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Every month, it seems, a new piece of legislation, or secret trade agreement, pops up that threatens to castrate the Internet as we know it. First came SOPA and PIPA. Now we have ACTA, CISPA, CSA, SECURE IT, TPP, and others. It is a veritable storm of nefarious acronyms. And for many, the bombardment is just becoming too much to keep up with. Those who spent precious time and energy to protect the Web from SOPA and PIPA are tired. When does it end?, they ask.

The answer is, of course: it doesn’t. To combat this problem of activist fatigue, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian and Internet rights group Fight for the Future have come up with a solution. It’s called the Internet Defense League (IDL). Its mission: create a “Bat-Signal for the Internet,” a bit of code crafted by the IDL, which the organization hopes can be used to launch concerted online protests, similar to the Internet “blackout” that helped stop SOPA and PIPA in their tracks.

Here’s how it works: Anyone with a website — from a personal Tumblr blog on up to major Web destinations — signs up with the IDL using an email address. Anytime a bit of legislation that threatens the open Web pops up, the IDL will release the custom-tailored code, which webmasters can embed in their site. No details about what exactly this code will do have yet been released, but the goal is clear: Alert concerned Netizens that it’s time to act; get the word out to the most people possible; and show Washington that the Internet is not to be messed with.

“We’ll invent something at the time, and it will be some really unified and shocking action,” Tiffiny Cheng, co-director of Fight for the Future, tells Forbes. “We’re creating the tools and the forms of protest that allow for viral organizing. That’s how the SOPA protests were able to get started and grow to the level they did.”

So far, Reddit, Mozilla, Imgur, Cheezburger Network, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Knowledge have all joined the Internet Defense League. There are surely many others (I added my neglected personal Tumblr blog, for instance), but those are the big names we know about at the moment.

To kick things off, the IDL, Fight for the Future, and Ohanian are campaigning heavily against CISPA (the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act), which the Senate has now merged with the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 (CSA), a bill that would allow for mass data sharing between the Federal government and businesses for an undefined range of law enforcement purposes. The Senate is expected to vote on CSA sometime at the beginning of June, and Fight for the Future has set up a website, Privacy Is Awesome, that allows concerned U.S. citizens to easily contact their senators to express opposition to the legislation.

Over at Reddit, which has been designated the official Internet Defense League forum of choice, Fight for the Future has posted a list of all 99 senators (and their phone numbers) who have not yet come out against CISPA. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has bashed CISPA for its invasions of privacy, is the only senator absent from the list. (Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) also says he’s against CSA, according to some of his constituents.) Here is that list:

Mark Begich (AK) – (907) 271-5915

Lisa Murkowski (AK) – (907) 456-0233

Jeff Sessions (AL) – (205) 731-1500

Richard Shelby (AL) – (205) 731-1384

John Boozman (AR) – (501) 372-7153

Mark Pryor (AR) – (501) 324-6336

John McCain (AZ) – (602) 952-2410

Jon Kyl (AZ) – (602) 840-1891

Barbara Boxer (CA) – (510) 286-8537

Dianne Feinstein (CA) – (415) 393-0707

Michael Bennet (CO) – (303) 455-7600

Mark Udall (CO) – (303) 650-7820

Richard Blumenthal (CT) – (860) 258-6940

Joe Lieberman (CT) – (860) 549-8463

Chris Coons (DE) – (302) 573-6345

Tom Carper (DE) (302) 573-6291

Marco Rubio (FL) – (407) 254-2573

Bill Nelson (FL) – (407) 872-7161

Saxby Chambliss (GA) – (770)-763-9090

Johnny Isakson (GA) – (770) 661-099

Daniel Inouye (HI) – (808) 541-2542

Daniel Akaka (HI) – (808) 522-8970

Chuck Grassley (IA) (319) 363-6832

Tom Harkin (IA) (319) 365-4504

Mike Crapo (ID) – (208) 334-1776

James Risch (ID) – (208) 342-7985

Richard Durbin (IL) – (312) 353-4952

Mark Kirk (IL) – (847) 940-0202

Daniel Coats (IN) – (317) 554-0750

Richard Lugar (IN) – (317) 226-5555

Jerry Moran (KS) – (785) 628-6401

Pat Roberts (KS) – (785) 295-2745

Mitch McConnell (KY) – (270) 781-1673

Rand Paul (KY) – (859) 426-0165

Mary Landrieu (LA) – (225) 389-0395

David Vitter (LA) – (318) 448-0169

John Kerry (MA) – (617) 565-8519

Scott Brown (MA) – (617) 565-3170

Barbara Mikulski (MD) – (410) 962-4510

Ben Cardin (MD) – (410) 962-4436

Susan Collins (ME) – (207) 780-3575

Olympia Snowe (ME) – (800) 432-1599

Carl Levin (MI) – (313) 226-6020

Debbie Stabenow (MI) – (616) 975-0052

Al Franken (MN) – (651) 221-1016

Amy Klobuchar (MN) – (1-888) 224-9043

Claire McCaskill (MO) – (314) 918-8100

Roy Blunt (MO) – (816) 471-7141

Thad Cochran (MS) – (601) 965-4459

Roger Wicker (MS) – (601) 965-4644

Jon Tester (MT) – (406) 252-0550

Max Baucus (MT) – (406) 449-5480

Richard Burr (NC) – (800) 685-8916

Kay Hagan (NC) – (704) 334-2448

John Hoeven (ND) (701) 250-4618

Kent Conrad (ND) – (701) 852-0703

Mike Johanns (NE) (402)-758-8981

Ben Nelson (NE) – (402) 391-3411

Kelly Ayotte (NH) – (603) 622-7979

Jeanne Shaheen (NH) – (603) 647-7500

Frank Lautenberg (NJ) – (973) 639-8700

Robert Menendez (NJ) – (973) 645-3030

Jeff Bingaman (NM) – (505) 346-6601

Tom Udall (NM) – (505) 988-6511

Harry Reid (NV) – (702) 388-5020

Dean Heller (NV) – (702) 388-6605

Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) – (212) 688-6262

Chuck Schumer (NY) – (212) 486-4430

Rob Portman (OH) – (614) 469-6774

Sherrod Brown (OH) – (614) 469-2083

Tom Coburn (OK) – (405) 231-4941

James Inhofe (OK) – (405) 608-4381

Jeff Merkley (OR) – (503) 326-3386

Pat Toomey (PA) – (610) 434-1444

Robert Casey (PA) – (215) 405-9660

Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) – (401) 453-5294

Jack Reed (RI) (401) 528-5200

Jim DeMint (SC) (843) 727-4525

Lindsey Graham (SC) (864) 250-1417

Tim Johnson (SD) (605) 332-8896

John Thune (SD) – (605) 334-9596

Lamar Alexander (TN) – (901) 544-4224

Bob Corker (TN) – (202) 224-3344

John Cornyn (TX) – (972) 239-1310

Kay Bailey Hutchison (TX) – (214) 361-3500

Mike Lee (UT) – (801) 524-5933

Orrin Hatch (UT) – (801) 524-4380

Mark Warner (VA) – (804) 775-2314

Jim Webb (VA) – (804) 771-2221

Pat Leahy (VT) – (802) 863-2525

Bernie Sanders (VT) – (802) 862-0697

Maria Cantwell (WA) – (206) 220-6400

Patty Murray (WA) – (206) 553-5545

Ron Johnson (WI) – (414) 276-7282

Herb Kohl (WI) – (414) 297-4451

John Rockefeller (WV) – (304) 347-5372

Joe Manchin (WV) – (304) 342-5855

John Barrasso (WY) – (307) 261-6413

Michael Enzi (WY) – (307) 772-2477

This is all certainly a good start. For the IDL’s plan to really work effectively, however, it seems to me that it will have to better define what exactly their code will do before the vast number of sites that are needed for the plan to work will sign up. That said, such a “Bat-Signal” is quite obviously the next step in online activism — we are all connected by the Internet, after all; why not use that connectivity to fight these battles? At the moment, the only people doing anything similar are Anonymous-branded hacktivists, who are excellent at acting in concert to carry out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks as a form of protest. DDoS will not, of course, win over anyone in Congress. So a less controversial strategy needs to be employed.

I, for one, am extremely curious to see what IDL comes up with. Those of you interested can sign up with the IDL here.