How to Build a Privacy Movement

We had a demonstration against the surveillance mania in Berlin last Saturday which attracted 15000 people, making it the biggest demonstration against surveillance for the last 20 years. The German Working Group Against Data Retention - which was the main organizer - is still discussing how to move on from this big success. Our feeling is that this was the founding moment of a wider privacy movement. An English news report is here, and there are pictures and videos and our English press release.

I have been at the annual Privacy Commissioners' conference in Montreal since Monday, so I did not really have time to blog about it here. But a lot of people at this conference wanted to know how we did it, and on short notice they put me on a panel today to talk about it. So here are my speaking notes and the accompanying slides - see it as a quick and dirty version of a "privacy-movement howto".

(In the notes, "Tuesday" refers to a pre-event organized by a number of civil society groups before the official conference started on Wednesday.)

Update: Because people keep asking me and don't seem to look into the slides: The "Stasi 2.0" t-shirts are available at dataloo.spreadshirt.net. I just noticed the site has no English version, but you should be able to understand it. It's a generic web shop.

Update 2: The shirts shop now has an english website.