A Web-based civic action site is providing a way for people irate about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) to voice their opinions in a very literal way. Reverse Robocall, a site set up by Shaun Dakin and Aaron Titus, allows users to record a message through the site and perform their own robocalls to politicians and lobbyists.

For a fee of $10, Reverse Robocall will let you record a message that will be delivered as a phone call to the offices of the co-sponsors of SOPA and each of the associations and lobbying groups that have backed the bill in Congress—88 in all. You can even customize the phone number that will appear in caller ID for the call in order to avoid being blocked by systems that reject calls without them. And, if you choose, you can let others listen into your message on the site and rate your effort.

SOPA isn't the only target of Reverse Robocall, and it's not an issue that the site specifically takes a stand on. In an interview with Ars, Dakin said that the site is a non-partisan, for-profit effort aimed at providing a service for advocacy groups, in the same vein as the petition site Change.org. But the service, launched in beta just before Thanksgiving, is also an outgrowth of Dakin and Titus' work as privacy advocates to work against robocalls by politicians, he said.

Dakin, a former executive at a market research firm, is the founder of Privacy Camp, a conference series centered on digital privacy. He's also founder of Citizens for Civil Discourse and the National Political Do Not Contact Registry, which has registered more than 200,000 people who want to opt out of political robocalls.

Titus is an attorney specializing in technology and privacy law, and is privacy director at the Liberty Coalition. He launched National ID Watch, a site that provides information to individuals on the potential exposure of their personal information because of corporate data breaches. He also gained notoriety in the realm of robocall resistance in January, when he took revenge on a Maryland school board for a 4:30am robocall announcing a school closing. Titus obtained the phone numbers of members of the board, and then robo-dialed them back the next morning at 4:30am with his own recorded message, "thanking" them.

Reverse Robocall is the pair's way of taking Titus' act of revenge to the next level. The SOPA call is just one of a number of pre-packaged sets of call targets; there are also "products." Some of the first targets were supporters of HR 3035, the Mobile Informational Call Act, also known as the "robocall bill," which would have allowed companies to hit mobile phones with "informational calls." (That bill died in December after massive opposition from privacy and consumer protection groups.) Another option will black a phone message to supporters of the Senate's Protect intellectual Property Act, and yet another allows users to hit all SOPA and PIPA supporters with one recorded message.

Not all of the robocall campaigns hosted on the site are political; the site hosted a robo-dial to PayPal officials over the shutdown of a fundraising campaign to buy "Secret Santa" gifts for needy children on Regretsy. PayPal reversed course a day after the campaign was set up.

Listing image by Photograph by Frédéric BISSON