The hacktivist collective known as Anonymous is calling for an internet blackout on Monday, April 22, in protest of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) that recently passed the House of Representatives.

The group is also "encouraging" all web developers and website owners to go dark on Monday, and display a message as to why, and encourage others to do the same.

The call for a blackout is being spread with a newly released video (above) and also on a Facebook page.

Text of the video statement follows:

Dear citizens of the internet,

We are Anonymous.

The United States Government is again attempting to control and censor the internet. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act has just recently passed the house.

This bill would allow major internet entities such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google to voluntarily share your personal information with the U.S. Government. This will not only effect users in the United States, but also anyone with an account with these companies.

This upcoming Monday, April the 22nd, we invite you to join Anonymous in a internet blackout. We encourage all web developers and website owners to go dark on this date. Display a message as to why you are going dark, and encourage others to do the same.

We hope, just like the successful protest over the Stop Online Piracy Act, we can encourage the senate to stop this bill.

Spread the message, and inform the world.

We are Anonymous
We are the people
We are the internet

Knowledge is free

The unprecedented level of economic inequality in America is undeniable. In an extended essay, Bill Moyers shares examples of the striking extremes of wealth and poverty across the country, including a video report on California’s Silicon Valley. There, Facebook, Google, and Apple are minting millionaires, while the area’s homeless -- who’ve grown 20 percent in the last two years -- are living in tent cities at their virtual doorsteps.

“A petty, narcissistic, pridefully ignorant politics has come to dominate and paralyze our government,” says Bill, “while millions of people keep falling through the gaping hole that has turned us into the United States of Inequality.”

Full transcript below the fold.

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America is in the grip of a societal economic panic. Lawmakers cry “We’re broke!” as they slash budgets, lay off schoolteachers, police and firefighters, crumbling our country’s social fabric and leaving many Americans scrambling to survive. Meanwhile, multi-billion-dollar American corporations like Exxon, Google and Bank of America are making record profits. And while the deficit climbs and the cuts go deeper, these corporations -- with intimate ties to our political leaders -- are concealing colossal profits overseas to avoid paying U.S. income tax.

"We're Not Broke" is the story of how American corporations have been able to hide over a trillion dollars from Uncle Sam, and how seven fed-up Americans from across the country, take their frustration to the streets and vow to make the corporations pay their fair share.

More here.

Another message from the Anonymous collective. This time, they want war.

To the Citizens of the United States and the United States Government.
We are Anonymous.

In the past few months, our collective has been organizing the operation known as Operation Blackout. Part of the operation's purpose was to alert the people of the coming bill that was to be called the Stop Online Piracy Act.

This Act would give Congress the power to censor any internet website they wish without consent from the Citizens of the United States. This act would've also had the power to jail any person who infringed on its new copyright law for an equivalence of five years. This copyright law would've had the power to destroy social networking sites such as Facebook and YouTube. Video gameplay and free movies would cease to exist.

However, Operation Blackout was a success. As a collective, we've managed to spread the word and alert the masses. Internet giants such as Google, Wikipedia, and Reddit became hand-in-hand with us as we all managed to make an impact on the decisions of our, "free government". But as we've seen with Megaupload, the government may not need a bill to be passed to get their way. Other operations we've conducted over this time period have awaken the people to the nightmare that is the United States Government. Sections 1031 and 1032 of the National Defense Authorization Act have been ratified. Yet we face new threats.

The United States Government is seeking to pass the Cyber Security Act of 2012. This act is as Orwellian as it sounds; it will endanger our collective and we will not stand by and watch while this government of lies prepares to take away our freedoms. The National Security Agency insists on labeling us as a leaderless, terrorist organization. The question is, "who do we terrorize?". Can it possibly be that the United States government is truly scared of us? Nevertheless, The time for action is now.

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Mayor Bloomberg may have his own personal army to keep tents out of Zuccotti Park, there's nothing he can do to make the "Big Banks" cool again to new college graduates.

As one professor of economics put it, "I teach financial markets, and it’s a little like teaching R.O.T.C. during the Vietnam War."

Via:

The new recruiting climate was on display at Yale in mid-November, when a group of Yale students turned a Morgan Stanley information session into a protest site. While their fellow students, clad in suits and clutching folders with résumés, filed into The Study at Yale, a local hotel, to learn more about the investment bank, a group of approximately 25 Yale undergraduates protested outside. They held signs and chanted slogans like “Take a stance, don’t go into finance” and “25 percent is too much talent spent” — a nod, protest organizers said, to the quarter of Yale graduates who typically take finance and management consulting jobs after graduation.

...

Yale, which has graduated financial heavyweights like Stephen A. Schwarzman, the co-founder of the Blackstone Group, is traditionally considered a Wall Street feeder school. But the Occupy New Haven movement wants to change the focus.

Alexandra Brodsky, a Yale senior who helped organize Tuesday’s protest, said in an interview that recruiting “serves to divide the campus.”

Ms. Brodsky added that she had recently begun openly questioning the career choices of her finance-minded friends, because “these are people who could be doing better things with their energy.”

Certainly not all new graduates will be able to resist the promise of high-dollar salaries and perks of the financial institutions, but how many of them are really seeking employment elsewhere?

The New York Times reports that a recent survey showed that the "most coveted positions among young workers these days are jobs at technology firms like Google, Apple and Facebook."

The Wall Street banks didn't even make it into the top 25 most coveted positions. JPMorgan Chase was the highest rated investment bank coming in at only 41st, with only 2 percent of those polled choosing it as their first choice for employer.

Heartbreaking, isn't it?