So people all over the place are rightly a little upset with all the snooping going on, spying on our communities, emails, telephone calls and the like. But so far there’s been little really effective action taken, apart from some noisy street protests here and there, and lots of activists giving TV interviews.

All of which makes this new Firefox browser plugin called Flagger so interesting. The addon does one thing, which is to automatically insert red flag keywords, (e.g. bomb, Taliban and anthrax) into any web address you visit. The idea is if enough people install the addon, the security forces will go nuts trying to track down all the ‘sinister’ activity it generates.

We’re thinking it’s a genius/insane idea, and while you could say it’s a threat to the fight against terrorism, you could also say it’s one way to fight back peacefully in the name of privacy against bull-headed government intrusion into our lives. But what do we know?

The plugin is free and open source, and can be configured with your own choice of message (to the snoops) and also you can switch it on and off, so we’re thinking that an international ‘flagger’ day may well be on the cards, when people are encouraged to switch it on and protest en masse from the safety (!?) of their armchairs. Pretty rad! [Via BoingBoing]