Data

Location
Boston
United States
Sector
Non-Profit or Non Governmental
General Issues
Media, Telecommunications & Information
Specific Topics
Internet Governance
Intellectual Property Rights
Intelligence Gathering
Links
Fight for the Future website
Videos
The Internet is under attack. This is the Battle for the Net. (September 2017)
Documentary: Stop Watching Us Rally Against Mass Surveillance - 10/26/13
General Types of Methods
Protest
Evaluation, oversight, and social auditing
General Types of Tools/Techniques
Propose and/or develop policies, ideas, and recommendations
Specific Methods, Tools & Techniques
Protest
Petition

ORGANIZATION

Fight for the Future

March 3, 2021 Patrick L Scully, Participedia Team
April 16, 2019 Scott Fletcher Bowlsby
October 9, 2018 Isadora
October 7, 2018 Isadora
October 5, 2018 Isadora
October 4, 2018 Isadora
October 2, 2018 Isadora
September 30, 2018 Scott Fletcher Bowlsby
September 28, 2018 Isadora
September 26, 2018 Scott Fletcher Bowlsby

Fight for the Future is a non-profit organization founded in 2011 whose mission is to ensure that the web continues to hold freedom of expression and creativity at its core, rejecting censorship from intellectual property or government surveillance.

Note: the following entry is missing citations. Please help us verify its content.

Mission and Purpose

Fight for the Future works to keep censorship-free, fully private access to afforable internet, focusing on defeating American legislation that censors free expression through copyright restrictions (SOPA, PIPA bills of 2012), warrantless surveillance and excessive policing, and pushing for the FCC's regulatory support for net neutrality to support a level-playing field in access to online services and information. 

Origins and Development 

Fight for the Future began as a Committee on Political Education (COPE) for the Service Employees International Union, which has 2 million members. 

The first Wayback Machine archive of their website focuses on healthcare and the 2004 US elections, comparing candidates (George W. Bush and John Kerry), until 2011, when Fight for the Future was established as a fully fledged non-profit with a focus on internet governance.  

Organizational Structure, Membership, and Funding

Fight for the Future is a non-profit which applies for grants and carries out fundraising to fund its operations, from individual and foundation donations. It also has a 501(c)3 Education Fund. Supporters of the Education fund include the Ford Foundation ($300,000)[1], Media Democracy Fund [2] [3] (unclear if their initial $300,000 grant was co-sponsored with or additionally matched by Ford[3], and whether the 2012 announced $759,000 additional grant came through in that amount [4]), the Wallace Global fund ($40,000 [5]), the Knight foundation (unspecified amount), the Open Society Foundations[6, unspecified amount], the State Infrastructure fund, CraigConnects and Ashoka.

The Education Fund IRS forms show the following changes in contributions:

from 2013-2014: $86,111

2014-2015: $312,034

2015-2016: $796,734 + $367,361 from other sources of revenue, and a significant uptick in fundraising expenses in this period, up 81,502 from 17,472 from 2014-2015 and dropping to 45,691 in 2016-17

2016-2017: $726,448 in contribution income.

Other sources of reporting[7] indicate there is a the $1.5 million operating budget from donations from the Ford Foundation, the Knight Foundation, DuckDuckGo ($25,000), Yelp ($10,000), and venture capitalists, but it is unclear whether this is separate from the Education Fund, given the organization's own IRS filings' differences[8]. The non-education fund also received donations from the Shuttleworth Foundation [9], Sonos (amount unspecified), Voqal (amount unspecified), and the Proteus foundation (amount unspecified). FIght for the Future also has lists of donations depending on their size: 3 of at least $10K, 9 of at least $5,000, and 28 people/couples, organizations or companies who have donated at least $1,000; 4 organizations or companies also do secondary fundraising campaigns on behalf of the organization.

Fight for the Future also encourages its supporters to sign up for a Virtual Private Network (VPN). Some VPNs have affiliated with them by promising to donate 30 to 40% of any referral sign-ups back to Fight for the Future's anti-surveillance campaigns. 

Specializations, Methods and Tools

Fight for the Future has specialized in mobilizing online protests with internet users, small businesses and large tech corporations in order to pressure American legislators and regulators. Their repertoire of action consists on individual-on-corporate as well as individual and corporate pressure on regulatory and legislative anti-censorship and anti-surveillance measures, notably implementing widespread coordinated "black outs" where small and large websites stop providing their main service for a day and direct visitors to a petition.

Major Projects and Events

Highlights from the full timeline from 2011-2013

Copyright

Fight for our Future began its mobilization against internet censorship by bringing attention to the Senate bill 978 in 2011, with a campaign called FreeBieber. The objective was to show that there was fair use value and commercial innovation to posting performance covers on YouTube instead of enforcing automated copyright. Major artists like Justin Bieber had been discovered after posting performances of song covers, and the campaign received national attention when it was discussed on the Colbert Report and was supported by the eponym himself. The campaign garnered 200,000 petition signatures and coverage on other news outlets and blogs, leading to the bill being dropped. Less than a month later, Fight for the Future focused attention on the House's Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) by calling November 16 the first American Censorship Day, and mobilized two millon petition signers and 84,000 calls to Congress were placed. To continue pressure, Fight for the Future rolled out its first Reddit campaign, where it asked individuals to pressure the GoDaddy webhosting company to come out against SOPA, which it achieved in under a week. It then followed up online mobilization with offline in-person meetings with Members of Congress. This made some senators begin to rescind their support for PIPA (Protect-IP Act), the upper-chamber version of SOPA.

Anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA mobilization 2012 reached its height with the January 18 internet blackout, where large and small websites posted a banner and made all their other content unavailable in order to direct internet users' attention to the bills, and to mobilize them into contacting Congress. The bipartisan PIPA bill lost more Republican support than Democrat among co-sponsors once the Heritage Foundation announced the vote would be included in their reelection scorecards, and redstate.com (a conservative website) vowed to place primary challengers against SOPA House members. Democrats did not turn against SOPA and PIPA as quickly since Democrats held the Senate Majority, and they were pressured by the movie industry against Sillicon Valley. Former Democratic Senator Chriss Dodd, then President of the Motion Picture Association of America, vowed to punish Democrats and including President Obama's reelection effort if they turned their back on the censoring bills. Regardless, the pressure from Sillicon Valley and individual internet users' opposition from SOPA and PIPA was so large enough that Dodd compared it to the Arab Spring. Defections became so widespread that co-sponsors to PIPA widthrew their support and both bills were tabled. A year later, Internet Service Providers working with Hollywood began lobbying for a stand-alone six-strikes policy that would ban consumers from accessing internet access if they had been identified by corporate copyright holders as infringing. Fight for the Future began an education campaign on Virtual Private Networks on the importance of private internet access as a tool against ISP's monopoly power and surveillance mechanisms.

Surveillance

A second set of issues tied to online freedom focused on government surveilance. Six months after the SOPA/PIPA protests, Fight for the Future picked up on the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (CISPA), creating the Do You Have a Secret campaign in June 2012 to email and call Congress against spying and surveillance. In it, Fight For the Future quoted a 2009 New York Times piece that identified the NSA's systematic collection of American's domestic communications as a result of a July 2008 legislative change from the W. Bush warrantless wiretap. The campaign was created a year before the Snowden revelations of the extent of NSA surveillance practices. 

In July 2012 Fight for the Future amalgamated tech community companies into the Internet Defense League as a permanent mobilization effort against censorship and surveillance legislation, which rallied against CISPA; Fight for the Future worked with Demand Progress to deliver over 300,000 signatures two days after CISPA was reitroduced, and the Internet Defense League kept up the pressure the following months by deploying its high profile company affiliates to recruit other internet companies into fighting CISPA. This included Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian trying to call Google CEO Larry Page and Twitter and Facebook headquarters in a YouTube video as part of a shaming campaign, although a few months later Snowden would reveal their silence on CISPA reflected active complicity, not ambivalence. The coallition also used the attention from the Snowden revelations to turn Independence Day (July 4th, 2013) into 4th Amendment (protection against unreasonable search and seizure) rallies in New York, Washington DC, San Francisco, Dallas, called "Restore the Fourth". The San Francisco rally also directly protested Senator Dianne Feinstein's role in passing the PATRIOT ACT which opened the door to the Bush administration's warrantless wiretaps. In the subsequent weeks the organization cowdfunded and projected a documentary about NSA spying in Manhattan, held the Stop Watching Us Rally in washington and delivered 575,000 signatures to Republican congressman Justin Amash (a self-described libertarian and member of the Freedom Caucus). These efforts led to the Reset the Net campaign for privacy rights in June 5th, 2014. Unlike their previous politically-engaging work, this campaign centered on mobilizing websites, companies and app developers into adopting specific security protocols, especially end-to-end encryption, among other technological fixes like adopting SSL. This was framed as an act of resistance against illegitimate mass surveillance, although there was also a petition for internet users to sign. The campaign was presented as a "privacy pack". Companies and website owners would implement technical privacy fixes and also run a banner that would not display until midnight June 5th, to present a coordinated message reminiscent of their anti-copyright campaing against SOPA/PIPA. Internet users were also provided with best practices for password protection and private anonymous internet browsing on computers, as well as a list of suggested encrypted chat apps for phones. The campaign had the backing of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, ACLU attorney Jennifer Granick, and security expert Bruce Schneier, as well as Silicon Valley and NGO support.

In 2015, as parts of the PATRIOT Act hit their sunset clause, Fight for the Future reactivated its anti-surveillance efforts by launching a campaign to black out Congress, whereby websites which signed up would identify internet traffic from congressional networks and redirect their traffic to a blacked out banner and a slew of topless pictures provided by protestors with the slogan #ifeelnaked to symbolize the NSA's mass spying as a digital strip search. Its aim was to defeat the adoption of "compromise" bills authored by Senators Feinstein and Burr like the USA Freedom Act because "the NSA considers the USA Freedom Act completely benign and it will not change their operations in the slightest”, according to Fight for the Future's cofounder, Holmes Wilson, since it would only curtail one of many ways bulk phone records are collected, and would leave other data collection sources and inter-agency backdoor access unregulated. The organization also rebuked the false dichotomy of reauthorizing the PATRIOT Act's bulk collection as the alternative to adopting new the new proposed legislation, pushing to let the provisions on mass surveillance sunset on June 1st. The Internet Defense League member sites signed onto the campaign, which were a part of the more than 10,000 websites that had installed the blackout code. The number included non-league members since the campaign gained traction on Reddit's (one of the league members) technology section. Fight for the Future then updated the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Stand Against Spying" scorecard, which covered legislative activity in the 113th Congress (2013-14), to take into account votes taken in the legislative battle over Section 215 renewal and the USA FREEDOM Act, which provided limited reforms of Section 215. Through their Restore the Fourth coalition (led by Alex Marthews and Zaki Manian of Restore), Fight for the Future's (led by Tiffiniy Cheng and Jeff Lyon) new political scoreboard that accounted for the ambiguity of voting for the Freedom Act, since a Yes/No vote could not be interpreted as support or rejection of surveillance per se. Their political scoreboard showed that African-American legislators were more likely to support reform, while those with a military background or having been part of the intelligence committee were more likely to support the NSA. Importantly, the scoreboard outlined that partisanship was not a reliable indicator of positions on the bill's surveillance regulations and disuaded journalists from generalizing probable votes. The Sunset 702 campaign scoreboard also scored how tech companies had reacted to news that they had collaborated with NSA surveillance or been leaking consumer an political information. If companies had supported limiting surveillance, they would be marked as "Team Internet", if they supported bils that gave them corporate immunity or supported surveillance, they would be labeled "Team NSA". After failing to pass in its November version because it could not overcome Senatorial fillibusters, the amended June version of the Freedom Act passed despite bipartisan opposition from Senators Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders and Fight for the Future's Sunset Section 702 campaign. The House bill (HR2048), sponsored by Republican Jim Sensenbrenner, promised to increase the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant-obtaining process, but restored authorization for roving wiretaps and tracking 'lone wolf' actors deemed to be terrorists by the Executive branch, and was heavily criticized by privacy advocates for having too many loopholes, and the Senate's author of the Freedom Act criticized how reforms were striped from the original bill.

After passage of the Freedom Act, Fight for the Future launched a follow-up campaign, End Surveillance, that tied the issue of mass surveillance to censorship, government control, and intimidation against journalists and dissenting activists like those connected with Black Lives Matter, shifting focus to how the NSA's tactics feed into the FBI's domestic operations. The campaign presented the state of surveillance legislation and highlighted the recurring attempts to pass CISPA to formalize data-sharing between private companies' customer data and federal agencies by providing companies with liability immunity from disgruntled customers, lowering their economic and public relations costs.

The following year, after the 2016 San Bernadino shootings, a California Judge granted the Los Angeles US Attorney's demand (on behalf of the FBI) that Apple create a backdoor on encrypted phones by disabling the "wipe disk" function if the security pin is entered incorrectly 10 times. Since CISPA's data-sharing arrangement kept stalling 4 attempts in, the government argued that the 1789 All Writs Act should be used to force Apple to cooperate. In response, Fight for the Future organized protest rallies, Don't Break our Phones, to support Apple's appeal against the court's pro-FBI order. The nationwide local rallies convened in Apple stores around the country at 5:30 on February 23, 2016. Fight for the Future asked that attendants open their phone and tablet screens to text that read "FBI, DON'T BREAK OUR PHONES!" by accessing a website that Fight for the Future updates to provide new digital protest signs, which currently say "SAVE THE INTERNET" in reference to their net neutrality campaign; as well as providing a one page flyer with four reasons to oppose the FBI's demand for attendants to distribute to passers-by and media crew. 

During the lame duck period after the 2016 election, Fight for the Future made an attempt at convincing President Obama to disclose the extent of surveillance programs and their legal justification, delete stored data and pardon Edward Snowden to encourage whistleblowers, appealing to the election results by advocating that the new administration should be forced to build the spying capacity from scratch. The campaign went without response. Under the Trump administration, Fight for the Future tracked Congress extended the Foreign Intelligence Surveilance Act's controversial Section 702's warrantless wiretapping through the S.139 bill, despite a bipartisan pro-privacy amendment proposal to end warrantless wiretapping. Fight for the Future highlighted how bipartisan opposition was met with bipartisan rebuke of the amendment as Democrat House minority leader Nancy Pelosi and 55 other democrats joined Republicans to vote down the pro-privacy amendment to S.139. The process was especially complicated by the new President's initial rejection of the FISA extension given his suspicion of wiretaps, followed by a last-minute reversal of opinion. Fight for the Future's digital campaign centered on their Citizen's Veto effort, where people sign up their phone and get a reminder of their lawmakers' voting record on FISA before the next election, as a means of accountability. This method offsets the need to remember particular votes for two (House) or six years (Senate) while triggering issue saliency when it is most necessary. They also provided a link to their Get Safe privacy toolkit, a step by step guide on protecting privacy by recommending hardware and software changes fine-tuned for specific devices and operating systems, new settings, habits, and additional information links to external sources of information, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Surveillance Self-Defence.

As the Obama-era FCC moved to adopt privacy rules that would bar internet provider services from being able to share web browsing history, app usage, location and the content of emails and other communications without the explicit consent of each individual subscriber at the end of its second term. The issue was triggered by Verizon's use of 'supercookies" to track the websites their network users visited and sell the information to ad brokers; it settled a 1.35 million dollar fine and put the issue on the FCC's radar. Furthermore, the FCC pledged to review attempts to charge customers for maintaining their privacy, and the preliminary rules passed by a 3-2 vote in March 2016. The rules only forbade ISPs from selling personally identifyable information, but could still share customer data if it was anonymized so that it couldn't be reasonably linked to an individual. After the November 2016 elections, the FCC charimanship went to former Verizon lobbyist Ajit Pai, who has made putting ISPs on a level playing field to Facebook and Google his priority, subverting net neutrality rules. On tracking, the new Congress cited burdening economic innovation, and Republican representatives (who held the majority) in the House and Senate voted to reverse the FCC rules. 15 Republicans crossed the aisle on a close vote in the House but their opposition was not enough (215 for the reversal, 205 for maintaining the FCC rules). After the vote, Fight for the Future began sponsoring billboards in states where Senators had voted to remove internet browsing privacy protections, naming and shaming Senators in their home state by showing their name, picture, how much s/he had received from telecommunication companies, and a link to Save Broadband Privacy campaign where people could sign a petition. The campaign started with bilboards against four members of Congress (rep. Blackburn, rep. Rutherford, Sen. Flake, and Sen. Heller) and was paid for through donations. Fight for the Future's campaign then attempted to expand their method to other congresspeople who voted to overturn the FCC order, but fell below their target. Crowdfunding went to billboards in three more states : rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers in Washington, rep. Bob Latta of Ohio, and rep. Greg Walden of Oregon (sole holdout in the state, according to the Battle for the Net's Oregon NetNeutrality Scoreboard.

The organization has also repeated the billboard method to the net neutrality fight in California against Assemblyman Miguel Santiago, who was also called out by local Battle for the Net activists using projectors and Wikipedia edits that changed AT&T telecom as his spouse in protest over the vote. The protest succeeded in bringing national attention to Assemblyman Santiago, and after an about-face that sent the bill back to committee, where it was revived. Once it went to the state Senate, Fight for the Future campaigned to have Californians contact their legilsators to support SB922, and has been adopted.

Given the lack of legal rights, its recent Security Pledge addressed company liability in protecting users' data by appealing directly to technology corporations, but has not registered any company pledging to its four data security principles.

Police militarization and criminalization of peaceful protestsIn relation to Black Lives Matter protests, the 2016 women's march, and Fight for the Future's on the ground protest work, the organization has been highlighting the increasing militarization of police in the US, and the trend towards state legislation criminalizing peaceful protests, pointing to how the organization connects digital and on the ground policing and surveillance against free speech as part of the same political process, discussing both in terms of reversing Congressional budget allocation for military technology purchases by local police through a petition drive inspired by the state-violence of Ferguson. Fight for the Future also pointed their members to researcher Zeynep Tufekci's direct link between the Ferguson protests, algorithmic censorship, and net neutrality. . Crowdfunding went to billboards in three more states: rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers in Washington, rep. Bob Latta of Ohio, and rep. Greg Walden of Oregon

Net Neutrality: Battle for the Net campaign 

In 2014 the FCC lost to Verizon's appeal against the 2010 net neutrality order because it chose the wrong legal framework to justify the Open Internet order. In order to remediate this, Fight for the Future joined 85 other organizations to deliver one million signatures in a petition drive asking FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to remediate the issue by reclassifying broadband under the common carrier framework. The organization also coordinated protestors' physical presence by gathering people outside the FCC headquarters in Washington DC for nine days, touting that the mere promise of a campout led Chariman Wheeler to reach out to Fight for the Future about the possibility of meeting, something that the FCC had rejected when they received the million signature petition. The pressure also helped the two Democrat commissioners appeal to the Chairman to reconsider classifying the internet as a public utility. A Sunlight Foundation machine learning model on a subset (800,959) of the more than 3.7 million FCC comments found that at least 60% of comments were letters written by organized campains, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Nation, Battle for the Net (Fight for the Future), but remarked that that proportion was lower than other high-volume regulatory dockets. A third of the comments were coordinated by Fight for the Future's Battle for the Net campaign, Daily Kos and Free Pressch begain that year (2014) and has become a spin-off organization (Battle for the Net) and mobilization arm that supports net neutrality. 

Fight for the Future then called on President Obama to fulfill his campaign promise to protect net neutrality through a petition, a twitter campaign, presenting his position as candidate, outlining his powers in protecting net neutrality insofar as mechanisms to reform the FCC. It also helped organize meetings between constitutents and House of Representatives in San Antonio, Texas, in Ithaca, New York, and in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

The Open Internet net neutrality order was adopted in March 2015, the net neutrality issue died down until 2017, when the issue was reopened by the new administration's chairman, Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer who had dissented and voted against the order when he was FCC commissioner during the previous comission. Fight for the Future called June 12 2017 a day of action through online protests. It prepared materials for people who signed up, and asked those who did to identify whether they had a large online audience or friend/employer who did. It also called for websites, companies and organization's participation, ranging from the ACLU to PornHub, from Vivaldi to BitTorent (two companies on opposite sides of the copyright debate), backing from the Women's March to the pot-advocacy magazine HighTimes. The campaign tried other previously used methods too, like distributing banners and code to simulate slowdowns and paywalls that replicate what the end of net neutrality might look like, and made it easy for internet users to submit their comments to the FCC and Congress through these banners, push notifications for apps, and social media memes, making participating websites a part of the comment-gathering process and distributing information dissemination to a wide variety of audiences.

The commission does not allow for more than 3 commissioners to be of the same party, and the December 2017 vote rescinding the 2015 order followed a party-line vote of 3-2. After the FCC vote, Fight for the Future started its Break the Internet campaign to pressure Congress to reverse the vote through using the Congressional Review Act (CRA), directing contact through Battle for the Net, which held the One More Vote operation for the Senate's vote on February 27, 2018. The Senate supported the move, and the focus of the campaign now lies in convincing the House of Representatives to adopt the CRA resolution that the Senate passed (52 for -47 against) through a discharge petition, where House members can force a vote on net neutrality despite the House Leader Paul Ryan's oppostion to bring it to a floor vote.

Furthermore, Fight for the Future is raising the issue salience of net neutrality during the 2018 midterm election by identifying 23 close House races where candidates opposing net neutrality are vulnerable to losing their seat, who is running against them and is a supporter of net neutrality and who has no stance, using their scorecard method. For example, in Iowa the Democratic candidate has no stance but the Green party candidate supports it, while the Republican incumbent opposed restoring net neutrality through the CRA. The Vote for Net Neurality campaign also lets Americans sign up for a bot called HelloVote that helps them register to vote, contact politicians in the area and inform them on where they stand on the issue. Lastly, it is running local action team recruitment to organize protests, hand out lawn signs and do voter education at the polls in districts it has identified as key, using the Facebook website. It has also put together avatar images and a document with outreach materials (sample Twitter messages and Facebook posts) for internet users. Their Dont Tread on the Net campaign frames the issue as one of corporate censorship with government support for ISP monopoly and its petition is geared towards Republican lawmakers, calling the FCC bureaucrats that killed net neutrality as part of a big government-pro corporation coallition. By using a modified Gadsden flag, the campaign seeks to highlight the bipartisan nature of net neutrality among the population (83% in general, 75% Republicans, 76% Independents), bringin up conservative support from Justice Scalia and a plea from Julian Assange to President Trump against media monopolies, as well as technologist Tim Berners-Lee. The campaign makes an appeal to Republicans' vulnerability in letting Democrats take the credit for saving net neutrality in a bid to make the pro-neutrality stance as competitive legislatively as it is bipartisan in the population. A third campaign, on August 16 2018 sought to mobilize small businesses' dependence on open and neutral internet access against large ISPs that throttle content, descriptively called Businesses for Net Neutrality. It asked signors, legally authorized to represent their company's position, to sign a petition that would be distributed to their members of Congress. Their voter follow-up campaing to Vote for Net Neutrality, called Red Alert, was run through under the Battle for the Net umbrella, and reported on progress.

Fight for the Future has also been involved in an open-data and accountability effort looking into the charge that the FCC allowed Comcast to astroturf the net neutrality reversal comment process through the Council for Individual Freedom, and . The accusation that there was a coordinated effort to fraudulently use the identities of individuals without their knowledge or consent, possibly from direct breach data or warehouse lists created from data breaches. The evidence gathered is points to bots that submitted at least half a million anti-net neutrality comments using real people's stolen identities in an effort to make it look like legitimate grassroots moblization against astroturfing. Appealing to the Reddit community, and suppoting the effort of local media in Denver, in reviewing the docket,  as well as running its own operation in Tampa, Florida, Fight for the Future and other organizations have helped uncover fraud in the proceedings, which has fuled a complaint (September 20, 2018) by the New York Times against the FCC's refusal to comply with multiple Freedom of Information Act requests.

International efforts

On the heels of the anti-PIPA and anti-SOPA, Fight for the Future built tools for efforts outside the US, starting with opposition to Europe's Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) which was defeated in the European Parliament, then worked with Canada's OpenMedia to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) since its intellectual property rules echoed SOPA/PIPA censorship proposals, specifically by targetting the Congressional delegation of "fast track" authority to the President as an undemocrative shirk of the legislative's responsibility to check and balanace the executive branch. In 2016, in conjunction with Citizens Trade Campaign, and as a return to their union workers' roots, Fight for the Future co-organized the Rock Against the TPP series of concerts. The events ran through Denver, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, San Diego, Boston and Pittsburgh from July to November to raise awareness against the TPP, with an accompanying protest petition signature and Congressional call drive effort. It has also come to the defense of Russian protest band Pussy Riot.

Analysis and Lessons Learned 

Fight for the Future's major policy successes have happened when high-volume individual users have been combined with big-clout corporations to levearge regulators and legislatiors. They have also grown their organization's engagement capacity by linking controversial issues to ongoing and long-term vote mobilization strategies. In developing tools like the poltical scorecard and the HelloVote bot, they have made single-issue grassroot participants keep track of politicians' track records and has linked participatory democracy campaigns to votes, duplicating the impact of their work. Other efforts where individual mobilization is not in line with big companies, like the surveillance track, have been harder to advance, and efforts to engage with tech companies on surveillance has been met with silence.

Publications

Fight for the Future is not a research organization so does not publish traditional reports. However, it frequently publishes press releases in the news section [10] and keeps statistics of their campaign engagement in each campaign description. Supplies and explanations are preented in both text and video form.

See Also

Battle for the Net

Petition

Protest

References

[1]https://www.fordfoundation.org/media/1512/2012_tax_return.pdf

[2]http://mediademocracyfund.org/matching-technology-talent-with-frontline-social-justice-organizations/

[3]http://mediademocracyfund.org/oidf-subfund/

[4]https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/01/27/worcester-fight-for-future-helped-ignite-internet-revolt-against-antipiracy-bills/cEZNoCuuHI7mk6eADQ4lZK/story.html

[5]http://wgf.org/grants/grantee-database-2/page/25/

[6]https://fdik.org/soros.dcleaks.com/download/index.html%3Ff=%252Fusp%2520sept%25202014%2520board%2520book%2520final%252010%25202.pdf&t=us

 [7]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/technology/net-neutrality-protests-opposition.html

[8]https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0Bz22uTps2Ng3fjhkaWtMbzVJQk5QZEN4NmpFSXV2MnhJUzNQSE4tR1BSWHFfZmh1MVhpcms

[9]https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/reports/2016/ bottom of page, dot/button 14

[10]https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news

External Links

Adam Weiss Stop Watching Us Rally documentary [see youtube links]

Sunight Foundation: 2014 FCC comment study

Notes

Fight for the Future amalgamated tech community companies into the Internet Defense League as a permanent mobilization effort against censorship and surveillance legislation, creating a sub-organization/spinnoff.

Lead image: Fight For The Future/Facebook https://goo.gl/CgtbR3