The internet is turning its focus to the NSA's expansive surveillance programs of ordinary citizens. Early yesterday, NPR reported that major internet sites such as Reddit, Tumblr and Mozilla are among nearly 6,000 websites participating in an online protest called The Day We Fight Back against government surveillance. Organizers have stated that the goal of the protest is to pass a federal bill called the USA Freedom Act in order to ban the mass surveillance programs exposed by Edward Snowden and used by the federal government against its own citizens, most notably by the National Security Agency.

The last time anything close to this happened was on Jan. 18, 2012, when major internet sites such as Reddit and Google disabled access and hosted banners in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Wikipedia's home page was black with a message saying, "Imagine a world without free knowledge," criticizing the anti-piracy legislation SOPA bill that the website claimed would "fatally damage the free and open internet," and pressed constituents to contact their Congress members. Google put a black box over its logo to oppose the federal legislation which intended to crack down on online piracy. Millions of people emailed Congress and the bills were gone by the next two days.

The USA Freedom Act's two sponsors are Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, and Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a Republican from Wisconsin who has bipartisan support in the House. Demand Progress wanted to use the protest to show lawmakers "that there's going to be ongoing public pressure until these reforms are instituted."

The protests are not as strong as the ones against SOPA, however: Wikipedia and Craigslist are not participating at all, while Reddit has posted a few banners on its homepage sidebar. Tumblr, Imgur, and Mozilla have not added anything to their home pages. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, LinkedIn, AOL and Yahoo have made no show of support on their sites either.