WordPress.com Joins Google, Reddit and Tumblr in Protesting NSA Surveillance

WordPress.com announced that it is joining forces with other organizations and companies around the globe to protest NSA surveillance. Earlier this morning Google endorsed the USA Freedom Act, new legislation with bi-partisan authorship that calls for NSA reform. Today WordPress.com joins Google and Reddit, Tumblr, Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cloudflare and many others in the effort to stop NSA surveillance.

This proposed legislation calls for an end to the indiscriminate bulk collection of Americans’ communication records, reformation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and an increase in government transparency.

WordPress.com opted to support The Day We Fight Back by offering a slightly modified “Stop NSA Surveillance” banner to sites hosted on its network.

You can see the banner in action on the WordPress.com blog.

WordPress.com has historically been strongly in support of freedom of speech, demonstrated by its recent efforts to strike back against censorship and commitment to raising awareness about the First Amendment. These issues are closely related to online privacy.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation nicely summarized the damaging effects of surveillance on the freedom of speech:

Free speech is chilled by the specter of ubiquitous surveillance. Just as journalists rely on secure and private communications to investigate stories and communicate with sources, individuals worldwide need to have the freedom to communicate, access information and use technology without big brother’s watching eyes.

It speaks volumes that WordPress.com, which powers many of the world’s top blogs and news outlets, stands firmly in support of freedoms and privacy.

If you want to join WordPress.com and millions of others in the fight to stop the American government from using its power to spy on its citizens and the rest of the world, it’s not too late to add the banner to your site. Self-hosted WordPress sites can join in by installing The Day We Fight Back plugin, now available for download from the WordPress plugin repository.