San Francisco - The world wide web marked the 25th anniversary of its invention on Wednesday with a new campaign for a “free, open and truly global Internet.”
The Web We Want campaign was launched by the World Wide Web Foundation, established by British scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
It was Berners-Lee who on March 12, 1989, filed the first proposal for what would later be named the world wide web.
The campaign came amid new revelations of government surveillance by the US National Security Agency.
The latest documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden portrayed an NSA slide from a programme called Quantumbot.
The surveillance scheme piggy-backed on botnets that infect computers with malware to implant the NSA's own spying tools.
The slide described the programme as “highly successful” and said that about 140 000 computers had been “co-opted” into the programme since August 2007.
Another programme revealed that the NSA would masquerade as a Facebook server and use the social media site to infect targeted computers.
The reports were published on Wednesday by a website called The Intercept, which was set up by Glenn Greenwald, the privacy journalist who broke Snowden's story.
The Web We Want campaign calls for an internet users bill of rights.
“The Web enables everyone on the planet to participate in a free flow of knowledge, ideas, collaboration and creativity,” the campaign statement reads.
“But now the actions of some companies and some governments threaten our fundamental freedoms on the web.”
Berners-Lee also called for action and protest against surveillance and the adoption “of a Magna Carta for the world wide web.
“Are we going to continue on the road and just allow the governments to do more and more and more control - more and more surveillance?” he said on the BBC. - Sapa-dpa