More than 10,000 websites are blocking Congress from accessing them in protest
Business Insider By Steven Tweedie
3 hours ago



(Fight for the Future) The Blackout Congress protest page.

More than 10,000 websites are currently blocking Congress from accessing them as a protest of the Patriot Act, according to The Hill.

The participating websites have embedded a small snippet of code into their websites that detects if a computer is attempting to access the website from an IP address associated with Congress. If that's the case, that person would be redirected to a protest page plastered with the words "Congress: this is a blackout."

The mass protest is organized by internet activist group Fight for the Future, which describes itself as "a nonprofit working to expand the internet's power for good."

This particular protest is focused on preventing the possible extension of three key provisions of the controversial Patriot Act, the Act of Congress that has allowed for mass government surveillance.

"We are blocking your access until you end mass surveillance laws," the blackout page states. "You have conducted mass surveillance of everyone illegally and are now on record for trying to enact those programs into law. 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. Until you do, thousands of web sites have blocked your access, and more are joining every day."

In addition to blocking Congress members' access to more than 10,000 websites, Fight for the Future is also organizing a mass protest with the hashtag #ifeelnaked.org. Stating that "NSA spying makes us feel naked," the protest invites people all over the world to post photos of themself partially naked.



So far, it's looking like Fight for the Future and other supporters of ending the Patriot Act may get what they want: the Senate recently blocked the NSA reform bill and three key Patriot Act extensions. Unless lawmakers manage to find support to extend the Act before Sunday at midnight, mass surveillance and those three key provisions of the Patriot Act will be no more.

somehow i think these lying bastards are still going to spy on us whether its legal or not. it wasnt legal in the first place and they still did it, im not sure i am going to believe that they are just going to stop. Courts ruled the spying to be illegsl, and yet politicians are still trying to push it through anyway, dont these idiots understand the concept of legal and illegal? the whole patriot act should be dissolved IMO.

Why should lawmakers know laws? I think that it's a crime to call it the patriot act in the first place.
Think about this though, the REAL patriots our founding fathers
were committing treason vandalism murder ACCORDING to the The crown. To us they are heroes. They risked everything including their lives so that we could be free of England's yolk.
The first article of Constitution of the United States guarantees us freedom of speech.
The Privacy Act of 1974 proved that it took 199 years to protect our private records. The court's have to issue a subpoena to sieze our paper records, why should it be any different for texts email social media unless there is an obvious threat or obvious criminal activity that can be managed by sites with filters? Yes, we have the right to peacefully assemble as well and if a bakery orders several kilos of flour from Columbia and is found to be selling artisan bread, no one goes to jail we know that the authorities are making an obvious attempt to protect us and everyone is happy. We don't care if the authorities track narcotics dealers and traffickers, at least I don't. We don't care if they track human traffickers.
The real questions we need to ask our lawmakers are what are the financial cost of the mass collections and how long does it allow kidnappers and crystal meth labs to operate while they count the 17 million recipes for monkey bread?