As we recently announced and participated in, a group of websites, companies, consumer advocacy groups and digital rights organizations all joined forces for a day of action last Tuesday against mass surveillance. That protest, dedicated to the memory of Aaron Swartz, involved participants and websites running banners that urged visitors to head over to the protest website and contact their representatives. An underlying goal was to harness some of the outrage against SOPA/PIPA and direct it toward the NSA‘s ongoing surveillance abuses, since online protest have been proven to help move the needle, even if they can‘t all be on the scale of SOPA.

Not everybody was impressed. Because the NSA and friends didn‘t immediately admit fault and declare an end to all surveillance before crying a lot, launching balloons and committing coordinated seppuku on the steps of the Capitol building, Nicole Perlroth at the NY Times took to penning a slightly-snotty article strongly suggesting the effort was a waste of time and „barely registered“: