Heading to Denver this weekend for the National Conference for Media Reform? You can catch me on Saturday morning (early! wake up anyway!) discussing electronic surveillance and what we can do about it with a really cool group of activists and experts. 

"This Conversation Is Being Recorded" features me, Stanford Center for Internet and Society scholar Jonathan Mayer, Access Policy Counsel Peter Micek, and senior research fellow at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, Seeta Peña Gangadharan. The conversation will be moderated by EFF’s Rainey Reitman. 

I'll discuss how the surveillance state has undergone serious mission creep since 9/11. We've witnessed troubling secrecy and surveillance trickle-down, from NSA spying at the military level all the way down to state and local police spying at so-called 'fusion centers' nationwide. At every level of government, we know less and less about what officials are doing, but an ever-growing cast of shadowy characters with government paychecks knows more and more about us. 

Other panelists will touch on issues like the Fourth Amendment implications of increasingly ubiquitous surveillance; how government hackers can and do compromise individual systems to surreptitiously access our information; the shadowy surveillance technology industry; and the targets of government spying.

But don't worry: so as to avoid plunging people into pits of despair, we’ll also talk about how we can fight back against the ever-growing surveillance state. There are no get out of surveillance free cards, unfortunately, but we have some solid ideas about how to create movements for lasting change in this arena. And even more important, we want to hear from you. 

Please join us at the panel and share your thoughts on how to build a movement for 21st century privacy rights. First we'll talk, then we'll organize. It'll be fun.