While looking forward to this Wednesday night’s NSA Comedy Night, I noticed a few more interesting developments that have hit the news last week on this subject.

Brian Knappenger, Director of the the upcoming documentary about Aaron Swartz, “The Internet’s Own Boy,” published a video op-ed video for the New York Times.  The five minute film addresses the popular question “Why Care About the N.S.A.?” in a short film exploring whether ordinary Americans should be concerned about online surveillance.

Also, it came out that our cell phone records were part of the N.S.A.’s larger plan.

All this makes it even more pertinent to have anonymous whistleblowing software, such as Secure Drop, which Forbes and the New Yorker are already using. The Freedom of the Press Foundation’s SecureDrop team, headed up by James Dolan and Garrett
Smith, both recently spoke at the Aaron Swartz Day celebration, and Aaron Swartz Hackathon kick-off, at the Internet Archive on November 8th. (Video of their talk here.)  Code from the hackathon has already been rolled into the latest download of SecureDrop.

SecureDrop was originally started by Wired’s Kevin Poulsen and the late Aaron Swartz. Poulsen is the plaintiff in the FOIA court case against the government over the release of Swartz’s Secret Service and FBI files, and has just released another 148 documents  as a result of his case. (Direct link to documents.)

So I hope to see you this Wednesday night at NSA Comedy Night, where we can all learn more about protecting our constitutional rights, and then proceed to let Will Durst shine a little laughter on the situation.