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Internet Defense League: A Bat Signal For the Internet

Posted by samzenpus on from the immediate-blackout dept.

mikejuk writes "Following the successful defense of the Internet against SOPA, website owners are being invited to sign up to a project that will enable them to participate in future protest campaign, the Internet Defense League. The banner logo for the 'bat-signal' site is a cat, a reference to Ethan Zuckerman's cute cat theory of digital activism. The idea is that sites would respond to the call to "defend the Internet" by joining a group blackout or getting users to sign petitions. From the article: 'Website owners can sign up on the IDL website to add a bit of code to their sites (or receive code by email at the time of a campaign) that can be triggered in the case of a crisis like SOPA. This would add an "activist call-to-action" to all participating sites - such as a banner asking users to sign petitions, or in extreme cases blackout the site, as proved effective in the SOPA/PIPA protest of January 2012.'"

3 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Unfortunate choice of name... by EdgePenguin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In the UK this is going to be reminiscent, for a lot of people, of the English Defence League - a bunch of neo-nazi football hooligans who stage rallies against 'Islamists' in English town centres, as a shallow pretext to harass and attack people with dark skin.

    1. Re:Unfortunate choice of name... by Mashiki · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Would those be the same islamists who were spitting on people, harassing women, and posting their "anti-gay/anti-homosexual/anti-western stuff" along with general hate speech, as defined by UK law? I'm just curious, I mean the UK does seem to have a serious problem with islamists, captain hook(Abu Hamza al-Masri) comes to mind, but there are plenty of others and plenty more of them on the government welfare dole too.

      --
      Om, nomnomnom...
  2. Re:needs technical measures by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Any time you move to central control, you have the risk that that control can be used for purposes like censorship or manipulation of public opinion by choosing what people are presented with. The internet started off with decentralized control and it could have kept going in that direction. It could have become the strongest force against thought-police and censorship that the world has ever known. Unfortunately, that didn't last long because central control is exactly what people want. They WANT a single site like Facebook to control all their communications, and basically tell them what they should do and not do. They want Apple to protect them from the big bad internet by controlling what software they are permitted to run on their own computers. People WANT that. Censorship is a feature to them, not a bug.

    When people think it's a good idea to give a private for-profit company like Facebook the ability to snoop and control their communications, good luck getting anybody to care about abstract concepts like "freedom".