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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Elizabeth Stark
You know that old slogan from Texas? Don’t mess with Texas. Well, some of us wanted to make sure Lamar Smith, the congressman from Texas who proposed SOPA, heard our version of the slogan: don’t mess with the Internet. A group of us, led by reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, started a crowd-funding effort that turned the slogan into a billboard in Lamar’s Texas district.
Andrew McDiarmid
During the pivotal committee markup in mid-December, the analyses regarding cybersecurity—the whitepaper, the Sandia letter, the op-eds by Stewart Baker, a new EFF-organized letter signed by eighty-three Internet engineers—were cited repeatedly by Reps. Lofgren, Issa, Chaffetz, Polis, and the other SOPA skeptics as they criticized the bill. Rep. Chaffetz memorably chided his colleagues, “We’re going to do surgery on the Internet … without bringing in the doctors. To my colleagues I would say, if you don’t know what DNSSEC is, you don’t know what you’re doing” with this legislation.
Patrick Ruffini
The first sign that the opposition would not go down without a fight came with a relatively simple procedural motion: they forced a full reading of the bill before the committee—a process which would take more than an hour at the outset of the proceedings. This delay set the tone for the next two days and was set against the backdrop of an impending recess and Congress rushing to tie up loose ends before heading home for the holidays.
Zoe Lofgren
We had prepared well over one hundred substantive amendments to SOPA, to be offered by a bipartisan group of Members. We started the markup at 10:00 a.m. and by the time the Committee recessed twelve hours later around 10: 00 p.m., we hadn’t reached all of the amendments that needed to be offered.
Patrick Ruffini
The opposition on the committee planned to offer as many amendments as possible. Democratic Rep. Jared Polis, an avid gamer and the only Internet entrepreneur in Congress, planned to force the committee to vote yea or nay on barring federal funds being used to benefit pornographers—who were some of the most aggressive copyright litigators. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from northern California, would ask movie theater owners to participate in SOPA’s rigid enforcement mechanisms; after all, movie theaters were themselves intermediaries for movie piracy, with “users” making bootleg recordings. Why not hold them accountable like you would the owners a website with millions of users, some of whom traffic in pirated content? In total, fifty-five amendments would be submitted.
Larry Downes
In Washington, the accepted wisdom by year-end was that the technology industry had matured at last into a lobbying force commensurate with its size and pocketbook. But what everyone missed was that the users had opened a third front in this fight, and clearly the one that determined its outcome. The bitroots movement wasn’t led by Google. It wasn’t led by anyone. Even to look for its leaders is to miss the point. Internet users didn’t lobby or buy their way into influence. They used the tools at their disposal—Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter and the rest—to make their voices heard. They encouraged voluntary boycotts and blackouts, and organized awareness days. This was a revolt of, by, and with social networks, turning the tools that organized them into groups in the first place into potent new weapons for political advocacy. The users had figured out how to hack politics.
Patrick Ruffini
Reflecting the indifference of most members to the dry technical issues behind the bill, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) began venting his frustration on Twitter: “We are debating the Stop Online Piracy Act and Shiela Jackson [sic] has so bored me that I’m killing time by surfing the Internet.” Jackson Lee spoke up to object, calling the remark “offensive.” Representative F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), a former committee chairman hostile to SOPA, piled on, demanding that Jackson Lee withdraw her remarks. Chairman Smith suggested she withdraw the word “offensive.” After some back and forth involving the body’s Parliamentarian, and a long delay, Jackson Lee agreed to strike her one word rejoinder, and instead deem King’s tweet “impolitic and unkind.”
Larry Downes
One of the unforgivable sins of the PIPA and SOPA process … was a complete failure to engage with anyone in the engineering community; what lawmakers on both sides of the issue regularly referred to as “bringing in the nerds.” And engineers were essential to getting it right, assuming that’s what the bills’ supporters really wanted to do. Both bills would have required ISPs to make significant changes to key Internet design principles—notably the process for translating web addresses to actual servers. Yet lawmakers freely admitted that they understood nothing of how that technology worked. Indeed, many seemed to think it was cute to begin their comments by confessing they’d never used, let alone studied, the infrastructure with which they were casually tinkering.
Patrick Ruffini
While televised House proceedings were nothing new (think C-SPAN), committee live-streams were rare, and this would become one of the most watched markups (if not the most watched) in history.
Open Congress (grassroots political activists)
What made SOPA different was that much of the exchange between constituents and officials was being posted online, thus merging many private one-to-one conversations into a massive one-to-many conversation. And the back-and-forths between different citizens and the same senator thus changed from iterations of the same query-and-response into a continuing discussion between that senator and the public at large.
Elizabeth Stark
Over two hundred thousand people watched the live stream of the hearing, and they tweeted and laughed about it. Why were they laughing? It was so painfully obvious that the U.S. Congress, the people we entrust to create our laws, fundamentally did not understand the Internet. There were members of Congress who had no idea what a domain name is, let alone how the Domain Name System, or DNS, works, voting on a bill that would change the very nature of this system. This was a huge wake up call. People were angry. In one of the only planned moments of levity, Congressman Jared Polis, probably the person in Congress who knows the most about the Internet, proposed an amendment saying that SOPA should not be used for porn. Basically, he was trolling. He not only told Congress about the song “The Internet Is for Porn” but asked to enter it into the Congressional record.
Tiffiniy Cheng
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.
Zoe Lofgren
The markup and amendment process helped to detail the failings of SOPA, from cyber-security to privacy to free speech. Finally, the delay gave time and opportunity to organize opposition among Internet users.
Elizabeth Stark
Tumblr had built an incredible tool that enabled all its users to easily call their politicians. And like that, we had nearly one hundred thousand calls to Congress—quite possibly the largest number of calls that had ever been made to Congress in one day. We shut down the lines.
Patrick Ruffini
That morning, there was talk that Chaffetz’s DNSSEC objection, encapsulated by his “bring in the nerds” riff, had struck a chord in the committee. He went to Smith, asking for a hearing on the technical and security implications of the bill before voting the bill out of committee, and wasn’t shot down. A concession like this would have been unprecedented. Capitol Hill watchers couldn’t recall a time when a bill entered the markup phase, only to go back for further fact-finding hearings. It was an embarrassing concession by the proponents that they hadn’t done their homework, and a sign of the full retreat to come. Things didn’t have a chance to play out like that. At 1:30 p.m., eleven hours and twenty-eight minutes into the proceedings, Smith took the microphone and announced that the committee would stand in recess, following word of a full House recess.
Zoe Lofgren
The following day th
e House recessed for the year and Congress left town, so the Committee was unable to finish the markup and kicked it over to January.
This was an important development for several reasons. First, I was later advised that over two hundred thousand people watched the telecast or webcast of the markup. Many who watched were apparently unimpressed by the arguments for the bill and by the apparent lack of Internet knowledge shown by some of the pro-SOPA Members of Congress.
David Segal
That just doesn’t happen: chairs simply don’t try this hard to move bills out of their own committees, advance them to votes in front of audiences of hundreds of thousands—with an unheard-of more than one hundred thousand people said to be have watching the live stream, and myriad others anxiously awaiting the results—and have the whole endeavor melt down before them, leaving them only to stand aside, consider the wreckage, and wallow in alternating despair and denial. Not only did the poor stooge not know that his cause was toast—he was deluded enough to publicly insist that he would bring the bill back before the committee when the House next reconvened, ostensibly to somehow achieve a vote tally in its favor.
It was a shocking, public rebuke for Smith, of the sort that someone of his stature seldom suffers—and we heard through the grapevine that John Boehner and Eric Cantor agreed about the severity of the embarrassment, and that they wanted the Whole Damned Thing shut down.
Ernesto Falcon
The result was simply amazing. Normally a couple of dozen people watch a Congressional hearing. But here, more than one hundred thousand Americans watched the legislative hearing on SOPA on the Internet and millions of people signed petitions opposing the bill. At that point, I finally began to believe we could realistically water down or outright stop these bills. Once people started calling Congress, writing letters, and attending town halls to express their displeasure, groups like mine finally had the leverage necessary to start winning.
David Segal
There were cracks in the armor now: Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the House Democrats, had made her opposition to the bill known on American Censorship Day—via Twitter, no less. We’d collectively steered in a few million more emails to Congress. There was increased resonance among the public.
Zoe Lofgren
Capitalizing on the extra time, I did an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) on reddit.com on December 16, 2011. In this forum, a site which is a favorite community for many of the Internet-savvy, I encouraged folks to contact their Members of Congress, and argued that SOPA was a grave threat to the Internet. I reassured the reddit community that, indeed, their representatives would listen to them if they spoke up.
David Segal
During the markup, Illinois Democrat and Judiciary Committee member Mike Quigley berated his own constituents as he argued that many SOPA opponents who’d contacted him had “a vision of the Internet that [was] unacceptable.” His office also seemed to think it unacceptable, or unfathomable, that they’d have been inundated with so much concern from their residents of Illinois’s 5th—or that some constituents might even have emailed them twice.
Tiffiniy Cheng
American Censorship Day successfully turned SOPA into a viral sensation, but the bills were still, somehow, expected to pass. Our work served to set the stage for an even larger protest to come on January 18. Coming up, there was still the SOPA committee hearing and a final vote on PIPA in the Senate. Ernesto at Public Knowledge made us well aware that we needed further action, and kept the SOPA list up to date on the latest legislative events. FFTF and its allies went into high gear, seeking to expand the number of participating websites.
Patrick Ruffini
The initial House hearing and the markup were action-forcing events that drove spikes in public and social media attention. But after the markup on December 15th and 16th, with Congress in recess, events acquired a momentum of their own. The markup, combined with the buildup to the Senate vote, triggered a categorical shift up in the volume of attention. The next big spike, the planned boycott of GoDaddy (which had issued statements supportive of the bills), came two days before Christmas and arose entirely from the community.
Huffington Post
“Walt Disney Co. President and CEO Bob Iger declined the invitation on behalf of content providers. ‘Hollywood did not feel that a meeting with Silicon Valley would be productive at this time,’ said a spokesperson. The meeting took place with only tech companies present. Feinstein, once a reliable vote for the existing version of Protect IP, is now working hard to amend the bill, according to Senate Democratic aides.”
Aaron Swartz
If there was one day that this shift happened, I think it was the day of the hearings on SOPA in the House, the day that we got the phrase “It’s no longer OK to not understand the Internet.” Something about watching those clueless members of Congress debate the bill, watching them insist that they could regulate the Internet and a bunch of nerds couldn’t stop them—that really brought it home for people. This was happening. Congress was going to break the Internet and it just didn’t care.
David Segal
After the markup, but well before the blackout, we’d already heard from several offices that the volume of constituent contacts that they were receiving had been surpassed only by the immigration reform debate, Obama’s health care reform push, or for many offices, never at all. Even more spectacularly: in the case of the prior debates, America’s sentiments were substantially divided. But when it came to SOPA, something like 99% of us—regardless of party, geography, or ideological self-identity—were on the same side.
Tiffiniy Cheng
Whether or not we’d sunk the bill was still unclear, but the fruits of the campaign were many: it generated over two million petition signers as well as two million emails and eighty-four thousand calls to Congress—four calls per second from Tumblr users alone. Videos and infographics built for the event eventually attracted over six million views and almost three million views, respectively. This was the first major attempt by Internet platforms to mobilize their users en masse. Rep. Zoe Lofgren redacted the logo of her Congressional website. Google, Huffington Post, AOL placed a full-page ad in the New York Times about SOPA.
7. The Blackout
Patrick Ruffini
The idea of an Internet blackout was first seriously floated in a CNET story on December 29th. And it was one of the industry’s leading lobbyists, Markham Erickson, who was quoted in the story, lending added credibility to the report.
January 18th was not initially blackout day. It was actually conceived as the day SOPA opponents would get the hearing they were denied by Lamar Smith two months earlier.
Tiffiniy Cheng
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.
Zoe Lofgren
I had talked a lot about melting the phone lines, and using the Internet’s communication power to impact Congress. Now, Internet leaders emerged, and the idea of a blackout was considered. A group of sites decided to participate. Along with others, I began to lobby tech leaders to try to increase the size and effectiveness of the blackout. On Monday, January 16th Craigslist jumped the gun and used its platform to sound the alarm about SOPA. I emailed Craig Newmark to thank him and then emailed others in the tech world to urge that they join the cause. I was later told that in the two weeks prior to mid-January, SOPA was the number one news topic for Americans under age 30. Most Americans over age 30 had never heard of it.
Patrick Ruffini
Monday, January 9th saw a small burst of Hill activity, with Darrell Issa’s office announcing a hearing before the
full Government Oversight Committee on the DNS blocking provisions in SOPA. The hearing would gather some of the most influential anti-SOPA voices from the business community: Union Square Ventures’ Brad Burnham, Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier, and reddit’s irrepressible co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Reddit’s involvement in the hearing is what turned the blackout from a source of speculation into reality. The day after the hearing was announced, reddit posted about their plans to their blog. “Stopped they must be; on this all depends,” was the title. On January 18th, reddit.com would shut down from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and in part given over to a live-stream of Issa’s hearing.
Elizabeth Stark
As anger on the Internet rose, the ever-energetic reddit community decided to fight back. How? Shut down the site for an entire day. The Wikipedia community then decided to follow suit. As did Mozilla, Google, Tumblr, I Can Haz Cheeseburger, and many, many more. All in all, over eighteen million people took action. Hell, even my mom told me that she “voted” for “privacy” (not quite Mom, but thanks for the support!).