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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All essays © 2013 by the various authors. All essays in Hacking Politics are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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Assistant editor: Joshua Bauchner
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British Library Cataloging in Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Black cover: paperback ISBN 978-1-939293-04-6 • ebook ISBN 978-1-939293-06-0
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First printing 2013.
The following honorary co-publishers made substantial contributions to the funding of Hacking Politics via the Indiegogo crowd-sourcing platform. We’re grateful for their support.
Anonymous
Anonymous
Anonymous
Anthony Aiuto
Kelly Birr
Rosario Dawson
Eric Decker
Luke Gotszling
Jim Lastinger
Marian Maxwell
Robert R Miles II
Maxim Nekrasov
Daniel R Quintiliani
Michael Sriqui
Eric Usher
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A Moment for Aaron
Foreword by the Editors
Hacking Politics: TLDR
PART 1: The World Before SOPA/PIPA
AARON SWARTZ For Me, It All Started with a Phone Call
CORY DOCTOROW The History of the Copyright Wars
JOSH LEVY Before SOPA There Was Net Neutrality
MIKE MASNICK COICA, PIPA, and SOPA Are Censorship
PART 2: The SOPA/PIPA Battle
DAVID SEGAL Now I Work for Demand Progress
PATRICK RUFFINI Beginning on the Right
DAVID MOON Demand Progress Needs a “Washington Guy”
GABRIEL LEVITT SOPA’s Elevation of Profits Over Patients: The Online Pharmacy Story
PATRICK RUFFINI Lobbying Republicans Through the Summer
DAVID SEGAL The Tea Party Enters the Fray
DAVID SEGAL AND DAVID MOON Gamers and Justin Bieber Join the Cause
DAVID MOON Clashes With the Big Guns
DAVID SEGAL Labor Sides with the Bosses
JONNY 5 Turning the Tide on SOPA
DAVID SEGAL What Was Lamar Smith Thinking?
PATRICK RUFFINI A Punch in the Gut
TIFFINIY CHENG Waking the Sleeping Giant
AARON SWARTZ Who’s Crazy Now?
DAVID SEGAL Nearing the Point of No Return
PATRICK RUFFINI The Markup
ANDREW MCDIARMID AND DAVID SOHN Bring in the Nerds: The Importance of Technical Experts in Defeating SOPA and PIPA
ERNESTO FALCON People Powered Politics
DAVID SEGAL AND DAVID MOON To the White House
DEREK SLATER On the White House’s Statement
OCCUPY WALL STREET Proposal to Reach Consensus on Statement Against the Stop Online Piracy Act
TIFFINIY CHENG The Blackout
DAVID SEGAL Congress Says: “This Can’t be Happening”
SUICIDE GIRLS I Live, Work, Play, and Love Online
OPEN CONGRESS Blowing Congress Wide Open
ALEXIS OHANIAN Why Reddit Helped Kill SOPA
DAVID SEGAL If Reddit’s Turned Off, Maybe They’ll Leave the House That Day
PATRICK RUFFINI Internet 1, Congress 0
ZOE LOFGREN Championing Technology and Free Speech in Congress Was Lonely … But Not Anymore
AARON SWARTZ After the Blackout
LARRY DOWNES Who Really Stopped SOPA—and Why
EDWARD J. BLACK Legislative Fights Are Like Icebergs
CASEY RAE-HUNTER Not in Our Names: Artists Stand Up for Expression
ELIZABETH STARK I Stopped SOPA and So Did You
BEN HUH Why Did the Anti-SOPA/PIPA Movement Go Viral So Quickly?
DAVE DAYEN The Internet Beat SOPA and PIPA: And Mean the Entire Damn Thing
DAVID MOON A Political Coming of Age
PATRICK RUFFINI This Time, the System Actually Mostly Worked
PART 3: Some Activism Since SOPA
DAVID SEGAL AND DAVID MOON Cyber Security and Party Platforms
DEREK KHANNA Fallout from the Copyfight
JOSHUA BAUCHNER The Seizure of Dajaz1
NICOLE POWERS An Interview with Julia O’Dwyer
DEMAND PROGRESS Raps with Megaupload Founder Kim Dotcom
PART 4: What We’ve Learned
YOCHAI BENKLER ET AL Glimpses of a Networked Public Sphere
DAVID KARPF Reflecting on the SOPA Blackout: Why Did It Work, and What Does It Mean?
DAVID SEGAL That Was Amazing. Can We Do It Again Sometime?
PART 5: Where Do We Go from Here?
RON PAUL The Battle for Internet Freedom Is Critical for the Liberty Movement
ERIN MCKEOWN A Case for Digital Activism by Artists
BRAD BURNHAM On the Freedom to Innovate
MARVIN AMMORI SOPA and the Popular First Amendment
CORY DOCTOROW Blanket Licenses: One Path Forward in Copyright Reform
LAWRENCE LESSIG The Internet Can Help Strike at the Root
Conclusion
Aaron Swartz speaks at the New York City anti-SOPA rally on January 18th, 2012
A MOMENT FOR AARON: 1968-2013
This book was constructed over the course of the fall, and we intended to release it earlier this winter, but then tragedy struck: our friend and colleague Aaron Swartz committed suicide on January 11th, while under federal indictment for downloading too many academic articles housed by the online cataloguing service called JSTOR. The shockwave was powerful: thousands have attended memorial services across the country, hundreds of news stories have been written. As of the writing of this foreword, there are at least a dozen long-form articles being drafted about Aaron’s life and his death, and multiple documentary films being edited. A swarm of events that were to commemorate the anniversary of the January 18th Internet blackout became bittersweet remembrances of our fallen ally.
Aaron has largely been memorialized as an advocate for copyright reform, information access, and Internet freedom. He was indeed such, but he was also so much more. He probably first cared about those causes for their own sakes, but his work on them provided a window into politics that made it impossible to ignore broader systemic corruption and injustices. He wasn’t a techno-utopian who believed that open access and an open Internet would alone fix all that ails humanity; he came to believe that a constant, directed, ideologically left-leaning layer of activism needed to be built on top of these platforms.
This transformation is perhaps best elucidated by Aaron himself in his own words, from a talk he gave at the Freedom to Connect conference in 2012. Here’s how he reacted when his close friend Peter Eckersley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation first told him about the bill that would become SOPA:
“Oh, Peter,” I said. “I don’t care about copyright law. Maybe you’re right, maybe Hollywood is
right, but either way is it really such a big deal? I’m not going to waste my life fighting over a little issue like copyright. Health care. Financial reform. Those are the sorts of issues I work on. Not something obscure like copyright.”
I could hear Peter grumbling. “Look, I don’t have time to argue with you. But it doesn’t matter for right now. Because this isn’t a bill about copyright.”
“It’s not?”
“No, it’s a bill about freedom of speech.”
You can see that his focus, more and more, was on matters of economic and social justice—but these new passions were synthesized with the old, as neither was enough on its own: to realize one’s vision of a better world, one must know how the world works (open access) and be able to share that information (freedom of speech) and be able to organize towards those ends (freedom to connect, online and off).
Rather than enriching himself—rather than assuming that he alone was responsible for his genius or deserved to benefit therefrom—he chose to employ his intellectual prowess and the modest fortune he achieved upon the sale of reddit to make the world a better place, for everybody. I’ve been fumbling for the precise words since his death, but he once told me something like, “Segal, I might seem a little cynical or misanthropic sometimes, but don’t worry: whenever I encounter a problem, I always try to identify the utility-optimizing solution to it.” He’d taken to calling himself an “applied sociologist.” And—always wearing a white hat—he was trying to hack the whole world.
It’s through social justice work that I first got to know Aaron, and that our organization Demand Progress came into existence: Aaron co-founded the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which endorsed my run for Congress in 2010. The day after I lost that election he emailed me to say, “We should talk some time. Need your help to fix the world.” So we joined forces to build Demand Progress and fight against that very bill whose import Aaron nearly dismissed.
Much has been and will be written about Aaron’s state of mind, why he did what he did. We can’t purport to know what he was thinking down to the final detail, but it is unambiguous to those of us who knew him well that the stress and anxiety that followed from the draconian prosecution were the proximate causes of his decision to take his own life.
While there is indeed a mental health crisis upon us, it’s important not to pathologize all those who despair. Therapists, medicine, and lifestyle changes will benefit many—presuming one can afford them. But Aaron’s way to allay others’ misery and reduce the likelihood that they might suffer the fate that befell him would be to focus on what could have saved his own life: he’d aim for the root causes of so much human anguish. He’d strive to upend a system that hangs a lifetime in prison over the head of an activist who harmed nobody, or destroys people’s lives over petty drug offenses, or forces millions of workers to spend decades slaving away at poverty wages without access to adequate healthcare.
We are sorrowful and we are angry, but we’ve found some solace in the vast public outcry at the injustice of his predicament—and in lawmakers’ demonstrated willingness to take on Aaron’s cause, and ours, as their own by addressing some of these structural problems.
Aaron was an ideologue, but not a partisan. He was definitively progressive, but didn’t care much about party stripe, and was willing, or even excited, to work with conservatives and right-libertarians when he agreed with them. The familiar left-right, single-axis paradigm sometimes breaks down, frequently so in the civil liberties and Internet freedom space. As was the case during the SOPA fight, as described in detail in this book, some of our staunchest allies will be on the right, inclusive of Republican lawmakers, and we are pleased to have an opportunity to work in common cause with them.
As of this writing the House Government Oversight Committee led by Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Elijah Cummings (D-MD) has initiated an investigation into his prosecution. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) have drafted legislation called Aaron’s Law, to reform the statute under which he was prosecuted. Legislation to provide open access to publicly funded research has been introduced by Senator John Cornyn (R-TX)—it was already planned prior to his passing, but Demand Progress and others are excited to support it.
It’s hard to know exactly what Aaron would make of all of this: he seemed not to always understand how much he mattered, to his friends and family, to hundreds of people whom he worked with over the course of his short life, and to millions across the world who never even met him. But he’d be hopeful that something positive might emerge from the tragedy of his passing.
And he’d be happy that so many care to learn more about the SOPA fight that was one of the highlights of the last year or two of his life. One of the hallmarks of his particularly humble brand of brilliance was that he didn’t assume every idea he had was superior, just for being borne of his own mind: he developed hypotheses, and he tested them. He exhorted us, “Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.” He was adamant that “the revolution will be A/B tested.” So read what follows critically, and let’s try to gain a sense of what worked and what didn’t, so that we can put up an even stronger effort the next time we need to come together to save the Internet.
—David Segal
February, 2013
FOREWORD
DAVID MOON, PATRICK RUFFINI, AND DAVID SEGAL
The SOPA/PIPA battles brought together a coalition that may be unprecedented in the diversity of viewpoints and backgrounds of its members. But those who came together shared in common that they could all say: “I’m pro-Internet” – This photo was taken at an emergency protest organized by the New York Tech Meetup community on January 18, 2012. Photo by Craig Cannon. http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/photos/5468462/86976852/
Between the fall of 2010 and early 2012, untold millions of Americans urged lawmakers to protect the Internet and oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act and its predecessor and companion bills.
It’s quite possibly the largest single, directed form of (non-electoral) activism as far as number of American participants—and that’s fitting, as the legislation would have undermined the greatest facilitator of the democratic impulse that’s ever been known to humankind.
Together, we used the Internet to save the Internet, and registered a resounding victory against all apparent odds and in direct contradiction of the intuitions of the most seasoned establishment political actors and lobbies like the Chamber of Commerce and the Motion Picture Association of America. This is that story.
Most Americans are familiar with the extraordinary Internet Blackout of January 18th, 2012, but to get to that moment took months and years of toil by dedicated activists, online, in the streets, and in the halls of power. In an age of polarized partisan politics, it took an alliance between the far left, the far right, and countless concerned Americans whose proclivities span the vast spectrum in between. We looked past differences and came together to uphold values shared by the overwhelming majority of Americans—and people from around the globe, for that matter. In so doing, we cast a spotlight on much of what can still be good about our political processes, but also helped illuminate the underlying structural decrepitude that made it possible that politicians would blindly push legislation that so clearly controverted the will of so many of their constituents.
In order to win, the Internet would turn the SOPA/PIPA battle into a testing ground for activists’ tools, messages, and techniques—and all manner of viral satire, meme, and webcam ranting you could possibly imagine. Countless developers, websites, organizations, and even businesses tried to outdo each other in their activist creativity. But behind the scenes and beneath the seeming chaos of the public disruption, there were very real conversations happening between groups that do not usually play together. The “white shoe” lobbyists, the “white paper” policy advocates, technologists, venture capitalists, bloggers, and activists were in regular contact to disc
uss timing and strategy considerations. The participants in these dynamic coalitions often held wildly divergent viewpoints, but all shared an interest in defending Internet Freedom.
Essentially, anyone with a web presence (and who could therefore steer impressions to SOPA/PIPA content) could participate in the advocacy battle. It was decentralized, but it was organized, as we were actively trying to orchestrate a calculated mayhem.
Contained herein are essays written by dozens of people who were involved in those efforts. Authors of the essays that comprise Hacking Politics don’t necessarily endorse each other’s opinions—and, in fact, their opinions vary widely and often contradict one another. That’s precisely part of the point of this book: to demonstrate the ways in which people of distinct backgrounds, ideologies, and interests joined together in common cause to fight legislation that would’ve censored the Internet.
We don’t claim this to be a comprehensive accounting of everything that happened during the anti-SOPA/PIPA fight. Far from it. But it does represent the vantage points of an important group of activists who were invested in this fight for months or even years. The following pages are an account of their perspectives on the effort to beat SOPA/PIPA, and so necessarily elevate these viewpoints. Countless others who aren’t represented here also played critical roles in that fight, and surely have intriguing stories to tell as well. We are aware that this book is United States-centric. There’s critical work being undertaken in support of Internet freedom the world over, but we operate predominantly in the domestic sphere and that’s where the SOPA/PIPA fight was won, so it’s where we’ve focused. Would that we had the resources to engage more deeply with our brothers and sisters around the globe!
Demand Progress and Don’t Censor the Net—the organizations that the co-editors of this book help manage—are new groups without a longstanding institutional structure. We are well aware of the debts that we owe to longer-standing organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Free Press, and others, as well as many key academics and myriad rank-and-file activists who care passionately about the issues at hand. Without their years (sometimes decades) of work, our organizations wouldn’t exist, and we wouldn’t have been able to play the roles we took over the course of this glorious effort. In fact, without the toil of so many conscientious groups and people, we’d surely have lost the fight for an open Internet long ago. We’re honored that many activists and organizations for whom we have so much respect have contributed essays to this book, though it’s impossible to do justice to their longstanding work over the course of just a few hundred pages. A stark indicator of the depth of the gratitude that we owe the longer-standing organizations: While most readers of this book will be well aware of the 2012 Internet Blackout, far fewer remember—and several were probably not yet alive for—the 1996 blackout to oppose the Communications Decency Act (which was later found to be unconstitutional).