The fight against cybersecurity laws is going offline. In fact, it may be calling your mom during dinner.
Fight for the Future is the Internet activist group that created a central hub for the massive Internet strike against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). The organization is now taking aim at cybersecurity bills in the Senate, and it’s changing tactics.
The Cyber Intelligence Security Protection Act (CISPA) and a piece of similar legislation, Lieberman-Collins Bill, are both expected to see a Senate vote soon—but not if Fight for the Future’s fundraising goes according to plan.
With a new campaign called Privacy is Awesome, the group has raised over $1,600 since it started Tuesday. Their goal is $10,000, but since activist and Democrats.com President Bob Fertik has offered to match half that, they’re already a third of the way there.
The biggest chunk of the money is going to hire Mobile Commons, a robocalling service, to contact constituents of key senators, Tiff Cheng, a Fight for the Future representative, said.
“We are spending $5,000 on the call tool that we’re using with Mobile Commons alone,”
It could be more expensive than that even,” she told the Daily Dot via chat. The rest, she said, would go to web designers, programmers, and organizers
To be clear, Fight for the Future isn’t just fighting CISPA. They’re also preemptively attacking the Lieberman-Collins bill, which has yet to be introduced in the Senate.
Lieberman-Collins has been touted as a way for President Obama to pass cybersecurity legislation while still opposing CISPA. Obama’s advisors have essentially promised he’d veto CISPA. Despite that, Cheng claims, Lieberman-Collins adopts CISPA’s most concerning language: it doesn’t protect user privacy; it doesn’t anonymize users; and it makes private user data available to numerous federal agencies.
“Obama needs to come out against L-C for the same reasons he came out against CISPA,” she added.
Maybe with enough robocalls, he will.
Photo via Privacy is Awesome
