us vulnerable to cyber-crimes, and further subject Black and brown people to racial profiling and increased crimininalization. Beyond crowdsourcing surveillance footage, corporations like Amazon form partnerships with law enforcement, offering the police an easy way to request and store footage en masse without probable cause. A clear attack on the Fourth Amendment, these corporate-law enforcement surveillance partnerships threaten our civil liberties and privacy.

We have an opportunity to pass policies in 2021 that will put an end to these surveillance partnerships and safeguard the American people from dangers and abuses of corporate surveillance. We’re also pursuing actions targeting the FCC, which can prevent dangerous surveillance devices—like Amazon’s surveillance drone that invades our privacy, collects our data, and monitors our every move—from coming to market based on the threats they pose.

We’ll also push forward legislation to end workplace surveillance. Corporations like Amazon are building extensive, internal surveillance networks composed of artificially intelligent security, tracking devices, thermal cameras, and scanners. These internal dragnets result in high rates of workplace injuries, inhibit worker organizing, and set up power imbalances between employers and workers that impede worker’s basic rights. We are mobilizing for Congress to take immediate action to stop corporations from surveilling and suppressing workers.

For years, Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act has been used to justify government spying on millions of people across America, including people of color, journalists, and human rights groups. Thankfully, Section 215—along with other key provisions of the PATRIOT Act—expired in March 2020, but Democrat and Republican leaders are working together to reauthorize the government’s surveillance powers.

Let’s be clear: Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act is dead, and it should stay dead. No amount of amendments will prevent the government from using Section 215 to spy on the public. The longer we go without reauthorizing this invasive legislation, the more likely it is that we can push the Biden administration to stop the PATRIOT Act once and for all.

Fight for the Future is perhaps best known for building the tech and messaging behind the largest online protests in human history that stopped SOPA/PIPA, draconian copyright enforcement legislation that would have led to massive online censorship. While copyright issues have taken a back seat to other tech policy and human rights fights over the last administration, these issues remain important to us, and there are significant opportunities and threats on the horizon.

Rampant DMCA takedowns and abuse on platforms like Twitch and YouTube, publishing companies suing libraries like the Internet Archive and the RIAA’s takedown of youtube-dl, a tool used by hundreds of journalists and others to download content from YouTube, are examples, but this election also saw several copyright maximalist politicians get re-elected, meaning we should also be on the lookout for legislation that prioritizes the rights of Big Content companies over the needs of artists and creators, as well as the basic free speech rights of Internet users.

As an organization made up of artists and creators, we care deeply about fighting for artists to be fairly compensated for their labor. That’s why we’re also supporting organizations like the newly formed Union of Musicians and Allied Workers, who are campaigning to demand Spotify pay artists at least one penny per stream, and fighting for Congress to provide meaningful relief for musicians and other arts workers who are out of work due to the pandemic.

In the past few years the general public has realized how our personal data can be weaponized, allowing corporations and bad actors to track our every move—online and off—in order to target all of us with manipulative advertisements, misinformation, and political propaganda. Big Tech companies like Facebook say they want stronger federal data privacy laws, but they really just want to write legislation that keeps them in control of our personal information. California recently passed strong privacy protections into law, but this law won’t be enforceable for a couple of years, giving Silicon Valley companies plenty of time to profit off of privacy abuses while pressing to undermine this legislation.

On the bright side, a number of pro-privacy lawmakers have won their bids for reelection, strengthening the possibility that strong privacy legislation can pass through a politically-divided Congress. Protecting our right to privacy is particularly dire in the context of rapid technological innovations that the government can’t keep up with. We will do all that we can, including pushing for federal legislation and for the FCC to enforce privacy provisions, to enshrine this essential human rights protection as we fight for privacy.