Americans are increasingly frustrated with our elected officials’ obsession with spying on innocent Americans. And while Americans may not be marching on Washington, as they probably should, there are other ways they’re making the point.
A new movement, called BlackOutCongress.org, means that thousands of sites are now blocking Congress from viewing their webpages in an online demonstration against the abusive data-collection provisions of the Patriot Act.
As of Sunday morning just under 15,000 websites were redirecting computers from Congress to a protest page where users are greeted with a black and white warning that reads, “We are blocking your access until you end mass surveillance laws.”
“You have conducted mass surveillance of everyone illegally and are now on record for trying to enact those programs into law,” the warning reads. “You have presented Americans with the false dichotomy of reauthorizing the PATRIOT Act or passing the USA Freedom Act. The real answer is to end all authorities used to conduct mass surveillance.”
The blackout was created by Fight for the Future, “a grassroots movement to ensure that everyone can access the Internet’s many resources affordably, free of interference or censorship and with full privacy.”
To join the blackout, sites just need to embed a code snippet on their pages that detects the computers used by Congress, and it then redirects them to the Blackout Congress page.
Thus far no politicians have stepped forward to curtail the massive spying programs, in which every single bit of data on a U.S. computer server is logged and stored by the NSA, who in turn maintains detailed dossiers on the lives of every single American citizen.
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