Surveillance Protest Blocks US Congress’ Access to Thousands of Websites

More than 14,000 websites have joined a grassroots campaign to black out their pages from the US Congress in protest of government mass surveillance, Fight for the Future Campaign Director Evan Greer told Sputnik on Friday.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik), Leandra Bernstein — Greer noted that the goal of the campaign is to impact the Sunday vote in the Senate on reauthorizing mass surveillance under the US Patriot Act.

“People are so fed up with this type of abusive spying that almost spontaneously overnight more than 14,000 sites have already joined.”

Websites participating in the campaign are encouraged to embed code on their pages that detects congressional IP addresses and redirects traffic to a blackout page. The page reads, “We are blocking you access until you end mass surveillance laws.”

The majority of the participating websites are startups, personal blogs and members of the Internet Defense League, Greer explained.

“It is not about whether giant technology companies, many of whom collaborate with the government on surveillance, are going to join this effort. It is about “people taking steps to protect themselves and demand their privacy back.”

Greer argued the US Senate has a clear choice to make in their Sunday vote.

“They can either reauthorize surveillance practices that the courts have already deemed to be illegal, or they can let them expire, which is what the public has been overwhelmingly calling for.”

Fight for the Future is a non-profit grassroots organization that has launched a number of viral Internet campaigns to advocate for net neutrality and digital privacy rights.

The US Senate is scheduled to meet in a rare session on Sunday, only hours before the June 1, 2015 expiration of key surveillance authorities in the Patriot Act.

In early May 2015, a US court of appeals ruled that government bulk collection of personal data, justified under the Patriot Act, is a violation of the US Constitution.