This CISPA Blackout Could Be Better

Monday's the day, ladies and gentleman. The big CISPA blackout is happening all over the Internet. It's a lot like the big SOPA blackout in January 2012, only it's missing, well, pretty much all the main characters. This time around, as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act heads to the Senate and, ultimately, President Obama's desk, where he may or may not veto the thing, the opposition to the privacy-thumping legislation isn't nearly as star-studded as it was a couple of years ago.

Then, the Internet united forces in protest, and everyone from Wikipedia to Wired went dark to mark the collective outrage over anti-piracy legislation. Now, the blackout includes such popular websites as Your Friendly Neighborhood Anarchist dot com and I Don't Care I'm Just Inspired dot Tumblr dot com. Oh, you're not familiar with those websites? Neither is the United States Senate.

That's not to hate on any of the at least 394 websites that Anonymous says have gone dark to protest CISPA. Unfortunately for the bill's opponents, though, that's not nearly enough to make the protest effective. "But there's a twibbon campaign, too!" you say? That's not going to cut it either. Because as much as SOPA taught us just how effective Internet protests could be, the effort also showed us how to make an Internet protest effective. Very simply speaking, it takes manpower and star power.

It's hard to tell how many people are behind the CISPA protest. We know that the nation's largest privacy advocates, organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), are working to stop the bill. We also know that a small network of Anonymous affiliates, many of whom are participating in the blackout, have joined the fray. (Both organizations stopped short of participating in the blackout, however.)

Even with all those folks, though, it seems like a pretty small fray—at least, compared to the SOPA protest it is. Whereas SOPA-related stories topped the front page of Reddit for days, CISPA's blackout is pretty far down the queue. There is a CISPA subreddit, but unlike the SOPA subreddit which has thousands of active readers well over a year after the protest ended, CISPA's rocking the low hundreds. Even Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian hasn't been able to mobilize the Redditor army.

So CISPA-hating is not as popular as SOPA-hating. We all knew this already. What the present blackout's making glaringly clear, however, is the extent to which CISPA simply lacks the celebrity that could turn this not just into a SOPA-sized outrage, but even a Kony-sized outrage. I'm not talking about getting Matt Damon on board or anything like that. But if the anti-CISPA movement actually managed to get the tech industry on its side, the effect could be tremendous. We know this because Rep. Mike Rogers is pointing to the tech industry's support as reason to move forward with the legislation, and it appears to be working.

All of this information is probably pretty discouraging if you're an opponent of CISPA. The blackout should feel like a protest everyone can participate in, one the whole world will see, but that's just not true. Plenty of people don't have the keys to big websites that they can shut down to make a statement, and the vast majority of the sites that did shut down aren't big enough for the general public to notice.

If you really want to make a difference in the fight against CISPA, it might be time to resort to more classic forms of political protest. Call your Senator. Write a check to the ACLU. (If CISPA does pass, they'll need the funds to challenge it in court.) Heck, do what Ohanian did and try to get in touch with the heads of the major Internet companies that protested SOPA. Get them involved. Imagine what would happen if Mark Zuckerberg made a public statement about how CISPA would ruin Facebook. People would listen!

It would be unfair to write off the entire anti-CISPA effort as a fringey Internet protest with a half-assed blackout effort. It's made up of passionate activists who want Congress to make the right choice. However, it feels like they're not getting anybody's attention. Even with the president's opposition to the bill in its current version, the passed the legislation by a healthy margin.

Something's not working for the protesters. It could be the lack of numbers or the lack of famous tech industry figures showing support. Or it could be something else, some missing piece that makes hating CISPA a lot less popular than hating SOPA. Or—and this is the real worst case scenario—maybe Americans actually just don't care about this new bill. Sure, it allows the government more access to your private Internet data without needing a warrant to retrieve it. But isn't that how they catch the terrorists?