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 MOON
David Moon is the Program Director for Demand Progress, a group dedicated to mobilizing the public to challenge power and promote civil liberties. He is a progressive policy attorney and political consultant based in metro-Washington, D.C. and also edits the state politics blog Maryland Juice.
With the amazing synergy between ordinary Internet users, activist groups, and online businesses, this was a coalition unlike any I had ever worked with before. Demand Progress and its membership of vocal Internet users was suddenly in league with major website operators, librarians, rightwing libertarians, cat-photo enthusiasts, hardcore gamers, and more.
One of the early collaborations for our strange bedfellows coalition was an effort to create counterweights to the many industry organizations and front groups that the bills’ backers had concocted. Demand Progress, Don’t Censor the Net, Public Knowledge, and several business groups that formed a Coalition to Protect Innovation and launched the website ProtectInnovation.com. This was but one of many awkward alliances that would emerge from the legislative fight.
I’ve made a career out of running progressive activists for elected office in the greater Washington, D.C. region, and the SOPA/PIPA campaign once again placed me in a position of trying to bring the leaders of the Democratic Party closer to the grassroots. That many Democrats in Congress were so quick to embrace these wretched censorship bills was further evidence that outside of constituency-driven hot-button issues like abortion or gay rights, big businesses were continuing to dominate policymaking decisions even in a party that prides itself on being the voice of the un-moneyed.
That’s why for me, beyond the specific policy concerns, the SOPA/PIPA fight has been and continues to be about projecting a political voice for the Internet. Policymakers need to understand that Internet users have emerged as a serious political constituency, and they need to grasp a simple fact: every day that passes, we are closer to a voting population comprised of a majority of people who came of age in a post-Internet world. But does Lamar Smith himself even use common social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube? I don’t mean the government aide behind @LamarSmithTX21, either. I’m asking whether Lamar Smith himself actually uses the Internet the way the rest of us do?
For my colleagues on the left, it’s obvious that we should want the Democratic Party to be the one that “gets” technology and the Internet. The idea that the current evangelical-driven Republican Party could be competitive with us for an emergent Internet constituency makes my stomach turn and makes me wish Democrats would form a Congressional caucus paralleling the increasingly successful politics of the “Pirate” parties in Europe. I guess that’s why it makes sense that I’ve ended up serving as that “Washington” presence for Demand Progress.
Today, Demand Progress is an organization with over one and a half million members and its primary function is to mobilize the public to advance civil liberties and progressive causes. We do so primarily during key moments in the public dialogue, when the actions of a few can be leveraged into results for many more—like blowing the whistle at an early stage in the vetting of new bill that’s supposed to sneak through without controversy, as we did with COICA or Amy Klobuchar’s felony online streaming bill, discussed later herein. Our work to stop SOPA/PIPA over the course of the last year is just one example of this model, but it fits the paradigm for activism today: harnessing grassroots (often Internet user-generated ) disruption to advance social change, demonstrated by an increasing impatience and a do-it-yourself attitude among activists across the spectrum. In the era of the Internet, (potential) change agents no longer need to filter their messages through tone-deaf media outlets and mercenary lobbyists, and they no longer need to abide by the past generation’s rules of civic engagement.
The Arab Spring protests, Occupy, the Tea Party, and Anonymous have all illuminated this paradigm shift. But if you look closely, you’ll see less obvious but still powerful examples in unexpected places. In one high-profile instance last year, a victim of perhaps perpetual child abuse secretly videotaped a seven-minute belt beating she received from her father, a Texas family law judge. She held onto the tape and years later published the shocking video on YouTube, where it was instantly watched by millions of people. It is worth noting that the reason why she was being beaten was her father was punishing her for downloading music on the Internet.
To be sure, harnessing the opportunities caused by a disruption of the public consciousness is nothing new. That’s kind of the point of any protest, right? But the speed, scale, and successes of the efforts today are hard to ignore. What allows them to be so successful is the critical mass of human beings now interacting on the Internet, and the speed at which the networks and apps allow us to share information with others. But it sure helps to have good read on what types of campaign tactics are likely to generate action.
Lunch with Aaron Swartz
My involvement with Demand Progress began on December 20, 2011, when I met the young Internet activist Aaron Swartz for coffee in Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle. I had never heard of Aaron or his work—but over time, I quickly saw that he was trying to trigger many of the same policy changes I sought to advance.
I first heard of Aaron through my childhood friend and on-and-off activist colleague David Segal. A former Rhode Island State Representative, Segal had just decided to join Aaron in helping to launch Demand Progress. I had just finished another election cycle of campaign work and was looking for new projects, so Segal insisted that I meet with Aaron. The two of them were trying to set up a “Washington presence” to help fight COICA and whatever might next come careening down the pike.
But my first meeting with Aaron wasn’t even really about COICA or Demand Progress. Instead I asked Aaron to describe his broad vision and what he hoped Demand Progress might achieve. Aaron expressed immense frustration with the political process and stated that his dream was to see well-meaning grassroots candidates running for office in every district in the nation. Surely that would send a message. Privately, I thought the idea sounded a bit grandiose (at least in the context of trying to create a short-term strategic plan for an organization), but that was mostly beside the point: it was clear that I shared Aaron’s sense of impatience with a broken political system and his desire to go big.
Over the few weeks after my coffee with Aaron, David continued to pester me to come work for Demand Progress. They needed a “Washington guy,” he kept telling me. But other than the mere coincidence of living “Inside the Beltway,” I wasn’t quite sure that I would be the Capitol Hill advocacy presence they had in mind.
To be fair, on paper I had some characteristics of a “Washington” person. I had a law degree, I had managed political campaigns, I had worked in issue advocacy, and I had worked inside government. But those vague descriptions masked the consistent progressive activism that undergirded my work. Moreover, as a young Asian-American male with thick-framed glasses and distaste for suits, I didn’t quite look the role to be hobnobbing with Washington’s K Street elite. But in the world of the Internet, these barriers mattered less than they used to. And so in January of 2011, I let them know that I was in.
When I first joined Demand Progress, I offered to host Swartz and Segal at my house in Washington for a retreat to plot out six-month and one-year goals for the organization. Our mission and methods were still up for debate, but during the retreat we decided to kick forward a broad work plan and focus our energies on those efforts where our members expressed the most interest. We basically treated the effort like a startup. But the one thing we did know was that fighting Internet censorship would be one of our primary endeavors. After all, our initial members joined the organization because of their concern over COICA, so we had a duty and greater standing to fight that bill and its successors.
It was obvious that the pro-Internet forces were going to be massively out-spent by industry proponents of COICA. We also knew that as a brand new group, Demand Progr
ess would enter the debate with little-to-no credibility among status quo policymakers, that mainstream media coverage of our efforts would be almost non-existent, and that nobody thought we had any real chance to stop the legislative threat. As a result, we faced constant obstacles and were forced to hunt down opportunities to leverage our limited assets for maximum effect.
When we first took on COICA (and later SOPA/PIPA), the establishment curtly brushed aside our concerns without further thought. Neither the special interests backing the bills—nor the bills’ sponsors, should we feel charitable enough to draw a distinction between them and the lobbies whose bidding they were doing—had realized the extent to which the Internet had become such a dominant force in many people’s lives, nor had they fully digested the advocacy potential of millions of people who interact on social networks and share information online, especially when the matter of concern was Internet policy. For much of 2011, most of our allies assumed that the big content-owning companies would be able to pass some sort of Internet regulating legislation that year.
Recruiting a Bigger Army to Fight SOPA/PIPA
In April 2011, I dropped a stack of flyers criticizing COICA outside a Congressional hearing for the bill. Our small coalition had been struggling to broaden opposition to the legislation, but we soon found ourselves with a completely new issue angle and set of allies. One of Moon’s anti-COICA info packets made it into the hands of Gabriel Levitt from PharmacyChecker.com—a website that helps consumers find websites that sell safe and authentic prescription drugs. Levitt wanted to make Demand Progress aware that COICA (and later SOPA/PIPA) threatened to shut down legitimate pharmacies and services that allowed U.S. seniors to purchase authentic prescription drugs from lower-priced Canadian pharmacies. This was a fairly mainstream issue, as seniors advocates like Lee Graczyk from Rx Rights (another anti-SOPA/PIPA advocate) had for years been working with members of Congress on safe drug importation.
But SOPA/PIPA turned out to be grab-bag of special interest goodies, and provisions threatening online pharmacies were included In the bills. As early as May 2011, major pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly were blogging that PIPA “helps protect patients.” To fight back, Rx Rights, PharmacyChecker.com and other affected websites joined the fight against SOPA/PIPA and added thousands of senior citizens to our coalition of Internet users. Thousands of seniors from across the country contacted their lawmakers, and we and other activists made sure that lawmakers who’d been sympathetic to the importation cause were aware of the bill’s impacts thereon. Rx Rights wisely targeted seniors living in Florida and other politically influential states to contact their members of Congress.
SOPA’S ELEVATION OF PROFITS OVER PATIENTS: THE ONLINE PHARMACY STORY
GABRIEL LEVITT
Gabriel Levitt is the vice president of PharmacyChecker.com and president of the United Nations Association Brooklyn Chapter. He has an MA in International Relations from American University.
“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”
—Article 24 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was most commonly criticized because its passage would have allowed the U.S. Government to curtail online publishing without due process, violating the cherished right of freedom of speech. Opponents argued that the bill grossly overreached and took a sledgehammer to protect intellectual property rights where a scalpel at most may be needed. But too few people were aware that SOPA could also deprive Americans of access to safe and affordable prescription medication. Access to affordable prescription medication is often a matter of life and death. Blocking it transcends traditional censorship issues and becomes a basic human rights violation.
This is the story of how the pharmaceutical and U.S. pharmacy industries supported SOPA to assert greater control over the online distribution of prescription medication and protect their high prices. They joined the movie and music industries to support SOPA in search of special government protections for their profits
For full disclosure, I’m vice president of PharmacyChecker.com, which helps consumers find safe online pharmacies and compare their drug prices. SOPA’s passage could have led to private or government actions to shut down PharmacyChecker.com, even though we do not sell prescription medication but only provide information.
PharmacyChecker.com joined a coalition of non-profit organizations, businesses, and individual Americans called RxRights.org, which advocates for safe personal prescription drug importation. When SOPA’s predecessor, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), was introduced, it was clear as day that the pharmaceutical industry had its paws on this legislation. Defeating SOPA became RxRights.org’s greatest priority.
SOPA’s Section 105, called “Immunity For Taking Voluntary Action Against Sites That Endanger The Public Health,” made it a vehicle to prevent Americans’ access to safe international online pharmacies, meaning, for our purposes, non-U.S., international mail-order pharmacies, where brand name drug prices are often 85% lower than at U.S. pharmacies. The provision, in effect, defined safe international online pharmacies as dangers to the public health, making them subject to takedown actions, such as refusal of service by registrars. This section was more pernicious than those dedicated to copyrighted materials. As important as is the free speech right to creative content, the right to affordable and necessary medication is often a matter of life or death. Not so for the shared MP3 download.
The industries backing SOPA/PIPA used as a scare tactic the fear of fake prescription drugs to justify online censorship. In reality, the legislation made no distinction between legitimate websites selling safe pharmaceuticals and those (of which there are many) selling potentially bad medication. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a SOPA-supporter, even produced a web video highlighting the death of a person who had taken fake drugs purchased online, attempting to conflate deadly counterfeit drugs with copyright infringement.
Drug affordability is a serious problem in America. Almost half of Americans—and 90% of seniors—rely on prescription medication to treat or prevent disease. The Commonwealth Fund reported that in 2010 forty-eight million Americans between the ages of 19–64 (not including seniors) did not fill a prescription because of cost. According to the National Consumers League, one hundred twenty-five thousand Americans die annually because they do not take needed medication. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reports $290 billion in additional healthcare spending (for more emergency room visits and hospitalizations) resulting from failure to take needed medicines.
Price controls in other countries mean that drug prices are much lower abroad. Before the Internet, Americans required travel to Canada or Mexico for lower-priced medicine. In fact, in the beginning of the last decade several members of Congress led constituents on bus trips to Canada for the purpose. Now the Internet has created a marketplace in which Americans access lower-priced and safe international online pharmacies.
U.S. laws serve the economic interests of pharmaceutical companies at the expense of American consumers. Federal law technically prohibits individuals from importing the same medicine sold in U.S. pharmacies from Canada and other countries, but the practice, while discouraged by the FDA, is generally permitted.
Let’s examine the FDA’s position on personal drug importation. The FDA has regulations in place to protect the U.S. drug supply, presumably to insure safety and efficacy. The FDA cannot guarantee the safety of medicines sold in other countries, so for their own protection Americans are not supposed to buy medication from Canada or anywhere.
But how strong is the FDA “guarantee” of the domestic supply to begin with? Are FDA-approved drugs sold here really safer than pe
rsonally imported ones from licensed sources? If they’re not, then the law protects pharmaceutical profits from lower cost competition, but not the public health.
America has experienced two tragedies over the past five years due to drug quality lapses: neither had anything to do with international online pharmacies. The first occurred in 2007–2008 when tainted Heparin imported from China killed about one hundred fifty Americans. The second occurred last year when forty-six people were killed and six hundred sickened by fungal meningitis contracted by bad steroid injections, which were manufactured and sold by a Massachusetts compounding pharmacy.
Americans might believe that most of our pharmaceuticals are “American.” The truth is that most are foreign! According to the FDA, 80% of the active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs)—main ingredients—in prescription medication sold in U.S. pharmacies are imported from countries all around the world, mostly India and China. This is not a new development. According to a Government Accounting Office report from 1998, 80% of APIs in “American” medications were imported. Drug and drug component importation is the pipeline of medicine into U.S. pharmacies, but the industry seems to use every available ploy and falsehood to control the pipeline and thus its prices—such as SOPA.
Americans are lead to believe that the FDA vigilantly maintains a “closed” drug supply chain. Yet a GAO report from 2010 based on FDA’s data found that “of the three thousand seven hundred sixty-five foreign establishments in FDA inventory for fiscal year 2009, there were two thousand three hundred ninty-four foreign establishments that may never have been inspected by the FDA …” In other words, the FDA’s claim that it can’t guarantee the safety of personally imported medicines should extend to legally imported APIs and finished products.