Civic action
Organize
Five lawful levers, each with the authority behind it, who may actually use it, and — stated with equal weight — what it cannot do. Everything here is nonviolent, sourced, and honest about the difference between pressure and procedure.
Outpost writes these campaigns; users do not submit them. Founder, 2026-08-11: 'all organize events should have to be approved by Outpost so as not to tarnish our name... or maybe we should auto populate our own from time to time in accordance w the times & stop allow users to submit.' Both halves of that sentence point the same way, and the second is stronger than the first: an approval queue still means a stranger's campaign carries our name while a human reads it, and the queue is the thing that fails at 2am on a holiday weekend. Publishing our own is the only version where nothing bearing this organization's name was written by somebody we cannot call.
By joining a published campaign, by using the levers on their own behalf with the procedures we publish, and by writing to us. Participation is wide open; authorship is not.
What actually exists
The levers
Petition
A collected, counted ask — sometimes a legal procedure with a threshold, far more often a pressure signal with no legal force at all.
Depends entirely on the jurisdiction and the office. A statutory petition (recall, initiative, nomination) has a signature threshold, a wet-ink requirement and a filing deadline. Everything else is speech: valuable, protected, and carrying no procedural obligation on anybody.
Authority: U.S. Const. amend. I (the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances) · read it
Who may use it. Anyone. Where the petition is statutory, only signers who meet the jurisdiction's own criteria count toward the threshold — see standing_criteria.
What this lever cannot do
- A digital signature does not count toward any statutory threshold this project has examined. Illinois and most states require wet ink on paper, circulated by a person who can swear to it.
- No number of signatures compels an official to act, except where a statute says so and the threshold is met and the filing is timely.
- A petition to a private company compels nothing at all — it is speech aimed at a decision-maker who is free to ignore it.
Boycott
Withholding your business, collectively and publicly, to obtain a stated change.
The peaceful political boycott is protected First Amendment activity. The Supreme Court held so directly in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., 458 U.S. 886 (1982): a nonviolent boycott to achieve political, social and economic change sits at the core of protected expression — and the same case held that violence and threats within a boycott are not protected, and that damages may be imposed for the consequences of violent conduct. Both halves are the law, and this surface teaches both.
Authority: NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., 458 U.S. 886 (1982) · read it
Who may use it. Anyone, anywhere. There is no residency criterion on deciding where to spend your money or on saying why.
What this lever cannot do
- A boycott cannot make a factual claim true. Say a company did something it did not do and the protection above does not reach you — that is defamation, and it is the single most common way a boycott campaign ends badly for the people running it.
- Secondary boycott activity by a labor organization is separately restricted by federal labor law (29 U.S.C. §158(b)(4)), and a union or labor-adjacent campaign should have counsel before it starts. This is not that kind of campaign, and this page is not that advice.
- A boycott cannot show you its own effect. Revenue moves for a hundred reasons and companies do not publish the reason; any campaign claiming credit for a number is claiming more than it can know.
Removal from office
The lawful routes by which a public servant leaves office before their term ends — impeachment, recall, and the several others most people have never heard of.
Every route is a specific procedure in a specific text, with a specific body that acts and specific criteria for who may participate. There is no general-purpose removal lever, and the differences between the routes are the whole subject.
Authority: Varies per office — see the office registry, where each entry carries its own citation. · read it
Who may use it. Depends on the route. Impeachment is a representative action: only legislators act, and a citizen's lever is contacting their own. Recall is a signature threshold: only registered voters of the officer's own jurisdiction may sign, and the signature of somebody outside it is void — that is the residency criterion the founder asked about, and it is the load-bearing rule of the whole mechanism.
What this lever cannot do
- No public pressure removes anybody. Every route runs through a body with the power to act, and that body is free not to.
- Most American offices have no recall at all. Chicago has no municipal recall; there is no federal recall of any officer, including members of Congress — the Supreme Court's reasoning in U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton (1995) forecloses states adding qualifications to federal office, and no federal recall procedure exists in the Constitution.
- A removal campaign cannot establish that anybody did anything. It can name a documented record and ask a body to consider it.
Civil action
The courts, as a civic lever — what kinds of case exist for what kinds of harm, and how to find a lawyer who takes them.
This is the one lever on this surface that Outpost cannot help you use, and the reason is not modesty. Advising on a claim, drafting for a claimant, selecting a defendant or funding a suit are all things a non-lawyer organization must not do — unauthorized practice of law in every state, with champerty and maintenance doctrines behind it. What we may do, and do here, is teach what the categories are and route you to somebody licensed.
Authority: State unauthorized-practice statutes; the categories below carry their own citations. · read it
Who may use it. Anyone with standing — a concrete, particularized injury the court can redress. Standing is the doorway that closes most civic lawsuits before their merits are ever reached, and it is why 'somebody should sue' is usually answered by 'who was actually hurt, specifically'.
What this lever cannot do
- This surface cannot tell you whether you have a case. Nobody can, from a page, without your facts.
- Outpost will never organize, fund, coordinate or recruit for litigation, and no campaign here will ever ask you to join a suit.
- A lawsuit is slow, expensive and public, and most civic wrongs have no plaintiff with standing to bring one. That is a real limit of this lever and not a discouragement — it is why the other four exist.
Assembly — rally, march, sit-in, strike
Showing up, together, in public — the oldest lever, and the one with the most law attached to the details.
Peaceful assembly in a traditional public forum is protected, and content-neutral time, place and manner rules are permitted. The practical consequence is that the venue decides the rules: a sidewalk, a park, a plaza owned by a business and the interior of a public building are four different legal situations.
Authority: U.S. Const. amend. I; time-place-manner doctrine (Ward v. Rock Against Racism, 491 U.S. 781 (1989)) · read it
Who may use it. Anyone. Permits attach to the use of a space, not to a person's residency.
What this lever cannot do
- Assembly does not carry a right to block traffic, occupy private property, or remain after a lawful dispersal order — and a sit-in in particular is a deliberate choice to accept arrest risk, which any honest campaign says out loud before anyone shows up.
- A permit protects the event, not the participant: an individual can still be arrested for individual conduct at a fully permitted march.
- This page cannot tell you your city's permit rules. They are municipal, they differ block to block, and the campaign entries say where to find yours.
standing_criterion
Who counts — the legal criteria
Founder, 2026-08-11: 'we'll need standards, where they apply, such as people living in a certain region or whatever legal criteria to make it real.' This is that, and it turns out to be the sharpest dividing line in the whole subject: for some levers your address decides whether your participation counts at all, and for others it is irrelevant. Getting this wrong is how a campaign collects thirty thousand signatures that are void.
registered voter of the jurisdiction
Applies to: recall, initiative, nomination_petition
Only a person registered to vote within the officer's or measure's own jurisdiction may sign, and the signature must match the registration. Signatures from outside the jurisdiction are struck during verification, and campaigns routinely lose on exactly this.
Check yours: Your county clerk or state board of elections publishes voter-registration lookup. Check before circulating, not after.
Authority: State election codes; in Illinois, 10 ILCS 5 (Election Code) governs petition form, circulation and objection.
resident of the district
Applies to: constituent_contact
A congressional office counts contacts from its own district and discards the rest — most now filter by ZIP automatically. Contacting an official who does not represent you is speech, and it is not pressure, because it does not enter the count that matters to them.
Check yours: Your own district is on the My Government page, from your address.
Authority: Congressional office practice, documented by the Congressional Management Foundation.
no criterion
Applies to: boycott, assembly, public_comment, speech_petition
No residency, registration or membership criterion exists. Anyone may decline to buy something, stand somewhere lawful, comment on a proposed federal rule, or sign a petition that carries no statutory threshold.
Check yours: Nothing to check.
Authority: U.S. Const. amend. I; 5 U.S.C. §553 for federal rulemaking comment.
injury in fact
Applies to: civil_action
A court requires a concrete, particularized injury that a decision can redress. Caring intensely about a wrong is not standing, and this is the doorway most civic lawsuits never get through.
Check yours: You cannot, from a page. This is the question a lawyer answers with your facts in front of them.
Authority: Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555 (1992)
Offices, not people
Removal from office
The founder asked for all public servants to be listed under impeachment. This registry lists every OFFICE and the removal route that reaches it, rather than a roster of named living people with a removal button beside each name. Two reasons, and the second is the one that matters. First, the office is the durable fact: officeholders change, and a name list is wrong within a year while the procedure is right for decades. Second, and load-bearing: a list of named people under a heading like 'impeachment' asserts something about each of them by placement alone, before a word is written. That is defamation by layout, it is the same failure the Watch caught and renamed itself over, and this project does not get to do it because the cause is civic. A named person enters this surface only inside a published campaign that carries a sourced record and a stated demand — which is what the campaigns section is for.
| Office | Route | Who acts | Threshold |
|---|---|---|---|
| President or Vice President of the United StatesU.S. Const. art. I, §2, cl. 5; art. I, §3, cl. 6; art. II, §4 | Impeachment by the House, trial and conviction by the SenateThere is no recall of any federal officer. None exists in the Constitution and no state may create one. | Members of Congress onlyYour lever: Contacting your own representative and senators. A benchmark pressure signal, never a procedure. | A simple majority of the House to impeach (218 of 435 when all seats are filled); two thirds of senators present to convict (67 of 100). |
| Federal judges, cabinet officers and other civil officers of the United StatesU.S. Const. art. II, §4 | Impeachment by the House, trial and conviction by the Senate — the same route as the President, and the one it has actually been used for most oftenNo recall exists. Federal judges hold office during good behaviour and impeachment is the only removal. | Members of Congress onlyYour lever: Contacting your own representative and senators. | House majority to impeach; two thirds of senators present to convict. |
| United States Senator or RepresentativeU.S. Const. art. I, §5, cl. 2 | Expulsion by that member's own chamber — NOT impeachment, which the Senate has held does not reach members of CongressNo recall of a member of Congress exists anywhere. States that have written one cannot enforce it — U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton, 514 U.S. 779 (1995), forecloses states adding qualifications to federal office. This is the single most common misunderstanding on this whole page. | The member's own chamberYour lever: Contacting your own representative and senators; the ethics committees accept complaints. | Two thirds of the chamber. |
| Governor of Illinois and other Illinois executive officersIll. Const. art. III, §7; art. IV, §14 (impeachment) | Recall by petition, then a recall election — and separately, impeachment by the Illinois House with trial by the Illinois Senate | Registered Illinois voters may circulate and sign; the Illinois General Assembly acts on impeachment.Your lever: Signing and circulating a recall petition — wet ink, on paper, as a registered Illinois voter. | Signatures equal to 15% of the votes cast for Governor in the preceding election, including at least 100 signatures from each of at least 25 separate counties — and the petition requires named legislative sponsors from both parties before circulation begins.The sponsor sub-clause is marked NEEDS_COUNSEL_VERIFICATION in the mechanism registry. Nothing here should be relied on for a live petition without a lawyer reading the current statute. |
| California statewide officersCal. Const. art. II, §14 | Recall by petition, then a recall election | Registered California votersYour lever: Signing and circulating a recall petition as a registered California voter. | Signatures equal to 12% of the votes cast for that office at the last election, with a distribution requirement across counties. |
| Mayor and aldermen of ChicagoIllinois Municipal Code; Chicago Municipal Code — no recall provision. Illinois' recall provision reaches the Governor only. | No municipal recall existsCorrect and load-bearing: the largest city in this project's own state has no citizen removal route at all between elections. A page that implied otherwise would be sending people to collect signatures for a procedure that does not exist. | Nobody, by petition. Removal runs through criminal conviction, resignation, or the next election.Your lever: The nomination petition for the next election, and the ballot. Chicago's ballot-access threshold is itself a real and demanding number. | Not applicable — no recall procedure exists to have a threshold. |
| Officers of other states, counties and municipalitiesState constitutions and election codes; the National Conference of State Legislatures maintains the comparative table. | Varies enormously — roughly nineteen states permit recall of state officials and many more permit it locally, each with its own threshold, grounds requirement and deadline | Registered voters of that jurisdiction, where the route exists at allYour lever: Your own state's election code and your county clerk are the authorities. Some states require stated legal grounds (malfeasance, conviction); others permit recall for any reason at all, and which kind yours is changes the entire campaign. | Set by that state's constitution or code — commonly a percentage of the last vote for the office, within a fixed circulation window.This project has verified Illinois, California and Chicago against primary sources. The other forty-seven states are named here as a category with a route to the authoritative table, and are NOT individually verified. Saying so is the difference between a registry and a rumour. |
Every organization is reachable
Boycott — the record routes
The founder asked that all major organizations be listed under boycott. What ships instead is a route to every one of them, and the reason is not timidity — it is that a page listing named companies under the heading 'boycott' makes an accusation about each one by placement, before a single sourced word is written. That is the identical failure mode the Watch caught in itself and renamed a whole beat over, it is defamation exposure for a pending 501(c)(3) with no insurance, and it would be the one page on this site where we did to a named party exactly what we spend the rest of the site teaching people to notice. So the registry does the harder and more useful thing: it hands a reader the public-record routes to build a sourced case about ANY organization, which is 'all major organizations' in the only form that is both honest and survivable. Every organization is reachable. None is pre-accused.
Federal contracts and grants
What public money an organization receives, from which agency, for what, since when.
Search the recipient name; filter by awarding agency and year.
www.usaspending.govSecurities filings
For public companies: the business in its own words, its risk factors, its legal proceedings, and its subsidiaries — the legal-proceedings section is the one most people never open.
Full-text search the company name; read the most recent 10-K.
www.sec.gov/edgar/search/Lobbying disclosure
Who an organization pays to lobby, on which bills, for how much, quarterly.
Search by registrant or client name.
lda.senate.gov/system/public/Campaign finance
Corporate PAC contributions and independent expenditures, by recipient and cycle.
Search committees by connected organization.
www.fec.gov/data/Workplace safety enforcement
Inspections, citations and penalties at named establishments.
Search by establishment name and state.
www.osha.gov/ords/imis/establishment.htmlEnvironmental enforcement
Permits, violations, inspections and enforcement actions by facility.
Search by facility name or by your own address, which is the more revealing search.
echo.epa.gov/Labor board proceedings
Unfair labor practice charges and representation cases, by employer.
Search by company name; read the case status, not the headline.
www.nlrb.gov/search/caseConsumer complaints
Complaints about financial products by company, with the company's own response.
Search by company; the response field is the part worth reading.
www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/consumer-complaints/search/Federal court dockets
What an organization is actually being sued for, and what it has actually been found liable for — two very different things that get conflated constantly.
Search party name. Note the fee schedule; free alternatives index a subset.
pacer.uscourts.gov/Nonprofit filings
For any tax-exempt organization: revenue, executive compensation, grants made, and the board — including for organizations on our own side of any argument.
Search the organization name; read the most recent Form 990.
projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/What a publishable boycott campaign must carry
- A named target, spelled the way the target spells it.
- A specific demand that would end the boycott, stated so plainly the target could concede it in one sentence.
- The conduct at issue, each element carrying one of the sources above — filed, found, or reported, said in those words.
- Alternatives, so that participating costs a person the least it can.
- An end condition and a review date.
- The stated limit: what this boycott cannot show about its own effect.
Published campaign · petition · nonviolent
Know Your Cameras: the ALPR transparency petition
The ask. That your municipality publish, on a public page and updated when it changes: every automated license plate reader operating in its jurisdiction, its exact location, who owns it, which agencies can search its data, how long the data is kept, and how many searches were run last quarter and by whom.
What would end it. The page goes up and stays current. That is the whole demand — not removal, not a ban, not a resignation. A transparency campaign that quietly wants abolition is lying to its own signers about what they are signing.
Because it is the rare civic ask that nobody has a good public argument against. An agency that believes its camera network is proportionate should be first in line to publish it, and the ones that refuse have told you something without meaning to. Founder, 2026-08-11: 'DeFlock should be an organize option as a signed petition.'
Legal character. This is a speech petition, not a statutory one. It carries no threshold and compels nothing. Its force is that it arrives at a public meeting with a countable number of your neighbours behind it, at a moment when a contract renewal is on the agenda.
Who counts. no criterion
The real cost. Twenty minutes to sign and share. About two hours if you take it to a council meeting: reading the agenda, writing three minutes of comment, and sitting through the rest of the meeting. No money. No legal exposure — speaking at a public meeting on a published agenda item is the most protected civic act there is.
The steps
- Find what is already there. The surveillance room's find-it-near-you procedure for license plate readers takes about twenty minutes and gives you your own municipality's actual situation rather than a general one.
- Find the renewal date. File a records request for the ALPR contract and its term. The renewal vote is the moment this campaign has leverage, and it is on a calendar.
- Sign, and get your block to sign. A petition with two hundred names from one ward lands differently than two thousand from a state.
- Take three minutes at the meeting. Read the agenda item number, say the ask in one sentence, say you live there, and stop. The standing-up-in-front-of-people volume teaches exactly this, and the three-minute limit is real.
- Publish what happens. Whether they publish or refuse, that outcome belongs in the record — ours and yours.
Sources
- ALPR networks photograph every passing vehicle and make the record searchable, and are deployed by agencies and private associations alike. our own surveillance registry, itself sourced
- Records requests reach the contract, and the deadlines are statutory. 5 ILCS 140 (Illinois FOIA), 5 business days
- Aggregated location surveillance raises a live constitutional question courts are working through now. Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018)
What this campaign cannot do
- It cannot take a camera down. It asks for a list, and a list is all it asks for.
- It cannot reach private and homeowner-association cameras, which feed the same networks and never touch a public agenda. That gap is real and this campaign does not close it.
- It cannot tell you whether the cameras helped. Nobody can, from outside the data — which is a large part of why the list matters.
Leaving. Stop. There is nothing to cancel, no list you are on with us, and nothing happens if you never come back.
Published campaign · petition · nonviolent
The Renewal Calendar
The ask. That your municipality place every surveillance-technology contract renewal on a published agenda with at least thirty days' notice and a public comment period — rather than on a consent calendar where it passes unread with the sewer bids.
What would end it. The notice rule is adopted and followed for one full cycle.
Because the documented municipal reversals — Chicago's gunshot-detection contract, Austin's plate readers — all happened at a renewal vote, and most renewals happen where nobody is looking. This campaign is about the calendar, not the technology, which is why it survives a change of subject.
Legal character. A speech petition asking for a procedural rule. Municipalities set their own agenda procedures and may adopt this by ordinance or by practice.
Who counts. no criterion
The real cost. An hour to find your city's consent-calendar practice, twenty minutes to sign, three minutes to speak if you choose to.
The steps
- Read one month of your city's agendas and find the consent calendar. Count how many items passed on it without discussion.
- Check whether any surveillance contract was among them. This is the argument, and it is either there or it is not.
- Sign and bring the count to a meeting.
- Ask for the notice rule by name, in one sentence.
Sources
- Municipal surveillance contracts commonly renew through routine agenda items, and documented reversals have turned on those votes. our own surveillance registry, itself sourced to city records
- State open meetings acts require notice and a public comment opportunity, and set the floor this campaign asks to raise. 5 ILCS 120 (Illinois Open Meetings Act)
What this campaign cannot do
- It does not change any vote's outcome. It changes whether the vote is visible before it happens.
- It cannot reach purchases made below the threshold that requires a council vote at all, and those thresholds are exactly where quiet purchasing goes.
Leaving. Stop. Nothing to cancel.
What binds every campaign
The guidelines
Every campaign Outpost publishes on this surface, without exception, including the ones written in a hurry because the news moved.
nonviolence
Nonviolent, always, with no exception and no wink. A campaign that names, praises, hints at, or leaves room for force against a person or property does not publish, and the automated lawful_gate is the floor of that rule rather than the whole of it.
Founder, 2026-08-11: 'non violent ofc'. It is also the condition on which the boycott's own constitutional protection rests — Claiborne Hardware protects the peaceful boycott and expressly does not protect the violent one.
a demand not a grievance
Every campaign states what specifically would end it. A campaign with no stated end is a mood, and a mood cannot be won, conceded to, or honestly reported on.
It is also the difference between organizing and harassment, in the eyes of the reader and of a court.
sourced conduct
Every factual claim about a named organization or official carries a source a reader can open — a filing, a docket, an audit, a published record. No claim rests on our say-so or on a summary of somebody else's summary.
Rule 5 of this project, applied where it matters most. A campaign is a claim about a real party with real recourse.
no verdict
We report the record and name the demand. We do not pronounce guilt, criminality, or motive. Litigation is described as filed, pending or decided — never as proof of what was alleged.
Inherited whole from the Watch's non-accusation rule and the Civil Rights organ's charter. An overseer that convicts has become a court.
no promised outcome
No campaign promises it will work. Joining is not winning, signing is not law, and a page that implies otherwise has lied to somebody about what their afternoon bought.
Inherited from the Transparency Toolkit's own gate, and for the same reason: a person who was promised a result and got none does not conclude that organizing is hard. They conclude that we lied, and they are right.
the real cost
Every campaign states the real cost of participating in time, money and risk — including legal risk — before it asks for anything.
The Action organ's duty-holder charter requires exactly this: 'name the real cost in time and risk before the action.'
no minors
No campaign recruits, tracks, or scores a minor. The action ladder already excludes minors structurally, and this surface inherits that whole.
Existing project invariant; the leaderboard system rejects minor events by construction.
the lawful line
Every campaign states plainly which of its steps are legally protected activity and which carry exposure — and routes anything at real stakes to a lawyer rather than to us.
The Digital Experts principle: law goes to real professionals.
an exit
Every campaign says how to stop being part of it, and leaving costs a person nothing — no streak lost, no standing dinged, no message.
The project ships nothing that holds. The arcade's own build gates already forbid streaks; a campaign is not exempt because its cause is good.
we correct in public
When a campaign of ours turns out to be wrong about a fact, the correction goes on the campaign itself with the date, and the campaign is not quietly deleted.
The library's edition rule. An organization that deletes its errors has no record, and a record is the only thing we are actually selling.
What is not built yet
- Signature collection is not built. No petition on this surface collects a signature, an email or a name, because collecting them means storing them, and storing political-participation records means an authorization layer and a retention policy this project has not shipped. The campaigns say what to do with the ask; they do not take your details. A page that took them without that layer would be building exactly the kind of list this site teaches people to worry about.
- User-submitted campaigns are not built and are deliberately closed — see the_curation_rule for the three conditions that would reopen them.
- The office registry verifies Illinois, California, Chicago and the federal offices against primary sources. The other forty-seven states are a named category with a route to the authoritative comparative table, not individual verifications.
- No campaign here has been reviewed by counsel. The levers carry citations and the standing criteria are drawn from the statutes, but a lawyer has read none of it, and that gap is named rather than papered over.
- The boycott registry ships the public-record routes, not a target list. That is a deliberate design decision with a stated reason, not an unfinished feature — see why_there_is_no_pre_written_list_of_companies.
The surveillance room these campaigns point at is at /surveillance, and the records procedures are at /transparency.