A year ago today, we joined the world in shock on learning that governments were spying on internet users around the world. Tapping internet service providers’ undersea cables, intentionally and secretly weakening encryption products, surreptitiously collecting everything from call metadata to photos sent over the internet by US citizens — nothing was off limits.
Just as troubling as the revelations themselves is the fact that since last summer, little if anything has changed. Despite a lot of rhetoric, our three branches of government in the United States have not made many concrete steps toward truly protecting citizens from unchecked government surveillance.
Automattic has been a strong supporter of efforts to reform government surveillance. We’ve supported reform legislation in Congress, and participated in the Day We Fight Back, earlier this year. More importantly, we aim to make our own legal processes for securing the information our users entrust to us as transparent and protective as possible.
Be the change you want to see in the world — that’s why we’re joining the many other companies who are participating today in Reset the Net. In the face of intrusive surveillance, we believe that everyone in the tech community needs to stand up and do what they can, starting with their own sites and platforms. For us, that means working to secure the connection between users and our websites. We’ll be serving all *.wordpress.com subdomains only over SSL by the end of the year.
If we’ve learned anything over the past year, it’s that encryption, when done correctly, works. If we properly encrypt our sites and devices, we can make mass surveillance much more difficult.
We’re happy to be taking these steps and hope that the coming year brings real reform to end mass surveillance.
Filed under: Community
Hmmm, surveillance, huh? What would they want with my small scribblings? Makes you wonder what they are doing with all those gazillion bits of data.
I’m excited to hear that SSL will be standard on wordpress.com subdomains soon. I really don’t like the idea that anyone’s spying on me, especially when I’m not doing anything wrong.
Thanks, WordPress!
This is great! Thank you. BTW, if you added a feature where users can pay to get SSL certs for their custom domain hosted by WordPress.com, I’d for one would gladly pay. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge…
Stand now.
I support this!
Reblogged this on A View from the Grid and commented:
Passivity is acceptance.
He who rules the net rules the world! We have become internet slaves and I am not sure we can ever be truly free from censorship but of course I support and appreciate the efforts of Automatic in fighting this sinister intrusion and violation of privacy!
My wife and I have discussed this many times. While we don’t believe the federal government has any business snooping about as they do in the name of national security, we don’t frankly care if they snoop us.
They would be bored to death with our internet activities. There is nothing to be hidden of our internet use.
We believe that those who fear this intrusion most are those whom have things to hide in the shadows. Our internet activities are all in the light. Clearly, Washington is misusing and abusing technology.
Excellent! This is great news and I support WordPress in its efforts to protect its members.
Thank you. It is disturbing the lengths governments go and spin it as being to protect their people. They’re just snooping. I’m all for RESETTING THE NET.
Thank you for participating in Re-Set the Net!
“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” Edmund Burke
You’d think humanity would have learned this lesson by now.
Great news, just hoping it won’t slow down the servers significantly
LOVE this, and THANK YOU.
Excellent, this is good to hear.
Much needed, and thanks.
Who in their right mind would post something on a public forum that they know the government would be interested in? Nevermind….evidently more than I thought.