Firefox’s parent company launches campaign against NSA monitoring

Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind the popular Firefox Web browser, wants to know what exactly the National Security Agency has been monitoring -- and it has helped kicked off a campaign to find out.

Last week, it was revealed that the NSA was gathering a mass amount of information on calls made through Verizon Wireless. The agency has also been gathering information from U.S. tech and Internet companies through a program called PRISM.

Those revelations inspired Mozilla and 85 other organizations and companies to launch StopWatching.US, a campaign that encourages online users to email Congress with a prewritten letter demanding that the government unveil “the full extent of the NSA’s spying programs.”

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“As users, we don’t have good ways of knowing whether the current system is being abused, because it’s all happening behind closed doors,” Mozilla wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

Mozilla has previously launched user campaigns to fight proposed bills that could have censored content on the Internet.

“Mozilla believes in an Internet where we do not have to fear that everything we do is being tracked, monitored and logged by either companies or governments,” the blog post says. “And we believe in a government whose actions are visible, transparent and accountable.”

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