NSA Data Collection Critic Promotes E-Mail Boilerplate Protest

The Government Accountability Project is circulating a privacy statement for e-mail communications it wants Internet users to adopt as a form of protest against the bulk collection of data by the NSA.

As the planned Feb. 11 Day We Fight Back protest against surveillance approaches, GAP wants backers of the protest to start using this as a boilerplate on all of their e-mails:

"This communication may be unlawfully collected and stored by the National Security Agency (NSA) in secret. The parties to this email do not consent to the retrieving or storing of this communication and any related metadata, as well as printing, copying, re-transmitting, disseminating, or otherwise using it. If you believe you have received this communication in error, please delete it immediately."

"This is a reminder to both senders and recipients that dragnet warrantless surveillance affects us all," says GAP executive director Beatrice Edwards. "It's illegal and highly intrusive in our daily lives."

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.