Declaration of Internet Freedom: 35K Worldwide Sign On So Far

Who can forget the Internet blackout strike of 2012. It forced Congress to dump such bills as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that would have allowed the U.S. government to censor content online — ostensibly to protect copyrighted materials.

Well, SOPA and the Protect Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (PIPA) are gone, but no one is forgetting.

Now online activists have come up with a Declaration of Internet Freedom — and in just two days nearly 36,000 folks have put their online John Hancocks on it here. Attempts at reining in online content keep coming from big companies and governments, as April’s Facebook and AT&T-supported Cyber Intelligence & Sharing Protection Act anti-terrorism bill so violently showed in April.

CISPA, even broader than SOPA, would violate Americans’ Fourth Amendment protections, advocates including Electronic Frontier Foundation reps said in April. This CISPA infographic shows why such companies as Facebook and AT&T backed CISPA — and how it compared in that rev to SOPA and PIPA.

A list of supporting companies and their statements backing CISPA is here.

As Arab Spring and the various global Occupy movements demonstrate, the Internet is an incredible rallying point for large-scale political movements, resistance and outcry. The Declaration of Internet Freedom of 2012 document — as supported by Access, ACLU, CREDO, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Free Press — includes a full preamble:

Here is the full text of its articles — split between the two large screenshots, below. Read more at source: DeclarationofInternetFreedom.com