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Anonymous has announced a joint action between the hacktivist group and the Occupy movement, "OUR POLLS," which seeks to Occupy the Vote 2012 with the aim of holding our elected officials accountable to the people.
Elected officials serve one purpose -- to represent their constituents, the people who voted them into office.
Last year, many of our elected officials let us down by giving in to deep-pocketed lobbyists and passing laws meant to boost corporate profits at the expense of individual liberty.
Our Senators and Representatives showed how little they cared about personal freedoms when they voted overwhelmingly to pass the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The NDAA allows for the indefinite detention of individuals based merely on a suspicion or allegation of sympathizing with questionable groups or causes.This act is a prominent threat to the inalienable due process rights of every US citizen as laid out in the Constitution. It allows the military to engage in civilian law enforcement, and to suspend due process, habeas corpus or other constitutional guarantees when desired.
Our congressmen passed one of the greatest threats to civil liberties in the history of the United States.Will we hold them accountable on election day? Will we hold our elected officials accountable for supporting rigid Internet censorship laws such as SOPA, PIPA, HR 1981 and the ACTA treaty? The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) aimed to crack down on copyright infringement by restricting user access to websites that hosted or helped facilitate pirated content. SOPA and PIPA's ambiguous, broad wording would have cast a wide censorship net around most of the Internet, thus creating questions of due process, burden of proof, and privacy violations.
The proposed laws were lobbied and paid for by Hollywood, RIAA, MPAA and other massive media companies and would safeguard entertainment industry profits at the expense of essential freedoms, the Internet and constitutional civil liberties . Even if the goal was to merely regulate pirated content, the ambiguous wording demonstrates that the authors and supporters of SOPA and PIPA have little-to-no understanding of the Internet's architecture or the frightening implications of the legislation.
What can you do?
You are one person. You have one vote.
Use that vote on November 6 to hold your elected official accountable for supporting bills such as NDAA, SOPA and PIPA. We are calling on voters, activists and keyboard warriors under all banners to unite as a single force to unseat the elected representatives who threaten our essential freedoms and who were so quick to minimize our individual constitutional rights for a quick corporate profit.
Anonymous also lists all U.S. Senators up for re-election in 2012 who voted to support the NDAA and who still support PIPA, all U.S. Representatives up for re-election in 2012 who voted to support the NDAA and who still support SOPA, and notes that all 435 seats in the US House of Representatives are up for re-election in November 2012.