Those who oppose the Obama administration's vast spying programs will gather in the nation's capital this weekend to urge the government to get out of their private lives.
The Stop Watching Us: Rally Against Mass Surveillance, organized by a coalition of 100 organizations, companies and public figures, will take place Saturday, the 12th anniversary of the signing of the Patriot Act into law.
Documents released by leaker Edward Snowden showed that the NSA is collecting phone records of tens of millions of Verizon customers as well as emails through nine companies including tech giants Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Facebook.
"In the last four months, we've learned a lot about our government," Snowden said in a statment released by protesters. "We've learned that the U.S. intelligence community secretly built a system of pervasive surveillance. Today, no telephone in America makes a call without leaving a record with the NSA. Today, no internet transaction enters or leaves America without passing through the NSA's hands. Our representatives in Congress tell us this is not surveillance. They're wrong."
Speakers at the rally will include Laura Murphy, director of the ACLU's Washington legislative office; former senior NSA executive and whistleblower Thomas Drake and Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., whose introduced a bill to change the NSA that was defeated.
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