Having been angered at revelations of the NSA’s pervasive spying program PRISM, a group of high-profile rights advocates have stepped forward to demand that lawmakers take action against government spying.

Led by the Mozilla Foundation, Reddit, the Electronic Freedom Foundation, the Internet Archive, and other organizations, a new movement called StopWatching.Us has created an online petition, calling for the government to give “a full accounting of the extent to which our online data, communications and interactions are being monitored”. So far the petition has been backed by more than 80 organizations, as well as several high-profile individuals in the Tech world, such as Rebecca MacKinnon and Cory Doctorow.

The petition, which is hosted here, alleges that the American government is in violation of the First and Fourth Amendments of the US Constitution, and consequently undermines American citizens’ basic rights to privacy. Among its other demands, StopWatching.us also wants Congress to reform the FISA Act and repeal section 215 of the Patriot Act, which gives the NSA’s surveillance program a legal grounding.

“The revelations, which confirm many of our worst fears, raise serious questions about individual privacy protections, checks on government power and court orders impacting some of the most popular Web services,” says the Mozilla Foundation’s Alex Fowler in a blog post.

The full extent of the US government’s surveillance operations came to light last week, firstly with the revelation that the NSA had secured a secret court order that compelled Verizon to hand over data on all of its customer’s calls, without notifying its users. Less than twenty four hours later, whistleblower Edward Snowden lifted the lid on PRISM, an extensive surveillance program that allegedly has the full cooperation of tech companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo, giving the NSA full access to people’s emails, web history, search history, chat records and more.

Mozilla and friends seem to have enlisted quite a few allies already, but it remains to be seen if their effort will be successful at all. According to one recent poll from the Pew Research Center, it seems that the majority of US citizens are actually okay with the NSA spying on their phone calls, so long as it helps them to thwart terrorist attacks.

Nevertheless, Mozilla’s Alex Fowler argues that regardless of the general population’s apathy, it’s a matter of principle and that it has no choice but to fight:

“Mozilla believes in an Internet where we do not have to fear that everything we do is being tracked, monitored and logged by either companies or governments. And we believe in a government whose actions are visible, transparent and accountable.”

Visit StopWatching.us now if you would like to support the campaign to end the government’s oppressive surveillance.