Today (Tue/11) marks a nationwide protest against government surveillance that is partially taking place online, as websites such as Reddit post banners opposing the National Security Agency domestic spying program.
A group of protesters plans to gather outside AT&T’s Folsom Street facility at 6pm for an outdoor rally and projection show against mass surveillance. Speakers will include whistleblower Mark Klein on his discovery of the NSA’s secret room inside that building.
To mark the occasion, Code Pink activists also surveilled Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s home (again).
AT&T is an old-school telecom, but new tech companies that facilitate online communication are coming under fire in San Francisco, too – albeit for a different reason.
City employees’ union SEIU Local 1021 will lead a march from the San Francisco Department of Human Resources, at One South Van Ness, to the mid-Market headquarters of Twitter, at noon on Wed/12.
City workers represented by SEIU 1021 are pissed because while Twitter’s economic benefit from the infamous 2011 Twitter Tax Break continues, it seems public employees are about get hit with higher health care contributions.
As Valleywag pointed out last year, Twitter’s gentrifying impact on mid-Market has been such a point of focus that it’s led some to invent new vocabulary to describe the phenomenon.
As SEIU 1021 contract negotiations get underway, expect this fight to continue.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, by the way, was named CEO of the Year at the The Crunchies tech awards at Davies Symphony Hall last night (check out John Oliver’s roast of the awards).
Costolo was also a winner at The Crappies, an alternative event hosted by Jobs With Justice that was staged just outside. Costolo was named “Best Tax Evader.”
According to a press release sent out by SEIU Local 1021, Sups. John Avalos and David Campos will join tomorrow’s rally. The point of the march, according to organizers, is “to deliver a message that corporate favoritism is coming at a price San Francisco residents can no longer afford.”