Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet

by David Segal, Patrick Ruffini

  This moment was recalled by politicos and technologists alike as a turning point. Congressional hearings were supposed to be dispassionate fact-finding missions, but a bill with drastic effects on the architecture of the Internet featured not one engineer. “It was like an inquisition court for the MPAA,” recalled a senior House staffer, who was appalled at the damage this could do the public’s perception of the institution. The notion that Congress wouldn’t even listen to technical concerns probably radicalized Silicon Valley to the point where something big, like a blackout, was seen as the only way to get a point across.

  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.

  It was in late October, once the opposition had something concrete to rally against, that the lobbying effort kicked into high gear. And “high gear” for technology companies still meant they were vastly outnumbered on Capitol Hill by their counterparts from the entertainment industry.

  One lobbyist involved in the anti-SOPA effort described the scene early one morning in the cafeteria at the Rayburn House Office Building at the height of the debate. Their team would convene at around 7:30 a.m. for member and staff meetings, and had so much ground to cover with that no more than one person was ever in meeting with a member or staffer at once; usually, in-house lobbyists and consultants teamed up. They also noticed the entertainment lobby was out in full force, with around fifty lobbyists convened at eight or nine tables pushed together. The anti-SOPA lobbyists set forth for their first wave of meetings, and reconvened at 9 a.m.

  When they returned, they noticed something odd: few, if any, of the pro-SOPA lobbyists appeared to have moved from their seats in an hour and a half. After their next round of meetings, they returned to compare notes and found the scene almost unchanged, with dozens of the same lobbyists still milling about in the cafeteria. The organizations that supported SOPA had spent $94 million on lobbying activity up to that point in 2011 (and $185.5 million the year before)—compared to $15.1 million across the entire technology industry. By all accounts, the proponents were running a professional, by-the-book lobbying operation, and doing so at massive scale. Yet, the lobbying colossus we all feared was starting to look like a sleeping giant.

  The content industry had showered its attention on a few go-to members on its target committees, primarily Judiciary (which had a heavy IP emphasis). That a near-unanimous consensus on the committees came about, with both Chairmen and ranking members leading the way, was a testament to the effectiveness of the MPAA and RIAA, and the longstanding bipartisan consensus on IP enforcement, spanning Presidents and Congresses. SOPA and PIPA were a direct assault on the Internet coated in banality. The content industry had carefully cultivated a sense that Congress should simply acquiesce to more copyright enforcement, as they had done overwhelmingly countless times before.

  Because passage in the Judiciary Committee seemed assured, the anti-SOPA lobbyists had to hustle and get creative, going places where Hollywood’s underworked lobbyists wouldn’t. They talked to freshman members on the Government Oversight committee, who might be looking to do a favor for their chairman, Darrell Issa. More generally, they viewed any backbencher without a previous history with Hollywood as a potential get. They also talked to lawyers at the Congressional campaign committees, explaining how the bills could be used to target campaigns that relied on the fair use exemption to copyright their advertising. (Having worked with campaigns, this was an issue I had faced numerous times before—and also exploited with Republicans, who often bore the disproportionate share of copyright complaints from left-leaning artists.)

  Another X-factor in the debate was the role of an emerging crop of young, social-media savvy staff on Capitol Hill, and the subsequent attention that Hill staff and even some members themselves paid to their social media feeds. More than one email or Twitter direct message exchange with our allies in political or communications roles went like this: Except for our LA [legislative assistant] on this issue, we all hate this bill.

  We will never know who was present at every meeting, but it seems safe to assume that pro-SOPA lobbying efforts didn’t extend far beyond members and staff directly involved in the issue. Yet it was this emerging crop of digitally-savvy communications staffers who were among the most vocal in raising red flags with their bosses after witnessing the outcry on Twitter. In many cases, these relatively junior staff had the ear of influential members with decision-making authority.

  The pathway to influencing this staff was more direct than a lobbying meeting; they read and write on Twitter. While only a handful of members (like Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill or Iowa’s Chuck Grassley) are known for tweeting themselves, a handful of other members—particularly those in leadership positions—have made social media the province of a more senior staff member who often has the ear of the member. And when an issue was exploding on Twitter or reddit, these staff became the default go-tos on all things Internet.

  “House Judiciary is embarrassing our majority today,” an aide direct messaged me during the December 15th SOPA markup. “You and everyone hate this bill, right?” emailed a press secretary for a senior Republican member. Internal debates over whether individual Republican member offices would release statements condemning the bills involved twenty-something communications and social media staff who were experiencing the outcry first-hand. When rattled RIAA lobbyists arrived to discuss objections to the bills with the office of an influential Republican member, they expressed marked displeasure with a staffer’s Twitter activity.

  In the case of some members, social media shaped reactions even more directly. Republican Rep. Tim Griffin of Arkansas, a former colleague of this author, was initially a SOPA co-sponsor on the Judiciary Committee. In his statement switching his position the day of the blackout, he cited concerns raised by his constituents on Facebook and Twitter. Nor was this lip service: He tweets himself and has used his personal Facebook profile to solicit feedback on issues being voted on in the House.

  Larger Senate offices who would later announce their newfound opposition via social channels would proudly report back on the record number of Facebook likes these announcements had gotten, seeing firsthand how fiercely protective their constituents seemed to be when it came to their online rights. For more than a decade, Congressional offices felt increasingly disconnected from their constituents. Mail wasn’t getting delivered post-9/11 and most of the email was spam. During SOPA, social media showed its potential to forge an authentic and real connection between the public and their representatives.

  As the debate grew larger and more public, Hill reactions seemed to become more reflexive and automatic, driven by a growing anti-SOPA political consensus. This was the actualization of a parallel reality that groups like Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, and ourselves had been nudging along in relative obscurity for the past several months. In this world, SOPA and PIPA were dangerous encroachments on our rights that would spawn universal revulsion from the online world. We believed it, but few others did; bloggers and interest groups who were approached about making statements months earlier, to chilly or no response, now gleefully weighed in bashing the bills. Post-markup, the debate seemed to be on autopilot, at least to those of us on the outside.

  WAKING
THE SLEEPING GIANT

  TIFFINIY CHENG

  Tiffiniy Cheng co-founded Fight for the Future with Holmes Wilson in the fall of 2011. They’d previously started an Internet freedom/copyright reform group called Downhill Battle way back in 2003. FFTF is dedicated to protecting and expanding the Internet’s transformative power in our lives by creating civic campaigns that are engaging for millions of people. They played a critical role in organizing protests like American Censorship Day and the wildly successful SOPA Blackout of January 2012. (Demand Progress coordinated closely with FFTF, and co-editor David Segal worked for them a bit as they got underway.)

  On January 18, 2012, the day of the Internet blackout, the Internet did more than just kill some bad legislation in Congress. On that day, millions of people showed the world that the networks and technologies they had developed over the past couple decades were capable of introducing real democratic participation to the American political process. We learned that politics doesn’t always have to be controlled by political parties, corporations, and special interest groups. We showed that regular people—independent of entrenched organizations and unaided by infusions of cash—can in fact win.

  With more money than ever flowing through American politics, and the media more consolidated and more dependent on corporate interests, how exactly did the Internet pull off such a major win?

  From the first second they realized the disruptive (and potentially very lucrative nature) of the Internet, the copyright and content industry—think Hollywood, Internet service providers, Big Media—have been trying to wrest control of it from the mostly horizontal networks that have defined it since its creation. It’s what they did with radio and television (anyone remember free TV?), and it’s what they will try to do with every future technology that revolutionizes content distribution by making it more horizontal, and less top-down. Armed with gargantuan lobbying budgets and flush with money to donate to campaigns, these industries will spare no expense to control both what content is allowed to flow on the Internet as well as how this content is distributed.

  But here’s the rub. From its very inception, the Web’s open architecture has been a given, and its users have come to expect that they can connect to one another without impediments and express themselves without being censored. There are no formal strictures, but it’s an unspoken right—and one that’s yelled about quite loudly when it comes under threat.

  Recognizing how pervasive and dearly-held these values are, the industry has taken a surreptitious route, exploiting copyright (jobs losses!) and security (terror!) laws as vehicles to make unpopular policy changes. Copyright is perceived as arcane and deadly boring, and nobody would dare throw a wrench into the machinations of the national security complex, so these “fine print” regulations easily fly beneath the public’s radar.

  And because many of the players behind these bills are responsible for feeding the public infotainment pabulum instead of real news, they assumed no one would notice or care anyway.

  This time, anyway, they were wrong.

  Power to the wonks: while it’s true that developments in Internet policy—particularly copyright issues—are hardly the subject of People magazine, over the past decade, a grassroots faction of media reform advocates and activists has emerged as a vocal movement. For years they have been warning the public about threats to the sanctity of the open Internet, using terms like Net Neutrality that made most people’s eyes glaze over. And that was one of the most successful pre-SOPA branding and legislative efforts! Unless we acted to pass laws that would prohibit government or industry from blocking legal content, they cautioned, players like Comcast, Verizon, and even repressive regimes, would be able to seize control of the most transformative technology of all time. But few listened.

  Then, in 2011, under the pretext of protecting the rights of artists, the corrupt and very powerful copyright industry spent a record $92 million on a push for the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s Protect-IP Act (PIPA). These laws—laws that could censor or even shut down any website without due process—faced minimal public resistance despite their stifling impact on entrepreneurial, intellectual, creative, religious, and political expression. With overwhelming bipartisan support, their passage was seen as inevitable.

  During the SOPA/PIPA fight, Hollywood and related industries vastly outspent Silicon Valley on lobbying. Estimates placed pro-SOPA/PIPA expenditures around $94 million in 2011. The chart above from the Kateopolis Tumblor visually depicts the spending disparity.

  When SOPA and PIPA were poised to be introduced in Congress, some of the best Internet activist groups and blogs started to sound the alarm. Then, in early October, Fight for the Future (FFTF), a small upstart group of technologists with deep roots in the digital grassroots organizing arena, began brain-storming about how to set off a much needed viral distress signal. Our first major salvo was an anti-PIPA video released by FFTF’s 501(c)3 arm, the Center for Rights—over the next few months it was viewed more than four million times on Vimeo and YouTube.

  When SOPA’s language was finally released, and after speaking to policy groups on the impact and likelihood of these bills passing, we believed that our only chance to stop these bills would be to mobilize millions into a unified, organized, and massive protest. We knew the Web was large and increasingly integrated into every aspect of people’s lives. We suspected—and were right—that using the appropriate strategies, we could unleash unprecedented public power.

  During a freak snowstorm on Halloween, FFTF discussed how disturbed we 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. We proposed that websites display our “Contact Congress” widget tool designed as a “government seizure” message on the front pages of their site or, on the suggestion from Harvey Anderson at Mozilla, blackout their logo. Our “Contact Congress” widget, built with the help of Aaron Swartz, gave sites, blogs, and individuals a way to further spread the word and at the same time protest SOPA. (This tool and associated site in particular set the messaging and tactics for the January 18 blackout to come.)

  Fight for the Future became highly respected in the SOPA/PIPA coalition for their ability to bring edgy messaging and well-produced action campaigns to the effort. The image above shows a planning document for the American Censorship Day website.

  The initial groundwork of the SOPA fight was hashed out by phone and over email, but to spread the message far and wide we knew we needed to work with policy, academic, and advocacy Internet policy groups and operators of larger websites. First we approached our closest allies, Demand Progress, Public Knowledge, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We then reached out to friends we knew at Mozilla, Techdirt, Boing Boing, Hype Machine, Open Congress/Participatory Politics Foundation, and Free Software Foundation, who agreed to sign on.

  To get the ball rolling, FFTF worked with Demand Progress and individuals like Hacking Politics contributor Elizabeth Stark to organize a brown bag gathering at Mozilla attended by representatives of CDT, EFF, Public Knowledge, Union Square Ventures, Yale and Stanford Universities, Silicon Valley, and others.

  These groups joined together on a listserv that became the core venue for anti-SOPA activist organizing over the months to come. Ernesto Falcon at Public Knowledge led legislative strategy on the mailing list and on conference calls. His timely work on the Hill and when he interfaced with grassroots groups was essential. Blogs used videos, infographics, and info sheets to report on the issue.

  We began to approach more friends and more people
we knew at sites, like reddit, Wikipedia, and Google, who, in turn, knew more people at sites like Scribd and Urban Dictionary. Many Wikipedia users were individually interested in participating in a blackout, and we got the support of the Wikimedia Foundation, but we were told that the decision for Wikipedia to participate in the blackout would require a community-wide conversation and decision-making process. We followed their advice and posted the idea of Wikipedia blacking out on the Village Pump section of Wikipedia, where active users congregate to discuss meta-concerns about the site. We crossed our fingers. Elizabeth Stark reached out to sites like Tumblr and 4chan. Aaron Swartz and David Segal spearheaded outreach to progressive “Netroots” groups like Avaaz, Credo, and MoveOn.

  Twitter was chirping about the following day’s protest. In the evening, when 4chan’s founder tweeted that he wished he could support American Censorship Day, we responded immediately and were buoyed by the potential for small ideas to grow. We still did not know if the site itself would participate.

  On November 16, huge sites like reddit, Mozilla, Boing Boing and 4chan either linked to our “Write Congress” pages, or included our widget on their site. In the early morning, we got a call from Tumblr who wanted to make sure we could handle the volume of traffic. We were definitely ready.

  Tumblr went above and beyond the call of duty with one of the most creative actions of the protest: they blacked out the dashboards of their over sixty million members, the overwhelming majority of whom had surely never heard of SOPA, or ever engaged in political protest.