The Iraq war has inspired a lot of innovative e-activism, from MoveOn's TV ads to the wiki-based volunteer effort at reviewing Guanatanomo documents for the ACLU.

Now anti-war e-activists have embraced one of the old standbys of pre-digital politics: snail mail. Bring Them Home Now is selling postage stamps with the "bring them home" symbol: a yellow ribbon super-imposed on a peace sign. BTHN is encouraging people to buy the stamps and use them to mail in their tax returns on April 15th.

The stamps were launched last week at a concert in New York, headlined by Michael Stipe of REM fame. According to Andrew Boyd, who designed the stamp, "the yellow ribbon doesn't mean 'I support the troops, therefore I support the war' -- it means 'I support the troops and therefore want to bring them home now and take care of them when we do'." Andrew is best known to e-activists as the creator of the Billionaires for Bush web site. He told me that he created the symbol three years ago -- before the war started -- because he wanted to "preemptively culture jam the yellow ribbon -- to make the yellow ribbon a contested symbol." He also bought the bringthemhomenow.com domain, which for the past couple of years has been pointed to bringthemhomenow.org.

Andrew was approached by a group planning the stamp and concert, and donated both his design URL to their project. He also hooked them up with Goodstorm, the for-a-cause schwag maker whose site sells not only the BringThemHomeNow stamps but an assortment of other gear with the BTHN symbol. The stamps themselves come from Endicia, a licensed reseller of customizable US postage.

That's right, these stamps are live US postage. A sheet of 20 stamps costs $20; $12 of that $20 goes to Endicia and USPS; of the remaining $8, 30% goes to Goodstorm to cover its services, and the other 70% is divided among four organizations working to bringing the troops home:

• Military Families Speak Out


• Gold Star Families for Peace


• Iraq Veterans Against the War


• Veterans for Peace

Andrew Boyd tells me that BTHN will be working hard over the next few weeks to encourage people to use the stamps come tax day. They're hoping to ignite a viral movement by asking people to buy sheets of stamps, mail their returns, and pass the remaining stamps onto friends for their returns.

It's a nice example of using digital tools to re-energize longstanding campaign techniques -- even seemingly stale ones, like mass mail-ins.