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

  Opposition to the bank bailouts, auditing the Federal Reserve, ending the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, even votes against wars and defense spending will all draw a not-insignificant amount of cross-partisan support, from people on both sides of the aisle who straight-up agree about things. Our political systems haven’t completely accommodated to those alliances, so they still offer the occasional chance to throw a wrench into machinations of the powers-that-be, relative to those issues where such solidarity can be achieved.

  There are of course substantial, critical differences between the left and the right which should not be downplayed, but opportunities for this sort of cross-partisan organizing are often overlooked because of undue presumptions of utter, complete polarization between the two major parties and the rank-and-file Americans who affiliate with one or the other of them. The standard single-axis left-right ideological paradigm is fraying—if it ever truly held to begin with—and the dynamic quickly degenerates into even greater confusion when one strives to map ideological tendencies onto the mainstream political parties.

  Fighting PIPA seemed like an opportunity to build a powerful Left-Right alliance and shock the establishment into recognizing the broad base of (still largely latent) opposition to the bill. The conference, to be attended by a mix of activists of all stripes, presented the perfect backdrop upon which to start to pull such a coalition together. Its purpose was to convene people from across the political spectrum to examine the advisability and feasibility of starting to organize towards an Article V Constitutional Convention, at which amendments to the Constitution would be offered through a process outlined in said Constitution.

  In practice, successful Constitutional Amendments have always been offered by Congress, but the framers left open the possibility of states compelling a convention to offer amendments as, essentially, a way of hacking around an inert, institutionally corrupt Congress. It’s never happened, but the transition to elected U.S. senators followed from pro-convention organizing: the Senate’s self-interest was in preserving the status quo, via which they were appointed by state legislatures (though some states had popular referenda which guided the legislatures’ choices). Senators didn’t want to have to face the voters, but they’d much rather take that risk than let the rabble have their experiment in a deeper democracy. So we got the 17th Amendment, and now, in their wisdom, the people may exercise their hexennial right to elect solons like Joe Lieberman to the Senate.

  Mark is conservative, but the kind of guy who’s willing to go on fringe left-wing TV or radio and have a real dialogue with the “enemy.” So we got along. The conference took place in September, before SOPA was introduced, but after Wyden had put his hold on PIPA. Mark was on our side on the issue, but in high demand, so I’d had trouble pinning him down. But during one session in which neither of us was a participant I cornered him and convinced him to join me in the Green Room, where we co-authored this snippet of righteous propaganda:

  “Have your own Web site?” the group wrote, “Maybe the government will shut it down tomorrow … without any notice to you. Republicans are going to introduce this (bill) in the House, Democrats in the Senate. What? Big labor, Hollywood, U.S. Chamber of Commerce all in this together … against you.”

  We linked it back to an article that Patrick Ruffini and I had written for the Portland Oregonian in support of Wyden’s hold (we should acknowledge Demand Progress’s Charlie Turner, who penned the first draft), and sent it to eight hundred thousand members of the Tea Party—via Facebook. And then I looked over Mark’s shoulder as he reloaded the page about one hundred times—in a fit of juvenile delight that’s all too familiar to me as somebody who also works in online activism—as he watched hundreds of people “like” the post.

  The Tea Party Patriots posted a message on Facebook calling PIPA “severe government overreach.” This became an early signal for Republican politicians that grassroots conservatives’ opposition to PIPA was growing. The screenshot above shows the Tea Party Patriots call to action on the issue on September 24, 2011.

  We made sure that Capitol Hill newspapers got wind of the message, and within a few days it seemed like there was a veritable anti-PIPA Tea Party rebellion. It was exactly the break we needed, and, to be honest, we were giddy and felt a bit like alchemists: the political establishment was reacting to an article we’d planted about a Facebook post that we’d helped author, about an op-ed that we’d co-written. Working with our right-wing allies a couple of left wingers—formerly of the Green Party, for chrissakes—had helped foment an (apparent) intervention of the scariest sort that the political establishment could imagine: an uprising by the Far Right.

  But nothing of it felt false, as when it came to PIPA, our ideals and those of the Tea Party Patriots were genuinely aligned. It was indeed nauseating to watch Hollywood, the Chamber of Commerce, organized labor, and the leadership of both parties cavorting, so ready to line up against the interests of ordinary Americans. So it made perfect sense that we should cry out against it in harmony.

  Shortly thereafter Tea Party Caucus chair Michelle Bachmann came out against the bill—first reported via a response she sent to a constituent who’d emailed her using one of Demand Progress’s petition pages. As Politico noted at the time:

  Bachmann’s stance is a victory for critics of the bill, who have previously been mostly civil liberties groups, liberal lawmakers and trade associations that represent Web companies. Advocacy groups have been lobbying to get more tea party members and conservatives on board to speak out against the legislation and, so far, it seems to be working. The Tea Party Patriots recently lambasted the legislation on its Facebook page …

  Demand Progress, which describes itself as a left-leaning civil liberties group, has been working with Republican political consultant Patrick Ruffini to launch a bipartisan assault against the bill.

  Bachmann’s email responded to a message from a Demand Progress member who raised concerns over the PROTECT IP Act. The group hopes the 2012 presidential contender’s concern about the bill will lead more conservatives to question its potential implications on innovation and First Amendment rights.

  Around the same time as the Bachmann letter, we were delighted to see a story published by CNET under the headline: “Is Google lining up Republicans against antipiracy bill?”

  People were really starting to take notice. It was a pseudo-investigative piece that tried to, as they say, follow the money. It connected dots, stumbling from point-to-point as spurred forward by the paranoid inklings of Content Industry operatives—who still couldn’t fathom that they were up against something that was growing much broader and more powerful than Google alone.

  It was sub-headed “Google has some interesting links to a right-wing political group called the Tea Party Patriots, which recently began criticizing the Protect IP Act, the bill that would make it easier for authorities to shut down pirate sites. Google opposes the legislation.”

  According to the article, “What supporters of Pro IP suspect is that Google is somehow responsible for the Tea Party Patriots’ new found interest in copyright.”

  Said supposed links largely reduced to the fact that Meckler had cosponsored that conference at Harvard.

  Then there’s Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard University professor who is one of the most notable proponents of free content and less restrictive copyright laws. Last week, he co-hosted a gathering called the Conference on the Constitutional Convention. The conference doesn’t appear to have had much to do with copyright, but Lessig’s fellow co-host was Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots.

  This Lessig-Meckler connection triggered warning bells among Pro IP supporters.

  For any number of policy and political impetuses, and because of the work of several advocates and hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file Americans, Republicans were starting to run away from SOPA and PIPA, and were posturing for political support from Internet users and Silicon Valley. Just a few months later during a live debate o
n national television Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and the whole gang of presidential contenders would be tripping over each other to be the most adamantly opposed to SOPA.

  GAMERS AND JUSTIN BIEBER JOIN THE CAUSE

  DAVID SEGAL AND DAVID MOON

  We anticipated little outcry from beyond the usual cadre of activists when Senator Amy Klobuchar sponsored S.978, an effort to subject online streaming to harsh criminal penalties. (It was later rolled into SOPA.) We first heard about the draconian prospective law through Mike Masnick’s Techdirt blog. In a June 1, 2011 article he alerted readers to the ramifications of Klobuchar’s proposal: “If you embed a YouTube video that turns out to be infringing, and more than ten people view it because of your link … you could be facing five years in jail.”

  Demand Progress’s membership had swelled to several hundred thousand, affording us a precious perch from which to sound the alarm about bad bills like this one. We dubbed S.978 “Ten Strikes” and blasted a call to action to our members. We were amused to see the “Ten Strikes” moniker catch on when we searched for articles about the bill—several Minnesota blogs and weeklies had alerted their readers to their senior senator’s doings. It was particularly exciting since we were in the Twin Cities for the Netroots Nation conference in late June, a convening of online activists where we spent a week bending every last attendee’s ear about Ten Strikes and PIPA.

  Then we were absolutely astonished to discover that thousands of new Internet users were using our system to send emails to their officials opposing Ten Strikes. It was especially surprising since these concerned Internet users weren’t coming to us through any one source. There was a sudden swarm of dozens of YouTube videos sounding the alarm. Some videos were crudely made and barely had a few dozens of viewers, while others had racked up thousands of views. But this decentralized YouTube mob helped generate over one hundred fifty thousand emails against the Ten Strikes bill in a matter of days.

  Klobuchar’s legislation was mobilizing entire online communities that certainly weren’t renowned for political activism. We began noticing that video gamers in particular were trepidatious, and then furious, about Ten Strikes. The video gaming sites Game Informer and Shoryuken both posted warnings that Ten Strikes could make criminals out of those who videotaped themselves playing video games: known as play-through videos, gamers regularly use them to review new games, share tips on how to make it through tough levels, or just brag about their feats.

  Shoryuken highlighted various categories of implicated activities:

  “Just to hit you over the head with this, that means that if you stream a game like Street Fighter 4 or Starcraft 2 (or a movie or a song etc) only ten or more times in a full half year, and if you make a bit of money doing it, you either need to have a license from Capcom or Blizzard etc or you risk going to jail … it almost certainly also includes recorded YouTube videos of copyrighted audiovisual works, whether they be match vids, game footage/live shot hybrids, movies, TV shows, music, and so on.”

  It was enough to make a game enthusiast go nuts. For the most avid video game players, such as Philip Burnell (aka DarksydePhil), online play-throughs were a key hobby and could generate thousands of views. But after finding out about the Ten Strikes bill, Philip Burnell used the YouTube video game channel he had operated for months to mobilize his viewers to oppose Klobuchar’s bill. In a tirade against S.978, Burnell sought to highlight “the unfair (and inadvertent) consequences” Ten Strikes would have on the Internet gaming community. Nearly seven hundred thousand viewers tuned in to watch his unvarnished, protracted, backlit tirade, and we could see that the Internet was beginning to use its strongest weapon—the ability to democratize the sharing of information—to save itself.

  A screenshot from Phillip Burnell’s lengthy, inspired rant against Amy Klobuchar’s S.978. Burnell and other gamers helped rally hundreds of thousands of gamers in opposition to the legislation.

  Incidentally, there’s an interesting ongoing discussion about the metaphysics of these videos as pertains to copyright law: no gamer traces the exact same path as he or she plays a game, so does a particular player’s handiwork amount to new intellectual property? Or is it a creation of the software’s originator, since all of the player’s moves are necessarily allowed for by the work of the engineers and artists who put the game together? It’s an intriguing, if obscenely esoteric, debate of the sort that might be fodder for an undergrad’s final paper in a media studies class, or ought to be had as technologists and hippies confab over peyote in the Nevada desert at Burning Man each summer—but suffice it to say that we don’t think the world should be such that the answers to these questions might determine whether or not somebody goes to prison or has to pay exorbitant fines. The fact that these considerations are even at hand is just further evidence that we’ve drawn copyright laws along ludicrously fundamentalist lines.

  One ongoing criticism of our activism from certain quarters, particularly on this front but also on others, is the notion that even if the letter of the law allows for Terrible Thing X to happen, odds are that nobody’s going to go after the small fry, petty violator—the Feds will only prosecute the industrial infringers. This argument holds especially little water in the copyright realm, where music publishers have readily tried to squeeze teenagers for hundreds of thousands of dollars in statutory damages. We also know from several incidents outlined in this book, perhaps most starkly illustrated in the case of the Dajaz1 website takedown explicated by Joshua Bauchner in a later chapter, that Content Industry flaks have extraordinary influence over the government, including law enforcement, there being a well-oiled revolving door between the two realms. Readers might consider perusing Harvey Silverglate’s excellent “Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent” whose thesis is that federal statutes are written in such an over-broad manner that the average American regularly commits unknowing felonies. We’re all sitting ducks, should we ever wind up in the sights of a federal prosecutor.

  With the vein of gaming enthusiasts taking up arms against the Klobuchar “ten strikes” legislation, a population of largely previously apolitical people had taken to activism and helped stall out a terrible bill. 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. (Full disclosure: Co-editor David Segal did work for FFTF through that fall, helping them get their email activism underway.)

  Bieber got his start circa 2008 when a music promoter discovered YouTube videos his mom had posted of him singing other artists’ songs. 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.”

  An image created by Fight for the Future as part of their satirical “Free Bieber” campaign.

  Demand Progress and Fight for the Future quickly made sure that all of the Minnesota press knew about the reigning king of pop’s decree, and produced a 30-second commercial whose thrust was: “Everybody’s out of work, yet somehow Amy Klobuchar’s in a throw-down with a Canadian teenage pop star. What gives?”

  We had pledged to get it into rotation for a week on cable stations in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, and our strategy made it into the pages of Politico. On November 11, 2011, they wrot
e “two opponents of Klobuchar’s bill … are looking to buy ‘a few thousand dollars’ worth of ad time … on major cable networks such as CNN, MSNBC, Fox and Comedy Central … The ad features shots of Occupy Wall Street protesters and then fades to an audio clip of Bieber speaking out against Klobuchar …”

  Our ad campaign appeared to strike some nerves with backers of PIPA and Ten Strikes. On Friday, November 11, 2011, the spot was ready to air and we submitted both the ad and payment information to our Comcast sales contact, Mike in Minnesota. He promised to check back with us on Monday, so that our ad would start airing the next Tuesday. We never heard back from Mike, and instead later received a voicemail demanding substantiation for the claims in the ad. After providing Comcast with copies of articles and statements by attorneys documenting the potential ramifications of Klobuchar’s anti-streaming legislation, Comcast still refused to air our ad.

  Next we tried our luck with another Minnesota cable company called Charter Media. Just as with Comcast, our Charter Media sales rep Nicole was more than happy to try to reserve ad space for us. It seemed normal enough when she wanted to know who the clients were, and even to see the spot in advance. But after reviewing the footage and finding out that the client was Demand Progress and Fight for the Future, Nicole came back to us with an additional request: “Legal has asked for the substantiation. Can you send that please.”