http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/techies-concerned-over-nsa-surveillance-will-march-in-dc-proclaiming-stop-watching-us/2013/10/25/5bedb546-3da7-11e3-b7ba-503fb5822c3e_story.html

But the words became more fluid as he channeled his concern Friday about NSA surveillance, in preparation for a lobbying trip to Capitol Hill demanding closer scrutiny of the secretive agency. If the spiel didn’t come easily at first, well, he’s not a lobbyist. Like so many of the protesters turning out for this weekend’s Stop Watching Us march, he’s a tech guy: a computer scientist from Cambridge, Mass.

Oh, did you expect anti-tech folks — the tinfoil hat crowd, the off-the-gridders? Instead, it’s the super-techie community that has been agitated about the government’s power to collect and analyze our personal data — “people who care” about the issue “because they understand it,” said Chris Lewis, vice president of Public Knowledge, one of the event’s nonprofit-group organizers.

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Hosted by a hodgepodge coalition that includes the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations as well as libertarian-leaning groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and FreedomWorks, the Stop Watching Us organizers hope for a diverse crowd that includes the Internet-weary. No need to RSVP by name: Just show up! Don’t worry about those addresses they’re collecting from you — it’s just to let lawmakers know that an actual constituent has shown up; no other use for the data planned.

But it’s the Internet-savvy who represent the beating heart of the movement. At a training session Friday morning on the Hill, a few gray-haired activists and policy wonks stood out in a crowd dominated by the postgrad vibe — beards, glasses, shaggy hair — of techies on their day off from the cubicle farm.