Molly Crabapple and Wil Wheaton are sick of being watched.
They're not alone – in fact, they're just two of the sixteen activists, politicians and academics appearing in a new video from the Electronic Frontier Foundation called "Stop Watching Us: The Video," released to support an upcoming rally in protest against the National Security Agency's surveillance program and calling upon Congress to investigate the full extent of the government's spying on its citizens.
Amongst those joining Crabapple and Wheaton are actors Maggie Gyllenhaal and John Cusack, director Oliver Stone, and talk show host Phil Donahue, as well as a number of whistleblowers, including Mark Klein, the former AT&T technician who has claimed for years the company was forwarding internet traffic to the government, and J. Kirk Wiebe, a former NSA analyst who went public with information about domestic surveillance programs.
The three-and-a-half minute video is directed by Brian Knappenberger, a documentary writer, director and producer arguably best known for his Anonymous documentary We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists. Describing himself as "very honored" to create the video, Kaneppenberger called this "the moment for a large scale debate on the future of this thing we all love, the internet, the way we communicate, our relationship with our government and how technology and its progress can blend with more traditional notions of privacy, liberty and democracy."
The rally, which is scheduled to take place in Washington D.C. this Saturday, is the culmination of an ongoing campaign on behalf of the EFF and more than 100 other organizations asking for current laws regarding internet surveillance to be amended to outlaw blanket surveillance, as well as the creation of a special committee to investigate just how widespread surveillance related to current NSA programs has been.
Both Thomas Drake, the former NSA linguist accused of providing classified information to a Baltimore Sun reporter in 2006 and 2007, and Iraq War veteran turned LGBT activist Dan Choi will speak at the rally, which begins with a march from Columbus Circle to the Capitol Reflecting Pool, before delivering a petition with more than 500,000 signatures demanding a full investigation into domestic surveillance to Congress.
More information about the rally can be found here.
