Roots Action helps you tell your state government to contract only with internet service providing corporations that respect net neutrality. Net neutrality, as you know, is the principle that demands that ISPs treat all network traffic the same, and that's the same principle that allows you, and not some corporation, to determine where you want to go on the internet. It's also the same principle that the FCC repealed late last year, because for them, corporate "freedom" to bilk us and herd us into junk news ghettoes is more important than our actual freedom to associate freely on the internet. But the state of Montana has already declared it won't contract with corporations that don't respect net neutrality; if enough states follow suit, those corporations are more likely to throw up their hands and keep things more or less the way they are. The FCC will hate it, but they're walnuts in the batter of eternity, and we're not.
Meanwhile, here's a welcome development: the Email Privacy Act, once unanimously passed by the House only to fall to some truly disgusting Senatorial machinations, is now a part of the House's version of the defense authorization bill. Now, the Senate will pass its own version, which might or might not include it, or the two bodies might conference it out -- but that's where we come in, by using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to tell our Senators to include the Email Privacy Act as part of the defense authorization bill. Unlike the poison pills they usually try to attach to defense authorization bills, the Email Privacy Act actually relates to national security, since it would require our government to get a warrant whenever it wants to look at personal emails left on a corporate server. So give your Senators a call; they won't see it coming.
Finally, if you have a cellphone, you're almost certainly getting phone calls from numbers that look like real people but are actually robocallers trying to separate you from your money; I can't tell you how many of these phone numbers I've put through a reverse lookup at Whitepages.com only to find they're "suspected spam" and/or "flagged as scam or fraud." Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell our FCC to enact the most vigorous possible regulations restricting the power of robocallers to disrupt our lives. Yeah, the FCC is in charge of that, and they don't give one rat's hind quarter about you or I; they only care about their corporate cronies. But said corporate cronies have no particular interest in protecting robocallers, since they're a) extremely unpopular and b) generally small-time crooks at best. And if robocallers induce folks to use their cellphones less frequently, corporations will care about that. So let's get cracking.
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