Lessig’s Mayday PAC is crowdsourcing donations in an attempt to revamp the system and change the way campaigns and elections are funded.
Mayday is also dubbing itself the Internet’s Super PAC, ready to defend the Internet from “a steady stream of threats and challenges to a free and open Internet,” according to the site. Those threats include net neutrality, SOPA and PIPA, and other regulatory issues…
By Friday we’ll see if the MayDay PAC hits its $5 million goal and is on track to end all super PACs with this new super PAC.
Here’s the timeline. The goal is to raise $5 million by July 5. The MayDay PAC aims to get campaign finance reform–minded candidates elected in 2016 and then help them get fundamental reforms passed. If the MayDay PAC succeeds, it hopes to have big money and corporate influence out of politics by 2018—and we might need to rename that date America’s New Independence Day.
So when mere months after his death Edward Snowden released his cache of internal NSA files, and we the public and the media all struggled to understand it and figure out what to do, it was hard not to miss Aaron immensely. It was a surprise of sorts seeing that I wasn’t the only one who looked to Aaron for guidance, and that I wasn’t the only one having a hard time without him. Remember when Wikipedia blacked out to protest SOPA/PIPA? A lot of people wondered why something similar didn’t happen in protest of the NSA, why something similar didn’t happen more recently in the fight for net neutrality. The answer, in large part, is because Aaron isn’t around anymore to do these things. To motivate and guide us.
In a deeply personal way Aaron lives on in me, but similarly his ideals live on in a whole crowd of organizations and people he collaborated with. Demand Progress is still running strong, with David Segal at its helm. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is still fighting for tech law reform, with Cindy Cohen as legal director and Peter Eckersley and Seth Schoen advising it on tech. The Freedom of the Press Foundation is supporting projects like SecureDrop, a tool Aaron helped develop to protect the anonymity of journalistic sources, and Fight for the Future is educating people about net neutrality.
