Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet
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David Segal
As Fight for the Future launched that October, they had in mind the mobilization of an entirely different crowd that was similarly predominantly apolitical: people who pay attention to Justin Bieber. Klobuchar’s bill could’ve turned him (more likely his mom) into a felon. FFTF’s campaign entailed launching a satirical site that was to serve as the hub of the “Free Bieber” movement. Their crack design staff mocked up several images of the Biebs behind bars, which straddled the line between hilarious and genuinely disturbing—one had him stuck in a cell, crying a L’il Wayne tattooed tear, caught in the gaze of a much older inmate. Within a few days we’d struck the mother lode: a radio host confronted Bieber about the bill and the concocted controversy. His response was to deliver a rather heartfelt (though clearly teenaged) soliloquy about how important it is that people be free to perform and share music; that he loves watching fans’ YouTube performances of his hits; and, most critically, that Amy Klobuchar “needs to be locked up, put away in cuffs.”
5. American Censorship Day
Tiffiniy Cheng
During a freak snowstorm on Halloween, FFTF discussed how disturbed they were by what SOPA would do if it passed. We realized that if SOPA passed, we could wake up someday to see some of our favorite websites seized by the government without due process or even a real warning. That became the driving concept we latched onto: we’d work to raise awareness of the censoring power of these bills by convincing websites to “take down” their own sites in an Internet-wide protest. As an early salvo, FFTF began to plan a day of protest called “American Censorship Day” on November 16—the date of the first SOPA hearing.
David Segal
Fight for the Future (for which I was doing some contract work at the time) took the lead in organizing the critical “American Censorship Day” in mid-November. It’s when reddit and Tumblr formally joined the effort—and Demand Progress provided some tech support for them. The effort steered many hundreds of thousands of new constituent contacts to Congress.
Patrick Ruffini
Ahead of the hearing, ten House members—among them Ron Paul, Jared Polis, Issa, and Lofgren—sent a letter to Smith and ranking Democrat John Conyers warning that SOPA would target domestic websites and urging them to go slow. While Silicon Valley was heavily represented on the letter, the signatures also began to tell the story of the coalition’s broadening reach, with representatives from tech corridors in Austin, Boulder, and Pittsburgh signing on. The letter also meant that there would be a divided house on SOPA right off the blocks—the opposition numbered a dozen members, to the twenty-four who had signed on as SOPA co-sponsors as of November 15th. While not numerically even, it was better than the 40-to-1 split that persisted in the Senate. And it would mean that there would be substantial opposition in both parties, raising the specter of chaos on the House floor.
Elizabeth Stark (co-founder of the Open Video Alliance)
As I learned more about it, I knew it was really bad. When I say really, I mean really fucking bad. I have been a long-time open-Internet advocate, and many of my colleagues said, “This is the worst bill we have seen in the past decade.”
Here was a bill proposed by lobbyists of the content industry—in the U.S., the RIAA and MPAA; internationally, the IFPI and many more. They said it was about piracy, but it was really about something more. It was part of a war on sharing, a fight against the way that the open, distributed Internet works. It was a blatant attempt to preserve their business models to the detriment of artists, innovators, and the public at large. And it was poised to pass. I called up some of my friends at Mozilla (you may have heard of their browser, Firefox) and said that we had to do something, and quick.
Aaron Swartz
When the bill came back and started moving again, it all started coming together. All the folks we had talked to suddenly began really getting involved—and getting others involved. Everything started snowballing. It happened so fast. I remember one week, I was having dinner with a fellow in the technology industry. He asked what I worked on and I told him about this bill. “Wow,” he said. “You need to tell people about that.” And then, just a few weeks later, I was chatting with this cute girl on the subway. She wasn’t involved in the technology industry, but when she heard that I was, she turned to me, very seriously, and said “You know, we have to stop SOAP.” Progress.
Ernesto Falcon
For those keeping count, more than 140 Internet engineers and cybersecurity experts, including the people that built the Internet, told Congress that filtering is dangerous while a grand total of three individuals said it was totally fine. Another argument was that the mere fact that the cable industry endorsed SOPA was proof that DNS filtering was not that big of a deal. I suppose it is just a coincidence that the NBCU (also Comcast) merely happens to be the largest and most powerful member of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.
Zoe Lofgren
Despite all the advances in connecting with representatives and senators, emails and online petitions just don’t get the same immediate attention from most Members of Congress that is created by a massive inpouring of phone calls. Petitions get noticed too, but elected officials know that a person who takes the time to call is also likely to take the time to walk into a voting booth. A few social network sites made an initial effort to generate phone calls in opposition, but it fell short. There were not enough phone calls, and many calls were made to the district offices of Members of Congress—when policy staffs and Members were in Washington. Hardly anyone noticed. But the effort was getting attention from tech bloggers and some online media sources. It was clear SOPA was being taken seriously as the threat it was. But would a large enough effort come in time?
Edward J. Black (President and CEO of the Computer & Communications Industry Association)
If SOPA were to have passed it is within reason to believe—depending on how the Courts interpreted “engage in, enable, or facilitate” copyright infringement—that Facebook posts, Twitter links, and really any Internet service or app that allows a user to post and others to view would have to screen material. A site like YouTube would need to preview the seventy-two hours of video uploaded each minute, and then approve the video. The companies would have to screen material either manually or using automatic filters with high false positive rates and no real way to check for “fair use.” They would have done this filtering either preemptively or very quickly after it was posted.
Patrick Ruffini
The political case for passing SOPA had been utterly decimated by the way its proponents handled the process in the Judiciary Committee, starting with a propagandistic one-sided November hearing that singled out Google as the bill’s sole opponent, and ignored the other “nerds” beating down Smith’s door to testify. Dismissal of the technical concerns—and of any real debate whatsoever—was cited by many in the technology industry as the catalyst for first getting involved and spurring their users to action.
Alex Ohanian (co-founder of reddit)
My foray into the political arena began with an email on November 6, 2011. Christina Xu, who works with me at Breadpig—a social enterprise I’d started—sent along a note from a friend who alerted her to a pair of bills that looked destined to pass the House and Senate before the New Year. Written with over $94 million in lobbying from the entertainment industry, the first versions of SOPA and PIPA read as though a technologist had never even been consulted. If either of these bills had been law back in 2005 when Steve and I founded reddit together, the site wouldn’t exist today.
Elizabeth Stark
And like that, the alarms went off. We had to do something huge. And luckily the Internet is the perfect platform for doing big things.
Larry Downes
The political philosophy of the Internet, though still largely unformed, is by no means inarticulate. The aspirations of Internet users largely reflect the best features of the technology itself—open, meritocratic, non-propriet
ary, and transparent. Its central belief is the power of innovation to make things better, and its major tenet is a ruthless economic principle that treats information as currency, and sees any obstacle to its free flow as inefficient friction to be engineered out of existence.
Those seeking to understand what kind of governance Internet users are willing to accept would do well to start by studying the engineering that establishes the network and how it is governed. The key protocols and standards that make the Internet work—that make the Internet the Internet—are developed and modified by voluntary committees of engineers, who meet virtually to debate the merits of new features, design changes, and other basic enhancements.
Mark Zuckerberg (cofounder of Facebook)
The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world. Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win—not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.
Larry Downes
In their political youth, Internet users are still profoundly idealistic and even a little naïve. They believe in democracy, freedom of expression, and transparent governance; they have little tolerance for draconian rules, for back-room deals, or for imposed legalistic “solutions” to poorly-defined problems that might be better solved with more technology. They are, if anything, more libertarian than anything else. But even that label implies a willingness to engage in traditional political theater, a willingness that doesn’t exist.
Brad Burnham (managing partner at Union Square Ventures)
I recently heard a woman from the Occupy movement say the most poignant thing. She said “no one is coming for us.” Her generation does not expect the government to be there when they need it, nor do they think the incumbent industrial hierarchies are structured or motivated to address the challenges they expect to face. Remarkably, she was not depressed, defeated, or bitter. She was determined. The kids who grew up inside AOL chat rooms and came of age on Facebook have an intuitive understanding of the power of networks that our generation will never have. They are not asking us to fix the problems we left them with. They are asking us not to get in their way as they try to dig themselves out. I think we owe them that.
Larry Downes
The engineering task forces are meritocratic and open. The best ideas win through vigorous debate and testing. No one has seniority or a veto. There’s no influence peddling or lobbyists. The engineers are allergic to hypocrisy and public relations rhetoric. It’s as pure a form of democracy as has ever been implemented. And it works amazingly well.
John Perry Barlow
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
Aaron Swartz
I remember at one point during this period, I helped organize a meeting of startups in New York, trying to encourage everyone to get involved in doing their part. And I tried a trick that I heard Bill Clinton used to fund his foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative. I turned to every startup founder in the room in turn and said “What are you going to do?”—and they all wanted to one-up each other.
David Segal
Brad leaned on his portfolio companies to participate, and with that came a scatter shot of some of the moment’s most influential social media start-ups, and a home base for the meeting: Tumblr’s hipster-chic offices in lower Manhattan. I leaned on Zoe Lofgren’s office to have the Congresswoman open the call, and she quickly accepted: her gravitas would help draw people in, and she would be able to walk us through the nuts-and-bolts of the markup process. And the techies whom we were hoping would participate would be impressed by her savvy about issues that many of them seemed to assume every last member of Congress was completely ignorant of.
Alex Ohanian
Apparently I was the only one celebrating SantaCon that day. Nonetheless, before celebrating with hordes of my fellow Kringles, I took a seat and we went around the room, volunteering contributions from our websites that might help spread the word about SOPA and PIPA. Today, reddit is one of the one hundred most popular sites online, but it’s rare in that the platform is rather open—much like the Internet itself. My offering was simple: we’d present the threat to the reddit community and give them our rationale behind the opposition. I didn’t know how our millions of users would react to the imminent threat, but I knew the best ideas for action wouldn’t come from me or even this room of “experts.”
Elizabeth Stark
We decided on a strategy. On November 16, sites such as Mozilla, Tumblr, reddit, and even 4chan would blackout their logos in protest of SOPA. Fight for the Future set up a central site called American Censorship Day, where all the sites involved were listed. And there was a call for the Internet community to get involved. This was a watershed moment in the politics of the Internet: sites like Mozilla and Tumblr took a public stance for the first time ever on a political issue.
6. The Markup
Patrick Ruffini
Our path to victory was dangerously narrow. As best, I could predict, it would play out as follows: Lamar Smith would succeed in ramming the bill through markup on the Judiciary Committee, and at that point, we would need to rely on Tea Party pressure to save us at the eleventh hour by persuading House majority leader Eric Cantor not to schedule SOPA for the floor. It seemed more plausible than any other SOPA death scenario, especially as the Senate seemed far more likely to pass its own tamer version of the bill. Nonetheless, given the deference normally given powerful committee chairs like Smith, it was a perilous path forward for the opposition.
Zoe Lofgren
A “markup” of a bill is a time when the committee of jurisdiction meets to go through the bill, line by line, with Members of the Committee offering amendments. It is a formal proceeding, televised and now webcast. December 15, 2011 was the beginning of the Judiciary Committee “markup” of SOPA. Showtime.
Patrick Ruffini
On the night of the 14th, I received a frenzied call from a tech industry lobbyist. Smith had been twisting arms, we didn’t know who was on our side anymore, and we were down to as few as half a dozen votes on the committee. The Internet needed to light up the phones. At the suggestion of a Capitol Hill veteran in my office, I would tweet out the direct line to the Judiciary committee staff room. It was reasoned that members would be taking meetings there in between votes. We brainstormed creative ways for members to experience the crescendo of outrage firsthand.
Aaron Swartz
Big stories like this are just more interesting at human scale. The director J. D. Walsh said good stories should be like the poster for Transformers. There’s a huge robot on the left side of the poster and a huge army on the right, but in the middle, at the bottom, there’s just a small family, trapped in between. Big stories need human stakes.
Jonny 5 (lead vocals, the Flobots)
In the winter of 2011 when my friend David Segal approached me about creating a YouTube video in opposition to SOPA, I knew it must be the right thing to do, because I trust David to be on the right side of things. I knew that, d
espite the hanging questions for artists as to how we will survive the transforming music industry, the answer would never resemble the heartless clampdown on fans proposed by SOPA. I knew that fans covering our songs at school talent shows and using our music as a soundtrack to personal slideshows deserve our gratitude, not legal action.
Patrick Ruffini
Issa’s crafty and resourceful social media team had set up a website, KeeptheWebOpen.com, initially to showcase their government transparency initiatives (including a platform called MADISON allowing wiki-style edits to legislation), that would be used as a platform to live-stream the hearings. A core of opposition quickly formed around Issa (himself a senior Republican and chairman of the Government Oversight committee), Lofgren, Polis, and Republican Jason Chaffetz of Utah.