Tuesday's protest is unlikely to have the same effect. It doesn't have the backing and reach of Internet powerhouses, the way the SOPA strike did. For example, while Google reportedly supports the bill — and sent out an email today about it to a few million users — Google isn't talking about it on its homepage.
And the end result won't be as drastic: Lawmakers aren't voting on this immediately, though it already has significant bipartisan support in the House.
"We're not expecting this to stop a bill that's about to pass, like in the case of SOPA and PIPA," April Glaser of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told NBC Bay Area last week.
But Segal says the organizers hope the protest will show lawmakers "that there's going to be ongoing public pressure until these reforms are instituted."
The USA Freedom Act could end government mass surveillance programs like the NSA's call records collection, the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in November. But it also warned that "the NSA has a long history of twisting the language of statutes to argue for surveillance authority."
The bill's two sponsors — Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis. — weren't always working alongside open-Internet activists. Leahy authored PIPA, one of the bills at the root of the 2012 protests, and in 2005 Sensenbrenner introduced the USA Patriot Act, which the Freedom Act would amend. Sensenbrenner said last July that he was "extremely troubled" that the FBI had used the Patriot Act to justify collecting phone records in bulk from Verizon.
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