In an attempt to recreate the Internet "blackout" that shut down SOPA and PIPA, a group of online activists have created the Internet Defense League, which promises to craft a "Bat-Signal for the Internet" that will warn Web users against bad legislation.
Every month, it seems, a new piece of legislation, or secret trade agreement, pops up that threatens to castrate the Internet as we know it. First came SOPA and PIPA. Now we have ACTA, CISPA, CSA, SECURE IT, TPP, and others. It is a veritable storm of nefarious acronyms. And for many, the bombardment is just becoming too much to keep up with. Those who spent precious time and energy to protect the Web from SOPA and PIPA are tired. When does it end?, they ask.
The answer is, of course: it doesnt. To combat this problem of activist fatigue, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian and Internet rights group Fight for the Future have come up with a solution. Its called the Internet Defense League (IDL). Its mission: create a Bat-Signal for the Internet, a bit of code crafted by the IDL, which the organization hopes can be used to launch concerted online protests, similar to the Internet blackout that helped stop SOPA and PIPA in their tracks.
Heres how it works: Anyone with a website from a personal Tumblr blog on up to major Web destinations signs up with the IDL using an email address. Anytime a bit of legislation that threatens the open Web pops up, the IDL will release the custom-tailored code, which webmasters can embed in their site. No details about what exactly this code will do have yet been released, but the goal is clear: Alert concerned Netizens that its time to act; get the word out to the most people possible; and show Washington that the Internet is not to be messed with.
Well invent something at the time, and it will be some really unified and shocking action, Tiffiny Cheng, co-director of Fight for the Future, tells Forbes. Were creating the tools and the forms of protest that allow for viral organizing. Thats how the SOPA protests were able to get started and grow to the level they did.
So far, Reddit, Mozilla, Imgur, Cheezburger Network, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Knowledge have all joined the Internet Defense League. There are surely many others (I added my neglected personal Tumblr blog, for instance), but those are the big names we know about at the moment.
To kick things off, the IDL, Fight for the Future, and Ohanian are campaigning heavily against CISPA (the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act), which the Senate has now merged with the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 (CSA), a bill that would allow for mass data sharing between the Federal government and businesses for an undefined range of law enforcement purposes. The Senate is expected to vote on CSA sometime at the beginning of June, and Fight for the Future has set up a website, Privacy Is Awesome, that allows concerned U.S. citizens to easily contact their senators to express opposition to the legislation.
Over at Reddit, which has been designated the official Internet Defense League forum of choice, Fight for the Future has posted a list of all 99 senators (and their phone numbers) who have not yet come out against CISPA. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has bashed CISPA for its invasions of privacy, is the only senator absent from the list. (Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) also says hes against CSA, according to some of his constituents.) Here is that list:
This is all certainly a good start. For the IDLs plan to really work effectively, however, it seems to me that it will have to better define what exactly their code will do before the vast number of sites that are needed for the plan to work will sign up. That said, such a Bat-Signal is quite obviously the next step in online activism we are all connected by the Internet, after all; why not use that connectivity to fight these battles? At the moment, the only people doing anything similar are Anonymous-branded hacktivists, who are excellent at acting in concert to carry out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks as a form of protest. DDoS will not, of course, win over anyone in Congress. So a less controversial strategy needs to be employed.
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Internet Defense League plans ‘Bat-Signal’ for the Web to combat dangerous bills